Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/107

 comparatively narrow and exhausted field, although, as a matter of training, every student has to go over the field and exhaust its interest for himself before he gets the benefit of what he is reading; mere modern politics, as I have said, furnish training only, and that incomplete training, for the advocate and partisan; the intermediate region is that in which real personal interest may be strongly engaged without much temptation to passionate controversy, and in which therefore the judgment may be best trained for its own perfect development, and for the uses of practical politics when the time for practical controversy and advocacy comes. We learn patience, tolerance, respect for conflicting views, equitable consideration for conscientious opposition; we see how very differently the men of the particular time seem to have read the course of events, which seem to us to have only one reasonable bearing; we see how good and evil mingle in' the best of men and in the best of causes; we learn to see with patience the men whom we like best often in the wrong, and the repulsive men often in the right; we learn to bear with patience the knowledge that the cause which we love best has suffered, from the awkwardness of its defenders, so great disparagement as in strict equity to justify the men who were assaulting it; we learn too, and this is not the least of the lessons, that there are many points on. which no decision as to right or wrong, good or evil, acquittal or condemnation, is to be looked for; and on which we may say that, as often the height of courage is to say I dare not, and the height of love is to say I will not, so the height of wisdom is to have learned to say, I do not know. I will however leave this point, as it is one on which I may have to say a word under my third head.

The next point after determining the nature of the disciplinary value ascribed to historical study, especially modern historical study, is the question of method. And as I have already said that it does not follow that the best method of studying History in one aspect is the best way of studying it in the other two, I will, for the sake of simplicity, go directly to our own idea of teaching in this place as