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“ If” says he, “ he is selfish as well as ignorant, it will often 
happen that you may play off his vice against his ignorance, 
and, by exciting his fears, restrain his mischief. But if he has 
no fear, if he is entirely unselfish, if his sole object is the good 
of others, if he pursues that object with disinterested zeal, then 
it is that you have no check upon him ; you have no means of 
preventing the calamities which an ignorant man in an igno- 
rant age would be sure to effect.” Mr. Buckle then at great 
length travels through the history of religious persecutions 
and other kindred subjects for the purpose of supporting 
these moral paradoxes, endeavouring to show that many of 
the vilest persecutors have been men of the purest virtue, and 
if they had been only less pure, they would have done far less 
mischief. 
It would take me far more space than I can possibly give to 
it at the end of this paper to disengage the truth in these 
statements from the falsehood, and to point out the nature of 
the sophistries which are involved in his reasoning. To do so 
would render it necessary that I should investigate the first 
principles of the whole subject, and lay down the relation in 
which the intellect and the reason stand to our moral nature. 
One thing, however, it is obvious that Mr. Buckle habitually 
overlooks. Intellectual greatness or intellectual power never 
exists independently of a moral character of some sort. The 
intellectually great man must be either a morally good man 
or a morally bad one, or occupy an intermediate position. 
To distinguish between these two factors, though possible 
to our powers of abstraction, is not possible in fact. His 
view of the character of religious persecution requires great 
modification, and his inductions of facts are not always 
happy. It is perfectly true that Marcus Aurelius persecuted 
the Church, though certainly not under the inspiration of 
any great zeal for the worship of Jupiter; and that the 
wretched Commodus and Elagabalus abstained from doing 
so. But is it a fact that all good emperors were persecu- 
tors, and that all bad emperors abstained from persecution ? 
Nothing short of this will sustain Mr. Buckle's position in the 
objectionable form in which he has placed it. I answer that 
Alexander Severus was nearly the best, if not the very best man 
who ever sat on the Imperial throne, and he tolerated Chris- 
tianity. Maximin was an utterly bad man, and Galerius little 
better, though the latter was not destitute of some enlarge- 
ment of mind, and both proscribed it. Diocletian also was not 
destitute of considerable mental qualifications, and he and 
Gralerius assailed the Church with the most terrible persecu- 
tion which she encountered during the continuance of the 
Roman Empire. Queen Mary was a moral but narrow- 
