l conceptions he
is investigating, are in truth his ancestors, bone of his bone, flesh of
his flesh. But at first the student who goes back, say, in the history
of Europe, behind the Renaissance or behind the Crusades into the actual
deposits of the past, is often struck with a kind of _vertige_. The men
and women whom he has dragged forth into the light of his own mind
are to him like some strange puppet-show. They are called by names he
knows--kings, bishops, judges, poets, priests, men of letters--but what
a gulf between him and them! What motives, what beliefs, what embryonic
processes of thought and morals, what bizarre combinations of ignorance
and knowledge, of the highest sanctity with the lowest credulity or
falsehood; what extraordinary prepossessions, born with a man and
tainting his whole ways of seeing and thinking from childhood to the
grave! Amid all the intellectual dislocation of the spectacle, indeed,
he perceives certain Greeks and certain Latins who represent a forward
strain, who belong as it seems to a world of their own, a world ahead
of them. To them he stretches out his hand: '_You_,' he says to them,
'though your priests spoke to you not of Christ, but of Zeus and
Artemis, _you_ are really my kindred!' But intellectually they stand
alone. Around them, after them, for long ages the world 'spake as a
child, felt as a child, understood as a child.'

Then he sees what it is makes the difference, digs the gulf.
'_Science_,' the mind cries, '_ordered knowledge_.' And so for the first
time the modern recognizes what the accumulations of his forefathers
have done for him. He takes the torch which man has been so long and
patiently fashioning to his hand, and turns it on the past, and at every
step the sight grows stranger, and yet more moving, more pathetic.
The darkness into which he penetrates does but make him grasp his
own guiding light the more closely. And yet, bit by bit, it has been
prepared for him by these groping, half-conscious generations, and the
scrutiny which began in repulsion and laughter ends in a marvelling
gratitude.

But the repulsion and the laughter come first, and during this winter of
work Elsmere felt them both very strongly. He would sit in the
morning buried among the records of decaying Rome and emerging France,
surrounded by Chronicles, by Church Councils, by lives of the Saints, by
primitive systems of law, pushing his imaginative, impetuous way through
them. Sometimes