History at Cambridge drew from Dr. Brigh, the Master of University, a censure which was also a prophecy. It is a better thing to manage men than to write books... You abould have gone on and become a bisbrey and made • yourself a practical power.' Still Embleton Ead done the special work which Creighton had hoped from it. It saw the inception of the History of the Papacy during the 'Reformation' and the publication of the first two volumes. The object of the book as described by the author was 'to bring together materials for a judgment of the change which came over Europe in the sixteenth century, to which 'the name of "the Reformation" is loosely given.' Probably if the book had reached its intended limits it would have contained judgements as well as materials for judgement. Indeed, not much more than a year after the appearance of these two volumes Creighton had arrived at a very definite conclusion on the Reformation as a whole. It was that the Reformation

'was primarily a demand for a redress of the grievances inherent in the absolutism of the Papal administration over the Church. There was no discontent with the doctrines. If the Papacy could have put its administration into better order there would have been no Reformation, but the new learning would have modified men's attitude towards dogma without causing a breach of the unity of the Church.'

Ten years later, when writing to Professor Kolde, who had criticised the account of Luther in the last volume, he said the same thing with greater care and deliberation :

'My point of view is that it was a misfortune for Christendom that the Reformation took the form of a breach of the unity of the Church ... I do not think that any breach was inevitable. The question is, Whose fault was it? I have investigated this question as I would investigate any political secession. I have regarded it as a question of Governmental wisdom and justice. I have tried to show that the Papacy behaved towards Luther foolishly and unjustly at first. Luther made no demands which the Church ought not to have been able to supply according to its own principles. The Curia was responsible for driving Luther to revolt.'

And in another letter he defines the question which he would have had to answer if he had gone on with his History as not, "Why did the Reformation come ?"—that ' is obvious-but, "Why did the old remain, why was it not 'swept away?"" In other words, it is not the Reformation that is the puzzle, but the Counter-Reformation. In Creighton's opinion it is a mistake in an historian to

believe that the hearts of men are always swayed by great movements of thought or emotion. They appear to be so, indeed, but it is because the men who have made history have been those who have been clever enough to devise a formula in which the chance of saving sixpence, of gaining sixpence, or of escaping being robbed of sixpence,' can be presented as a decent motive. If the Pope would have left off pillaging Germany, "justification by faith only "would 'have created only a languid interest.' The genius of Luther lay in seeing that this and no other was the formula that could revolutionise Europe. The Papacy was as grasping at the beginning of the fifteenth century as at the beginning of the sixteenth, but the Lollards and Hussites came to nothing. It is useless to put this in a popular 'form at first. It may be done some day.'

It was not, however, this minimising theory of the Reformation that attracted such criticism as the History of 'the Papacy' met with. The praise and the blame fastened on the same feature the characterisation of the Popes. It was not indeed until the third and fourth volumes appeared that Lord Acton delivered his attack in the pages of the English Historical Review.' Creighton, as editor, had asked him to notice this fresh instalment, and naturally felt some surprise at the character of the review. It reads to 'me,' he wrote to Mr. R. L. Poole, like the utterances of a ' man who is in a furious passion, but is incapable of clear expression. He differs toto cælo from my conception of 'the time, apparently on some concealed grounds of polemics ' esoteric to a Liberal Roman who fought against infallibility.' The review underwent many corrections before it appeared, and Acton claimed to have altered every passage which could be construed or misconstrued into hostility.' On the whole this was to be regretted, for the interest of the controversy lay in getting at Lord Acton's whole mind on the subject, and to do this from the softened expressions of the review must have been difficult. Now, with the help of certain passages in the published Letters to Mrs. Drew, and the long letter from Acton himself to the author which Mrs. Creighton prints in part, it is easy enough. In the review Creighton is described as 'not striving to prove a case or 'burrowing towards a conclusion,' but as wishing to pass through scenes of raging controversy and passion with a serene curiosity, a suspended judgment, a divided jury ' and a pair of white gloves. . . . He will neither bless nor curse, and seldom invites his readers to execrate or admire.'

6

In another sentence Acton speaks of him as varying • disinterested history with the polemics of Cardinal New'man'-a criticism which, now that Acton's attitude towards Newman has been disclosed in his Letters to Mrs. Drew, takes on a fresh significance. Further, he charges Creighton with making little of the primary fact in the Papal economy' of that age-the positive strengthening of authority and its claims. In this autocratic atmosphere such beliefs as that a soul might be rescued from purgatory by a few coppers' throve naturally. In the letter from which Mrs. Creighton gives extracts Acton speaks more plainly. The medieval Popes 'instituted a 'system of persecution.' That is the most conspicuous fact in their history-the breaking point, the article of their system by which they stand or fall.' Now, persecution was in Acton's eyes the one unpardonable sin. He thinks it ‘a crime of a worse order than adultery, and the acts done by Ximenes considerably worse than the entertainment of Roman courtesans by Alexander VI.' In the preface to the new volumes Creighton had described the epoch with which they deal as one of the most ignoble, if not the most 'disastrous, in the history not only of the Papacy, but of Europe. There is very little of the white glove here. 'have tried,' he went on, to deal fairly with the moral • delinquencies of the Popes, without, I trust, running the risk of lowering the standard of moral judgment.' But it was not, in his opinion, becoming to adopt an attitude of lofty superiority over anyone who ever played a prominent part in European affairs, nor charitable to lavish undis'criminating censure on any man.' Acton's remark on this is: You say that people in authority are not to be snubbed 'or sneered at from our pinnacle of conscious rectitude. I 'really don't know whether you exempt them because of 'their rank, or of their success and power, or of their date.' And then he states his own view of the historian's function. The inflexible integrity of the moral code is to me the 'secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of history. 'If we may debase the currency for the sake of genius or 'success or reputation, we may debase it for the sake of a 'man's influence, of his religion, of his party, of the good 'cause which prospers by his credit and suffers by his dis' grace.'

