It seems a strange predicament to have to apologise for conferring a great boon on one's contemporaries and posterity by saving them from serious loss. But such is my position. No sooner was it known that it was proposed to publish extracts from the Conference Journals of the late Rev. Joseph Fowler, than there came forth the strongest remonstrances against any such a perilous procedure. The objections were that: (1) "It would do harm," by which I found was meant—that it might modify to an extent the views which some had entertained and sought to propagate with regard to the merits of the questions in dispute and of the policy pursued in those disastrous times, which have left so little to be garnered, but the lessons they may teach. But it seems to me that those lessons should not be wastefully swept into the gulf into which the melancholy wreckage dropped. Even should the fresh historic light involve a readjustment of the balance of blame, why should not the readjustment be B allowed in the interests of historical truthfulness and ecclesiastical fair play? The due dispensing of blame and praise, of warning and encouragement, is a province of history as well as of administration. We are told again that the lessons to be learnt from these discussions are not those which are needed at the present time, but, on the contrary, are inopportune and dangerous. I think it will be found that the practical inductions which flow naturally from the inner history of those troublous times are applicable at all times, and that most if not all of them are specially significant and admonitory now. Again, it should be borne in mind that if the materials for the authentic history of those times are not secured and set in order very soon, a partisan and pamphleteering presentation of the matter will take possession of the field. Some years ago we were assured by an eager partisan that "the time has not come for an history of our last great conflict," the context plainly showing that a history written in the interests of his own projects would be premature so long as anyone still lived who was capable of confronting one-sided statement with unchallengeable records and painfully remembered, because so deeply inburnt, personal observation and experience. I believe there are but three survivors of those terrible catastrophes who were behind the scenes at the time of their enactment. Of them my old friend Dr. Rigg has already broken ground upon the site of these rich historic excavations. In doing this he has deserved well of Methodism. But he has not found time to dig far below the surface, or to exhume and put in situ and in juxtaposition, the figures and historic tablets he has partly brought to light. My own spade will still further clear the ground, and confirm and carry on his shrewd researches. It is the bane of human history that it has been written to such a large extent with an apologetic purpose, or from a party point of view, or to sustain some one political hypothesis and discredit or explode some other. This misleading and bewildering perversion is not confined to domestic and contemporary chronicles. Thus Mitford, from amidst the arches and the columns of the Abbey which had become his country seat, turns old Greek history into one pictorial philippic against the nascent democracy of his native land. This, in turn, stirs up the Lombard Street M.P., the plodding and persistent Grote, to try his hand at a History of Greece from the view-point of a modern English Liberal. Thus the simple-minded earnest student is |