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The Historian's Vocation
By Arthur S. Link

IT is probably accurate to say that man's first conscious intellectual endeavor was his effort to know and remember his past. Long before he had a written language or began to evolve a primitive understanding and control of his natural environment, he and his fellow-clansmen and tribesmen recorded and preserved in song and saga the origins of tribes and peoples and the memory of migrations to green pastures, of wars and heroic deeds, and of natural occurrences and catastrophes. It would seem, indeed, that man has always known instinctively that knowledge of his past is one of the basic items of his equipment for survival. He learned this fact presumably at the dawn of human history.

It seems equally safe to say that one of the ego's basic drives is toward understanding of the self in time. This is more than a conscious act of survival. It stems from the self's innate curiosity about the self. To be sure, the sophistication with which the individual conducts his search depends upon his own equipment of mind and even more upon the intellectual resources of his culture. But all peoples, whether they be herdsmen in Ur or scholars in twentieth-century universities, have had an innate curiosity about the past. It is not enough to say, as one of my distinguished colleagues once said, that men study history because they enjoy it. It is more important to say that men study history, whether around the council fire or in universities, because their egos demand such activity for their own fulfillment, because they tell them that they must know their past if they will vindicate their superiority over the rest of the natural world.

I

Man is not content merely to study history. The ego will not be satisfied with this, because the ego in its unredeemed or natural state is not able to see history apart from itself. It is the center of creation; history, therefore, has no meaning outside its understand-

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ing. Thinking that it is the creator, the ego drives toward the reduction of history in order to assimilate and master history. What occurs when this takes place is that the ego compels its finite mind to reduce the infinite to finiteness, in order that the mind may understand, control, and use the infinite of history.

If you are thinking that all this sounds theoretical, permit me to say that there is nothing theoretical about it at all. It is a plain statement of simple fact, which I am inclined to believe goes a long way toward describing techniques that men most often use to delude themselves. But I must resist the temptation to talk about cases, like that of primitive men in a so-called natural state or even of the rank and file of people today, which obviously illustrate my generalizations. My space is limited, and I must get directly to the practicing historian, the man upon whom I want to concentrate my attention. I want to say a specific word about his condition.

Journeymen of the historical craft live as much in bondage to the ego as do their less sophisticated or learned fellowmen. This fact is all the more significant because in the western Christian world, at least, they have been trained to live according to the law. That law is what the profession calls methodology, that is, the way in which one should go about studying history and doing research and writing. This methodology was based in its inception either upon Biblical affirmations about the reality of truth or upon Newtonian-Darwinian concepts of scientific certainty. A fact is a fact, for all that; two plus two equals four, and so on. Now, the historian, along with most other intellectuals in the modern world, long ago concluded that Biblical faith was irrelevant, that it did not validate his methodology; he has long since ceased to see its meaning for his methodology. No sooner had he repudiated the Biblical foundations, however, than -scientists themselves began to undermine reasons for believing in scientific certainty. These two great erosions have by our own day gone a long way toward destroying the intellectual and faithful foundations of historical methodology.

Some members of our profession have been frank -enough to admit that this is true and honest enough with themselves to try to find a new modus operandi. The more extreme among them have embraced and practiced a pure subjectivism, an out-and-out ego-centric understanding of history. There is, they say, no such thing as absolute historical truth; facts mean altogether different things to

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different people, depending upon culture, environment, and so on. History, consequently, has no meaning outside the mind of the historian; indeed, in an existential sense the historian creates history. The historian should approach his subject by constructing hypotheses based upon what he knows to be true. He should then write his history after marshaling evidence to support his hypotheses.

This is too strong doctrine for most historians to profess openly, or even to accept consciously. It may be that they have been trained in seminars too rigorously in the rules of evidence and in respect for the formalities to be willing to abandon the old methodology for the new subjective anarchy. Perhaps they have also done enough work in historical sources to have come to feel the strange power that evidence itself can exert over the mind of the researcher. In either event, most historians go about their daily work on the common sense assumption that historical truth must have its own existence because otherwise their work would be meaningless and their careers a fraud. They live not in total darkness but, it might be said, in the dim light of natural revelation. And in many instances they live scrupulously, morally, righteously by the law of historical method. For them it is no longer a divine law, handed down on some Sinai; they know the law's formalities, not its life. But it is a seemingly viable way of professional life. Carefully observed, it enables one to write acceptable monographs and to teach seminars of his own.

