overed the
earth with peace as with a garment and pierced the veil that cuts us
off from the dead, will look back to us as groping blindly in
darkness. But they will be wrong indeed if they think that we realize
our blindness.

A still greater pitfall before us is that we read history not as men,
but as gods, knowing the event. The name of Marathon to us implies not
struggle, not danger, but triumph; and as we think of the little band
of Athenians defiling from the mountains and looking on the sea, with
the utmost determination we cannot quite enter into their thoughts. Of
how little avail must have seemed this handful of lives, their last
and best gift to Athens, against the might and majesty of Persia
afloat before them. We know of that runner and of the rejoicing that
broke out upon his words; and at the very opening of the scene the
darkness is pierced by a gleam they could not see, a gleam which for
us will not go out. Or think of Edwardes besieging the Sikhs in
Multan with his puny force, half of whom, when he began, were in
sympathy with the besieged. We know that the terrier's courage kept
the tiger in; and, conscious of that, we cannot really place ourselves
beside the young Engineer of 29, as with only one or two volunteers of
his own race round him he kept the field during those four burning
months in which British troops were not allowed to move. The tiger's
paw had crushed those whom he had hastened to avenge: he did not know,
as we know, that it was not to fall on him too.

There is the same difficulty with the course of years. With the
history of four centuries before our minds, only by sustained effort
of thought can we realize that the men of 1514 looked onward to 1600,
as we to-day look towards 2000, as to a misty blank. We hardly trouble
our heads with the future. The air is full of speculations, of
attempts to forecast coming developments, the growth, the improvement
that is to be. But we do not really look forward, more than a little
way. The darkness is too dense: and besides, the needs of the present
are very urgent. As we think of the sixteenth century, behind Henry
VIII's breach with Rome, behind Edward VI's prayer-books, waits the
figure of Pole, steadfast, biding his time; coming to salute Mary with
the words of the angel to the Virgin; coming, as he hoped, to set
things right for ever. And behind Pole are the Elizabethan settlement
and the Puritans; ineradicable from our consciousness. To t