resent as the mastering
of the major premiss to the understanding of a syllogism; and to those
who reproach me for wasting my life over the chronicles of barbarian
invasions and the records of monkish litigations, instead of
contemplating the illustrious deeds of Greek sages and Roman heroes, I
confidently reply that it is more useful to a man to know his own
father's character than that of a remote ancestor. Even in this quiet
retreat," he went on, "I hear much talk of abuses and of the need for
reform; and I often think that if they who rail so loudly against
existing institutions would take the trouble to trace them to their
source, and would, for instance, compare this state as it is today with
its condition five hundred or a thousand years ago, instead of measuring
it by the standard of some imaginary Platonic republic, they would find,
if not less subject for complaint, yet fuller means of understanding and
remedying the abuses they discover."

This view of history was one so new in the abate Crescenti's day that it
surprised Odo with the revelation of unsuspected possibilities. How was
it that among the philosophers whose works he had studied, none had
thought of tracing in the social and political tendencies of the race
the germ of wrongs so confidently ascribed to the cunning of priests and
the rapacity of princes? Odo listened with growing interest while
Crescenti, encouraged by his questions, pointed out how the abuses of
feudalism had arisen from the small land-owner's need of protection
against the northern invader, as the concentration of royal prerogative
had been the outcome of the king's intervention between his great
vassals and the communes. The discouragement which had obscured Odo's
outlook since his visit to Pontesordo was cleared away by the discovery
that in a sympathetic study of the past might lie the secret of dealing
with present evils. His imagination, taking the intervening obstacles at
a bound, arrived at once at the general axiom to which such inductions
pointed; and if he afterward learned that human development follows no
such direct line of advance, but must painfully stumble across the
wastes of error, prejudice and ignorance, while the theoriser traverses
the same distance with a stroke of his speculative pinions; yet the
influence of these teachings tempered his judgments with charity and
dignified his very failures by a tragic sense of their inevitableness.

Crescenti suggested th