I have, I suspect, just been describing the situation of the vast majority of historians whom I happen to know. I mean no derogation of them when I say that living by the law as historian amounts to precisely the same thing and has precisely the same inevitable results as living by the law in all of life. We are not able to fulfill our true vocation, that is, to be good and faithful historians, because we simply do not have it in us to fulfill the law's demands. That, I can hear you say, is a big statement and easy enough to make, but what about the proof? All that I can say in reply is that we are moving now on a level where theories and speculations have no relevance. We are dealing with experience, not theory. In trying to explain to the Christian community at Rome the futility of striving after righteousness, even under divine law, Paul appealed to the facts of Israel's history and, most importantly, to the truth that he had been given the grace to see in his own experience. And so it is when

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we talk about what happens when the historian tries scrupulously to live by the law.

To begin with, as I can testify from my own experience, the law of historical methodology, most especially the law as most historians understand it, leaves us in vast darkness. It tells us that there are facts but does not tell us what they mean. It says that there is such a thing as history, but it does not tell us what it is. In other words, it does not answer our first questions about the meaning of history, even the meaning of our own lives in history. The law fails, more importantly, because it makes onerous demands without giving the power to fulfill its high and worthy standards. It tells me that ass historian I must be scrupulous, honest, and fair, that I must honor truth by respecting its integrity, that I must marshal my evidence and relate the facts as I see them. Well and good; the rules are clear enough. But what happens when I try to put the facts together for a lecture or a book? I find that the harder I try the more I fail to satisfy the law's demands. I am not just parroting Paul at this point. Over and over I have found from my own experience that my ego drives inexorably toward its own control, that is to say, it seeks to impose its own pattern upon events, selects its own evidence and discards evidence when it is not useful, in short, writes its own history. And so I find that the so-called subjectivists were right, at least in their diagnosis of our situation. Scientific objectivity, as present-day historical methodology understands it, is a snare and delusion for me.

II

The most pretentious thrust of the historian's mind takes form in the construction of theories and philosophies of history. This occurs in the first place because the mind is overwhelmed, baffled, and disorganized by the immensity and complexities of history. The human mind, if for no other reason than its sheer physical inadequacy, can never assimilate more than a minute segment of the historical record. Long and laborious research according to the best canons of historical method and invoking the assistance of all the tools of modern technology, can yield only fragmentary knowledge of any single brief isolated episode or period. If, for example, we study the history of a single presidential administration in the United States, we do well if we attain a degree of mastery over the most obvious facts about

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a few leaders of the government in Washington and the larger forces and movements in the country that were operating to shape important policies during this brief period in one country. At best we will have seen only the small tip of the historical iceberg. We can never know all the thoughts and actions and decisions of the millions of Americans in their daily lives and work, to say nothing of the vast stream of events in the rest of the world, even those parts of the world with close ties to the United States. This is true only secondarily because the historical record is fragmentary; it is true more importantly because our finite minds are not capable of comprehending the infinitude of history.

It is altogether understandable why both philosophers and historians (and ordinary folk, too, for that matter) through the ages have sought release from the bonds of finiteness by devising theories or philosophies of history. As I said a moment ago, the ego drives powerfully and inexorably toward its own control of history. In its finiteness it cannot truly, fully know history; none the less, it will be satisfied with nothing less than its own understanding of history. Hence it must reduce history's complexities, dilemmas, and baffling uncertainties to some comprehensible, manageable system. The results, obviously, are theories and philosophies of history.

There have, of course, been many different kinds. This is not the time and place for description and analysis of their varied assumptions and understandings, but it is, I think, important to note that all theories and philosophies of history have at least four characteristics in common. First, all of them, at least all that have been fully developed, pretend to nothing less than a world view, a cosmology, a complete and total understanding. As Richard Hofstadter said of Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism, "It offered a comprehensive world view, uniting under one generalization everything in nature from protozoa to politics." Second, ironically, in view of their aspirations, all theories and philosophies of history have been the product of their peculiar culture and their culture's understanding of human affairs. That is to say, they cannot be understood outside the total context of the culture that spawned them. Third, all these well-developed systems attain comprehension and symmetry by rigorously imposing their own order on history, and they do this by quite ruthlessly ignoring, excluding, or discarding evidence that is not susceptible of assimilation. This is, I think, as true of Greek ideal-

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ism as it is of dialectical materialism. Fourth, most if not all great philosophies of history have not been content merely to describe but have ranged beyond and have attempted to discover the dynamics of history, to discern and isolate the forces that move men and nations.

