OR OUTLINES OF LECTURES ON ANCIENT AND MODERN HISTORY, CONSIDERED ON THE PRINCIPLES OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND: BY THE REV. C. J. ABRAHAM, M. A. FELLOW OF KING'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, and one OF THE ASSISTANT ETON, PRINTED AND SOLD BY E. P. WILLIAMS; AND TO BE HAD AT THE ETON WAREHOUSE, 5 BRIDGE STREET, BLACKFRIARS, LONDON. MDCCCXLV. PREFACE. The following outlines of Lectures (or Lessons, for they partake of the nature of both) were given to a Class, that had gone through a detailed course of Geography, with occasional portions of History. They are not intended as a substitute for, but to encourage further study, and to supply a sort of frame to set the picture in. When the Author was called upon to prepare this course, he looked in vain to the great Historians, French or English, for guidance in a just philosophical view of general History. Unhappily the subject has fallen mainly into the hands of Infidels, such as Voltaire, Gibbon, and Hume, or of Latitudinarians, such as Robertson and Sismondi; the former of whom has been shown by Mr. Maitland, in his work on the Dark Ages, to have been very illinformed as to the real condition of the Medieval Church. The Infidel writers naturally took no account of the real influences of Christianity, nor the Latitudinarians, of the Church, as the Divine Teacher of Christianity. Doubtless all the above writers have very great merits as historians, narrators, and philosophers; but their antichristian or heretical opinions make their works more dangerous than useful: and the fact is a startling one, that our youth draws its historical knowledge mainly from such impure wells. Montesquieu's work on the rise and fall of the Roman Empire is perhaps the most valuable modern work of the kind, prior to the 19th Century. |