Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 29.djvu/469

Rh something from the wreck and deluge of time." He (the Bishop) did not agree with Bacon that it was history defaced. It was more especially the establishing of the remaining facts out of which history had to be formed because history itself, as they commonly understood it, was far nearer theory about facts than a mere relation of the facts themselves. Such a pursuit as they were engaged in was full of every advantage, especially to a people in a high state of civilisation, and that, he thought, every reasonable man would see in a moment. There could be no future to a people about whom there had been no past; the future developed itself just as it did in life in the world around. The future carried it out of the past. Dead vegetable matter made the humus; into that the roots of the living tree were struck, and because there had been vegetation in the past there was vegetation in the future. And so it was with regard to the higher life of a nation. Unless there was a past to which it could refer, there could not be in it any high sense of its own mission in the world. New peoples were predatory; they came, as the Goths of old, to plunder and overrun countries which had a past and extinguish them, and as they acquired for themselves a past they began to develop a future out of the past, and so that which had led them to love and venerate the past did, in fact, give them the best standing point for helping in the present to make provision for the coming of the future. He did not want to bring the old times back again: in common things such a reintroduction would be grotesque, in deeper matters dangerous; but they would understand the present around them far better if they could trace the present back into the past, see what it arose out of, what it had been the development of, and what it contained to serve for the future before them. There was nothing which so tended to keep the mind of men from rash experiments, from those things which destroyed nations altogether, by the sadden idea crossing the mind that some very great result might be obtained by the entire subversion of everything. There was nothing on the one side that more guarded a people against such a course than by having a veneration for the past, and nothing more truly directed those shapings of the present, which every reasonable man knew he had to give way to, than the being able in the new shaping to have before him the old out of which he was going to shape it, so that his shaping might only carry out more completely the purposes for which that which he was now altering began to exist. They might see all that he had ventured to suggest when they looked round the grand old Cathedral they were to visit that day. With it grew up the life of England, out of the remains which were left at the Saxon invasion, which extinguished the earlier Christianity. Out of the restoration of the Saxon element as it became historic, developing itself through a series of great Priests and Princes, the wonderful building had been erected. The Bishop concluded: "I see the clock is staring me in the face, and I can only ask you to forgive what has been so hastily said, because time, which to the antiquary is so valuable, and the railway train stop for no one.'

A hurried vote of thanks having been passed to his Lordship at the suggestion of the Mayor of Southampton, the meeting was adjourned, and the members present, with many others who had not ventured out in consequence of the bad weather, braved it to visit Winchester and St. Cross. Winchester having been reached shortly after one o'clock, the Hall of the ancient Castle was visited, the Mayor and Town