concurrence of some philosophy, with a great deal of impartiality. How
idly do we say, in speaking of the events of our own time which affect our
party feelings,--'We stand too near to these events for an impartial
estimate: we must leave them to the judgment of posterity!' For it is a
fact that of the many books of memoirs written by persons who were not
merely contemporary with the great civil war, but actors and even leaders
in its principal scenes--there is hardly one which does not exhibit a more
impartial picture of that great drama than the histories written at his
day. The historian of Popery does not display half so much zealotry and
passionate prejudice in speaking of the many events which have affected
the power and splendor of the Papal See for the last thirty years, and
under his own eyes, as he does when speaking of a reformer who lived three
centuries ago--of a translator of the Bible into a vernacular tongue who
lived nearly five centuries ago--of an Anti-pope--of a Charlemagne or a
Gregory the Great still further removed from himself. The recent events he
looks upon as accidental and unessential: but in the great enemies, or
great founders of the Romish temporal power, and in the history of their
actions and their motives, he feels that the whole principle of the Romish
cause and its pretensions are at stake. Pretty much under the same feeling
have modern writers written with a rancorous party spirit of the political
struggles in the 17th century: here they fancy that they can detect the
_incunabula_ of the revolutionary spirit: here some have been so
sharpsighted as to read the features of pure jacobinism: and others [2]
have gone so far as to assert that all the atrocities of the French
revolution had their direct parallelisms in acts done or countenanced by
the virtuous and august Senate of England in 1640! Strange distortion of
the understanding which can thus find a brotherly resemblance between two
great historical events, which of all that ever were put on record stand
off from each other in most irreconcilable enmity: the one originating, as
Mr. Coleridge has observed, in excess of principle; the other in the utter