creeds. Cusanus renovated the mystic numbers of Pythagoras, discovered new mysteries in the Tetractys, and illustrated spiritual truth by the acute and the obtuse angle. But Ficinus did not restore the Athenian Plato, nor Nicholas of Cusa, the Samian Pythagoras. The Plato of the first was the Plato of Plotinus; the Pythagoras of the second was the Pythagoras of Hierocles. Pico of Mirandola, the Admirable Crichton of his time, endeavoured to combine scholasticism with the Cabbala, to reconcile the dialectics of Aristotle and the oracles of Chaldæa; and produced, in his Heptaplus, an allegorical interpretation of the Mosaic account of the Creation, which would have seemed too fanciful in the eyes of Hypatia herself. Patritius sought the sources of Greek philosophy in Zoroaster and Hermes, translated and edited the works which Neo-Platonists had fabricated under their names, and wrote to Gregory XIV., praying that Aristotle might be banished the schools, and Hermes, Asclepius, and Zoroaster appointed in his place, as the best means of advancing the cause of religion, and reclaiming the heretical Germans.

Protestantism was too strong for these scholars, just as Christianity had been too strong for the Alexandrians. Their feebleness sprang from the very same cause; their whole position was strikingly similar. They were the philosophic advocates of a religion in which they had themselves lost faith. They attempted to reconcile a corrupt philosophy and a corrupt religion, and made both worse. Their love of literature and art was confined to a narrow circle of courtiers and literati; and while the Lutheran pamphlets, in the vernacular, set all the north in a flame, the philosophic refinements of the Florentine dilettanti were aristocratic, exclusive, and powerless. Their intellectual position was fatal to sincerity, their social condition equally so to freedom. The despotism of the Roman emperors was more easily evaded by a philosopher of ancient times than the tyranny of a Visconti or a D'Este, by a scholar at Milan or Ferrara. It was the fashion to patronise men of letters, but the natural return of subservience and flattery was rigorously exacted. The Italians of the fifteenth century had long ceased to be familiar with the worst horrors of war; and Charles VIII., with his ferocious Frenchmen, appeared to them another Attila. Each Italian state underwent, on its petty scale, the fate of imperial Rome, and the Florentine Academy could not survive for a twelvemonth its princely master, Lorenzo de Medici. The philosophic and religious conservatism of Florence was thus as destitute of real vitality, of all self-sustaining power, as its prototype at Alexandria. The Florentine Platonists, moreover, did

FLORENCE AND ALEXANDRIA.

167

not exhibit that austerity of manners which gave Plotinus and Porphyry no little authority even among those to whom their speculations were utterly unintelligible. Had Romanism been

unable to find defenders more thoroughly in earnest, the shock she then received must have been her death-blow; she must have perished, as Paganism perished. But, wise in her generation, she took her cause out of the hands of a religious philosophy, committed it to the ascetic and the enthusiast, and, strong in resources heathendom could never know, passed her hour of peril, and proved that her hold on the passions and terrors of mankind was still invincible. The Platonists of Alexandria and of Florence both were twilight men; but the former were men of the evening, the latter men of the morning twilight. The passion for erudition, which followed the revival of letters, might be wasted, south of the Alps, on trifles; it was consecrated to the loftiest service in the north. The lesson conveyed in the parallel we have attempted to draw is a grave one; twice has the effort been made to render the abstractions of a philosophised religion a power among mankind-in each case without success. The attempt to refine away what is distinctive of a revelation, real or imaginary, and to subtilise the residuum into a sentimental theism, has always failed. Such a system must leave the indifferent many as they were, and superstition is unchecked. It must excite the disdain of the earnest few, as a profane and puerile trifling with the most momentous questions which can occupy the mind of man. As its inconsistencies become apparent, it will always be found to strengthen the hands of the parties it professes to oppose. It must urge the higher class of minds into a thorough and impartial, instead of a onesided scepticism, and so reinforce the ranks of consistent and absolute unbelief. It must abandon minds of a lower order to all those religious corruptions which lull the conscience, and gratify the passions. It has done nothing to reform the world; and, never strong enough long to oppose a serious obstacle to progress, it has been suffered repeatedly to die out of itself. Such examples in the past should much diminish the dread which many feel of that would-be religious scepticism among ourselves which essays to emasculate the truths of revelation, much as the Alexandrian and Florentine Platonists proposed to etherealise the myths of polytheism and the doctrines of Christianity into a vague sentiment of worship.

While the theosophy of the Alexandrian school enjoyed a revival in the hands of men of letters, its theurgy was destined to impart an impulse to the occult science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is not a little interesting to trace the

same mental phenomena at the entrance of the European world on the middle ages, and at its exit from them. We see the same syncretism which confounded the Oriental and Hellenic conceptions together, the same endeavour to hold converse by theurgy, and by white magic, with the unseen world. As Plotinus returns with Ficinus to the regions of day, so Iamblichus revives with Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa. The ancient and the modern cabbalists established their theurgy on a common basis. Plotinus and Campanella both agree on this point, that the world is, as it were, one living organism, all the parts of which are related by certain sympathies and antipathies, so that the adept in these secret affinities acquires a mastery over the elements. It was by this principle, according to Agrippa, that art made nature her slave. As Proclus required of the theurgist an ascetic purity, so Campanella makes it an essential that the cultivator of occult science be a good Christian -one possessing no mere historic, but an intrinsic' faith, a man qualified alike to hold commerce with holy spirits, and to baffle the arts of the malign.

