"Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel." The Old Testament shows us how all preceding history was its prelude, and every succeeding generation establishes the fundamental truth, that the people and nation that will not be taught of Christ must perish. Adequate ideas of the world's history can be gained, if this be true, by him only who surveys the world from this standpoint. 8. EMPIRICAL HISTORY. It is a curious thing in literature, that popular historians have been to so great an extent inspired by an unnatural enthusiasm against the Gospel. Such a perverted genius as that of Gibbon has unfortunately controlled the fancies of others, and our libraries are filled with elaborate distortions of historic fact, one book begotten of another, and all conveying the most confused and inadequate ideas of the world's progress. What a splendid opportunity was lost by Gibbon, when he resolved to leave out from his narrative the story of the apostles and martyrs, ignoring the unquestionable base of all he undertook to tell! The stubborn facts could not be overlooked; but, as far as possible, he gropes on with Paganism under the Antonines, without reference to realities which he only reaches in his fifteenth chapter, and of which he then condescends to take notice as "a very essential part of the history of the Roman Empire." Ah, indeed! Hamlet a very interesting part of the drama! The entire chapter reflects disgrace upon its author, alike by its place in his ponderous work, and by the spirit with which he struggles to assign the origin and progress of the Gospel to every cause but the true one, to every auxiliary influence, forgetting those which are primary and fundamental. It is as if an historian of the United States of America should begin with the great exhibition of industries which took place in Philadelphia at our late Centennial Celebration of Independence, and then, after a volume about the activity and enterprise of the American people, should devote a chapter to prove that Washington and his contemporaries deserved a retrospective glance, as having in a remarkable manner fallen in with times and circumstances and mingled some wisdom and more mistake in their influences upon succeeding times and manners. 9. CONVENTIONAL IDEAS. A better class of historians, such as Robertson, and Ranke, and Dean Milman, have been unable to divest themselves of conventional ideas and habits in their valuable works. They adhere to traditional notions and misleading phrases, even where they demonstrate the fallacy of such forms of thought and speech. Thus, while they tell us about the exploded Decretals, and other fables of the medieval period, they still adopt the old raiment of language which puzzles the student. They speak of Roman pontificates, as if there had been such things in the days of Clement or Hippolytus, and give us tables of "the Popes" begin ning with St. Peter! In the very same pages they demonstrate that St. Peter was never at Rome except to be beheaded, and that it is about as sensible to call Sylvester a Pope as it would be to date the Empire from the first consulate, to speak of the "Emperor Cincinnatus," or to paint him at his plough in imperial purple. IO. AN UNDERESTIMATED EPOCH. The transfer of the Roman capital to Byzantium, for example, is evidence of overwhelming significance, as to the workings of Christianity before Constantine, as to the predominance of the East in its origin and progress for three centuries, and as to the leavening influences in Roman politics, which, in spite of Diocletian and the persecutors before him, had made such an astounding revolution possible, if not inevitable. Christianity had made no assault upon the Cæsars; but the upsetting of their throne upon the seven hills, and the removal of their capital to the Thracian Bosporus, was a mere index of what it had been doing while it fought with the rabble of Olympus and mocked the shameful superstitions of mythology. Yet this most consummate of all the changes and revolutions in history has been wellnigh overlooked, or only treated as a curious incident. Like the Chinese, who survey the universe each one from his own habitation as its focus, our historians have thought and written as Occidentals. They have not condescended to observe that the original seat of Christianity was the Orient; that its triumph was the triumph of Greek thought over the less intellectual Latin races; that this truth was the magnet that drew the Empire eastward, that diminished the influence and dignity of old Rome, and that dictated to it from the Ecumenical Synods, - all Eastern in geography, all Greek in language in their idiomatic expression of dogma. How comes it, when to state these admitted facts is to prove the conclusions to which I point you, how comes it that all our popular histories, and most of those which aim to be scientific, chronicle these truths indeed, and then go on to ignore them? They treat of Christianity as if it were generated in Italy, and as if its first doctors and missionaries had been commissioned from the Vatican, in the same pages that enable us to prove the essentially Grecian origin and character of the Church. II. THE RUTS OF HABIT. The human mind is slow to turn out of the ruts of habit; it prefers the beaten way, even when it makes them plod in a thoroughfare imprinted only by the hoofs of asses. A noteworthy example presents itself in the condescension of transcendent genius to the trammels of conventional expression. Milton flourished more than a century after the true theory of the universe had been taught by the presbyter Copernicus; he had himself conversed with Galileo, who crowned the system of Copernicus with the glory of irrefragable demonstration. Milton understood the heliocentric struc ture of the solar system, and the rotations of the earth, diurnal and annual. Now it is most curious, that, although his great poem would have gained immensely by adopting this philosophy, and placing Uriel in a central sun, he yet stuck to the conventional ideas of the poets, and so commensurately degraded the ground plan of his immortal epic. The critical student of that scheme may recall the explorations of Lucifer, as he passed through Chaos and at last discovered our universe, enclosed in a spherical shell and pendent from the resplendent gates of Heaven. When he gained the surface of this shell, and looked down upon the stellar worlds enclosed within, how admirably it would have suited the poet's purpose to have conducted him to our solar system, by a discovery of its real nature, the glorious sun illuminating the planets, and our earth, with its little moon, in its true relations with all the rest. But no: even the gigantic genius of Milton must fall into the dull routine of untruthful science, and disfigure his work with the rubbish of the outworn Ptolemaic theory; that incomparable monument of the genius and plausibility with which mankind can embellish what is false, and make "the worse appear the better reason." Take a specimen of the consequences: "They pass the planets seven, and pass the fix'd, And that crystalline sphere whose balance weighs Here is neither rhyme nor reason; but it illustrates my point, namely, the disposition even of noble minds to adopt the idols of the market |