Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/25

 all his ideas in chronic effervescence and all his hopeful discoveries in a state of tantalising suspension, in the hope that once a year he can visit the Bodleian or the British Museum. For that day of many students, many books, many libraries, and many readers, I look with confidence; in the meantime I do hope and trust that my work here, although this may not be its primary aim or its most successful use, may help in a humble way to educate workers for the good time coming.

For I desire to introduce myself to you, not as a philosopher nor as a politician, but as a worker at history. Not that I have not strong views on politics, nor short and concise opinions on philosophy, but because this is my work, and I have taken it up in all sincerity and desire of truth, and wish to keep to my work and to the sort of truth that I can help on in the inquiry; because you have plenty of politicians and plenty of scholars to whom, if they wish to have it, I certainly win not begrudge the name of philosophers. I suppose that it is truth we are all seeking, and that though the sorts of truth are distinct and the ways that we work in are very different, when we have found what we seek for we shall find all our discoveries combine in harmony; and I trust and believe that the more sincerely, the more single-heartedly we work each of us, the nearer we consciously come to the state where we shall see the oneness and glory and beauty of the truth itself. So that the theologian, the naturalist, the historian, the philosopher, if he work honestly, is gaining each for his brother, and being worked for each by his brother, in the pursuit of the great end, the great consummation of all. We may all speak humbly, the theologian because of the excellence of his subject, the rest because of the vastness of our field of work, the length of our art and the shortness of our life; but we cannot afford to speak contemptuously of any sort of knowledge, and God forbid that we should speak contemptuously, or hypercritically of any honest worker.

The subject-matter of Modern Historical inquiry has peculiar advantages for the training of the powers most constantly in exercise in a practical generation. Compared with the study of Ancient History it is like the study of life compared with