Well, here, in the light of this nineteenth century, in one of the most polished, most delightful, and most accessible cities of Italy—centuries ago the largest, and even now the fourth largest, in Europe—there occurs an event to which their attention is invited. It is not an event of which a few only can be witnesses, and which all others must learn on their testimony. It occurs in public. It occurs fifteen or twenty times each year, and year after year. All may scrutinize it again and again, as often and as closely as they please. No mystery is made of anything about it. We admit it has come down to us from the middle ages, dark, ignorant, and superstitious as they are alleged to have been. But then, if it belongs to the past, it occurs still, and belongs equally to this nineteenth century. Moreover, it comes directly in contact with those physical sciences in which they think themselves strongest, and it should, therefore, interest them, and claim their attention.
Will they accept the invitation? We think very few will heed it.
Many would not dare to believe in a miracle nowadays, not even if it happened to themselves. They take their ground beforehand. Since miracles are impossible, any special one must of necessity be false—either a fraud or a delusion. They know from the beginning what the result of inquiring into this one must be—why give themselves unnecessary trouble? Such minds choose their own side, and implicitly choose the consequences that follow.
Others pretend to examine, but do it with a resolute and unshakable predetermination that this must not be found out to be a miracle. They foster a prejudice which may blind their eyes to the light; and they, too, make themselves equally responsible for their conclusion and its consequences.
But if any one—Catholic, Protestant, or Rationalist—will examine it seriously and candidly, no matter how closely and patiently—nay, the more closely and patiently, the more surely—he will come to the same inevitable conclusion to which such an examination has heretofore led so many other candid and intelligent inquirers: Digitus Dei est hic: The Finger of God is here.
THE NEW SCHOOL OF HISTORY.
If the ghost of Tacitus could return from the Acherontic shades, learn the English language, and spend a few weeks in reading the most popular modern works in that branch of letters of which he was in his day the conspicuous ornament, he would rend his toga in despair, and mourn over the ruin of one of the noblest of the sciences. The “dignity of history” was not an unmeaning phrase when kings, consuls, and military commanders moved with stately pace through the polished pages, and uttered the most heroic of sentiments in the most formal of addresses. Ancient authors would have deemed it the grossest indecency to quote familiar language from the lips of any historical character, or to let the
world imagine that men who concerned themselves with the destinies of states, behaved even in moments of relaxation like the men who buy and sell in the shops, and confine their cares to commonplace domestic matters. And yet what could be more absurd than to suppose that generals addressed their armies amid the heat of battle in a speech regularly compounded of exordium, argument, exhortation, and peroration; or that great men wore the grand manner to bed with them, and put on civic crowns before they washed their faces in the morning? It is not so very many years since Cato used to be represented on the English stage in a powdered wig and a dress-sword, which was not more incongruous than the spectacle presented by all the old statesmen and fighting characters of antiquity, mouthing orations, and posing themselves in the best of the classical histories. Perhaps it was something to be thankful for that, in the eclipse of learning during the disturbed middle ages, the art of writing history after the heroic manner was lost. The chroniclers of feudal times devoted infinite pains to the reeord of facts—as well as the record of many things that were not facts—but knew little of the graces of literary composition, and cared nothing for the dignity of history. They stripped off the heavy robes, and showed us the deformed and clumsy figures underneath. Lacking literary culture and the fine art of discrimination, they left us only the bare materials of history instead of the historical structure itself. Industrious but injudicious collectors, they were sometimes amusingly garrulous, sometimes provokingly uninteresting; but their labors were invaluable, and modern scholars owe them a debt which can never be repaid. It is only within a
hundred years that English writers have tried to combine the merits of the ancient and the mediæval schools, discarding the cumbrous and delusive garments in which Herodotus and Livy used to wrap up the Muse Clio, and draping the bare skeletons of the annalists with comely mantles. There was a portentous dulness in most of the earlier essays in the reviving art, scarcely interrupted until Hume embodied his sceptical philosophy in a history of England, and the infidel Gibbon threw a lurid splendor over the chronicles of the declining empire. Both these eminent writers brought to their work an elegance of style worthy of the classical period, and a vigor of thought so different from the unreflecting industry of their plodding predecessors, that the falsehood underlying their narrative was not readily perceived, or was too easily pardoned. Boldness of theory, and in Gibbon a sardonic wit, added interest to the charms of the well-told story. But Hume and Gibbon, as well as many of their less distinguished contemporaries, labored under a radically wrong theory. They accommodated historical narrative to the illustration of preconceived principles, instead of deducing the principles from the facts; and left us, consequently, volumes of sophistical argument, rather than chronicles of actual occurrences and pictures of actual society.