metan conquerors took up the torch of science and
learning, and handed it on to western Europe when the new generations
were ready. He will learn how in the meantime, during ages which we
both wrongly and ungratefully call dark, from Rome again, that other
great organisation, the mediaeval Church, had arisen, which amid many
imperfections and some crimes did a work that no glory of physical
science can equal, and no instrument of physical science can compass,
in purifying men's appetites, in setting discipline and direction on
their lives, and in offering to humanity new types of moral obligation
and fairer ideals of saintly perfection, whose light still shines like
a star to guide our own poor voyages. It is only by this contemplation
of the life of our race as a whole that men see the beginnings and
the ends of things; learn not to be near-sighted in history, but to
look before and after; see their own part and lot in the rising up and
going down of empires and faiths since first recorded time began; and
what I am contending for is that even if you can take your young men
and women no farther than the mere vestibule of this ancient and ever
venerable Temple of many marvels, you will have opened to them the way
to a kind of knowledge that not only enlightens the understanding, but
enriches the character--which is a higher thing than mere
intellect--and makes it constantly alive with the spirit of
beneficence.

I know it is said that such a view of collective history is true, but
that you will never get plain people to respond to it; it is a thing
for intellectual dilettanti and moralising virtuosi. Well, we do not
know, because we have never yet honestly tried, what the commonest
people will or will not respond to. When Sir Richard Wallace's
pictures were being exhibited at Bethnal Green, after people had said
that the workers had no souls for art and would not appreciate its
treasures, a story is told of a female in very poor clothes gazing
intently at a picture of the Infant Jesus in the arms of his Mother,
and then exclaiming, '_Who would not try to be a good woman, who had
such a child as that?_' We have never yet, I say, tried the height and
pitch to which our people are capable of rising.

I have thought it well to take this opportunity of saying a word for
history, because I cannot help thinking that one of the most narrow,
and what will eventually be one of the most impoverishing,
characteristics of our day i