The mirror of the past is the only way to peer at the image of what is human. The reflection is darkened by time and sin. Specters of the dead, haunting the dusty stacks of long-ago thoughts, turn up repeatedly, if indistinctly, on library shelves and in the dens of archivists. Storytellers such as the Greek Homer, abstract philosophers such as the Athenian Plato and John the Evangelist, poets such as King David and the Italian Petrarch, historians such as the Romans Livy and Tacitus, biographers such as the Greek Plutarch and the Physician Luke, essayists such as the Roman Seneca, the emperor Marcus Aurelius, and the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne, lived the past, made it their own, spoke to it and heard a response. Such writers expressed empathy toward past lives that span the ages. They engaged in a dialogue with the past, a discussion of self in light of others, creating a sensitive portrait, based on the varied experiences of humans at particular places and times, of the image of God in human, apparent throughout the ages. This is true history.