Intrinsically and extrinsically it may be considered inaccessible
to these generations. Intrinsically, the spiritual purport of it has
become inconceivable, incredible to the modern mind. Extrinsically, the
documents and records of it, scattered waste as a shoreless chaos, are
not legible. They lie there printed, written, to the extent of tons of
square miles, as shot-rubbish; unedited, unsorted, not so much as
indexed; full of every conceivable confusion; yielding light to very
few; yielding darkness, in several sorts, to very many.' ...

"'This, then,' continues our impatient friend, 'is the Elysium we
English have provided for our heroes! The Rushworthian Elysium.
Dreariest continent of shot-rubbish the eye ever saw. Confusion piled on
confusion to your utmost horizon's edge; obscure in lurid twilight as of
the shadow of death; trackless, without index, without finger-post, or
mark of any human foregoer; where your human footstep, if you are still
human, echoes bodeful through the gaunt solitude, peopled only by
somnambulant pedants, dilettants, and doleful creatures, by phantasms,
errors, inconceivabilities, by nightmares, pasteboard norroys, griffins,
wiverns, and chimeras dire! There, all vanquished, overwhelmed under
such waste lumber mountains, the wreck and dead ashes of some six
unbelieving generations, does the age of Cromwell and his Puritans lie
hidden from us. This is what we, for our share, have been able to
accomplish towards keeping _our heroic ones_ in memory.'"

After some further diatribe against all preceding historians,
collectors, and editors, he drops his ventriloquism, and, resuming a
somewhat more natural voice, he proceeds:--

"Nay, in addition to the sad state of our historical books, and what
indeed is fundamentally the cause and origin of that, our common
spiritual notions, if any notion of ours may still deserve to be called
spiritual, are fatal to a right understanding of that seventeenth
century. _The Christian doctrines, which then dwelt alive in every
heart, have now in a manner died out of all hearts_--very mournful to
behold--and are not the guidance of this world any more. Nay, worse
still, the cant of them does yet dwell alive with us, little doubting
that it is cant, in which fatal intermediate state the eternal
sacredness of this universe itself, of this human life itself, has
fallen dark to the most of us, and we think that, too, a cant and a
creed."

So!--as our honest Germ