Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/372

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360
ESSAYS ON MODERN HISTORY

used to straggle through forty-five and even eighty-five volumes, but he was profoundly in earnest; and it was of him that Tholuck said that the orthodox are generally the most pious. He had more heart for the interior life of saints than for the border history of Church and State. His knowledge, deep and massive as that of a later Benedictine, was seldom new, and with his traditional habits he was like a ghost in the company of Böckh and Ranke. Among books which he took faithfully as he found them, deeming with Mr. Freeman that manuscripts begin to be useful after they are printed, many were interpolated, incorrect, assigned to the wrong men. Schweighäuser's saying that for centuries no real care had been, taken of classical texts was almost equally true of ecclesiastical; and the work of Wolf and Bekker scarcely; began for them until Neander was dead. When the Annals of Baronius were reprinted, De Rossi reminded the editor that the primitive church presented no longer the same outlines as in 1567, or in the days of Pagi, and offered, unfortunately in vain, his aid as an annotator. Since Neander a deeper spirit of inquiry has possessed itself of his topic and is working changes as considerable as in all the time since Baronius. He spent his last days in a forlorn endeavour to trace the Bohemian revolution to Bohemian causes, telling much that nobody knew about a very obscure time. For, like all men before Shirley, he entirely mistook Wyclif. In our day Lechler and Arnold, Matthews, Buddensieg, and Loserth have published a new Wyclif, and a new pedigree of Hus, and the same transforming effect of the scientific approaches has befallen or yet awaits every chapter of Neander.

The tendency of the nineteenth-century German to subject all things to the government of intelligible law, and to prefer the simplicity of resistless cause to the confused conflict of free wills, the tendency which Savigny defined and the comparative linguists encouraged, was completed in his own way by Hegel. He displayed all history by the light of scientific unity, as the manifestation of a single force, whose works are all wise, and whose