l works that Carlyle was thinking when he said that he
had waded through them all, but that nothing should ever induce him to
hand even their names and titles down to posterity. And yet how much
is there even in Carlyle's histories that might safely be consigned to
oblivion!

Why do we want to know history? Why does history form a recognized
part of our liberal education? Simply because all of us, and every one
of us, ought to know how we have come to be what we are, so that each
generation need not start again from the same point and toil over the
same ground, but, profiting by the experience of those who came
before, may advance toward higher points and nobler aims. As a child
when growing up might ask his father or grandfather _who_ had built
the house they lived in, or who had cleared the field that yielded
them their food, we ask the historian whence we came, and how we came
into possession of what we call our own. History may tell us afterward
many useful and amusing things, gossip, such as a child might like to
hear from his mother or grandmother; but what history has to teach us
before all and everything, is our own antecedents, our own ancestors,
our own descent.

Now our principal intellectual ancestors are, no doubt, the _Jews_,
the _Greeks_, the _Romans_, and the _Saxons_, and we, here in Europe,
should not call a man educated or enlightened who was ignorant of the
debt which he owes to his intellectual ancestors in Palestine, Greece,
Rome, and Germany. The whole past history of the world would be
darkness to him, and not knowing what those who came before him had
done for him, he would probably care little to do anything for those
who are to come after him. Life would be to him a chain of sand, while
it ought to be a kind of electric chain that makes our hearts tremble
and vibrate with the most ancient thoughts of the past, as well as
with the most distant hopes of the future.

Let us begin with our religion. No one can understand even the
historical possibility of the Christian religion without knowing
something of the Jewish race, which must be studied chiefly in the
pages of the Old Testament. And in order to appreciate the true
relation of the Jews to the rest of the ancient world, and to
understand what ideas were peculiarly their own, and what ideas they
shared in common with the other members of the Semitic stock, or what
moral and religious impulses they received from their historical
contact wi