THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. 161 



they who shall live through all this distress, and who then shall share in the 

 triumph of God, and of His holy Church, catholic, apostolic, and Eoman." 1 



Conceptions of this kind are not limited to historians whose names 

 have dropped out of remembrance, and to men who, while the drama 

 of contemporary revolution is going on, play the part of a Greek 

 chorus, telling the world of spectators what has been the divine pur- 

 pose and what are the divine intentions ; but we have lately had a 

 professor of history setting forth conceptions essentially identical in 

 nature. Here are his words : 



" And now, gentlemen, was this vast campaign " (of Teutons against Eomans) 

 "fought without a general ? If Trafalgar could not be won without the mind of 

 a Nelson, or Waterloo without the mind of a "Wellington, was there no one 

 mind to lead those innumerable armies on whose success depended the future 

 of the whole human race? Did no one marshal them in that impregnable con- 

 vex front, from the Euxine to the North Sea? No one guide them to the two 

 great strategic centres of the Black Forest and Trieste ? No one cause them, 

 blind barbarians without maps or science, to follow those rules of war without 

 which victory in a protracted struggle is impossible ; and, by the pressure of the 

 Huns behind, force on their flagging myriads to an enterprise which their sim- 

 plicity fancied at first beyond the powers of mortal men ? Believe it who will : 

 but I cannot. I may be told that they gravitated into their places, as stones 

 and mud do. Be it so. They obeyed natural laws, of course, as all things do 

 on earth, when they obeyed the laws of war : those, too, are natural laws, ex- 

 plicable on simple mathematical principles. But while I believe that not a 

 stone or a handful of mud gravitates into its 'place without the will of God ; that 

 it was ordained, ages since, into what particular spot each grain of gold should 

 be washed down from an Australian quartz-reef, that a certain man might find 

 it at a certain moment and crisis of his life ; if I be superstitious enough (as, 

 thank God, I am !) to hold that creed, shall I not believe that, though this great 

 war had no general upon earth, it may have had a general in heaven? and that, 

 in spite of all their sins, the hosts of our forefathers were the hosts of God." 2 



It does not concern us here to seek a reconciliation of the seem- 

 ingly incongruous ideas bracketed together in this paragraph to ask 

 how the results of gravitation, which acts with such uniformity that 

 under given conditions its effect is calculable with certainty, can at the 

 same time be regarded as the results of will, which we class apart be- 

 cause, as known in our experience, it is so irregular ; or to ask how, if 

 the course of human affairs is divinely predetermined just as material 

 changes are, any distinction is to be drawn between that prevision of 

 material changes which constitutes physical science and historical pre- 

 vision : the reader may be left to evolve the obvious conclusion that 

 either the current idea of physical causation has to be abandoned, or 

 the current idea of will has to be abandoned. All which I need here 

 call attention to, as indicating the general character of such historical 



1 " The Hand of Man and the Finger of God in the Misfortunes of France." By J. C., 

 ex-chaplain in the auxiliary army. 



9 " The Roman and the Teuton," pp. 339, 340. 

 11 



