Philosophical History' in these
times, cannot even be _not_ seen: it is misseen; affirmed to have
existed,--and to have been a godless Impossibility. Your Norman
Conquerors, true royal souls, crowned kings as such, were vulturous
irrational tyrants: your Becket was a noisy egoist and hypocrite;
getting his brains spilt on the floor of Canterbury Cathedral, to
secure the main chance,--somewhat uncertain how! 'Policy, Fanaticism,'
or say 'Enthusiasm,' even 'honest Enthusiasm,'--ah yes, of course:

'The Dog, to gain his private ends,
_Went_ mad, and bit the Man!'--

For in truth, the eye sees in all things 'what it brought with it the
means of seeing.' A godless century, looking back on centuries that
were godly, produces portraitures more miraculous than any other. All
was inane discord in the Past; brute Force bore rule everywhere;
Stupidity, savage Unreason, fitter for Bedlam than for a human World!
Whereby indeed it becomes sufficiently natural that the like
qualities, in new sleeker habiliments, should continue in our time to
rule. Millions enchanted in Bastille Workhouses; Irish Widows proving
their relationship by typhus-fever: what would you have? It was ever
so, or worse. Man's History, was it not always even this: The cookery
and eating-up of imbecile Dupedom by successful Quackhood; the battle,
with various weapons, of vulturous Quack and Tyrant against vulturous
Tyrant and Quack? No God was in the Past Time; nothing but Mechanisms
and Chaotic Brute-Gods:--how shall the poor 'Philosophic Historian,'
to whom his own century is all godless, see any God in other
centuries?

Men believe in Bibles, and disbelieve in them: but of all Bibles the
frightfulest to disbelieve in is this 'Bible of Universal History.'
This is the Eternal Bible and God's-Book, 'which every born man,' till
once the soul and eyesight are extinguished in him, 'can and must,
with his own eyes, see the God's-Finger writing!' To discredit this,
is an _infidelity_ like no other. Such infidelity you would punish, if
not by fire and faggot, which are difficult to manage in our times,
yet by the most peremptory order, To hold its peace till it got
something wiser to say. Why should the blessed Silence be broken into
noises, to communicate only the like of this? If the Past have no
God's-Reason in it, nothing but Devil's-Unreason, let the Past be
eternally forgotten: mention _it_ no more;--we whose ancestors were
all hanged, why should we ta