Excerpt from Historical Essays

Ladies and Gentlemen, - I do not know whether I have made a very wise selection in the subject which I have chosen for these Lectures. There was a time - a time which, measured by the years of our national life, was not so very long ago - when the serious thoughts of mankind were occupied exclusively by religion and politics. The small knowledge which they possessed of other things was tinctured by their speculative opinions on the relations of heaven and earth; and, down to the sixteenth century, art, science, scarcely even literature, existed in this country, except as, in some way or other, subordinate to theology. Philosophers - such philosophers as these were - obtained and half deserved the reputation of quacks and conjurers. Astronomy was confused with astrology. The physician's medicines were supposed to be powerless, unless the priests said prayers over them. The great lawyers, the ambassadors, the chief ministers of state, were generally bishops; even the fighting business was not entirely secular.

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