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By thus keeping within one's intended space, as carefully mapped out in advance—and I would advise every projector of a book to get practical suggestions from his publisher, and then clearly settle as to size and subject before he tackles to the task-by thus doing we circumscribe at once the field of investigation; and by apprehending well that in which we mean to be impressive or original, by conceiving fitly our main purpose in authorship, we are prepared to apply ourselves to the real service of our age. Some writers set their minds to work upon manuals, upon abridgment of what they find at hand for a certain period and country, some upon amplifying; but no one should undertake to narrate history with the same fullness as one who has told the tale before, unless he is confident that he can truthfully put the facts in a new light or add something really valuable, which has not been already set forth elsewhere.

Let it be admitted, in fine, in all historical writing, that much patient and minute study must be bestowed for one's own personal gratification alone; that one may spread the results before his readers, but not the processes. Whatever the historian may print and publish for the edification of the public, let him endeavor to make the result apparent for which he prospected; let him tell the tale, unfold the particulars, and inculcate the lesson, with the pertinence and force which best befit the character of his undertaking; and let him show his essential excellence precisely where the public has the most right to expect and desire it.

VII.—THE HISTORICAL METHOD OF WRITING THE HISTORY OF

CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE.

By PROF. CHARLES J. LITTLE,

OF GARRETT BIBLICAL INSTITUTE.

THE HISTORICAL METHOD OF WRITING THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE.

By CHARLES J. LITTLE.

"Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," wrote Dean Stanley, "is in great part, however reluctantly, 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 Dr. Newman that up to that time England had produced no other ecclesiastical history worthy of the name."

I place these words at the head of this brief paper because, in the first place, the notions of intelligent men (excepting, of course, clergymen and historical students) concerning the development of Christianity are derived, so far as they are drawn from books at all, almost exclusively from secular history; and because, secondly, the striking historical productions of the nineteenth century have either reluctantly or willingly tended more and more to include religious phenomena in their descriptions and discussions. Now "it is not," as Bacon says, "the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in and settleth in it that doth the hurt." And the lie that sinketh in and settleth in the mind is the lie that is insinuated rather than uttered, the lie that is suggested sometimes in the candor of innocent but unwarranted belief, and sometimes with the rhetorical subtlety of consummate partisanship rather than the lie of brute ignorance or sectarian spleen. When, for instance, Mr. Buckle published his famous examination of the Scottish intellect of the seventeenth century, most readers accepted his conclusions touching the character of the Scotch clergy because of the multitude of his citations, hardly thinking of the existence even of the facts that he did not state. In like manner, when one reads that skillful and adroitly insinuating book, Jansen's "Geschichte des Deutschen Volkes," one

is aware, at the last, of a bad taste in the mouth which is not easily traceable to particular pages or even to particular statements.

This effect is most to be deprecated in the minds of the young, for impressions thus almost insensibly acquired lie in their memories latent but indestructible, yet coloring stealthily all their future thought. Histories of the church, whether histories of structure or histories of doctrine, when written from sectarian points of view and avowedly to accomplish sectarian ends, are easily dealt with by intelligent men. They can be read with suspicion; their citations can be verified with scrupulous care; the facts forgotten and omitted by their authors can with industry be supplied. But the ecclesiastical portions of a secular history are more difficult to deal with, for these seem to be merely incidental or at most collateral to the main trunk of the narrative. Only slowly does the reader become aware that what seems incidental is really the lifeblood of the book, for when he takes a secular history in his hand he is expecting nothing of the kind. Indeed, the impossibility of writing European history, in the true sense of the term, without dealing with the development of Christian ideas, without dealing, on the one hand, with their progressive conquest of a succession of alien environments, and, on the other hand, with their occasional submergence, with their frequent transformations, and their surprising modifications under the influence of these alien surroundings, seems curiously enough never to have dawned fully upon anyone until it forced itself upon Gibbon's powerful mind. Gibbon's influence worked, however, both directly and indirectly in a variety of ways. It inspired scholars like Guizot to a closer study of Christian ideas and Christian institutions upon the development of European society; it inspired broad-minded churchmen like Arnold, Milman, and Stanley to a closer study of secular society, to a more careful examination of the external conditions amid which the Gospe) of the Galilean was compelled to live and to develop its colossal and divergent forms. It led men like Buckle and Lecky and Draper to their elaborate and splendid defenses of a rational skepticism, while it stimulated in its ultimate effect men like John Richard Green to the writing of histories in which "more space should be given to a Methodist revival than to the escape of a young pretender."

This influence of Gibbon, combined with that of the great

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