HO CLERICAL VIEWS. 33 that truth and justice must in the end confirm the doctrine that it upholds ; with a belief that party statements, and highly coloured pictures of friend and foe, are dangerous enemies of truth and justice, and damage in the long run the cause that employs them ; that all sides have everything to gain and nothing to lose by full and fair knowledge of the truth. And a clerical view of professional responsibility I take to be the knowledge that I am working, in God's sight and for His purposes. If such be a right view, I rejoice to have evidence of my success in realising it. If it be a mistaken one, well, I will claim credit for good intentions as well as steady work. I wish that my conscience were equally clear as to the other branch of professorial usefulness, oral teaching or lecturing. On this topic J proposed in my inaugural lecture to set before myself two leading principles : the first was to begin at the beginning— We must begin at the right end, work from the past forwards, not backwards from the present.' I meant, of course, not merely that I did not intend to read history backwards, which would be a difficult process in lecture, but that I should start from the beginning of the modern period and treat the course of historical progress generally and in natural order, rather than, by choosing topics which owed their importance to the interests of the day, work in the reverse order. I intended, in fact, to trace the gradual development of the modern world rather than to trace back particular points of development to their original germs. I have on the whole followed out that idea, although from time to time I have varied it with a course of analytical lectures. The result has been that, during these ten years I have never got beyond the year 1648. I have gone over the whole of the political history of Europe generally, and over that of England and Germany, with great minuteness, throughout the greater part of that long series of years ; but D