The history of the Middle Age shows even greater results, and greater innovation, to which allusion has been already made. The great difficulty was the papacy. Between the Catholics, who regarded it as of divine institution, and the Protestants, who regarded it as a manifestation of Antichrist, and the sceptics, who despised both and regarded it as mere superstition, this great centre around which the life of the Middle Ages revolved had been unknown or misknown to a degree of absurdity. Gradually, as the 19th century arose wiser and sadder out of the chaos of the French Revolution, the immense part played by the church was at first dimly suspected, and at last with increasing clearness perceived. This must on every account be regarded as the greatest achievement of the modern school; it implied the unlearning of so many old errors, the acquiring of so many new truths, above all, the repression of so many deeply-rooted prejudices. It restored the continuity of history, in which the Middle Ages had hitherto appeared as an unexplained gap,—an unwelcome wedge of barbarism thrust between the ancient and modern civilizations.
After the Middle Ages, the period which has been most illumined by the new lamp of history is that of the early church and the whole subject of religious dogma and institutions. In spite of the fierce controversies which have raged over this region, a large residuum of undisputed fact has been rescued from ignorance and prejudice, and church history is no longer a legend, but one of the most interesting chapters in the annals of the human mind.
As regards modern history, we are oppressed and nearly overwhelmed with the mass of new materials and new discoveries which have been launched upon us. The diligent publication of state papers and documents, which all civilized states have taken in hand, has exceeded in the last half century all that had been done before in that direction. The result is that there are few periods of modern history which are not far better known to us than they were to the contemporaries who lived in them. But history in this field cannot boast of such laurels as she has won in the field of antiquity and the Middle Ages. There has been no great reversal of old points of view, no great triumph of historical perspicacity piercing through traditional error down to latent truth. Modern history has won its victories more by weight of metal than by the skill of its commanders, not that the generals have lacked skill, but they have had less occasion to display it.
The history of institutions has received much attention in recent times, and promises to be one of the most fruitful veins of inquiry yet opened, and this in reference both to primitive institutions, which are rather prehistorical than historical, and the constitutions of states which have reached adult political life. The old Aryan tenure of land and village communities, and ancient law, whether in old Rome or modern Bengal, have been the subjects of elaborate investigation, embodied in works which mark a new departure in knowledge. The institutional history of political states at the present moment perhaps the subject which attracts the most lively attention of scholars. It is not confined to the constitutional history of England, though England, as the mother of parliaments, has a fair claim to priority of interest. But the subject is narrowed and degraded by contemplating it from the point of view of modern politics, and chiefly in reference to the popular freedom or national wellbeing produced. The earnest historical inquirer is as impartial as the pathologist who studies disease equally with health. The institutions of despotism have their raison d’être and normal evolution as well as those of free governments, and the scientific historian will neglect the one as little as the other. In any case the history of the institutions of Europe from the times of the Frankish empire to the end of the French monarchy offers the widest field for courageous historical research. It has absorbed and transcended all those inquiries which used to be included under the somewhat jejune title of the history of civilization. Institutious in the secular order, and religions in the spiritual order, are now seen to be the most massive and permanent factors in human life, capable indeed of evolution and change, but little susceptible to the immediate action of man’s intelligence and will, and yielding only to the new modifications brought about by time and the gradual transformation of ideas and moral conceptions, the result of increased knowledge.
It is hardly necessary to add that a broad distinction must be made between history and what has been called the philosophy of history, a term now replaced by the far better one “sociology,” invented by A. Comte. Sociology has the purely scientific aim of investigating the nature and constitution of societies, to discover the laws which regulate their growth and decay, to do in short for them what biology has already done for the animal and vegetable kingdoms. History, while it can never again dispense with the assistance of sociology, remains occupied with the description of the social organism (at a given period) in its ensemble, and the term “descriptive sociology” has been suggested as an improvement on the old one, history. We may question whether the innovation will be accepted or is needed. The human interest attaching to the story of man’s past fortunes will always provoke the means of its own satisfaction, and there is little doubt that history, the name and the thing, as the highest form of prose literature, will continue to instruct and console mankind to the remotest generations.
HIT, the ancient Is (see Euphrates, vol. vii. p. 670), a town of Asiatic Turkey, vilayet of Baghdad, is situated on the west bank of the Euphrates, 70 miles W.N.W. of Baghdad. Its streets are narrow and frequently steep, rising one above another along the side of a hill, and the houses, which are flat-roofed, and one or two stories in height, are built chiefly of clay. It contains a graceful minaret and some richly decorated tomb-towers. The prosperity of the town depends upon its fountain of bitumen, which has flowed from time immemorial, and, according to Herodotus, supplied that material for the building of Babylon. The inhabitants make use of the bitumen for lime burning, and also for covering boats. From water which bubbles up in the centre of the spring salt is manufactured. The population is about 3000.
