Lesson From History

( Originally Published 1885 )

FEW boys in school appear to be fond of the study of history. They not infrequently call it dull and dry. Sometimes they are inclined to get excused from the study. A few years later in life, when they have a mare mature judgment, they usually form a much higher idea of its value, and find it more interesting and instructive. But should the principle of elective studies, now so popular at Harvard, reach the upper classes in the grammar schools, history, it is to be feared, would soon be left in a hope-less minority.

When, however, boys are permitted to omit the study of history, and pay but little attention to the subject till they are past sixteen or eighteen years of age, they seldom recover what they have lost. During all their subsequent lives they never cease to regret that they neglected the opportunity, when their memories were fresh and active, to become familiar with the general outlines and the main facts of history. There is " no lamp by which our feet may be guided but the lamp of experience." "What man has done, man may do." Yet the experience of the human race is what we call history. " W hat man has done" is recorded on the pages of history.

Let me this morning present to you some unique illustrations from history, somewhat out of the ordinary channels of thought, it may be, but which I hope will show not only that all the world are wonderfully dependent upon one another, but also that what may seem to be remote and inconsequential are in reality more clearly connected to us and to our interests than at first would appear.

Every one knows how impossible it is for any one, at this day of general travel and intercommunication between all nations, to hide himself and remain unknown in any part of the world. A man having committed a crime in Boston may seek concealment in a remote state of South America ; but it will not be long before some one who formerly knew him will step in, recognize him, and call him by his former name. Bank officers are said to go to Canada, sometimes, but it is not because they can be hidden there. Mutineers upon the high seas can now find no land under the sun whither they can flee and be unknown.

Neither could one escape from his friends, if, for any reason, he should conceive the desire to do so. Even the boys from this school can scarcely find a spot where they will not meet some former schoolmate. Last summer a graduate of this school was spending a day in Kansas City, and while there he met four other graduates, all of whom were living in the immediate vicinity.

But not only are all countries interlocked and intertwined one with another, so that it is important to be intimately acquainted with the present condition of the whole world, but the ages are more closely connected than one might suppose, which makes a knowledge of all races and all times a necessity, in order to do business the most successfully.

"Light Horse Harry" Lee was a conspicuous figure in the Revolutionary War, and that was more than a hundred years ago. Yet his own son was the most prominent officer in the army of the South, during the late Rebellion. But to a casual observer, who has not made a close study of history, the period of the Revolution would appear to be several generations back of Secession and the Confederacy.

It frequently seems, to one who has not carefully studied and reflected upon the history of this country, that the age of the Pilgrims and the Puritans, the first settlers in New England, was generations and generations ago. My great-grandfather's great-grandfather was contemporary with Roger Williams, and Miles Standish, and Governor Winthrop ; yet it is true, in a certain sense, that there is but one link between our time and the period of those old pioneers. A person born, say in 1720, could have con-versed with old people who had been in their younger days acquainted with the early settlers, and they in turn, living to be eighty or ninety years of age, would reach down into the period of those who, born perhaps in 1800 or 1810, are still living to tell us the anecdotes of their childhood. In 1872 I heard an aged lady, then a hundred years old, tell what happened " the year the war broke out "; that is, in 1775, ninety-seven years before. Thus it may be said that but a single generation stands between the first settlers of New England and the people of today. So, reckoning the space of one life as eighty years, we find that there are but three links between our period and the time of Columbus and Luther, Henry VIII. and Tyndale, and the introduction of knives and forks for table use.

If this is not at first apparent, I pray you to reflect that the age of which I speak was substantially four centuries ago ; that it reached forward eighty years; that our own age may be regarded as reaching back-ward eighty, years ; and that two periods of eighty years'' taken from four hundred, leave but three periods of eighty years between them.

And from the beginning of the Christian era, when Christ and Caesar, Virgil and Pompey, Cicero and Josephus, and Paul and Peter were fulfilling their earthly destiny, but twenty two or twenty three of our life-time periods of eighty years have intervened, and seventy-five such ages will carry us back to the Garden of Eden, and we can interview our first parents, Adam and Eve.

I do not mean to be understood that the persons just named as belonging to the time of Christ were exactly contemporary with each other, but only as living near the same period. Cicero and Virgil were a generation before Christ, and Paul and Josephus came into the generation following.

