It seems clear, therefore, that historical truth, if we do not mean by that simply the truth of the records with which we deal, is something which can not be ascertained once for all. It is a living and dynamic truth. It is genuinely progressive. We may say that it is like something being worked out in the course of time, and something which the sequence of events progressively exposes or makes clear. If, therefore, we declare that Herodotus, or any other historian, has not told the truth, and do not mean thereby that he has uttered falsehoods, we mean only that the truth has grown beyond him and his time. For his time it might well be that he told the truth sufficiently. Ancient Greece may then have been precisely what he said it was. To blame him for not telling us what ancient Greece is now, is to blame him irrationally. In the light of historical truth, the Father of History and all his children have been, not simply historians of times old and new, but also contributors to that truth and progressive revealers of it. If they have been faithful to their professed purpose of preserving the memory of what has happened and in making what has happened understood, they are not rivals in the possession of truth. They have all been associated in a common enterprise, that of conserving the history of man in order that what that history is and what it implies may be progressively better known. History is therefore not simply the telling of what has happened; it is also and more profoundly the conserving of what has happened in order that its meaning may be grasped. A book of history differs radically from a museum of antiquities. In the museum, the past is preserved, but it is a dead past, the flotsam and jetsam of the stream of time. It may afford material for history, and then it is quickened into life. In a book of history, the past lives. It is in a very genuine sense progressive. It grows and expands with every fresh study of it, because every fresh study of it puts it into a larger, a more comprehensive, and a new perspective, and makes its meaning ever clearer. The outcome of reflections like these is that history is constantly revealing something like an order or purpose in human affairs, a truth to which they are subject and which they express. History is, therefore, a career in time. That is why no historical item can be so placed and dated that the full truth of it is definitely prescribed and limited to that place and date. Conformably with the calendar and with geography we may be able to affirm that a given event was or is taking place, but to tell what that event is in a manner which ensures understanding of it, is to write the history of its career in time as comprehensively as it can be written. It is to conserve that event, not as an isolated and detached specimen of historical fact, but as something alive which, as it continues to live, reveals more and more its connections in the ceaseless flow of history itself.