Hyperboreans, bringing with them to the South the spirit of a Melanesian apostolate, found it hard to fix reproach on this high-minded and generous North German. From the beginning of Sybel's Historische Zeitschrift, which opened with his inaugural lecture, and from the Ghibelline controversy which, about the same time, brought the Prussian philosophy of history into high relief, it was apparent that he held aloof from the views of many men who were his comrades and friends. All of course would agree that the past must be interpreted and tried by some standard that does not vary, not by the view which each man may have made his own. But then there is the fixed standpoint of manifest destiny. If the past is not judged by the present, it must be judged by the event, which is the verdict of the power that governs the universe. Our view must be based not on theory but experience. History conveys no wisdom to men who refuse to verify and register its conclusions. Failure is always deserved, and that which perishes perishes by its own fault. Nothing in the memory of mankind broke down more disastrously than the scheme of ruling Western Europe by the combined Empire and Papacy. It brought upon the German and Italian people a long succession of sorrows and humiliations ; and its end, like that of ancient Rome, of ancient France, is among the solemn portents of the world. The judgment of ages impresses and imposes itself alike on royalist and republican, Christian and pagan, whose several sympathies have nothing to do with the manifest facts of science.
Giesebrecht was less definite in asserting his opinions, and practised a larger charity. Not being a divine, a canonist, a politician, but a narrator of events, he left it to experts of every kind to moralise, to generalise, to eliminate permanent truths from the succession of causes and effects. Papacy and Empire were the shape in which Germans of the twelfth century understood religion and policy ; he resolutely makes the best of pope and emperor. The hierarchy does not make him an enemy by crushing the liberties of Rome ; and when the