I

It seems to us that Lord Acton is right as regards principle and wrong as regards its application. He is right in giving the 'inflexible integrity of the moral code' the

high place that he assigns to it. He is wrong when he forgets that the historian who has to apply the moral code to particular cases must take into account the circumstances of each. Creighton in his reply dwells on the necessity of this qualifying process:

Selfishness, even wrong-doing, for an idea, an institution, the maintenance of an accepted view of the basis of Society, does not cease to be wrong-doing-there is the principle. But it is not the same as personal wrong-doing; . . . it does not equally shock the moral sense of others, or destroy the moral sense of the doer . . Homicide is always homicide; but there is a difference between that of a murderer for his own gain and that of a careless doctor called in to see a patient who would probably have died anyhow; and the carelessness of the doctor is a difficult thing to prove.'

There is the application of the principle. Instinct brings us all to this conclusion in practice. On a platform the politician may denounce as assassins the Ministers who have plunged his country into what the speaker considers an unjust war. But if he is asked to meet one of them at dinner he probably forgets his own comparison and accepts the invitation. At the back of his head he knows that the cases are different, though he may just have said the exact contrary. Lord Acton's theory draws no distinction between the legislator and the judge. For the judge to say, 'This is not properly described as 'murder,' seems to him as bad as for the law-maker to say, 'In persons of high station murder is not a crime.'

On the question of persecution Creighton's answer was complete. 'What,' he asks, 'is tolerance ? Is it a moral 'virtue in the possessor, or is it a recognition of a necessity ' arising from an equilibrium of parties? It seems to me that 'we speak of it as if it was the first, when actually it is the second.' To Lord Acton it was the first, and naturally so. A man who thinks persecution' a crime of a worse order than 'adultery' cannot but regard toleration as the highest of virtues. But as a matter of history how often have men ceased to persecute because they thought it wrong; and how often because they have found that it does not secure the result they desire, or has other consequences which deprive that result of its value, or because they no longer believe very ardently in the system for which they have been fighting? Persecution again has a different aspect according as it is employed to sustain an existing system or to propagate a new one. In the former case it seems to those

Wid Pet Na Dle may rev The cojects of it 2 weng x ferry a sadistei rier df dings, and they sanncs sompian - dey in safer ova perti

·Scie à a irgen, mi is an expression of the soudson win I mades essay ir a vi preservation. When men were banged a Fagani ir neg-saving it was because people thongst du ten-saing vs 1 mme, and rugs to be BETALT Ds DVL Team La come, but we ink i can be checked more effectually by ies sagar punishments. Now-a-days people are not agreed about vi : Dey to ace think it a menace to society: hence they it wire punishment: but men vic scrapersonay thought herey a come may be accused f a metal mm, 306 Decemy of a no crime. The in mesiace resis of the Birmation were not a four fee thought; and the era of Calvin, who knew that ecclesiastical unity was woch, was a far greater cne tha that of Innocent III, who arazas y main 2. I am hopelessly tempted to simit degrees Aamany?

And in a letter to Mr. R. L. Pocle he says:

Lord Actra' demands that history should be primarily a branch of the moral sciences, and should aim at proving the immutable righteousneas of the ideas of modern Liberalism-tolerance and the supremacy of conscience!

Probably Creighton's argument did not in the least change Lord Acton's opinion. He continued to think that persecution, being the worst of crimes, is the crime that a Christian, and still more a priest, and most of all a Pope, ought most to abhor. But the common sense of mankind is against this view. We do not think Ximenes worse than Alexander VI., or strike St. Charles Borromeo out of the Calendar.

Some readers of these two letters have probably turned to the later volumes of the History of the Papacy' in order to discover the justice of Lord Acton's censure. Creighton Sometimes gave a carefully considered character of a particular Pope, and sometimes left the reader to draw a character for himself. It is this latter method that seems most to have shocked Lord Acton. He could not, for example, forgive the absence of a formal condemnation of Sixtus IV. Yet there will be many to whom it will appear that after Creighton's descriptions of Sixtus IV.'s policy any formal condemnation would have been superfluous. That the Vicar of Christ should have hopelessly lowered the moral standard of the Papacy'; that 'his