212 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

of the wheel, of fire, of pottery, and of edged tools, has set out to be master
of his environment. Within this fragment of Time, the history of Lettered
and Civilised Man fills an even smaller space. It is therefore not remark-
able that a satisfactory clue has yet to be found to the meaning of the
strange acts of the strangest of living creatures. Bcdo tells the story of the
Northumbrian thane who compared the life of Man on Earth, in relation
to the unknown immensity of Time, to a moment in which a bird might
fly into the warmth of a hall in winter, and then be lost to sight again in
the storm—de hieme in hiemem regrediens. Of this short space of Time men
had knowledge; they knew nothing of what had gone before, nothing of
what might follow after.1

'British historians are not necessarily without "care of knowing causes"
if they refuse to commit themselves to any more definite judgment upon
the pattern of History and the meaning of human, existence.>z

1 In the famous passage (Baeda: Historia Ecclfsiftstica Gcntis jAjiftlonim^ Book II,
chap). 13) that Sir Llewellyn Woodward has cited here so aptly to illustrate his own
thesis, the actual terms in the comparison arc, of course, not the brevity of the civiliza-
tions' Time-span up to date by contrast with the immensity of the Time-span posited
by Anthropology, Geology, and Astronomy, but the brevity of ti soul's visible life on
Earth by comparison with the immeasurable magnitude of this some soul's mysterious
non-terrestrial history. The relevant words are vita hoininum in tcrris, ad eoniparationcm
eius, quod incerturn est, temporis and ita haec vita hominum ad motiintm afipfirct; quid autem
sequatur, qiddve praecesserit, prorsus ignoramus. The meaning of these words seems clear,
and it is clinched by the context; for the debate in which these words tire reported by
Bede to have been spoken was a discussion in the witvnaKcmot of the Kingdom of
Northumbria, and the question at issue was whether to abide by a traditional Paganism
or to be converted to Christianity; it was not the question whether the dutu for studying
the history of Man in Process of Civilization were at present to be deemed insufficient—
on a criterion to be found in the estimated scale of Anthropological, Geological, and
Astronomical Time—for attempting to make sense of this post-primitive current episode
of human affairs.

The subject of the Northumbrian notables' debate was, in short, not History, but
Religion and Politics. If, however, we could imagine them discussing, either before or
after their historic debate, the question raised by Sir Llewellyn Woodward, we can be
sure, a priori, that, whether they had been speaking as still unconverted pagans or been
speaking as recent converts to the Christian Faith, they would have been us confident of
their ability to read the riddle of the terrestrial history of Mankind «8 they were shy of
trying to read the riddle of the eternal destiny of a soul. On the lips of Hetle's seventh-
century Northumbrian thanet, 'the unknown immensity of Time' did not mean the
chronological aeons with which the twentieth-century Western geologists and astro*
nomers credited the duration of a Physical Universe; it meant an Ktcrnity that was not
commensurate with Time in the astronomer's or the annalist's sense of that word. In the
seventh-century Weltanschauung of a pagan Northumbrian warrior or a Christian Roman
missionary, the Time-span of the histories of the civilisations wns not dwarfed by the
Time-span of the age of the Earth and the far greater age of the Stellar Cosmos, since
these seventh-century Western minds had no idea that chronological periods of these
latter orders of magnitude might have elapsed already and might bo due to go on rolling
into the future. In their cosier vista, as presented in both the Christian and tho pagan
myth, the Cosmos, the Earth, Terrestrial Life, Human Life, and Civilisation had all
come into existence and entered on their careers in the self-same week; and this imaginary
date lay a shorter time back than the estimated date at which the twentieth-century
Western historian placed the rise of the earliest civilizations at the culmination of a
chronological prelude of almost unspeakably greater length. In this seventh-century
Weltanschauung neither the history of the World of Man nor the, on this estimate, coeval
history of the Stellar Cosmos presented a puzzle to which a satisfactory clue had not yet
been found; and neither the pagan seventh-century Northumbrian, nor the Christian*
seventh-century Roman inquirer would have hesitated to commit himself to a definite
judgement upon a pattern of history whose meaning, so he devoutly believed, had been
revealed to Man by God.

Thus, in citing Bede, Sir Llewellyn Woodward is taking a pre-Christian or Christian
antithesis between Time and Eternity, not as a precise equivalent, but as a suggestive
allegory, of a post-Christian antithesis between one Time-span of one order of chrono-
logical magnitude and another Time-span of a different order of magnitude in the same
chronological dimension.—AJ.T.

* Woodward, E. L.: British Historians (London 1933, Collins, produced by Adprint