An old tradition has come down to us to the effect that Paul, on his way to Rome, when he had appealed to Caesar, being delayed at Puteoli, went up to the hill Pansilipo to shed a tear over the tomb of Virgil, and thought how much he might have made of that noble soul if he had but found him still on earth. An old Latin hymn is still extant, which tells the incident in this way : —

Ad Maronis mausoleum
Ductus, fudit super eum
Piae rorem lacrymae:
Quantum, dixit, te fecissem,
Si te vivum invenissem,
Poetarum maxime ! "

The condensed phraseology of the verse scarce admits a literal translation of its touching thought, but I find in an old book a free paraphrase, which will give quite a clear idea of the force of the original : —

" On his way to Nero's Court,
When at Puteoli's port,
At the tomb where Virgil slept,
Paul, in thoughtful sadness, wept;
Wept, that he of world-wide fame
Should have died ere Jesus came!
In his musings, unexpressed,
This the thought that swelled his breast:
'Oh! that I had found thee living
In the light the Cross is giving;
Could have seen thee, from above
Taught to know a Saviour's love;
Then, with love to Christ supreme,
Thine had been a nobler theme;
And thy harp, in loftiest lays,
Down the ages rolled His praise!'

Thoughtful and sad, Paul from the hill went down
To Home, to prison, to a heavenly crown."

We must confess that it is not common thus to couple the names of Virgil and Paul together, as though there was a bond of sympathy between them, but Paul would adopt the sentiment of that famous Latin motto, —

" Humani nihil alienum."

One of the most striking pictures presented by that gifted author, J. T. Headley, in his "Sacred Mountains," is the contrast that he makes in regard to Mount Tabor. He speaks of the " contrasts of earth," and likens our world to a "middle spot between heaven and hell," which partakes of the character of both. " The glory from the one and the midnight shades from the other meet along its bosom, and the song of angels and the shriek of fiends go up from the same spot. Noonday and midnight are not more opposite than the scenes that are constantly passing before our eyes." "Truth and falsehood walk side by side through our streets, and vice and virtue meet and pass every hour of the day."

" It was a bright spring morning. A form was seen standing on Mount Tabor. He sat on his steed in the clear sunlight, his eye resting on a scene in the vale below, which was sublime and appalling enough to quicken the pulsations of the calmest heart. That form was Napoleon Bonaparte, and the scene before him the fierce and terrible battle of Mount Tabor."

"Amid the twenty-seven thousand Turks that crowded the plain and enveloped their enemy like a cloud, and amid the incessant discharge of artillery and musketry, Napoleon could tell where his own brave troops were struggling only by the steady, simultaneous volleys, which showed how discipline was contending with the wild valor of over-powering numbers." Thrown into confusion and trampled under foot, that mighty army rolled turbulently back toward the Jordan, where Murat was anxiously waiting to mingle in the fight. Dashing with his cavalry among the disordered ranks, he sabered them down without mercy, and raged like a lion amid his prey. This chivalric and romantic warrior declared that the remembrance of the scenes that once transpired on Mount Tabor, and on those thrice-consecrated spots, came to him in the hottest of the fight and nerved him with tenfold courage." "Roll back the centuries, and again view that hill. The day is bright and beautiful as then, and the same rich, Oriental landscape is smiling in the light of the same sun. There is Mount Tabor, the same on which Bonaparte stood with his cannon ; and the same beautiful plain, where rolled the smoke of battle, and where struggled thirty thousand men in mortal combat. But how different is the scene that is passing there I The Son of God stands on that height and casts his eye over the quiet valley through which Jordan winds its silver current. Three friends are beside him. Far away to the northwest shines the blue Mediterranean ; all around is the great plain of Esdrelon and Galilee ; eastward, the lake of Tiberias dots the landscape, while Mount Carmel lifts its naked summit in the distance. But the glorious landscape at their feet is forgotten in a sublimer scene that is passing before them. The Son of Mary the carpenter of Nazareth begins to change before their eyes. Heaven has poured its brightness over that consecrated spot, and on the beams of light which glitter there, Moses and Elias have descended, and, wrapped in the same shining vestments, stand beside him."

Then follows a minute and wonderfully graphic picture of the transfiguration, ending with the mysterious voice in the words, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased ; hear ye him."

" Can there be a stranger contrast than the battle and the transfiguration upon Mount Tabor? One shudders to think of Bonaparte and the Son of God on the same mountain ; one with his wasting cannon by his side, and the other with Moses and Elias just from Heaven."

But you say the two scenes are separated by eighteen centuries. What are eighteen centuries but a moment of time only ? Time is measured not by seconds and centuries, but by deeds. Actions are the hour-strokes, and annual marks, and century records of the world. Cause and effect and motives are the criteria by which the deeds of this world are to be judged. " Time's effacing fingers " act only on the physical world, and not on the mental and moral world. In that realm time is nothing. It can neither add to nor take from the actions of our race ; it is by them that individuals and nations are to be judged. What study, then, can be more vital in interest, more attractive in material, or more fruitful in utility than the study of the annals of mankind? It puts vitality and an enthusiastic glow of transfigured interest and meaning into all subjects which come before the mind for consideration. Have pity for the boor of whom Wordsworth says, —

" A primrose by the river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more."