the temporal order, what reason have you to fear that they will change hereafter? You agree at least, we believe, that the Church does not change, and that the policy once adopted is the policy she always pursues. The past is a sufficient pledge of the future. True, she asserts the independence and supremacy of the spiritual order, and so do you; true, she asserts the supremacy of the law of God for princes and states as well as for individuals and subjects, and so do you, when you do not turn political atheists; true, she seeks by all the means in her power to maintain the supremacy of that law in the practical government of society, and so do you, if you have any reverence for God or respect for morality; true, she aims to do, and where her action is free does do effectually, what every sect professes to have at heart; but this is a reason why you should love her and give her your confidence, not why you should distrust and oppose her. With her, religion, order, liberty, justice, may be maintained in our republic, and without her they cannot. Are the American people so blind, so bereft of common sense, as to fear her, because she is fitted to accomplish their most ardent wishes and the purest and holiest desires of their hearts?

It is not very wise, in opposing a church we happen to dislike, to deny the only principles on which we can defend the one we like. We are not a Protestant, but we will go as far as any Protestant in asserting the freedom and independence of the sects before the secular authority. We cannot in our horror of them consent to throw doubt on the great principles we plead in our own defence. As long as they do not trample on the equal rights of others, as long as they do nothing to disturb the public peace, we will maintain their freedom before the state, and deny in their case as much as in our own the right of the secular authority to interfere with them. It is madness to deny the freedom and supremacy of the spiritual order for the sake of opposing Catholicity. The American people may allege that the Church is not the divinely commissioned representative of the spiritual order on earth, and for that reason oppose her; but to oppose her because she asserts her independence and supremacy in face of the temporal power, the very thing she should do, and must do if she is what she professes to be, is to deny the independence and supremacy of the moral order, and to give up the world to the government of lawless passion or brute force.

That a portion of the American people, misled by their prejudices and influenced by the misrepresentations and calumnious charges brought against us by No-Popery publications, are violating against us some of their own most deeply cherished principles, and for which in their own case they would fight unto death, is unhappily too true. Of them we may truly say, "They know not what they do." The American mind at the present moment is all out of joint on religious matters, and they are like an army in the dark, thrown into confusion, and unable to distinguish friends from foes. They fire as often upon the former as the latter, yet at bottom they are a brave people and mean well. Their confusion will not last for ever, we hope, and they will recover themselves when the day, not far distant, begins to dawn. They will then see distinctly that society reposes on the maintenance of the independence and supremacy of the moral order in its practical government, and they will see that there can be no greater madness than that of warring against the only institution which is able to maintain that independence and supremacy. Religion and morality do not hold so high a rank with us, that we can afford to reject any help in their favor offered us. There is with us a sad want of high moral principle, of strict honesty, of conscientiousness. In public life we look to the expedient rather than to the right, and honor success rather than integrity and justice. In private life we abandon ourselves to the world, forget God and duty, and think only of multiplying sensible goods. We are becoming material, and rapidly falling into practical atheism. One half of our adult population are unconnected with any religious denomination, and probably a still larger proportion have grown up without having even been baptized. Everybody now sees that Protestantism can neither make nor keep a people practically religious. Lord Shaftesbury stated in the House of Lords not long since, that there are five millions of the adult population of England and Wales that never attend any place of religious worship. To a Christian mind, nothing can be more horrible.

All is not as we could wish it in Catholic countries. Owing to the jealousies of the governments, and to the power heresy and schism have given them to oppress the Church, she has not even there been able to do all her work. The tyranny of despots has restricted her freedom and lessened

her practical efficiency. But in no Catholic country is the moral and religious state of the people so deplorable as in Great Britain and the United States. Catholic populations, however far below what they might be and ought to be, have yet a sensibility to moral ideas and to religious considerations that we look in vain for in Protestant populations. They are more under the influence of the spiritual order, and are more easily affected by appeals to conscience. In our own country they almost alone keep alive in practice the memory of religious ages, and, whatever may be the estimate in which a worldly-minded community may hold them, they are the main hope of our country. They have their faults, their vices even, but they are a Christian people, and feel that man's first duty is to God, and his dearest hope is hope of heaven.

ART. II. The Philosophical Works of DAVID HUME. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 1854. 4 vols. 8vo.

