Page:Three introductory lectures on the study of ecclesiastical history.djvu/27

I] also, though remotely and indirectly, to the same source. There are events in the common course of history—revolutions, wars, divisions of races and nations—which in themselves can hardly be called religious, but which have at least one aspect distinctly religious. There are also institutions, customs, ceremonies, even vestures and forms of ritual, in which, though originally pagan or secular. Christian ideas have now become so crystallized as to be inseparable from them. All these it is the task of Ecclesiastical History to adjust and discriminate.

Secondly, in every age, even the worst, there has been beneath the surface an undercurrent of religious life and of active goodness, which it will be our duty to bring to light, as the true signs of a better world beyond, and of the Divine Presence abiding with us even here,—a Church, as it were, within a Church; a "remnant," to use the language of the older covenant; "a still small voice," which almost of its own nature escapes the notice of the historian whose attention is fixed on the wind, the earthquake, and the fire of the vast movements of the world.

Thirdly, the whole history of the Church, though usually flowing in the tracks marked out for it by the great national and geographical boundaries of the world, yet has a course, not always, and therefore not of necessity, identical with the channel of human civilization. In the history of the Church,