Words Worth Noting - November 3, 2022

“Vaguely in the course of time (and more especially in our Protestant countries) the Reformation has come to stand for the idea of ‘liberty of thought.’ Martin Luther is represented as the vanguard of progress. But when history is something more than a series of flattering speeches addressed to our own glorious ancestors, when to use the words of the German historian Ranke, we try to discover what ‘actually happened,’ then much of the past is seen in a very different light. Few things in human life are either entirely good or entirely bad. Few things are either black or white.”

Hendrik Van Loon The Story of Mankind