Bywater: 'Heracliti Ephesii Reliquiae,' p. 38.]

Forgetfulness is so common a human failing. In our rapid transit through
life we are so inclined to forget the past stages of the journey. All
things pass by and are swallowed up in a moment of time. Experiences
crowd upon us; the events of our life occur, are recorded by our busy
brains, are digested, and are forgotten before the substance of which
they were made has resolved into its elements. We race through the
years, and our progress is headlong through the days.

Everything, as it is done with, is swept up into the basket of the past,
and the busy handmaids, unless we check them, toss the contents, good
and bad, on to the great rubbish heap of the world's waste. Loves,
hates, gains, losses, all things upon which we do not lay fierce and
strong hands, are gathered into nothingness, and, with a few exceptions,
are utterly forgotten.

And we, too, will soon have passed, and our little brains which have
forgotten so much will be forgotten. We shall be throttled out of the
world and pressed by the clumsy hands of Death into the mould of that
same rubbish-hill of oblivion, unless there be a stronger hand to save
us. We shall be cast aside, and left behind by the hurrying crowd,
unless there be those who will see to it that our soul, like that of
John Brown, goes marching along. There is only one human force stronger
than death, and that force is History, By it the dead are made to live
again: history is the salvation of the mortal man as religion is the
salvation of his immortal life.

Sometimes, then, in our race from day to day it is necessary to stop the
headlong progress of experience, and, for an hour, to look back upon the
past. Often, before we remember to direct our mind to it, that past is
already blurred, and dim. The picture is out of focus, and turning from
it in sorrow instantly the flight of our time begins again. This should
not be. "There is," says Emerson, "a relationship between the hours of
our life and the centuries of time." Let us give history and archaeology
its due attention; for thus not only shall we be rendering a service to
all the dead, not only shall we be giving a reason and a usefulness to
their lives, but we shall also lend to our own thought a balance which
in no otherwise can be obtained, we shall adjust ourselves to the true
movement of the world, and, above all, we shall learn how best to serve
that nation to which it is our inestim