Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/99

 culture, not the political system, or even the political map, which that system had laid out. The ideas of medieval and modern life are of medieval and modern growth, or if connected with antiquity, connected by a new birth of culture, a re-discovery, a re-creation, not a continuous impulse of vitality. Save in the one region, that of the History of Religion, Ecclesiastical History; yet in that also the one great fact of the Christian dispensation, which connects the ancient Hebrew isolation with the great Catholic Church life, is itself as much a break as a link of continuity; so immensely does the new transcend the old, that, in the apostle's words, old things are passed away and behold all things are become new. The Unity and Continuity of Ancient and Modern History is an idea which is realised on a great and intelligible scale in Ecclesiastical History only; and even there the unity is to some extent a unity of ideas, a coincidence of religious and moral motive influences, and not merely of historic continuity. It is in it that the continuity of the Latin civilisation, of the Holy Roman Empire and of the Latin language, Roman Law and Latin literature, is traceable, and to it that we owe them. To it, or to influences which it nourished or provoked, we owe the renaissance, that revival of ancient culture the very title of which is a denial of the continuity which its influences seem to claim for it. But I am not going to usurp the functions of a Professor of Church History, and I am very sure that Church History is not the ground on which the doctrine of the Unity of History is supposed by its advocates to take its stand.

One word more; I do not deny this Unity in the high region of religious History or in the scarcely less comprehensive grasp which the political philosopher may take of Universal Human Life; nor do I deny it in the minute archæological investigations in which all particulars great and small have much the same value; nor do I deny that the student of modern history may gain lessons of immense value from the old. But I do maintain that it is wrong to say that the one cannot be studied without the other; for the things, persons, ideas, plot and scenery are different in the two; and more than that, save in the region of Church History, the