ault. It is blank
darkness, which even the imagination fails to people.

What, then, is the use of History, and what are its lessons? If it can
tell us little of the past, and nothing of the future, why waste our
time over so barren a study?

First, it is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of
right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall,
but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false
word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or
vanity, the price has to be paid at last; not always by the chief
offenders, but paid by some one. Justice and truth alone endure and
live. Injustice and falsehood may be long-lived, but doomsday comes at
last to them, in French revolutions and other terrible ways.

That is one lesson of history. Another is, that we should draw no
horoscopes; that we should expect little, for what we expect will not
come to pass. Revolutions, reformations,--those vast movements into
which heroes and saints have flung themselves, in the belief that they
were the dawn of the millennium,--have not borne the fruit which they
looked for. Millenniums are still far away. These great convulsions
leave the world changed,--perhaps improved, but not improved as the
actors in them hoped it would be. Luther would have gone to work with
less heart, could he have foreseen the Thirty Years' War, and in the
distance the theology of Tubingen. Washington might have hesitated to
draw the sword against England, could he have seen the country which he
made as we see it now.[2]

The most reasonable anticipations fail us, antecedents the most apposite
mislead us, because the conditions of human problems never repeat
themselves. Some new feature alters every thing,--some element which we
detect only in its after-operation.

But this, it may be said, is but a meagre outcome. Can the long records
of humanity, with all its joys and sorrows, its sufferings and its
conquests, teach us more than this? Let us approach the subject from
another side.

If you were asked to point out the special features in which
Shakespeare's plays are so transcendently excellent, you would mention
perhaps, among others, this--that his stories are not put together, and
his characters are not conceived, to illustrate any particular law or
principle. They teach many lessons, but not any one prominent above
another; and when we have drawn from them all the direct instru