Let us admit that all that can be found is published; but alas, the most unusual movements have generally the fewest documents.
Take, for instance, the religious history of the Middle Ages: it is already a pretty delicate task to collect official documents, such as bulls, briefs, conciliary canons, monastic constitutions, etc., but do these documents contain all the life of the Church?
Much is still wanting, and to my mind the movements which secretly agitated the masses are much more important, although to testify to them we have only a few fragments.
Poor heretics, they were not only imprisoned and burned, but their books were destroyed and everything that spoke of them; and more than one historian, finding scarcely a trace of them in his heaps of documents, forgets these prophets with their strange visions, these poet-monks who from the depths of their cells made the world to thrill and the papacy to tremble.
Objective history is then a utopia.

We create God in our own image, and we impress the mark of our personality in places where we least expect to find it again.
But by dint of talking about the tribunal of history we have made most authors think that they owe to themselves and their readers definitive and irrevocable judgments.
It is always easier to pronounce a sentence than to wait, to reserve one's opinion, to re-examine.

The crowd which has put itself out to be present at a trial is almost always furious with the judges when they reserve the case for further information; its mind is so made that it requires precision in things which will bear it the least; it puts questions right and left, as children do; if you appear to hesitate or to be embarrassed you are lost in its estimation, you are evidently only an ignoramus.
But perhaps below the Areopagites, obliged by their functions to pronounce sentence, there is place at the famous tribunal for a simple spectator who has come in by accident.

He has made out a brief and would like very simply to tell his neighbors his opinion.
This, then, is not a history _ad probandum_, to use the ancient formula.
Is this to say that I have only desired to give the reader a moment of diversion?
That would be to understand my thought very ill.

In the grand spectacles of history as in those of nature there is something divine; from it our minds and hearts gain a virtue at once pacifying and encouraging, we experience the salutary sensation of littleness, and seeing the beauties and the sadnesses of the past we learn better how to judge the present hour.
In one of the frescos of the Upper Church of Assisi, Giotto has represented St.Clara and her companions coming out from St.Damian all in tears, to kiss their spiritual father's corpse as it is being carried to its last home.