I hope it is obvious that I would not want to be understood as passing moral judgment on theories and philosophies of history. The interesting and significant fact is that most ordinary workaday historians have never derived much help or understanding from them. To be sure, monolithic interpretations and theories have had their vogue from time to time, and individual historians have sought refuge from their bafflements in them. But it would seem that some automatic device always sets to work to prevent such commitment by the rank and file. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the average working historian is almost inherently suspicious of too much theory. His methodology has trained him to be this way. Perhaps by natural revelation he has come to see if not to understand the infinitude of history and to know that commitment to theory or philosophy can never open doors that now seem locked to him. If philosophy and theory do not provide the way out, then what? The historian, it would seem, has no recourse but to live by a law that pronounces the sentence of death upon him because it fails to give power for fulfillment of its impossible demands.

III

The historian is set free, that is to say, enters into new life in which he can know and live with the truth of history and be the kind of historian that God means him to be, when he is justified, when he is set in a right relationship to God. I do not mean to imply that he is justified merely as professional teacher and scholar. When it occurs, justification is a radical transformation of the entire person-body, mind, and spirit. It is a new state of being, not an attitude of mind or a new way of looking at things. It is a complete turning around of personality, from inward looking toward self to outward looking toward God. It is the experience that all men have felt when they have known the redeeming power of God. We do not need to say at this point precisely how this occurs. Let it suffice to say that justification occurs when the Holy Spirit, whether in response to human submission or by God's own loving grace alone, comes to the individual in his helplessness and despair, restores his health by

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smashing the fortress walls of selfishness and pride, and gives him the ability to love God and hence to love creation.

The point that concerns us most as teachers and students is what all this means to us in our particular vocations. I realize clearly enough the difficulties of undertaking any explanation. And yet I cannot escape the conviction that we cannot begin to know what it means to be Christians in our vocations until we have abandoned the absurd practice of compartmentalizing our lives and come to see that living by faith means living by faith as historians, economists, scientists, and so on, in every detail of daily work.

I think that we can best approach this subject by trying to see what happens to the historian when he is given the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is hard to know where to begin, because he is made a new creature. He is given, for one thing, the ability to see all things a new way-to know himself as creature, finite being, whose creative powers have been dulled or destroyed by pride, selfishness, ambition, lust for power. He is given the ability to live with himself because God has accepted and forgiven him. He is given not perfection or sanctification, for the old man has not yet been entirely destroyed, but a mighty helper, guide, corrector, and friend in the Holy Spirit, who never leaves him even in his darkest perplexities. He is given, among other things, the grace to be grateful, even joyful, in response to God's goodness in giving him family and friends, a university with colleagues and students to serve and love, and the sustaining fellowship of the Church. He is given, finally, the sight to see his vocation for what God intended it to be.

For the historian in his daily work of trying to learn, teach, and write, all this has very specific meaning. To begin with, it means the liberation of the self from the tyranny of the ego's insatiable demands for its own understanding and control of history. I do not mean to imply that this happens all at once, or that we are ever completely liberated from our bondage. But the Holy Spirit works and prays for us even in our persistent, stubborn rebellion. And he does break through to reclamation. He gives us the ability first of all to know that truth without which there can be no understanding of history-that God exists, and that because he exists truth lives in resplendent power and glory. The historian will no longer say with Descartes, "Cogito, ergo sum." He will now say "Deus est, ergo sum," ergo creation, being, truth, history. Think what this

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means to the historian in so vital a matter as his methodology. It means that historical truth exists not in his imagination or because of his whim, but because God himself, the Creator of the universe, has brought human history into being and has himself lived in human history. Man, a finite creature, can know and understand truth only partially, imperfectly, corruptly, it may be. But by God's grace he can at least honor, respect, and treasure it. That is to say, the historian, while readily acknowledging that only God knows all historical truth, can now affirm, profess, and confess that he stands in the presence of something far greater than himself, something that gives meaning to his life and work-the faith and knowledge that every single fact of history has its own objective existence and integrity. We may ignore, warp, or deny those facts, but in the very act of doing violence to them we stand already condemned.

