The men and women of the fourteenth century, of all ranks, stand
out to us in fresh and living colors. We see them in their dress,
their feasts, their dwellings, their language, their habits, and
their manners. Amid all the changes in human thought and in social
institutions the characters appeal to our common humanity,
essentially the same under all human conditions. The men and women
of the fourteenth century love and hate, eat and drink, laugh and
talk, as they do in the nineteenth. They delight, as we do, in the
varieties of dress, of parade, and luxurious feasts. Although the
form of these has changed, they are alive to the same sentiments
which move us. They like fun and jokes and amusement as much as
we. They abhor the same class of defects which disgust us,--
hypocrisies, shams, lies. The inner circle of their friendship is
the same as ours to-day, based on sincerity and admiration. There
is the same infinite variety in character, and yet the same
uniformity. The human heart beats to the same sentiments that it
does under all civilizations and conditions of life. No people can
live without friendship and sympathy and love; and these are
ultimate sentiments of the soul, which are as eternal as the ideas
of Plato. Why do the Psalms of David. written for an Oriental
people four thousand years ago, excite the same emotions in the
minds of the people of England or France or America that they did
among the Jews? It is because they appeal to our common humanity,
which never changes,--the same to-day as it was in the beginning,
and will be to the end. It is only form and fashion which change;
men remain the same. The men and women of the Bible talked nearly
the same as we do, and seem to have had as great light on the
primal principles of wisdom and truth and virtue. Who can improve
on the sagacity and worldly wisdom of the Proverbs of Solomon?
They have a perennial freshness, and appeal to universal