fogies of fathers!' More than unwise; for possibly it may be false
in fact. To look at the political and moral state of Europe at this
moment, Christendom can hardly afford to look down on any preceding
century, and seems to be in want of something which neither science
nor constitutional government seems able to supply. Whether our
forefathers also lacked that something we will not inquire just now;
but if they did, their want of scientific and political knowledge was
evidently not the cause of the defect; or why is not Spain now
infinitely better, instead of being infinitely worse off, than she
was three hundred years ago?

At home, too--But on the question whether we are so very much better
off than our forefathers Mr. Froude, not we, must speak: for he has
deliberately, in his new history, set himself to the solution of this
question, and we will not anticipate what he has to say; what we
would rather insist on now are the moral effects produced on our
young people by books which teach them to look with contempt on all
generations but their own, and with suspicion on all public
characters save a few contemporaries of their own especial party.

There is an ancient Hebrew book, which contains a singular story
concerning a grandson who was cursed because his father laughed at
the frailty of the grandfather. Whether the reader shall regard that
story (as we do) as a literal fact recorded by inspired wisdom, as an
instance of one of the great root-laws of family life, and therefore
of that national life which (as the Hebrew book so cunningly shows)
is the organic development of the family life; or whether he shall
treat it (as we do not) as a mere apologue or myth, he must confess
that it is equally grand in its simplicity and singular in its
unexpected result. The words of the story, taken literally and