I suspect that these generalizations have much to say to the present sometimes very warm discussion in the historical profession about whether it is possible to write so-called objective history, by which is meant history purged of the ego's distortions and perversions. As we usually do, we begin this discussion by asking the question the wrong way. We should ask, instead, whether historical truth has its own existence, in short, whether there is such a thing as objective history. If we answer this question in the affirmative, we will not ask the essentially foolish question of whether we can in fact write objective history. We will know only that we must try even if we are bound to fail, and that we must trust in the power of God to give us the ability partially to succeed. For when God justifies and calls us, that is, gives us the ability to accept historical truth in humility, he also gives us the ability to be good and faithful historians. This is a fact of experience, not a theory, and it is difficult to explain because its precise meaning will vary according to the individual experience. But let me try for a moment to elaborate upon it.

The first result of justification is to free the historian from the tyranny of the law. This is rather inaccurately put, as in fact justification gives the historian ability for the first time to know and understand the majesty and righteousness of the law. It would, I think, be more accurate to say that the first great result of justification is to lift the law's sentence of death upon us as historians. It does this by giving us the ability to observe the law. There is no great mystery about how this happens. In his natural state, the his-

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torian is such a slave of ego that he cannot observe the law's demands no matter how hard he tries. In justification, God in the Holy Spirit not only restores health to the ego, the mind, the whole person, as I have already tried to say; he also gives the historian, the whole person, power to live in new freedom from day to day, in the classroom and the study.

For example, there is the freedom that comes from new understanding of daily tasks. The historian set right knows that he is God's chosen man. God has called him to study history for a specific vital purpose-to preserve the historical record in truth and integrity, not merely because history is a record of God's work in time, but because mankind cannot be truly free unless and until it knows the truth about itself. That truth is revealed most fully in the record of the past. In the classroom or in the study writing articles and books, the historian is God's man. He is not the servant of students who might want to be entertained or of governments and cultures which demand glorification and deification. He is God's servant. And just as God calls the historian to this service, so also does he give the historian courage and power in time of need to perform it.

There is liberation, too, in the historian's new understanding of how he should proceed to the service to which God has called him. Freed, at least in part, from the ego's drive toward its own understanding and use of history, he can now see his reasonable service to be the discovery and relation of events of the past. In short, he can see that he is called to be a mere chronicler of the past. To be sure, he will be eager to know and understand theories and philosophies of history, because they constitute an important part of the record of human intelligence at work. But he does not have to be concerned about imposing his own system to control events. He accepts his own finiteness. He knows that he can never know all of history's complexities. He knows that imperfection and mortality stamp his work with ephemeral character. This apprehension, however, brings not tension and anxiety but release from the compulsion to be original, masterful, cosmic. It frees the historian to live creatively.

I have said that the historian justified will have the grace to see his proper role as being that of mere chronicler. The adjective is adequate but somewhat misleading. Seen in the light of faithful service, being a mere chronicler is an awesome task indeed. It means not only taking history seriously, but also taking one's disci-

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pline seriously. It means never being satisfied, and working relentlessly because there is so little that is known and so much to do. It means knowing that the good chronicler is not one who merely records events, even events in their vastness, but one who tries to understand why things turned out as they did-one who attempts to analyze and interpret as well as to relate. It means rigorous regard for a methodology that is grounded in truth, and being a good scholar and a good citizen of the academic community, because this only is service acceptable to God. It means knowing that alleged piety is no substitute for hard and excellent work, and that one can truly love God as historian only if he is willing to go far beyond the law's demands.

I come back to the most wonderful and amazing fact about this justification of which I have been speaking. It is simply that God gives us power to fulfill our vocations's demands. I am reminded at this point of Georg Neumark's great seventeenth-century hymn of trust, "If Thou but Suffer God to Guide Thee," and particularly of the last two verses which follow:

Only be still, and wait his leisure
In cheerful hope, with heart content
To take what e'er thy Father's pleasure
And all-discerning love hath sent;
Nor doubt our inmost wants are known
To him who chose us for his own.

Sing, pray, and swerve not from his ways,
But do thine own part faithfully;
Trust his rich promises of grace,
So shall they be fulfilled in thee;
God never yet forsook at need
The soul that trusted him indeed.

