s documents, have been cast out of the
science, and we are presented with a quite continuous and purely natural
sequence of events. Religious historians like Bishop Creighton or Lord
Bryce do not find their periods broken by divine interpositions; the
writers of the Cambridge History do not occasionally arrest us before
some great event and warn us that the chain of human causation seems to
be obscure or discontinuous. There are, of course, problems of history,
but they are not obscurities which, like the obscure places in science,
tempt the theologian to enter and claim a divine interposition. The
story is from beginning to end--to use Nietzsche's phrase--"human, all
too human." On the whole, as it has been hitherto written, it is a story
of wars, and, though patriotic piety puts its gloss on the issue of a
war here and there, the historian does not find any serious problem in
them. No French historian will now claim divine action in the Napoleonic
wars, and assuredly few of us are prepared to see the finger of God in
the fortunate issue of Prussia's many campaigns since Frederick the
Great.

Whatever we may think of the cosmic process generally, the human part of
that process does not encourage a theological interpretation. Man is
working out his own destiny, and doing it ill. We see him, like some
pedlar plodding along a country road under his burdens, carrying through
whole centuries institutions and ideas and follies that he will
eventually shed. When he drops them, there is no more element of
miracle or revelation in his action than when he discovers the use of
steam or of aluminium or of the spectroscope. His mind expands and his
ideals rise. It is a little incongruous to suppose that some infinitely
wiser and affectionate parent was looking on all the time and giving no
assistance. In the dialogue between Mephistopheles and God which Goethe
prefixes to his _Faust_, the devil obviously scores. In the sight of
such an intelligence man must have made a pretty fool of himself during
the last 1500 years. We human beings are more charitable. Take the whole
story as the gradual development of human intelligence and emotion under
unfavourable political conditions, hampered by a despotic and perverse
clergy, and it seems natural enough.

This is the impression one gets from history, and the nearer history is
to our own time and the better we know it, the less it suggests a divine
guidance. There is something parochial o