ANTINOMIANISM OF MODERN HISTORIANS 181

Like the Satan in whose indomitable perversity the spirit of Late
Modern Western Man had been prefigured by Milton's foreboding
genius, the heralds of a mundane Aufkldrung opened their campaign by
fastening upon hostages that their adversary had given to Fortune. A
Bossuet who had consciously followed the lead of his Christian and Jew-
ish masters, and had unconsciously kept in step with his Muslim con-
temporaries, in taking for his metaphysical pole star a 'Law of God'
governing the whole Life of the Universe, had at the same time found a
place in the divine economy of human affairs for 'laws of Nature' which,
in Bossuet's belief, were enacted by God as by-laws and were adminis-
tered by the same divine legislator and potentate to suit the exigencies of
His own paramount plan. According to this view the normal cyclically
recurrent regularity of these 'by-laws of Nature' could be, and duly was
on occasion, interrupted by 'miraculous' acts of personal intervention
not unlike those performed by the human driver of a wheeled vehicle
when he puts on the brake in descending a hill or even temporarily un-
ships the wheels from the body of the coach in order to negotiate its
passage through a strait gate or over a precipitous portage.1 The first of
the new departures made by Bossuet's revolutionary-minded contem-
poraries was to deny that the wheels of the Universe were ever unshipped,
or even braked, in this unceremoniously purposeful fashion. Without
prejudice to the questions whether God existed and whether, if He were
deemed to exist, He might or might not be deemed to have the same
mastery over His Universe as a human coachman has over his coach, the
intellectual heralds of a Late Modern Age of Western history declared
with one voice that in fact there was no evidence of any deity exercising
any such divine prerogative.

There was no essential difference in outlook between Late Modern
Western 'deists', who took their cue from 'the Glorious Revolution' of
A.D. 1688 in England and Scotland by allowing the deity still to reign on
the understanding that he should no longer aspire to govern, and Late
Modern Western atheists, who, taking their cue from subsequent political
revolutions in North America and in France, professed to have de-
throned and perhaps even decapitated a Capetian God as the necessary
preface to a declaration of Nature's independence. In thus banishing
God from the cosmic scene and, in the act, eliminating miracles, Late
Modern Western deists and atheists joined forces to release 'the laws of
Nature' from their ancient servitude to arbitrary divine checks and
balances. Henceforward these 'laws of Nature' were^to be free to be
entirely inexorable and were consequently to be subject to becoming
completely intelligible to the Collective Intellect of Man.

'Avec l'e*clat du ge*nie, Newton marque ce passage du transcendant au
positif qu'un. Pufendorf esaayait d'ope"rer dans le droit, xin Richard Simon

* 'Ce meme Dieu qui a fait r«nchaSnement de I'univere, et qui, tout-puissant par lui-
mSme. a voulu, pour <<tablir Tordre, que les parties d'un si grand tout dependissent les
unes des autres, ce meme Dieu a voulu aussi que le cours des choses humaines eQt sa
suite et ses proportions . . . et qu'a la reserve de certains coups extraordinaires ou Dieu
voulait que sa main parut toute seule, il n'est point arriv* de grand changement qui
n'ait eu ses causes dans les sieclea pr^dents.'—Bossuet, J.-B.: Dtscours sur FHistoire
Universelle, 3rd ed, (Paris 1700), Troisieme Partie, chap, ii.