Page:Three introductory lectures on the study of ecclesiastical history.djvu/57

II] all ground—which every student of history ought to touch once in his life—original authorities. We cannot do it always, but by the mere necessity of exploring any one subject to the bottom, we must do it at times. It will be a constant charm of the history of the Chosen People, that there we shall rarely be absent from, at any rate, the nearest approaches which can now be made to the events described. But it will be a charm also in the minute investigation of any point in the later history, that, however well told by modern compilers, there is almost sure to be something in the original records which we should else have overlooked. How inestimable are the fragments of Hegesippus, and the Epistle of the Church of Lyons, embedded in the rhetoric of Eusebius! How life-like, in the dead partisanship of Strype, are the letters, injunctions, and narratives of the actors whose words and deeds he so feebly undertakes to represent.

And original records are not confined merely to contemporaneous histories, nor even to contemporaneous literature, sermons, poems, laws, decrees. Study the actual statues and portraits of the men, the sculptures and pictures of the events: if they do not give us the precise image of the persons and things themselves, they give us at least the image left on those who came nearest to them. Study their monuments, their gravestones, their epitaphs, on the spots where they lie. Study, if possible,