y repeats itself is an apothegm which has descended to us
from a dateless antiquity. It has been made to serve so often as to
become trite; and yet its use is a necessity, inasmuch as it embodies a
verity, which to ignore were ignorance and folly linked together; and
as we stand on our eminence and scan the way humanity has worn with its
multitudinous feet, as the events of the world pass in review before
us, some so closely resemble others as that the one seems the echo of
the other; and there appears reason for that fascinating generalization
of the ancient philosopher, that the epochs and events of the physical
realm and history were a fixed and limited quantity, which, revolving
in a vast cycle, would bring from time to time the reiteration of the
facts or doings of an ancient era. There was no new thing thinkable,
only a reintroduction of the old. To illustrate this fact in brief, we
have but to note the history of philosophy. You read the names of
those who figure as founders of philosophical systems, and those
systems seem many. Read the systems as founded, and you find an
old-time philosophy, rejuvenated with some little addition of cap or
bell better to adapt it to the modern time. The much-lauded Hegelian
philosophy is the system of Democritus, with the addition of a little
more absurdity in the assertion of the identity of contradictories.
The multitudinous philosophies may thus be reduced to a single
quaternion, and the reputed inaugurator of a new philosophy is like to
be a charlatan. So history seems but a plagiarist.

There is an epoch in ecclesiastical history known as the War of the
Iconoclast; but that was only an embodiment of what had transpired
before, and what has occurred often since. Iconoclasm is a bias of
humanity. It grows out of the constitution of man. He is by heredity
a breaker of images. If this view be not fictitious, we must not be
surprised if there are developments of this spirit in our era or any
era. It is a perennial reappearance. Whether it come in religion,
statecraft, economic science, or literature, can be of little moment.
The fact is the matter of paramount importance. Christianity was the
iconoclast which broke in pieces the images of decrepit polytheism, and
hewed out a way where progress might march to fulfill her splendid
destiny. Luther was the iconoclast whose giant strokes demolished the
castle doors of Romish superstition, and broke to fragments the imag