nd to the common level, and to confession to a large admixture
of error. I might fairly take this for granted; but it may be well that
I should entrench myself behind the very apposite words of a historical
authority who is certainly not obnoxious to even a suspicion of
sceptical tendencies. [1]

Time was--and that not very long ago--when all the relations of
ancient authors concerning the old world were received with a
ready belief; and an unreasoning and uncritical faith accepted
with equal satisfaction the narrative of the campaigns of Caesar
and of the doings of Romulus, the account of Alexander's marches
and of the conquests of Semiramis. We can most of us remember
when, in this country, the whole story of regal Rome, and even
the legend of the Trojan settlement in Latium, were seriously
placed before boys as history, and discoursed of as
unhesitatingly and in as dogmatic a tone as the tale of the
Catilline Conspiracy or the Conquest of Britain....

But all this is now changed. The last century has seen the birth
and growth of a new science--the Science of Historical
Criticism.... The whole world of profane history has been
revolutionised....

If these utterances were true when they fell from the lips of a Bampton
lecturer in 1859, with how much greater force do they appeal to us now,
when the immense labours of the generation now passing away constitute
one vast illustration of the power and fruitfulness of scientific
methods of investigation in history, no less than in all other
departments of knowledge.

At the present time, I suppose, there is no one who doubts that
histories which appertain to any other people than the Jews, and their
spiritual progeny in the first century, fall within the second class
of the three enumerated. Like Goethe's Autobiography, they might all be
entitled "Wahrheit und Dichtung"--"Truth and Fiction." The proportion
of the two constituents changes indefinitely; and the quality of the
fiction varies through the whole gamut of unveracity. But "Dichtung" is
always there. For the most acute and learned of historians cannot
remedy the imperfections of his sources of information; nor can the
most impartial wholly escape the influence of the "personal equation"
generated by his temperament and by his education. Therefore, from the
narratives of Herodotus to those set forth in yesterday's "Times," all
history is to be read subje