I am not going to enter into the question of what larger and wider fields of enquiry the humbler by-paths of research may help us to pass through without going helplessly astray; but this is certain, that there never has been a civilized nation since nations grew into organized life--never has been, never will be--in which something like a passion for finding out the smaller secrets of the past has not been strong, and in some minds absorbing. Be that as it may, there are, it may be estimated, some hundreds of volumes scattered about in all sorts of odd places, in the custody of all sorts of odd people, within the metropolitan area which contain the entries of the three most important events in the lives of millions of people who have been born, wedded, and died within five miles of Temple Bar during the last three centuries and a half. These volumes are being consulted every week. Copies of the entries made in them are produced as evidence in courts of justice every month, and vast sums of money change hands every year on the testimony which those books afford, and almost upon that alone. On that testimony again and again the title to large estates, the right to seats in the House of Lords, the legitimacy of son or daughter, has depended. Fiction and fact have vied with each other in emphasizing the romantic incidents that our parish registers have chronicled or concealed. All the existing parish registers within the metropolitan area, from the year 1538 (when parish registers first began to be kept in England) to the beginning of the present century, and all the churchwardens’ books besides, might easily be kept in a single room of Somerset House, and be easily supplied with perfect personal indices in five years. * * * * * One more class of ancient records remains to be dealt with before we leave London and its purlieus. Nothing has yet been said of that immense mass of precious muniments which constitute the apparatus from which the _ecclesiastical_ history of England may be compiled; that is, the history of the part which the Church has played in the political, religious, and, I may add, the moral and intellectual training and education of the nation.