ional and
providential destinies of my country, and the benedictions of the
Eternal for all those who trust in Him and tremble only at his
Word."

The old Dutch scholar differs in many important points from Mr. Motley,
as might be expected from his creed and his life-long pursuits. This I
shall refer to in connection with Motley's last work, "John of
Barneveld." An historian among archivists and annalists reminds one of
Sir John Lubbock in the midst of his ant-hills. Undoubtedly he disturbs
the ants in their praiseworthy industry, much as his attentions may
flatter them. Unquestionably the ants (if their means of expressing
themselves were equal to their apparent intellectual ability) could teach
him many things that he has overlooked and correct him in many mistakes.
But the ants will labor ingloriously without an observer to chronicle
their doings, and the archivists and annalists will pile up facts forever
like so many articulates or mollusks or radiates, until the vertebrate
historian comes with his generalizing ideas, his beliefs, his prejudices,
his idiosyncrasies of all kinds, and brings the facts into a more or less
imperfect, but still organic series of relations. The history which is
not open to adverse criticism is worth little, except as material, for it
is written without taking cognizance of those higher facts about which
men must differ; of which Guizot writes as follows, as quoted in the work
of M. Groen van Prinsterer himself.

"It is with facts that our minds are exercised, it has nothing but
facts as its materials, and when it discovers general laws these
laws are themselves facts which it determines. . . . In the
study of facts the intelligence may allow itself to be crushed; it
may lower, narrow, materialize itself; it may come to believe that
there are no facts except those which strike us at the first glance,
which come close to us, which fall, as we say, under our senses; a
great and gross error; there are remote facts, immense, obscure,
sublime, very difficult to reach, to observe, to describe, and which
are not any less facts for these reasons, and which man is not less
obliged to study and to know; and if he fails to recognize them or
forgets them, his thought will be prodigiously abashed, and all his
ideas carry the stamp of this deterioration."

In that higher region of facts which belongs to the historian, whose task
it is to interpret as w