ure the like temptations, and prepare us
for effectually ministering to the good of others. And if the struggle in
our own hearts be long, and there be moments when we seem to have our
Gethsemane; let us cleave the closer, with the more simple trust, to our
heavenly Father; still imploring Him to grant us in this world knowledge
of his truth, and in the world to come life everlasting; assured that the
clouds shall one day disperse, and the vision of truth be unveiled to us
in the bright light of the eternal morning.

I shall be well content that all that I have said to you be forgotten; and
when these lectures take their humble place in the series of which they
form a part, deriving an honour, not their own, from the great names with
which they are associated, I shall be willing that they be consigned to
neglect; if I can only hope that this final exhortation to prayerful study
may remain fixed in the memory of any one of those that now hear these
words, or may impress the mind of any chance student who, in traversing
the same ground, may hereafter have occasion to peruse them, at a time
perhaps when the voice that now speaks shall be hushed in the tomb, and
the spirit shall have gone to its account.

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The lectures are now ended. May God forgive the errors, and sanctify any
truth that has been uttered to His honour! The faults are mine: the truth
is His, not mine. To Him be the glory.

NOTES.

Lecture I.

Note 1. p. 3. Subdivisions Of Historical Inquiry.

A few words may explain the distinctions intended in the text.

History has been properly distinguished by Macaulay into two branches, the
artistic or descriptive, and the scientific or analytic. (_Essays_, vol.
i. 2, on Hallam.) If viewed in the former aspect, history aims as far as
possible to reproduce what has been, to recover a picture of the past.
Hence it is obedient to the two conditions which rule all art,--precise
outline in details, and preservation of perspective in the combination. In
the latter, theory in some slight degree steps in, but theory dictated by
the instinct of taste rather than by reflection. It is in this branch, in
which the historian is the critic, that the border line lies between art
and science. For it is hard to measure the precise amount which is due in
the appreciation of facts respectively to artistic intuition and to
reflective analysis.(1054)

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