o. So it stands written in a life claiming
Anselm's authorship; and there is no reason why the
authorship should not be his. Out of the heart come
the issues of evil and of good, and not out of the
intellect or the understanding. Men are not good or bad,
noble or base--thank God for it!--as they judge well
or ill of the probabilities of nature, but as they love
God and hate the devil. And yet it is instructive.
We have heard grave good men--men of intellect and
influence--with all the advantages of modern science,
learning, experience; men who would regard Anselm
with sad and serious pity; yet tell us stories, as having
fallen within their own experience, of the marvels of
mesmerism, to the full as ridiculous (if anything is ridiculous)
as this of the poor decapitated Kieran.

"Mutato nomine de te
Fabula narratur."

We see our natural faces in the glass of history, and
turn away and straightway forget what manner of men
we are. The superstition of science scoffs at the
superstition of faith.
____

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES

To be entirely just in our estimate of other ages is not
difficult--it is impossible. Even what is passing in
our presence we see but through a glass darkly. The
mind as well as the eye adds something of its own,
before an image, even of the clearest object, can be
painted upon it,

And in historical inquiries, the most instructed
thinkers have but a limited advantage over the most
illiterate. Those who know the most, approach least
to agreement. The most careful investigations are
diverging roads--the further men travel upon them, the
greater the interval by which they are divided. In
the eyes of David Hume, the history of the Saxon
Princes is "the scuffling of kites and crows." Father
Newman would mortify the conceit of a degenerate
England by pointing to the sixty saints and the hundred
confessors who were trained in her royal palaces for the
Calendar of the Blessed. How vast a chasm yawns
between these two conceptions of the same era!
Through what common term can the student pass from
one into the other?

Or, to take an instance yet more noticeable. The
history of England scarcely interests Mr. Macaulay
before the Revolution of the seventeenth century. To
Lord John Russell, the Reformation was the first outcome
from centuries of folly and ferocity; and Mr.
Hallam's more temperate language softens, without
concealing, a similar conclusion. These writers have all
studie