Page:Three introductory lectures on the study of ecclesiastical history.djvu/41



is sometimes said, that of all historical studies that of Ecclesiastical History is the most repulsive. We seem to be set down in the valley of the Prophet's vision,—strewn with bones, and behold they are "very many," and "very dry;" skeletons of creeds, of churches, of institutions; trodden and traversed by the feet of travellers again and again; the scapegoat of one age lying lifeless by the scapegoat of the next; rusty controversies, 'of which the locks have been turned so often that they can now neither be opened nor shut;' craters of extinct volcanoes, which once filled the world with their noise, and are now dead and cold; the salt shores of a barren sea, which throws up again dead and withered the branches which the river of life had cast into it full of beauty and verdure,—the very reverse of that green prospect which I set before you in my opening Lecture; the more dreary, it may be said, from the wide extent into which it spreads. "How are we to give interest to such a task; how shall the