66 wandering stars," and again they revolve loyal planets around the sun. And the cross will bind them so mightily that they will never wander again. If this be true, then certainly, demonstrate this central fact as you will and you fill Christian hearts with joy, and in the various demonstrations Christians will see so many suns mingling and concentrating rays, until the magnificent fact shines with the clearness of an eternal day. ARTICLE VI. ANCIENT AND MODERN HISTORIANS. By Prof. E. D. Sanborn, Dartmouth College, N. H. THE best historian is he who represents, with the greatest fidelity, the life and spirit of the age he describes. It is not sufficient that what he records should be strictly true, it should be true to the living archetype; it should be relatively as well as absolutely true. It is possible for a painter to represent a landscape, with perfect accuracy of outline, giving to every object its proportionate size, form, and position, adjusting, with the utmost skill and precision, the relative distances of the several parts, and yet by an artful blending of light, shade and colouring, he may destroy the fidelity of the picture and render it false to the original. So it is with the historian. He may make a true record of mighty revolutions in the political world, assigning to the prominent actors in life's drama their respective parts, their exact position upon the stage, and their relative military and political influence, and still, by distorting and colouring their motives, and shading their characters, he may represent these same actors, at pleasure, as a curse or a blessing to mankind. While the historian records those great events which change the governments of the world, and the fortunes of nations, he should not over look those noiseless and constantly progressive revolutions in manners, morals, and religion, which give a new character to society and change the destinies of nations. A history may contain no untruth, and yet leave a false impression upon the mind of the reader. All the particular events recorded may be true, and yet those modifying influences which give character to the age may be omitted. The man who should attempt to record the events of the eighteenth century, without alluding to the rise of Methodism in England, or the "Great Awakening" in America, would certainly present a very imperfect view of the social and religious state of those countries, however accurate he might be in the details of political and military history. Hence the importance of knowing the principles of an author, and the particular influences under which he wrote. If the reader be informed in the outset that a writer of English history is a Whig or a Tory, a Catholic or a Protestant, his own reflections may, in some measure, neutralize the effect of the author's political or religious prejudices and partialities. To decide upon the merits of a historian, we must know the age in which he lived, and the influences to which he was subjected; and conversely, to appreciate the value of a history we ought to be acquainted with the writer and the party to which he belonged in religion and politics. If we arraign an ancient historian before a modern tribunal of criticism, and test his merits by the existing standard of historical excellence, we shall, inevitably, do him injustice. The failure of recent critics to make a just discrimination in this respect, has, undoubtedly, contributed to bring the old historians into comparative disesteem. It has become fashionable among scholars to talk of the childishness, the vanity, and superstitious credulity of Herodotus, and to complain, with seeming honesty, of Livy's obtuseness and reckless disregard of truth. These writers are gravely charged with carelessness, partiality, and even the grossest dishonesty, because they did not write history as the critics of the nineteenth century think it ought to be written. It will not avail them to plead, in their behalf, that they wrote as a Greek or Roman, of those times, might be expected to write. It is enough to condemn them that they have not written as Hallam or Niebuhr would have written, had they been the contemporaries of these authors. Herodotus and Livy have faults peculiar to their times. They are such as never can be repeated. Modern historians, it is true, are free from them. They have shunned the errors of an early age; and, in their extreme caution, have plunged into faults of an opposite character, still more injurious and far less pardonable. The early historians were artless. They believed too much. They received human testimony with too little doubt. They sometimes mistook appearances for realities. Modern historians are theorists, wily advocates, using the facts of history to weave the web of their tangled sophistries, in order to prejudice men in favour of their party or creed. Antiquity does not furnish a single philosophic historian, in the modern acceptation of that term; and yet, there are some among the old writers who, in all the qualities of a good historian, have never been equalled. "The spirit of history," says one, "is frequently history deprived of its spirit." The philosopher in pursuit of principles, reckless of details, plays the anatomist; and while he dissects away those less substantial parts on which life