Mr. Buckle, with great abundance of learning and fulness of thought, attempts to prove that the history of Spain and Scotland verifies these propositions.  The general causes which, according to him, have sunk Spain so low in the scale of civilization are loyalty and superstition.  The Church and State have been supreme, and the consequence has been that the people are profoundly ignorant.  Under able rulers, like Ferdinand, Charles V., and Philip II., the loyal nation attained a great height of power and glory; under their incompetent successors, the loyal nation, obedient to crowned sloth and stupidity as to crowned energy and genius, descended with frightful rapidity from its high estate, thus proving that the progress which depends on the character of individual monarchs or statesmen is necessarily unstable.  Circumstances similar to those which made Spain loyal made it superstitious; and loyalty and superstition early formed an alliance by which all independent energy of conduct and thought was suppressed.  According to Mr. Buckle, the prosperity of nations, in modern times, “depends on principles to which the clergy, as a body, are invariably opposed.”  This proposition is, to him, true of Protestant as well as Catholic clergymen; and a nation like Spain, looking to the Government for what it should do, and to the Church for what it should believe, has necessarily become inefficient and ignorant.

Spain has few friends among English readers, and Mr. Buckle’s contemptuous opinion of its civilization may not, therefore, rouse much opposition that he will be compelled to heed.  But it is not so in respect to Scotland, a caustic survey of whose civilization occupies three-quarters of the present volume.  The position is taken, that Scotland, of all the countries of Protestant Europe, has been and is the most superstitious and priest-ridden.  The only thing that saved the people from the fate of Spain was the fact, that their insubordination to temporal authority was as marked as their slavery to spiritual authority.  They had the good fortune to be rebels as well as fanatics; but the reforming clergy having, after 1580, allied themselves heartily with the people against the king and nobles, increased as patriots the influence they exerted as priests.  The love of country being thus associated with love of the Church, the people were enslaved by the very religious leaders who aided them in the fight against those forms of arbitrary power they mutually detested.  The tyranny of the Presbyterian minister was lovingly accepted by the same population by which the tyranny of bishop and king was abhorred.

Mr. Buckle, with the malicious delight which only a philosopher in search of facts to fit his theory can know, has delved in a stratum of theological literature now covered from the common eye by more important deposits, in order to prove that in the seventeenth century the people of Scotland were ruled by a set of petty theological tyrants, as ignorant and as inhuman as ever disgraced a civilized society, and that their ignorance and inhumanity were all the more influential from being called by the name and acting by the authority of religion.