to understand Plato, or a philosopher to read the material world, must surely be applied to the Greek of the New Testament if we would know its true compass and significance by a profounder insight than we have. The severe beauty of the Vulgate and our own homely and noble English versions have partially set aside and obscured their original by the chain of words that come native to our thought and the long link of household associations. Such work as Erasmus's was is dreaded by many as a wanton iconoclasm, a defacing, if not a destruction, of the holiest forms of faith. Perhaps the very fear is the best argument that the task needs to be done again. Of all phases of bibliolatry, that which prefers the copy to the original is surely the strangest. For ourselves, we can only express our firm confidence that the Gospels will never lose by being studied in the very words of the Evangelists.

379

THE STUDY OF HISTORY.1

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WHAT is History? What does it profess to teach us? How is it to be studied? These are questions which will spontaneously occur to my hearers who are interested in the subject of this lecture. The word History is ancient enough. It belongs to that people who first understood the value of History, and who were the first to set the example of this kind of writing-the Greeks. History, then, in the words of the first Greek historian, Herodotus, means Inquiry-an inquiry into facts. These are the inquiries (he says), that is, the history of Herodotus of Halicarnassus;' -and he tells us, furthermore, what he considered was the purpose of history; that the deeds done by the Greeks in their wars against the barbarians should not go out of memory, and be forgotten.' He felt a truth which thousands of men before him had not felt or had not attempted to realise that all men owe a debt of remembrance to those who have gone before them, especially when those predecessors of theirs have been their benefactors, especially when the blessings of moral, intellectual, social, and political freedom have been worked out by their blood and their endeavours. And the same feelings which prompt a true-hearted man to preserve the memorials of his father and mother, would prompt him as a citizen to preserve and remember the memorials of his fellow-men, who stand to him in the next relation to that of parents, as teachers, rulers,

A Lecture delivered at the Working Men's College.

liberators, preservers of his and their common country. And there is more in it than mere thankfulness:-for there is not a man that hears me this day, and there will not be for all future time, who has not been benefited by this book of Herodotus. This simple act of love and duty— the endeavour that so far as he was concerned the deeds of his countrymen should not be forgotten-has issued in the most wonderful consequences to all generations.

But his own example furnishes the best comment on what he meant by History, and in what spirit he thought that such inquiries should be conducted. We should expect that in proportion to the love and faith in which he undertook this task, he would prosecute it with earnestness. And so he did. He was unwearied in his researches after the truth; he spared no pains. To get at the facts, to disentangle them from the misrepresentations in which his own prejudices, or the passions or the ignorance of others, might have obscured or entangled them-this was his great object.

We have then in him an example of the duty of a historian, and of all who, without being historians, are bent upon the study of history. They are to be inquirers, seekers after truth, and, as such, earnest in their pursuit of itand earnest especially that they do not mistake their own notions or conceptions of it for the truth which it has to reveal.

You see that in thus asking ourselves what History' is, we have glided insensibly into the second question—“What does it profess to teach us?' If it be a painful inquiry into facts, that is at once the meaning and the object of History. So far then it is leading us into an acquaintance with the truths and facts which concern our race, which concern our predecessors, which concern ourselves; which are lying about us and around us; in all the questions of the

day; in the institutions and governments under which we live; in the words we are now using; in the most familiar habits and usages of our lives. As the science of medicine brings us to the knowledge of the facts and laws which regulate and concern our health; as astronomy to the laws which determine the motions of the heavenly bodies; as other physical sciences introduce us to the consideration of laws which regulate the material universe; history brings us to the knowledge of those facts and those laws which concern us as men and citizens. It tells us how men have grown from barbarism to civilisation, from separate and contending masses to a sense of national life and unity; how that national life has expressed itself—in what forms, actions, languages; what causes have fostered or obstructed that national union; how men have struggled for truth and righteousness; what mistakes they have made in so doing; how they have been punished by them, how they have recovered from them. It brings before us, moreover, the lives of those who were most instrumental in advancing or retarding these

events.

If it be important to know these facts, then is it important to know history, from which alone they can be derived. And history is thus a part of that great revelation which all arts, all sciences, and all literature is gradually unfolding before our eyes. It is helping us, like these other branches of philosophy, to see things as they are; it is helping to disencumber us of those images and delusions-that slavery to present sense and present objects-which stand between us and the truth. Nay, more, it is bringing us to the knowledge of what is true, permanent, and substantial, apart from the mere outward forms and phantoms we are so apt to mistake for it; enabling us to disengage the errors, dogmas, and systems of men from the truths which they sought to maintain; to see a light in the thickest darkness,

an order not of human but divine appointment vindicating itself among the loudest clamours and deepest confusions of our race.

There is a passage in Lord Bacon so much to this purpose that I cannot forbear quoting it. Although' (he says) 'we are deeply indebted to the light, because by means of it we can find our way, ply our tasks, read, distinguish one another; and yet for all that the vision of the light itself is more excellent and more beautiful than all these various uses of it; so the contemplation and sight of things, as they are, without superstition, without imposture, without error, and without confusion, is in itself worth more than all the harvest and profit of inventions put together.' And so may I say of History; that useful as it may be to the statesman, to the lawyer, to the schoolmaster, or the annalist, so far as it enables us to look at facts as they are, and to cultivate that habit within us, the importance of History is far beyond all mere amusement or even information that we may gather from it.

But when I say that History is a revelation of facts as they are, do not suppose that your whole task consists in stringing all the facts of a period together, or that when you have got the facts you have necessarily mastered all the truths involved in them. Remember that when you have possessed yourselves of all the facts-supposing that you have done so there is yet another process to come, not less laborious; that is, to look at the facts steadily, to make sure that you do see them. For you know that many people think that they see things when they do not; that nothing is more common than this self-deception; that the habit of seeing, and seeing accurately and carefully, has to be taught, not to children only, but to grown people, when first introduced to objects which are strange to them or new. You know, too, that a man may look a hundred times at a common