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It is now more than six hundred years ago since one of the earliest fathers of English history, an inmate of the venerable Abbey of St. Albans, which nurtured the first school of English historical learning, recounted, at the commencement of his work, how he was vexed by questions, some put by envious detractors, some arising from serious perplexity, whether the record of times that were dead and gone was worthy of the labour and study of Christian men. He replied, with a lofty consciousness of the greatness of his task, first by an appeal to the highest instincts of man, and then added, as a further and complete sanction of these instincts, the words of the psalmist, "The just shall be had in everlasting remembrance." These are simple and familiar words; but the old chronicler of St. Albans was right in saying that they contain the principle which vindicates and sanctifies all historical research. "If thou," he said to his readers, "if thou forgettest and despisest the departed of past generations, who will remember thee?" "It was to keep alive," so he added, "the memory of the good, and teach us to abhor the bad, that all the sacred historians have striven from Moses down to the 'deep-souled' chroniclers of the years in which we ourselves are living."

1. "Everlasting remembrance" — "eternal memory" — "a memorial that shall endure from generation to generation." This is what history aims to accomplish for the ages of the past. As we are reminded both by Scripture and by experience of the noble, the inextinguishable desire implanted within us to understand and to bring near to us the wonders of the firmament, so in like manner we may be assured that there lies deep in the human heart a desire not less noble, not less insatiable, to understand and to bring near to us the wonders of the ages that are dead and buried (Psalm 77:5, 10, 11; Psalm 78:2-4). As the celestial spheres are mapped out by the natural student to guide the mariner, and "for times, and for seasons, and for days, and for years," so the spheres of earthly events are mapped out by the historical student, and the monuments of glory and the beacons of danger are set along the shores of the past, to direct us through the trackless ocean of the future. Happy, thrice happy he who has the ears to hear those voices of the dead which others cannot hear — who has the eyes to see those visions of the ancient times which to others are dim and dark. History may be fallible and uncertain, but it is our only guide to the great things that God has wrought for the race of man in former ages; it is the only means through which "we can hear, and" through which "our fathers can declare to us the noble works which He has done in their days, and in the old time before them."

2. And not only the religion of the natural man, but the whole structure of the Bible is a testimony to the sacredness and the value of historical learning. Unlike all other sacred books, the sacred books both of the Old and New Testament are, at least half in each, not poetical, or dogmatical, but historical. Doctrine, precept, warning, exhortation, all are invested with double charms when clothed in the flesh and blood of historical facts. If there has been an "everlasting remembrance " of One supremely Just, in whom the Divine Mind was made known to man in a special and transcendent degree, it is because that Just One, the Holy and the True, "became flesh and dwelt amongst us," and became (so let us speak with all reverence and all truth) the subject of historical description, of historical research, of historical analysis, of historical comparison. The sacred historians of the Jewish Commonwealth — still more the simple, homely, but profound historians of the New Testament whom we call the Evangelist, — are the most impressive of all preachers.

3. And this power is not confined to the history of the Jewish people, or of the Christian Church. It extends to the history of "the nations" — of "the Gentiles," as they are called in the Bible. "The just," without reserve, in whatever nation, and of whatever creed, "is to be had in everlasting remembrance." "Whatsoever things are true," etc., in whatsoever race, or under whatsoever form, — these things are the legitimate, the sacred, subjects which the Father of all good gifts has charged the historians of the world to read and to record wheresoever they can be discerned.

(Dean Stanley.)

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KJV: Surely he shall not be moved for ever: the righteous shall be in everlasting remembrance.

WEB: For he will never be shaken. The righteous will be remembered forever.