important history is contemporary history. Yet reflection on this
doctrine will show that it is not only consistent with a serious and
steady interest in what is called Antiquity (and indeed in the past in
general), but its only rational basis and justification. Were the past
really past it were dead--dead and done with, and it were wisdom for us
who are alive to let the dead bury their dead. Much of what has been
done and suffered under the sun is indeed gone beyond recall, and is
well buried in forgetfulness. In such forgetfulness lies the fact and
evidence of progress. 'Vex not its ghost'; no necromancy will or should
evoke the departed spirits or avail to make them utter significant
speech to living men. The chain of links which once bound stage to stage
of human history is somewhere for ever broken; and as we retrace, in the
memory of the race or in that of individual, the Ariadne-clue which we
here call 'the unity of History' it vanishes somewhere beyond our vision
into the dark backward and abysm of time. True, of late Archaeology and
Anthropology have cast their search-lights into the darkness, piercing a
little deeper than of old into the mists that surround the origins of
our civilization; but before that dimly illuminated region of
pre-history there still lies, and will always lie, an impenetrable pall.
As again in thought we move forward down the stream of time, the light
available to us for a while increases, increases till we reach the
present where it threatens to blind us with its dazzling excess, and
then suddenly fades and is quenched in the twilight and final darkness
by which the future is hidden from us. Of the whole stream of history
our best or utmost intelligence illuminates but a short reach, and that
imperfectly.

'Our ignorance is infinitely greater than our knowledge,' and the wise
historian is sobered but not discouraged by this reminder of the limits
of his possible understanding. Neither the remote past nor the distant