write it pushes it forward into the future. And clearly we face, if not a new difficulty, a fact at least which is of fundamental importance in the attempt to understand what history itself is. So Herodotus becomes again illustrative. His history once written and given to the world becomes itself an item in the history of Greece, making it necessary that the story be retold. In the face of a fact, at once so simple and so profound, how idle is the boast of the publisher who could say of the author of a recent life of Christ[2] that she "has reproduced the time of Christ, not as we would understand it, but as He himself saw it. She has told what He believed and did, rather than what He is reported to have said. She has stripped Him of tradition and shown Him as He was; she has given to literature an imperishable figure, not of the wan Galilean of the Middle Ages, but of the towering figure of all history." How idle, I repeat, is such a boast of finality when we know that this new history of Christ, instead of ending the matter, may cause another history to be written by some student who comes to the old record with a new insight and a new inspiration. It is possible, we may say, to portray the Christ of His own day, or the wan Galilean of the Middle Ages, or the figure which commands the attention of the twentieth century, but the real Christ, the towering figure of all history,--who will portray that? It is yet to be done and done again. No historical fact can ever have its history fully written: and this, not because the adequate data, the wise and unbiased mind, and the moderate supply of genius are lacking, but because it is itself the producer of new history the more it is historically understood. It grows, it changes, it expands the more adequately we apparently grasp it. We seem never to be at the end of its career and we must stop abruptly with its history still unfinished. Others may take up our task, but they will end as we have ended. The history of nothing is complete.