The spirits called by Iamblichus lords of the sublunary elements are equivalent to the astral spirits of Christian theurgy; and those powers which are said by him to preside over matter and impart material gifts, answer to the elementary spirits of the Rosicrucians. Iamblichus and Proclus were firm believers in the efficacy of certain unintelligible words of foreign origin, which were on no account to be Hellenized, lest they should lose their virtue. Cornelius Agrippa enjoins the use of similar magical terms, which he declares more potent than names which have a meaning, and of irresistible power, when reverently uttered, because of the latent divine energy they contain. The 'Shemhamphorasch' of Jewish tradition, and the Agla' of the cabbalists, are examples. The great point of distinction between the theurgy of the earlier and of the later period is sufficiently obvious. In the fourth and fifth centuries theurgy came in to eke out an unsatisfactory philosophy, and to prop a falling religion. In the sixteenth century a similar intrusion into the unseen world was the offspring of a newly recovered freedom. It received its direction and encouragement, in part from the revived remains of ancient tradition, but it was pursued with a patience, an originality, and a boldness, which showed that the impulse was spontaneous, not derived. These magical essays were the gambols of the intellect let loose from its long scholastic durance.

In modern Germany, the philosophy of Schelling rests in substance on the foundation of Plotinus-the identity of subject

FREDERICK SCHLEGEL.

169

and object. It is generally admitted, that his intellectual intuition is a refined modification of the Neo-Platonist ecstasy. But it is in some members of the so-called romantic school that the fallacious principle of the Alexandrians is most conspicuous. Frederick Schlegel did his best to make it appear that the great want of Christian literature was a mythology like that of the Greeks. His philosophy seeks to throw over all life and history the haze of a poetic symbolism. He was symbol-mad; and, very naturally, became a Roman-catholic deist, to indulge his taste that way to the utmost. He wrote bitter diatribes against the Reformation. He depreciated Luther as the mere translator of the Bible. He extolled Jacob Behmen as the gifted seer who revealed to mortal gaze its inmost mysteries. He evolved as much Christianity as he cared to conserve from the fancies of the Indian Brahmins. Such a fantastic religio-philosophy as this, is the result for which experience bids us look wherever men attempt thus to combine a poetical theosophy with popular superstition. Frederick Schlegel was never an authority, and the little influence he once exerted is rapidly passing away. This destructive conservatism-this superstitious scepticism-this subtilized materialism, is a contradiction too monstrous to be kept alive by any amount of mere cleverness.

The dialogue Mr. Kingsley has imagined between Orestes and Hypatia is prophetic. If ever the sceptical intuitionalism of our times should have the opportunity of trying, on any considerable scale, the efficacy of its principles, that prophecy would be fulfilled. It would then appear that the masters in this school are capable of pandering to the passions of the multitude as Orestes did. Their theories would be as impotent to influence the general mind as the speculations of Hypatia concerning the myths of Greece. The same proud selfishness would display itself. The mass of mankind, without intuitions,'-the multitude who never hear the mystic voice of the over-soul,' or open the avenues of their nature to the influxes of the All, would be left of necessity to themselves. Their existence is but transitory-their vices the shadows of the great picture of the universe-a necessary foil whereby to exhibit the super-Christian virtues of the philosophic few. They will soon be resolved into the aggregate of souls which make up the heart and motive power of all matterso, why should they not live as heretofore? This people, that knoweth not our transcendental law, are accursed. This spiritualist pantheism would not indeed restore, under its old names, the Olympus of Greece, as the Alexandrians strove to do. But it would come to the same thing upon their leaguing, as they would be forced to do, with some form or other of that

baptized paganism we call popery. These religions for the few, however, with their arrogant refinement and idle subtlety, have played the part of priest and Levite too often. That faith which has proved the Good Samaritan and true neighbour to suffering humanity can alone finally secure its homage and its love.

ART. VI.-(Des Intérèts Catholiques au XIX Siècle.) Catholic Interests in the Nineteenth Century. By COUNT De Montalembert. Second Edition. 1853. Paris: Lecoffré. London: Nutt, 270, Strand.

THIS is the Romanist song of triumph. The chivalrous Montalembert, who has grown grey in the service of the papacy, and in all the turnings of the wheel of fortune in France, has ever remained faithful to legitimacy and the pope; who has the high merit of being an honest and sincere man in a wicked and perverse generation,' and whose earnest tone of speech, and childlike enthusiasm of faith, conciliate respect even in the absence of a good cause and sound logic, here recounts the victories achieved and the conquests effected by Romanism, and, on the ground of past triumphs, and present prosperity, foresees and predicts the universal ascendancy of Rome.

In order to give full effect to his survey, the author places himself at the beginning of the present century, and, in a series of sketches, offers a contrast between the palmy state of the papacy now, and its depressed condition then. On the first of January, 1800, there was no pope in existence. Pius VI. had died in exile. Not till after an interregnum of eight months was a successor chosen in the person of Pius VII. The selection was not

made without extreme difficulty, and at last the choice fell on a monk whose obscurity was his principal title. The Austrians occupied the legations, the Neapolitans were masters of the city of Rome. The entire episcopacy was in banishment, and the clergy were decimated by transportation and the guillotine. There remained to the holy see neither material nor moral resources, for the vast patrimony of the church was gone; legislation, education, society at large, were a prey to the theories of the eighteenth century. In England, Romanism groaned and pined away beneath a Draconian code of persecuting laws. In Germany, the system of the papacy held no rank, either literary or political. In France it was a laughing-stock. In Italy it was an object of assault on the part of absolute monarchs at Naples, at Parma, at Turin, at Florence. In Austria the church slept on