of barbarism
within its natural limits; for this appealed to what was noblest in
human nature. We forget the elaborate intrigues which preceded the
Peloponnesian war, for these appealed only to vulgar and ordinary
motives of self-aggrandisement. We remember the trumpet voice which
summoned Christendom to deliver Christ's sepulchre from Pagan insults,
for that was the great romance of religious sentiment. But we forget the
treaties by which this or that Crusading king delivered his army from
Mahometan victors, because these proceeded on the common principles of
fear and self-interest; principles having no peculiar relation to those
from which the Crusades had arisen.

Now, if even actions themselves are easily dropped from the memory,
because they stand in no logical relation to the central interest
concerned, how much more and how universally must dates be liable to
oblivion--dates which really have no more discoverable connection with
any name of man or place or event, than the letters or syllables of
that name have with the great cause or principles with which it may
happen to have been associated. Why should Themistocles or Aristides
have flourished 500 B.C., rather than 250, 120, or any other number of
years? No conceivable relation--hardly so much as any fanciful
relation--can be established between the man and his era. And in this
one (to all appearance insuperable) difficulty, in this absolute defect
of all connection between the two objects that are to be linked together
in the memory, lies the startling task of Chronology. Chronology is
required to chain together--and so that one shall inevitably recall the
other--a name and an era which with regard to each other are like two
clouds, aerial, insulated, mutually repulsive, and throwing out no
points for grappling or locking on, neither offering any natural
indications of interconnection, nor apparently by art, contrivance,[21]
or fiction, susceptible of any.

II. _Jewish as compared with other records._--Let us open our review
with the annals of Judea; and for two reasons: first, because in the
order of time it _was_ the inaugural chapter, so that the order of our
rehearsal does but conform to the order of the facts; secondly, because
on another principle of arrangement, viz., its relation to the capital
interests of human nature, it stands first in another sense by a degree
which cannot be measured.

These are two advantages, in comparison with all other his