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 distinguished 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 talk of ropes!

It is, in brief, not true that men ever lived by Delirium,
Hypocrisy, Injustice, or any form of Unreason, since they came to
inhabit this Planet. It is not true that they ever did, or ever
will, live except by the reverse of these. Men will again be
taught this. Their acted History will then again be a Heroism;
their written History, what it once was, an Epic. Nay, forever
it is either such; or else it virtually is--Nothing. Were it
written in a thousand volumes, the Unheroic of such volumes
hastens incessantly to be forgotten; the net content of an
Alexandrian Library of Unheroics is, and will ultimately shew
itself to be, _zero._ What man is interested to remember _it,_
have not all men, at all times, the liveliest interest to