Page:Three introductory lectures on the study of ecclesiastical history.djvu/22

14 for the period over which it extends, it is the sufficient and almost the only authority for the fortunes of the Anglo-Saxon commonwealth.

In later times, since history has become a distinct science, the same testimony is still borne by the highest works of genius and research, however much it may have been withheld by the mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, in this wide field. Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" is, in great part, however reluctantly or unconsciously, the history of "the rise and progress of the Christian Church." His true conception of the grandeur of his subject extorted from him that just concession which his own natural prejudice would have refused; and it was remarked not many years ago, by one then of note in this place, that up to that time England had produced no other ecclesiastical history worthy of the name. This reproach has since been removed by the great work of Dean Milman; but it is the distinguishing excellence of that very history that it embraces within its vast circumference the whole story of mediæval Europe. Even in that earlier period when the world and the Church were of necessity distinct and antagonistic, Arnold rightly perceived, and all subsequent labours in this field tend to the same result, that each will be best understood when blended in the common history of the Empire, which exercised so powerful an influence over the development of the Christian society within its bosom, whilst by that