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Now, if even actions themselves are easily dropped from the memory, because they stand in no logical relation to the central interest concerned, how much more and how universally must dates be liable to oblivion–dates which really have no more discoverable connection with any name of man or place or event, than the letters or syllables of that name have with the great cause or principles with which it may happen to have been associated. Why should Themistocles or Aristides have flourished 500 B.C., rather than 250, 120, or any other number of years? No conceivable relation–hardly so much as any fanciful relation–can be established between the man and his era. And in this one (to all appearance insuperable) difficulty, in this absolute defect of all connection between the two objects that are to be linked together in the memory, lies the startling task of Chronology. Chronology is required to chain together–and so that one shall inevitably recall the other–a name and an era which with regard to each other are like two clouds, aerial, insulated, mutually repulsive, and throwing out no points for grappling or locking on, neither offering any natural indications of interconnection, nor apparently by art, contrivance,[2] or fiction, susceptible of any.

II. Jewish as compared with other records.–Let us open our review with the annals of Judea; and for two reasons: first, because in the order of time it was the inaugural chapter, so that the order of our rehearsal does but conform to the order of the facts; secondly, because on another principle of arrangement, viz., its relation to the capital interests of human nature, it stands first in another sense by a degree which cannot be measured.

These are two advantages, in comparison with all other history whatever, which have crowned the Jewish History with mysterious glory, and of these the pupil should be warned in her introductory lesson. The first is: that the Jewish annals open by one whole millennium before all other human records. Full a thousand years had the chronicles of the Hebrew nation been in motion and unfolding that sublime story, fitter for the lyre and the tumultuous organ, than for unimpassioned recitation, before the earliest whispers of the historic muse began to stir in any other land. Amongst Pagan nations, Greece was the very foremost to attempt that almost impracticable object under an imperfect civilization–the art of fixing in forms not perishable, and of transmitting to distant generations, her social revolutions.[3] She wanted paper through her earlier periods, she wanted typographic art, she wanted, above all, other resources for such a purpose–the art of reading as a national accomplishment. How could people record freely and fervently, with Hebrew rapture, those events which must be painfully chiselled out in marble, or expensively ploughed and furrowed into brazen tablets? What freedom to the motions of human passion, where an extra word or two of description must be purchased by a day’s labour? But, above all, what motive could exist for the accumulation or the adequate diffusion of records, howsoever inscribed, on slabs of marble or of bronze, on leather, or plates of wood, whilst as yet no general machinery of education had popularized the art of reading? Until the age of Pericles each separate Grecian city could hardly have furnished three citizens on an average able to read. Amongst a people so illiterate, how could manuscripts or manusculpts excite the interest which is necessary to their conservation? Of what value would a shipload of harps prove to a people unacquainted with the science or the practical art of music? Too much or too little interest alike defeat this primary purpose of the record. Records must be self-conservative before they can be applied to the conservation of events. Amongst ourselves the black-letter records of English heroes by Grafton and Hollinshed, of English voyagers by Hakluyt, of English martyrs by Fox, perished in a very unusual proportion by excessive use through successive generations of readers: but amongst the Greeks they would have perished by neglect. The too much of the English usage and the too little of the Grecian would have tended to the same result. Books and the art of reading must ever be powerful re-agents–each upon the other: until books were multiplied, there could be no general accomplishment of reading. Until the accomplishment was taken up into the system of education, books insculptured by painful elaboration upon costly substances must be too much regarded as jewellery to obtain a domestic value for the mass.