The historian requires peculiar talent for his work. He must have such patience and energy as will enable him to carry on any research that will throw light on the subject he is investigating; he must weigh all evidence as coolly as the most unprejudiced judge; he must not assume the part of an advocate until he has examined the subject from every standpoint and reached an unbiased conclusion; he must grasp the real ideas and principles that underlie the events and are hastening the progress of civilization; he must have sufficient imagination to see the events as real, and to make his readers see them as such; in addition, he must have a copiousness of illustration and a fluency of language that will enable him to present his subject in an attractive form. In short, he must be a scholar, an explorer, a philosopher, and a rhetorician. Few, if any, have possessed all these qualifications in a preëminent degree; Bancroft certainly possesses them all in no small degree.
Gibbon will doubtless ever hold an honorable place as an historical writer; and yet he attempts to account for the rapid spread of Christianity entirely on human grounds, and refuses to recognize the greatest force then at work in effecting changes among the nations of the world. Macaulay well says of Gibbon: “He writes like a man who had received some personal injury from Christianity and wished to be revenged on it and all its possessors.” No such charge can be made against George Bancroft. He is a firm believer in God, recognizes Christianity as the most powerful factor in the progress of civilization, and continually evinces his unfaltering belief in God’s superintending care over human affairs. The opening paragraph of his address on President Lincoln may be taken as his creed on God in history. Notice how clear his statement and triumphant his faith:
“That God rules in the affairs of men is as certain as any truth of physical science. On the great moving power which is from the beginning hangs the world of the senses and the world of thought and action. Eternal wisdom marshals the great procession of the nations, working in patient continuity through the ages, never halting and never abrupt, encompassing all events in its oversight, and ever effecting its will, though mortals may slumber in apathy or oppose with madness. Kings are lifted up or thrown down, nations come and go, republics flourish and wither, dynasties pass away as a tale that is told; but nothing is by chance, though men, in their ignorance of causes, may think so. The deeds of time are governed, as well as judged, by the decrees of eternity.”
A quotation from his history will show his estimate of Christianity:
“To have asserted clearly the unity of mankind was the distinctive character of the Christian religion. No more were the nations to be severed by the worship of exclusive deities. The world was instructed that all men are of one blood; that for all there is but one divine nature and but one moral law; and the renovating faith taught the singleness of the race, of which it embodied the aspirations and guided the advancement.”[E]
Notice also this noble tribute to Christianity in his history:
“The colonists, including their philosophy in their religion, as the people up to that time had always done, were neither skeptics nor sensualists, but Christians. The school that bows to the senses as the sole interpreter of truth had little share in colonizing our America. The colonists from Maine to Carolina, the adventurous companions of Smith, the proscribed Puritans that freighted the fleet of Winthrop, the Quaker outlaws that fled from jails with a Newgate prisoner as the sovereign—all had faith in God and in the soul. The system which had been revealed in Judea—the system which combines and perfects the symbolic wisdom of the Orient and the reflective genius of Greece—the system, conforming to reason, yet kindling enthusiasm; always hastening reform, yet always conservative; proclaiming absolute equality among men, yet not suddenly abolishing the unequal institutions of society; guaranteeing absolute freedom, yet invoking the inexorable restrictions of duty; in the highest degree theoretical, yet in the highest degree practical; awakening the inner man to a consciousness of his destiny, and yet adapted with exact harmony to the outward world; at once divine and human—this system was professed in every part of our widely extended country, and cradled our freedom. Our fathers were not only Christians; they were, even in Maryland by a vast majority, elsewhere almost unanimously, protestants. Now the Protestant Reformation, considered in its largest influence on politics, was the awakening of the common people to freedom of mind.”[F]
In a recent private letter to Dr. Buckley, of the Christian Advocate, Bancroft uses these words quoted in that paper:
“Certainly our great united commonwealth is the child of Christianity; it may with equal truth be asserted that modern civilization sprung into life with our religion; and faith in its principles is the life-boat on which humanity has at divers times escaped the most threatening perils.”
And again: