II. What is the object of studying history? What is history? It is not a mere record of dates, not the mere annals of actions, not merely the account of what men have performed or what nations have wrought. A man does not know history because he can recite glibly, beginning with Alfred the Great and coming down to the present time, the dates of the chief events and the chief epochs in English history. History is the record of God’s dealing with the human race. History is the account of the great laws under which this human race has been evolved from its lowest condition to its highest condition. As the tree grows from the seed planted in the ground—first the little bud peering above the surface, then the stalk, and then the branches, and by and by the completed oak; as the child grows from the babe in the cradle, taking on one new faculty and one power after another till he comes into as yet incompleted manhood—for the completion of manhood lies afar off in the dim, distant and invisible future—so the nations of the earth, and so the whole race of man has been developed from the seed to the oak and from the babe in the cradle to manhood in its maturity; and to read history is to read the process of this development.
What, for example, is English history? To know English history is to know that in the Bible, way back years and years before the birth of Christ—fourteen centuries before—were planted all the seeds of a free representative government; to know that in the Mosaic statutes is to be found the outline of a perfect political economy; to know that the Mosaic commonwealth had in it all the elements of those institutions which have made America a free nation; popular suffrage, representative assemblies, political government divided into three departments, executive, legislative, and judicial; a carefully framed system of laws, with a carefully framed system of penalties, a universal system of education, and a religion that was national. To know history is to know that Alfred the Great was a devout believer in the Bible as the word of God, that he studied it and found in this Old Testament, fourteen centuries before the birth of Christ, these seeds of a free government buried and forgotten. It is to know that he gathered them out of this old book, as men have gathered wheat seeds out of old mummies in the tombs of Egypt, and planted them in the more fertile soil of an Anglo-Saxon community. It is to know how the Anglo-Saxon Witenagemote grew to be an English Parliament; it is to know how the people came to be represented in it under Simon de Montfort; and how they came to be supreme in it under Charles the First, and Cromwell. It is to know how the nation was at first a congeries of conflicting tribes, partially brought together by Alfred the Great, and consolidated together under one national sovereignty by William the Conqueror, and growing thence into unity under successive statesmen, until these latter days, when William Gladstone, the greatest statesman of them all, is perfecting the Christian unity of the empire by Christian justice and equity. It is to know how, in the earlier history of this nation, the Pope of Rome assumed authority and control over the nations. It is to know how, through the centuries, the war went on between the Anglo-Saxon love of liberty and this claim of the Church of Rome; how it was begun under Augustine, continued under Thomas à Becket, brought to the beginning of the end under King Henry the Eighth, until finally under Elizabeth the bonds that bound England to Rome were severed forever, and England was made free from every foreign prince and potentate. It is to know how this seed—the sovereignty of the people in the nation, the sovereignty of the nation against the anarchy of feudalism, and the liberty of the nation against the Pope—grew into a tree, as yet but a young sapling; it is to know how then God carefully dug this sapling up, and transported it three thousand miles across the ocean and planted it in the yet more fertile soil of America. It is to know that because of the battle and bloodshed, and the long suffering endured on that soil, to-day there floats over us the banner of liberty and justice. The seeds were there in that old Bible, the culture was there in that English history; the fruit we rejoice in here to-day.