THE publishers deserve the thanks of philosophical students for this complete and very handsome edition of the philosophical works of David Hume. We have little sym

pathy with this much over-estimated writer, who was an unbeliever in religion, a sceptic in philosophy, and of no remarkable worth or moral dignity as a man; but he is one of the great names of British metaphysical speculation, and no student of the aberrations of the human mind for the last century and over, whether in Great Britain or on the Continent, can safely overlook his Essays. His Treatise of Human Nature, published when he was only twenty-seven years of age, rewritten and republished some ten years later, under the title of An Inquiry concerning Human Understanding, provoked a good deal of philosophical inquiry, and gave rise to the Scottish school of Reid and the German school of Kant, the two most widely diffused and influential schools of recent times.

Hume is usually classed among sceptical philosophers, but he was no dogmatist, and originated no school of his own. He arrived speculatively at sceptical conclusions, it

is true; but it would be doing him injustice to suppose that he practically accepted or wished others to accept them, for he says that he did not, and that nobody does or can. What he did was to show, that, if the sensist philosophy in vogue in his time is accepted, genuine science is impossible. Whether he had adopted a different philosophy for himself, or not, does not appear; but most probably he had not, and his real aim was to disparage all philosophy and bring men back to what in our language is called good sense. But be this as it may, without much erudition, and no great aptitude for metaphysical pursuits, he succeeded in showing that the empirical philosophy favored by Bacon and Hobbes, and elaborated and defended by Locke, conducts every one of its disciples of a little logical nerve to mere egoism and scepticism.

Hume has the merit of being-in his speculations - a consistent sensist. According to him all the objects of human knowledge are Impressions and Ideas. The impressions are external and internal, and are what we now call sensations and sentiments. Ideas, as he defines them, are not an image or representation with which the mind in all its operations is immediately conversant, as Locke pretended; the simple mental apprehension of the object, as maintained in most of our own schools; the species or phantasms by means of which objects themselves are attained, as Aristotle and the Schoolmen taught; the forms or essences of things, detached from the Divine Reason and clothed with material bodies, as Plato held; or the intelligible reality in contradistinction from the sensible, intuitively apprehended by our intellect, as we ourselves hold; but feeble images or faint copies of sensations and sentiments, formed by memory, imagination, and reflection operating upon them, as furnished by the senses. All human knowledge, then, as to its matter, is confined to our external and internal impressions and their pale reflex in the understanding.

All the objects of human reasoning or inquiry, it follows from this, are reducible to two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact. As the ideas are simply images or copies of facts of consciousness, formed by the mind operating upon its own impressions and lying wholly within its sphere, the understanding has no occasion to appeal to experience, or to go out of itself to find

or determine their relations. In regard to these relations our reasoning is intuitively or demonstratively certain, and has a solid support in immediate consciousness, and the principle of contradiction, or that of identity. But in reasoning concerning matters of fact, the case is different. We can in it support ourselves on neither. Matters of fact are contingent, and in every instance the contrary is conceivable. The proposition, that the sun will not rise to-morrow is intelligible, and no more implies a contradiction than the proposition that it will rise, and we should therefore in vain attempt to demonstrate its falsity. Yet nothing is more certain than that we do continually reason concerning matters of fact, draw inferences from them, from the presence of some infer that others have been or have not, will or will not occur, and are obliged to do so in all the practical business of life. Now, what is the principle of this reasoning?

The principle of this reasoning is, apparently, the relation of cause and effect. It is only by that relation that we can go beyond the evidence of our memory and senses. If asked why you believe a matter of fact not present, as, for instance, that your friend is in the country or in France, you give as a reason some other fact, a letter which you have received from him, the report of an acquaintance who has been there, or your knowledge of his former resolutions and promises. Were you to find a watch or some other piece of mechanism in a desert island, you would conclude that men have been there. All our reasoning concerning matters of fact is of the same kind, and it evidently rests on the supposition that the two facts are related as cause and effect, so that the one necessarily implies the other. It is only by the supposition of this relation that we can infer the one from the other, or regard the present fact as a proof of the absent fact. But whence do we obtain our knowledge of this relation?

This relation is not discoverable from reasoning, a priori. Let an object be presented to a man of ever so strong natural reason and abilities; if it is entirely new to him, he will not be able, by the most accurate examination of its sensible qualities, to discover any of its causes or effects. Adam, though his rational faculties be supposed, at the very first, entirely perfect, could not from the fluidity and transparency of water have inferred that it would suffocate