The Sun.
London, England, 1864-10-31 00:00:00

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prefer our own age to live in be e.stuy other.,44,v,
that all the appliances and discoveries okoni*ltiy weVe.
be intolerably missed if wo were remora* from-4henf
are forced to grant, too, that in every past period we know-
of we should find a lower tone of general public opinion
than that which prevails now—still we must all allow that
there is such a thing as progress, that society in some way
improves with time, that not only in science, but also in
social morals, home steps are gained as years roll by, and
that these steps, once gained, are permanent acquisitions.
Whether it be so or not, we cannot believe it otherwise.
We can neither believe that, having learnt the power of
steam, men will go back to pack-horses, nor that the moral
social enlightenment which they have new reached will
ever relapse into degradation and barbarism ; and to call the
the world wiser and better than it was is, we suppose, in a
certain sense, to allow that the men and women who compose
it are wis=er and better. Thus we are all disciples of progress ;
we are so because, in this sense, it is imposslle for men to be
otherwise. Nevertheless there is something irritating, and
prompting to instinctive contradiction, in the assumptions
of "advanced thinkers" on this head. They arc for ever
saying with the boastful Ct.pancus, "We are much better
than our fishers,'—

Etr more than heirs of all cur parents' fame,
Our glories darken their diminished Lane—
" the children of cur day know more than the E gcs of the
past," and so on. Uuder such talk, and even under cur
own aindssions, we know that a fallacy lurl.s, it they are
intended to mean that the old boundaries of human nature
the old capacities fir human wisdom and greatness, are ex-
tended by the course of acquisitiGn and discovery. It is not
knowledge, but thought, which snakes the wise man. Just
as the children who know so much are very common-
place children still with all their knowledge, so the
sages who were ignorant of most of the things they know
were sages still. Nor, for that matter, can we see that
the diffusion of useful knowledge, railways, and elec-
tricity, and the penny post, would have made them much
wiser in the line in whieh.we now look up to and revere
them, and still accept them as teachers and exponents. They
found their way to the heart of things; they could look as
far as we; their imagination could, to say the least, take as
long flights ; they could think, and feel, and talk, and play
the man with any of their descendants, let the world last as
long as it may. They left names which will never be sur-
passed ; and this is eo universally granted that, to the great
Jnajority of men even to those who tsAkaugliztx?gress,
it vatild be a Fke

comp

great men who have been. Extravagance is never felt to
have so utterly exceeded bounds as when the hero of the
hour is compared with some hero of the past, looking out
on us from the far misty distance. Even the boasters have
their moments of depression and compulsory homage,
like the French sculptor who, after proving to demonstra-
tion that his horses were in every respect—in beauty of
form, in anatomy, in arrangement—immeasurably superior
to the group of Lysippus, broke in upon his elope in a passion
of unwilling candour, " lifais it faut avcuer—it must be
granted that those ugly brutes are living and mine are dead."
Their own heroes they patronise as their own creation, but
what has stood the test of ages and achieved an enduring
name they know to be another sort of thing altogether.
However, involuntary candour is a frequeat visitant to no
one, and certainly one cause of the optimist's exaltation of
the present is a defective apprehension of past merit; they
are too much occupied with themselves and their own
views to realise the difficulties and the achievements t f pre..
vious, and especially remote, times. To such men as
Theodore Parker all the thinkers of Christian times before
the Reformation are merely puerile "shabby Africans,"
and the like. It matters not that these Africans gave the
cue to ages of thought; they fasten on some weak point,
which is never hard to • find, draw comparisons between
what they know and what the others were ignorant of, and
conclude that every tiro of the present day who is well up
in its commonplaces excels St. Austin, not only in know-
ledge, but in grasp and largeness of mind—is morally and
intellectually above him. And if, in some points, they
cannot prove any advance at all over the past—if th 3
noblest poetry, the grandest architecture, the art of exe
preesion in its heroic perfection, is not to be found, is
scarcely pretended to in our time—these are things which
"advanced thinkers" do not care for, take no account of,
and consider W 3 have outlived."