Page:Three introductory lectures on the study of ecclesiastical history.djvu/70

 shall be in a better condition to draw out a plan for the whole campaign.

Meanwhile, there are some general considerations of the chief practical advantages of the study, with which I may for the present leave it in your hands.

Whatever may be the uncertainties of History, whatever its antiquarian prejudices, whatever its imaginative temptations, there is at least one sobering and enlarging effect always to be expected from it—that it brings us down from speculations and fancies to what at least profess to be facts, and that those facts transport us some little distance from the interests and the illusions of the present. This is especially true of History in connexion with Theology. As it is one of the main characteristics of Christianity itself, that alone of all religions it claims to be founded on historical fact—that its doctrines and precepts, in great measure, have been conveyed to us in the form of history, and that this form has given them a substance, a vitality, a variety, which could, humanly speaking, have been attained in no other way; so we need not fear to confess that the same connexion has existed through all the subsequent stages of the propagation of the religion. "The disciple is not above his Master;" Theology is not above Christianity: the Christian Church is in many respects the best practical exposition of the Christian Religion. Facts are still the most powerful, the most solid, the most stubborn guides