God stands with us in the classroom as we seek to relate the facts of the coming of the French Revolution or the American Civil War. His Spirit works with us in the library as we search through newspapers and magazines, and in the study as we struggle to reconstruct the evidence of past events. Do we go off on our own tangents? Do we seek to fit the evidence into our own molds? Then the Spirit can, if he will, correct and guide us back to faithful chronicling. Perhaps he will not so use us; perhaps he will use our willfulness for our larger training as historians. Even so, he gives us the ability to live with our mistakes and to learn from them, and to go on in daily

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work in trust that he will turn all our imperfect work to good purposes.

There is great and rich significance for the historian in the experience of the compilers of the historical books of the Bible. judged by modern standards, they were unlettered men with only a primitive methodology. And yet they laid the foundation for historiography; indeed, in their understanding of history and scrupulous regard for the truth of historical events they set standards to which all historians might well aspire. But we miss the point of their achievement if we regard their work as being some special act of grace, never to be repeated. The point is that God inspires all history that is well and faithfully written. If the writers of the Biblical record were "inspired," that is, given grace to be true historians, then we, too, can be "inspired" even as we are justified.

Permit me to add one final word about the justification of the historian, or of any scholar or person, for that matter. I said at the very beginning that we too often ask the question about the meaning of faith to our vocations in the wrong way, as if the matter involved our own superior goodness or our skill as scholars. I have tried to show what being justified by faith means to the historian, but I have completely failed if I have imputed any righteousness to the individual whom God has been pleased to justify. I have failed in an even worse way if I have implied that we are competent to say whom the Holy Spirit claims and helps. Thank God, it is no concern of ours whom God loves and helps. We can only be thankful for the gift of the Holy Spirit, who is the author of all good work and who enables us to love all our colleagues and live with ourselves even while we know our own unworthiness.

IV

In the brief space remaining I want to shift my attention from what it means to be a Christian as historian to what it means to understand history as a Christian. I must apologize for the sketchiness of what I am about to say, because this subject deserves a great deal more careful attention than I can give at this point. My only excuse for making the effort at all is that there are several important things that ought to be said to point up the larger meaning of justification.

God does not leave the historian to grope in darkness, not knowing what history is. In justification he gives the historian power to see

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all things anew through the eyes of faith. I do not mean a private faith, such as might come from the self communing with the self. I mean that faith not built by human minds but what is called Biblical faith, which is to say the record of God speaking by the prophets, the law, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit in the Church. Biblical faith speaks clearly and forcefully to us, if we will but listen.

It tells us, first of all, I suspect, that history is not the product of the human mind. It does not consist of the kind of abstracted reality that theory and philosophy would have it be. These are part of the stream of history, to be sure, but they are not history in the sense that they pretend to be. Biblical faith knows nothing about philosophy of history, except to say that it is the foolishness of the Greeks and another evidence of the corrupted ego's effort to deify itself. Biblical faith tells us that history is the sum total of all actions and events, the record of every movement of mind or matter since creation. This record exists because God has called it into existence in space and time. He who brought matter into existence has given a matter-of-fact reality to matter. He who swung the planets into their courses also created man a part of matter with a consciousness of time.

I think that it is important to add that Biblical faith tells us most emphatically that there is no such thing as a so-called Christian interpretation of history. At least this is the conclusion to which I have come, or to which the Holy Spirit has brought me, after trying for years to work out a Christian interpretation. History is simply history, the same for Christians, Jews, Moslems, people of no faith. We do not shape, change, or control it by trying to force it into a so-called Christian mold according to our understanding. A Christian interpretation would not be much better than another rival to other interpretations.

Biblical faith, I think also, tells us something very special about the historical record. It tells us that it is stored in its incredible totality in the mind and memory of God. He has numbered the hairs of our heads as well as the days of princes and kings. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without his knowing it. He knows our going in and our coming out. It is to him a precious thing because it is his truth. Think what this says to us as historians. It says, does it not, that because history belongs to God we violate the divine sovereignty when we tamper with it. It says that history is a whole, and that no one part is more important than the other. It says,

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finally, that all history is local, personal history, that the truth of history lies not in sweeping and obscuring generalizations, but in the myriad seemingly small and unimportant details of the vast unknowable record. Is this not something of what we see when we see history through the eyes of faith?

Biblical faith gives additional vital insight to the historian in its view of man. Faith tells me that it is the only true and authentic view of man, and that it is authentic precisely because it is the only view that sees man beyond the limits of human understanding. The historian can, I suggest, derive enormous help in understanding even when he cannot affirm that the Biblical view reflects God's knowledge of man.

