Excerpt from What Is History? That is to say, history, according to this View of the case, is meant to instruct. It should teach some lesson. The lesson may be a political one or a moral one or a religious one. But it is always history with a purpose, - its justification is ethical. Far and wide through historical writing can be found this ideal. Sometimes it is consciously and strongly held. There is a work in eight volumes in the University Library with the title, The History of England on Christian Principles. Sometimes it is less consciously and clearly acknowledged, and yet the his torian none the less tells his story under its influence. Macaulay is a devotee of the Whig party and is teaching its doctrines when he is writing his history of the seventeenth century as much as when he is speaking or voting in Parliament in the nineteenth. Froude uses his history of England to teach the evils of the Roman Catholic Church and to discredit Anglican clericalism, exactly as he uses any of his other forms 'of writing. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.