It is even so.  So it stands written in a life claiming Anselm’s authorship; and there is no reason why the authorship should not be his.  Out of the heart come the issues of evil and of good, and not out of the intellect or the understanding.  Men are not good or bad, noble or base—­thank God for it!—­as they judge well or ill of the probabilities of nature, but as they love God and hate the devil.  And yet it is instructive.  We have heard grave good men—­men of intellect and influence—­with all the advantages of modern science, learning, experience; men who would regard Anselm with sad and serious pity; yet tell us stories, as having fallen within their own experience, of the marvels of mesmerism, to the full as ridiculous (if anything is ridiculous) as this of the poor decapitated Kieran.

“Mutato nomine de te
Fabula narratur.”

We see our natural faces in the glass of history, and turn away and straightway forget what manner of men we are.  The superstition of science scoffs at the superstition of faith. ____

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES

To be entirely just in our estimate of other ages is not difficult—­it is impossible.  Even what is passing in our presence we see but through a glass darkly.  The mind as well as the eye adds something of its own, before an image, even of the clearest object, can be painted upon it,

And in historical inquiries, the most instructed thinkers have but a limited advantage over the most illiterate.  Those who know the most, approach least to agreement.  The most careful investigations are diverging roads—­the further men travel upon them, the greater the interval by which they are divided.  In the eyes of David Hume, the history of the Saxon Princes is “the scuffling of kites and crows.”  Father Newman would mortify the conceit of a degenerate England by pointing to the sixty saints and the hundred confessors who were trained in her royal palaces for the Calendar of the Blessed.  How vast a chasm yawns between these two conceptions of the same era!  Through what common term can the student pass from one into the other?

Or, to take an instance yet more noticeable.  The history of England scarcely interests Mr. Macaulay before the Revolution of the seventeenth century.  To Lord John Russell, the Reformation was the first outcome from centuries of folly and ferocity; and Mr. Hallam’s more temperate language softens, without concealing, a similar conclusion.  These writers have all studied what they describe.  Mr. Carlyle has studied the same subject with power at least equal to theirs, and to him the greatness of English character was waning with the dawn of English literature; the race of heroes was already failing.  The era of action was yielding before the era of speech.

All these views may seem to ourselves exaggerated; we may have settled into some moderate via media, or have carved out our own ground on an original pattern; but if we are wise, the differences in other men’s judgments will teach us to be diffident.  The more distinctly we have made history bear witness in favour of our particular opinions, the more we have multiplied the chances against the truth of our own theory.