There is in modern thought a tendency to look upon the prominent characters
of history as resultants rather than as initiatory forces. As in an earlier
stage the irresistible disposition is to personification, so now it is to reverse
this process, and to resolve into myths mighty figures long enshrined by tradition.
Yet, if we try to trace to the sources of these movements, whose perpetuated
impulses eddy and play in the currents of our times, we at last reach the
individual. It is true that "institutions make men," but it is also true that "in
the beginnings men make institutions."
In a well-known passage Macaulay has described the impression made upon
the imagination by the antiquity of that Church, which, surviving dynasties
and
empires, carries the mind back to a time when the smoke of sacrifice rose
from the Pantheon and camelopard and tiger bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre.
But there still exist among us observances – transmitted in unbroken
succession from father to son – that go back to a yet more remote
past.
Each recurring year brings a day on which, in every land, there are men who,
gathering about them their families, and attired as if for a journey, eat with
solemnity a hurried meal. Before the walls of Rome were traced, before Homer
sung, this feast was kept, and the event to which it points was even then centuries
old.
That event signals the entrance upon the historic stage of a people on
many accounts remarkable – a people: who, though they never founded
a great empire nor built a great metropolis, have exercised upon a large
portion of
humankind an influence, widespread, potent, and continuous; who have for
nearly two thousand years been without country or organised nationality,
yet have
preserved their identity and faith through all vicissitudes of time and
fortune; who have been overthrown, crushed, scattered; who have been ground,
as it were,
to very dust, and flung to the four winds of heaven; yet who, though thrones
have fallen, and empires have perished, and creeds have changed, and living
tongues have become dead, still exist with a vitality seemingly unimpaired.
They are a people who unite the strangest contradictions; and whose annals
now blaze with glory, now sound the depths of shame and woe.
The advent of such a people marks an epoch in the history of the world.
But it is not of that advent as much as of the central and colossal figure
around
which its traditions cluster that I propose to speak. ... Read the whole speech