and beauty depend, he leaves to his readers only the skeleton of the dead past. In the hands of such men, history becomes a succession of learned disquisitions upon the moral and political elements of social progress. They frequently exhibit profound views of human life, and develope those controlling laws which regulate and limit the advancement of the race-laws with which every student of history ought to be familiar-still they do not write history. Their works are necessarily fragmentary. They are erudite dissertations, learned essays, critiques, any thing but lucid narrative. Another class of modern philosophic historians make use of history for the purpose of proving a theory in politics or religion. Such a writer often plays the eclectic, and selects only those particular facts which sustain his own views. Better far go back to the childlike simplicity of Herodotus, and collect both fact and fable, and weave them into a graceful and pleasing narrative, leaving the reader to draw his own inferences from the furnished data. The errors of the imagination are less injurious than the perversions of the speculative reason. In the one case, what history loses, poetry gains; and truth may be recovered by stripping off its borrowed robes. In the other, truth perverted and misapplied not only loses its salutary influence, but becomes positively hurtful. It sheds a false light, which leads the sincere and honest inquirer astray. If we carefully consider the condition of the first writers of history, we shall no longer wonder at the poetic character of their narratives. The im-agination is ever developed before the judgment. Men feel and enjoy before they reason and decide. Hence poetry, which is the language of emotion, precedes prose. The beginnings of history lie hid to the inquirer. The first man's discourse to his child is the fountain whence oral history flows. In its progress, it is enriched by countless tributary streams of tradition. Poetry gathers up those traditions, and from them weaves the mazy web of mythology. When the seeker after pure historic facts begins to trace those lines of truth that run, like golden threads, through this complex tissue of reality and fiction, he is at once involved in uncertainty, and begins to question the fidelity of all history. Truth and error are so intimately blended that, for the sake of the truth, he is obliged to adopt the error with which it is united. For obvious reasons, the first written histories could rise but little above tradition. They must be confused, contradictory, and exaggerated. The writer who is himself the product of the age in which he writes, rarely possesses the patience or discrimination necessary to separate fact from fable. He is perhaps in advance of his generation in culture and intelligence, and yet he is the index and exponent of the mind and heart of the nation to which he belongs. knows the past only by tradition. guides the teacher and the taught. pressions of the many and sets his own seal upon them. He Like his fellows, he The same dim light He gathers up the im writes to please his contemporaries. He has not yet attained to that elevation of soul which prompted Thucydides to write "for eternity." Such lofty aspirings are the result only of high intellectual culture. The historians who preceded Herodotus were such writers as we have described. Indeed, it is only in an indefinite and popular sense, that those collectors of traditions, myths, fables, allegories, and epigrams, can be called historians. They were prolix story-tellers, who pursued their vocation for the amusement of an imaginative and superstitious people. The wares they furnished were adapted to the market to which they were brought. The works of Herodotus constitute the transition from story-telling to true history. He rejected the practice of his predecessors of relating the traditions of a single city; and undertook to write, in one beautiful whole, all the most important events relative to the principal nations of the then known world. Examine his materials, a crude mass of facts, fictions, mythologies, dreams, omens, prodigies; in a word, all the monstrous creations of the unrestrained imagination and blind credulity of a youthful people. For whom did he write? Not for the practical, talented, and phlegmatic Englishman, not for the speculative, erudite, and philosophic German, but for the inquisitive, lively, and credulous Greek. He was himself the child of a poetic age, born beneath the same genial skies, and subjected to the same moral influences as those for whom he His narratives were not destined to reach the public eye through the circulating library, nor in cheap editions, scattered, like the leaves of autumn before a November blast, but they were to be recited at the great Olympic festival, or read from manuscripts to assembled crowds of his countrymen. They were not written for the eye of cold skeptical critics, who ask for authorities, and try every assertion by the test of argument, but they were designed to delight the curious minds of countless, interested, excited, and intelligent listeners, men who heard, with delight and applause, tales of strange beasts and birds, and still stranger men. Such an audience stayed not to question the accuracy of the narrator, who de wrote. |