The next point I have to notice is Mr. Nickerson’s presentation both of the Inquisition as an _idea_ and of the contrast between its _methods_ and those of modern times. The task undertaken is the most difficult of any that lies before the historian; yet it is also the most essential. The wrong way of dealing with the remote past when it presents acts or states of mind quite unfamiliar, and even repulsive to us, is to express horror or ridicule and leave it at that. Thus we have Mr. Davis in his typical Oxford textbook upon the Angevin period sneering at the massacre at Beziers as “pious butchery”; thus we have another typical Oxford textbook, Mr. Oman’s, dealing with an earlier period, sneering at the piety of Gildas; and thus we have yet another textbook—from Cambridge this time—in which the Regius Professor of History, Dr. Bury, sneers at a vision of St. Patrick’s as the result of a “pork supper.” Now that way of writing history, which is, I am sorry to say, still the common way in our English Universities, is worthless. Your business in writing of the past is to make the past comprehensible. More: you ought, as I quoted at the beginning of this, to make it rise from the dead; and that you certainly cannot do if you are so little able to enter into its spirit that everything in it which differs from yourself appears small, repulsive, or absurd. Anyone, however ignorant, can discover what is repulsive and absurd in standards different from their own; and one’s learning, no matter how detailed, is wasted if one gets no further than that. The whole art of history consists in eliminating that shock of non-comprehension and in making the reader feel as the men of the past felt. We have a very good example of the same difficulty in the case of travel-books. We all know how intolerably boring is a book of travel in which the writer can get no further than decrying or laughing at the foreigner, and we all know how the charm of a book of travel consists in its explaining to us, putting before us as a living and comprehensible thing, some civilization which at first sight seemed to us incomprehensible.