the "great forces of history" he always had in mind "the continuity" of the events which gives to our history "a real unity." Although preeminent in the exposition of military and political events, in everything which he wrote about American history, he had a consciousness of the idea of development and of the principles which underlie the movements of events and the growth of institutions in our country.

I should not for a moment think of comparing Mr. Fiske with the great historian Gibbon in respect to capacity for research or the habit of making use of primitive. sources of information, but in regard to the quality of which I am speaking he was the superior of Gibbon.

I also

I agree with our distinguished associate, Leslie Stephen, that the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a monumental work, not yet, if it ever will be, superseded. Whatever its faults," it "remains as the first great triumph of a genuine historical method.” 1 agree with Mr. Stephen when he says that while Gibbon gives us "an admirable summary of the bare facts of history he is everywhere conspicuously deficient in that sympathetic power which enables an imaginative writer to breathe life into the dead bones of the past." He is a skilful anatomical demonstrator of the dead framework of society," but utterly incompetent observer of its living development.

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"2

Mr. Howells, in some charming reminiscences 3 which he printed soon after Mr. Fiske's death, speaks of him as a philosopher; he seems, however, to hesitate to call him a prophet.

To my mind he was preeminently a prophet, using that word in the sense in which it is used by Jeremy Taylor in his powerful discourse on Prophesying, or preaching.

1 English Thought, etc., Vol. 1, p. 446.

2 Ibid., p. 447.

Harper's Weekly, July 20, 1901, p. 732.

He was religious in boyhood, he certainly was a man of faith in later life. One who knew him well tells me that there was a period in middle life when his trust in intuitions was somewhat feeble, although it returned to him later. This, it seems to me, is the impression which the reader gets from some of Mr. Fiske's earlier essays. Whether correct or not, it is evident that he was a firm believer in the latter portion of his life. It was during his later years that I became best acquainted with him, and then he trusted largely to feeling in forming convictions.

Professor Royce, it seems to me, has given an admirable analysis of his philosophical position. He has stated it himself in the introduction to his volume of essays, "Through Nature to God." In speaking of conversations which he had with Huxley in his earlier years, he says that he was conscious that while they generally agreed in their ways of looking at things, there was a difference. He himself, he says, valued, as Huxley did not, a source of information to which Tennyson refers in the lines:

"Who forged that other influence,

That heat of inward evidence,

By which he doubts against the sense?" 2

Mr. Fiske was always so genial and serene and so oblivious of the burdens and sorrows which a large portion of mankind feel so keenly, that I cannot think of him otherwise than as a man of faith.

I take pleasure in remembering that Mr. Fiske told me that it was in consequence of a profound talk upon the subject of immortality which we had in my brother's parlor, that he selected that topic for a lecture which he had agreed soon to give before a society of ladies in Boston. The address was afterwards printed as the first of his little publications on religious philosophy, and is known as the Destiny of Man.

Harvard Graduates' Magazine, Sept., 1901.

2 Through Nature to God [1899], p. vii.

I remember hearing Mr. Fiske deliver as a sermon in the pulpit of a church in New Bedford, on a Sunday morning, during the summer vacation of its pastor, a portion of the first of the essays in Through Nature to God. He liked to do this kind of thing, and on several occasions appeared in pulpits on Sunday.

I am far from thinking that Mr. Fiske has said the final word in religious philosophy. After men have learned all that science has to teach on this subject they turn to a border-land of knowledge, and find a source of information in faculties which belong to the mind at its existing stage of development, as the result of human evolution. In treading upon this field we stand on dangerous ground. While from the intuitions of the race we get glimpses of truth, the truth obtained from this source is mingled with a great deal of error.

It is the opinion of the best thinkers, I believe, that Mr. Fiske relied more confidently upon the deliverances of "common sense," or the "practical reason," than he was justified in doing in the present state of knowledge.

Still I must remember that his clear and devout expositions of religious philosophy have afforded great solace and support to the great body of the more thoughtful persons who still find a congenial home within the borders of the more advanced branches of the Christian Church. For one I heartily rejoice that this is so.

Mr. Fiske told me that he desired very much to write a life of Jesus. He said the same thing to the late Mrs. Martha Le Baron Goddard. I wish he had done so; it would, I am sure, have been a glorious work.

In 1870 Mr. Fiske printed in the curious little book which I hold in my hand called The Modern Thinker two essays entitled, The Jesus of History and The Christ of Dogma. These essays were afterwards reprinted in a well known volume entitled, The Unseen World and Other Essays.

In a note to the first of them in that volume he says that he intends to write a "work on Jesus of Nazareth and the Founding of Christianity," of which these essays "must be regarded as furnishing only a few introductory hints."

I read these papers carefully when they first appeared. I have read them again recently. They embody, in the main, the results of the researches of the great German scholar, Ferdinand Christian Baur and those of the celebrated David Friedrich Strauss, as they appear in his "New Life of Jesus." Modifications of the teachings of these great scholars would have to be entertained today. It is very noticeable, however, that they still have a powerful influence in shaping the conclusions of the best writers and scholars today.

It is interesting to see, for example, how widespread is the adoption and constant use of Baur's fundamental Tendenz Theory." But much has been added, since his time, to our knowledge of the dates of the New Testament books and the relative order in which they were written. With what joyous enthusiasm Mr. Fiske would have absorbed this additional knowledge and brought his information up to date!

To turn again to Gibbon, I presume that we all believe that the arguments in his two celebrated chapters on the rise of Christianity are conclusive as against the proofs of supernaturalism as stated by Paley and writers of his school. But he seems to have been wholly incapable of fathoming the real causes that led to the acceptableness of Christianity in the heathen world. That cold man, without enthusiasm, lacking in imagination, with only the dimmest consciousness of the part played by development in the movements of history, could not realize the attitude of the people in the Roman Empire as, having lost their gods, they stood "groaning and travailing in spirit, waiting for the revealing of the Sons of God"; nor could he

1 Edition of 1899, p. 66.

appreciate the power which lay in the life of Jesus and in the simple but deep teachings of the gospels, when stripped of the impedimenta of the law by Paul and formulated in the terms of the Greek philosophy prevalent in the civilized world; he could not appreciate, I say, the power of these truths, when embodied as they were in the life of early Christian brotherhoods, to give needed comfort and support to the longing and hungry souls of the heathen world.

Had Mr. Fiske written a life of Jesus it would have had the picturesqueness and interest of the remarkable Vie de Jésus of Ernest Renan and, without the blemish of his sentimentality, would have represented a much higher standard of scholarship.

In writing of the sad death of Buckle at Damascus Mr. Fiske says, "as a fresh instance of how the world passes away from us while yet we are stammering over the alphabet of its mysteries, there is something infinitely pathetic in the cry which went up from the exhausted and fever-stricken traveller: 'My book, my book! I never shall finish my book!'"1

Mr. Fiske, also, left his history unfinished. Had he been conscious that he was near his end when he died, he, too, would have had regrets on that account, but whatever sorrow he might have felt, I am sure that he would have passed away in the cheerful serenity which marked his life.

Darwinism and Other Essays (1895), pp. 211, 212.