This is true because the Biblical view is the only view that takes man seriously in history. It takes him seriously as a part of nature. It does not reduce him to idea by ignoring or relegating to unimportance his material nature. On the other hand, it affirms his personality and possibility for free creative existence beyond the slavery of ego or great forces. It does not reduce him to an economic cipher or a cog in a machine of progress. In other words, the Biblical view accepts man for what he is-a creature, fallen, corrupted, confused, rebellious, yet worthy of respect, love, and honor because he remains God's creature even in his fallen-ness.

Because the Biblical view takes man for what he is, it is an honest view with no purpose to serve other than to reveal man to himself. We have no better proof of the sturdy reliability of its honesty than the Biblical record itself. As Woodrow Wilson once put it, "The Bible has revealed the people to themselves." It strips bare all pretension to human righteousness. Its pages are filled with the record of human sin-of idolatry by people freed from slavery, adultery by kings, betrayal and denial by disciples. It says that the economic interpretation, Freudian psychology, and all other insights of all other views of man are partially right, insofar as they go. But in its honesty, the Biblical record tells us more. It tells us that human kind bear the stamp of divinity on their brow, and that we cannot take an honest view of human history unless we acknowledge God's work through human kind in history.

To the historian, I suspect that Biblical faith would say that he cannot be a true and faithful chronicler of events outside its understanding. For outside the context of faith there are only partial,

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imperfect, earth-bound understandings of man. Bound to these corrupted understandings, the historian can never escape the bondage of human kind. Only in Biblical understanding can he know the truth that sets him free.

Biblical faith tells us, finally, that the great authenticator of history is also the living Lord of history, the same then, now, and ever more. Faith impels us to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Lord of history. Faith gives us the capacity to know that history, even the record of human affairs, is the record of God's work in time in all the places of the earth. He is the Lord of the Soviet Union and the United States, just as he is the Lord of the pharaohs, of Cyrus, and of Nero and Titus. Nothing has happened or will happen except by his will or permission; he uses men and nations to achieve his inscrutable purpose. History is also the special record of this same God's redeeming activity-what the Germans call Heilsgeschichte and we rather imprecisely call "sacred history"-which culminated in God's direct, personal participation in human affairs in the Incarnation and the coming and living of the Holy Spirit in the Church.

For the historian who sees through the eyes of faith, God's lordship is the central, supreme, and essential fact of history. He knows that all of history must be understood in terms of God's eternal, unending work in redemption. He knows, for example, the meaning of God's life on earth and how the Cross and Resurrection condemn all human pretension and pride and vindicate forever God's lordship. Standing under the shadow of the Cross, the historian finally sees the truth, the reality of history. He knows that this is the great watershed, that human affairs can never be the same again because of God's sacrificial act of love.

All this is to say, of course, what God's lordship and activity in history mean to all men who live in faith. But what does God's lordship say to the historian in his daily vocation, in his work as historian? It will mean different things, I am sure, to different men, but to me it says something very specific and practical. It tells me that I can be a true and faithful historian only as I remember that God, the Lord of history, is also the sole judge of history. I serve and glorify him only as I remember that my precious, single task is to preserve the historical record in purity and integrity. I am a chronicler, not a prophet. It is not my task to prove God's existence or even his lordship over history. I am not competent to render judgment on

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righteousness and evil. I cannot know how and where and when God works, except as he has revealed himself to the Church. It is not given to me to say, "Thus saith the Lord." This is the prophet's word, the word of the Church. It is given to me to preserve the record, even in its fragmentary and imperfect form, without which the prophet cannot know how to speak.

What I am trying to say is that we historians have enough to do without trying to play God. "Do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring light to the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart." We are surely tempted to do this, and we often succumb. We feel, for example, that we must defend the Church by revealing its righteousness in the historical record, or that we must vindicate God's lordship by showing how he has acted at precise moments in human affairs. We are not competent to do this anyway, but when we try, we deny God's lordship by our refusal to believe that the historical record, like the Gospel, which is the vital part of that record, has its own integrity and power, gives its own testimony, and pronounces its own answers. Let us remember that for the historian, as for other men, the fear of the Lord, that is, the knowledge of his lordship, is the beginning of wisdom.