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 2 22 S. E. Baldwin History has a place in " the hterature of power." It has it only by right of the human motive that controls events and the imagina- tion that can see and paint it. There was a half-truth in what Sir Edward Burne-Jones once said, that there were but four English historians: Sliakespeare, Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray. There is no historian who is not an artist. He must tell his story in a large way. He is concerned with what is in essence part of a long process. Facts, as Macaulay puts it, are the dross of history. Their relations to us are what is to be fined out, and when these are found in religion, something great has at once come in to dignify the work. Herbert Spencer has said that in the fine arts " a work . . . which is full of small contrasts and without any great contrasts, sins against the fundamental principles of beauty "} The thought may be extended to historical literature. There must be great contrasts to make any particular history effective. But more than this, it is only so far as it presents great contrasts that any history, be it particular or universal, is true. They are its soul. They are the moving cause of the trivial events and common course of things which conceal them from general observation. Such contrasts, in those states of society with which the his- torian has to deal, enter into each human life. They come from those two things which, as Kant said, fill every man with a certain awe — the starry heavens and the still, small voice of his own con- science. This conscience may be largely a product of human evolu- tion. It means little or nothing to the savage. The starry heavens mean little to him. But he is impressed by the inborn or from birth in-trained conviction that there are higher and unseen powers, one or many, from whom something is to be feared or gained. Man enters organized society without losing this conviction. He feels himself bound to something higher and stronger. The bond may easily become a fetter, but on the whole it makes life larger and less selfish. What is natural to man is inherited from generation to genera- tion. Whatever he has acquired — be it of thought or knowledge — must be taught over again by each generation to the next, if it is to endure. Religion is part of his nature — a spiritual possession which education does not give, except in form, and seldom takes away. That the religion of every race has, down to recent times, gone far to shape its history, few will dispute. Does its controlling in- fluence on national conditions pass away before a higher civiliza- ^ Autobiogi-afhy, II. 408.