t 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 Tuebingen. Washington might have hesitated to
draw the sword against England, could he have seen the country which
he made as we see it now.[34]

[Footnote 34: This is a reference to the condition of this country
during the Civil War.]

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

Bishop Butler says somewhere that the best book which could be written
would be a book consisting only of premises, from which the readers
should draw conclusions for themselves. The highest poetry is the very
thing which Butler requires, and the highest history ought to be. We
should no more ask for a theory of this or that period of history,
than we should ask for a theory of "Macbeth" or "Hamlet." Philosophies
of history, sciences of history,--all these there will continue to be;
the fashions of them will change, as our habits of thought will
change; each new philosopher will find his chief employment in showing
that before him no one understood anything; but the drama of history
is imperishable, and the lessons of it will be like what we learn from
Homer or Shakespeare,--lessons for which we have no words.

The address of history is less to the understanding than to the higher
emotions. We learn in it to sympathize with what is great and good; we
learn to hate what is base. In the anomalies of fortune we feel the
mystery of our mortal existence; and in the companionship of the
illustrious natures who have shaped the fortunes of the world, we
escape from the littlenesses which cling to the round of common life,
and our minds are tuned in a higher and nobler key.

For the rest, and for those large questions which I touched in
connection with Mr. Buckle, we live in times of disintegration, and
none can tell what will be