3. In the third place, it is necessary to take account of the under-currents, not only of our own age, but of the past ages with which we have to deal. Every age has such under-currents, and every age tends to be unconscious of them. We ourselves have succeeded to a splendid heritage. Behind us are the thoughts, the beliefs, the habits of mind, which have been in process of formation since the first beginning of our race. They are inwrought, for the most part, into the texture of our nature. We cannot transcend them. To them the mass of our thoughts are relative, and by them the thoughts of other generations tend to be judged. The importance of recognizing them as an element in our judgments of other generations increases in proportion as those generations recede from our own. In dealing with a country or a period not very remote, we may not go far wrong in assuming that its inheritance of ideas is cognate to our own. But in dealing with a remote country, or a remote period of time, it becomes of extreme importance to allow for the difference, so to speak, of mental longitude. The men of earlier days had other mental scenery round them. Fewer streams of thought had converged upon them. Consequently, many ideas which were in entire harmony with the mental fabric of their time, are unintelligible when referred to the standard of our own; nor can we understand them until we have been at the pains to find out the underlying ideas to which they were actually relative. I will briefly illustrate this point by two instances: