RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE: PERSONAL 399 



great purpose in history is to get behind men and grasp thoughts. 

 History is the growth and development of ideas, and this is true 

 of every kind of history, political, religious, literary, or scientific. 

 In the Letters of Lord Acton, recently published since his death, 

 this is incessantly and vigorously asserted. " The vividness and 

 force with which we trace the motion of history depends on the 

 degree to which we look beyond persons and fix our gaze on 

 things." This represents a useful protest against the picturesque 

 scenery of an older school of historians, and is, perhaps, a necessary 

 revolt from Carlyle's teaching. Our new historians are interested 

 in doctrines, in principles which push things toward certain con- 

 sequences, not in the passions and follies and wishes of persons. 

 They are interested in what Lord Acton called " the impersonal 

 forces which rule the world, such as predestination, equality, divine 

 right, secularism, Congregationalism, nationality, and whatever 

 other religious ideas have grouped and propelled associations of 

 men." But surely the protest has been carried too far. An im- 

 personal idea, after all, is unthinkable. It is right in history to 

 get past the men who played their part on the stage, but never to 

 leave them so far out of account as to forget their real connection 

 with the ideas. Acton's plan for his projected History of Liberty 

 would seem to assume that there is an impersonal force called 

 liberty, which somehow ground itself out and developed spontane- 

 ously. After all, as there could be no society without the indi- 

 vidual with his contribution to make to the whole, so there could be 

 no idea without an idealist, and no religion nor religious influence 

 without the single soul. In the great scheme of modern history 

 projected by Lord Acton, and being so worthily carried out by 

 scholars in the Cambridge History, he reckoned modern history as 

 beginning with the close of the fifteenth century " w T hen Columbus 

 subverted the notions of the world and reversed the conditions of 

 productive wealth and power; Machiavelli released government 

 from the restraint of law; Erasmus diverted the current of ancient 

 learning from profane into Christian channels; Luther broke the 

 chain of authority and tradition at the strongest link; and Coper- 

 nicus erected an invincible power that set forever the mark of 

 progress upon the time that was to come." Surely the very men- 

 tion of the names is enough to suggest doubts as to the rigor and 

 vigor of the theory. 



The history of the world may not be what it has been called and 

 treated, merely, the biography of great men; but at any rate the 

 history of the world would be different if the influence of even a 

 few of its great men had been left out. We sometimes think we 

 can explain a great man by our common phrase that he was the 

 creature of his time, and there is usually much truth in the use 



