reformer. If a man did not strengthen the remains of
Roman order and the root of Roman Christianity, he was simply helping
the world to roll downhill into ruin and idiotcy. Remember all these
evident historical truths and then turn to the account given by
Charles Dickens of that great man, St. Dunstan. It is not that the
pert cockney tone of the abuse is irritating to the nerves: it is that
he has got the whole hang of the thing wrong. His head is full of the
nineteenth-century situation; that a priest imposing discipline is a
person somehow blocking the way to equality and light. Whereas the
point about such a man as Dunstan was that nobody in the place except he
cared a button about equality or light: and that he was defending what
was left of them against the young and growing power of darkness and
division and caste.

Nevertheless the case against such books as this is commonly stated
wrong. The fault of Dickens is not (as is often said) that he "applies
the same moral standard to all ages." Every sane man must do that: a
moral standard must remain the same or it is not a moral standard. If we
call St. Anthony of Padua a good man, we must mean what we mean when we
call Huxley a good man, or else there is no sense in using the word
"good." The fault of the Dickens school of popular history lies, not in
the application of a plain rule of right and wrong to all circumstances,
but in ignorance of the circumstances to which it was applied. It is not
that they wrongly enforce the fixed principle that life should be saved;
it is that they take a fire-engine to a shipwreck and a lifeboat to a
house on fire. The business of a good man in Dickens's time was to bring
justice up to date. The business of a good man in Dunstan's time was to
toil to ensure the survival of any justice at all.

And Dickens, through being a living and fighting man of his own time,
kept the health of his own heart, and so saw many truths with a single
eye: truths that were spoilt for subtler eyes. He was much more really
right than Carlyle; immeasurably more right than Froude. He was more
right precisely because he applied plain human morals to all facts as he
saw them. Carlyle really had a vague idea that in coarse and cruel
times it was right to be coarse and cruel; that tyranny was excusable in
the twelfth century: as if the twelfth century did not denounce tyrants
as much or more than any other. Carlyle, in fact, fancied that Rufus was
the right