Excerpt from History of Methodism in Illinois, From 1793 to 1832
This is not so much a history as a collection of material for the use of the future historian. Webster defines history as "a statement of the progress of a nation or an institution, with philosophical inquiries respecting effects and causes, in distinction from annals, which relate simply the facts and events of each year in strict chronological order, without any observations of the annalist; and from biography, which is the record of an individual's life."
The larger the field of the historian, and the longer the period embraced in his work, the more fully can he carry out this definition of the great lexicographer, and make the philosophical element the more prominent. But as his field becomes less, and his time shorter, the more will the annalistic and biographical elements predominate over the philosophical.
The stately, but unreadable, histories of Gibbon and Hume, the former covering a period of more than fourteen hundred years, and embracing the whole civilized world, and the latter covering the whole period of English history, afford examples of the one; whilst that most interesting and readable of modern historical-works, Macaulay's England, confined as it is to the events of a brief period, well illustrates the other.
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