trustworthy;
or that the words of a statute have no more to do with reality than
the words of a romance. It is a question of degree. Historical
narrative could not be written under the conditions most properly
imposed upon criminal proceedings in a court of law. If nothing
which cannot be proved beyond the possibility of reasonable doubt is
admitted into the pages of history, they will be bare indeed. It is
significant that Froude laid down in 1892 the same propositions for
which he had contended in the Oxford Essays of 1855. He had suffered many
things in the meantime of The Saturday Review, but he held to his
old opinions with unshaken tenacity. All Froude's changes were made
early in life. When once he had shaken himself free of Tractarianism,
The Nemesis of Faith, and Elective Affinities, he remained a
Protestant, Puritan, sea-loving, priest-hating Englishman.

The subject with which Froude began his brief career as Professor
was the Council of Trent. The Council of Trent has been described by
one of the great historians of the world, Fra Paolo Sarpi, whom
Macaulay considered second only to Thucydides. Entirely ineffective
for the purpose of securing universal concord, it did in reality
separate Protestant from Catholic Europe, and establish Papal
authority over the Church of Rome. When the Council met, the Papacy
was no part of orthodox Catholicism, and Henry VIII. never dreamt
that in repudiating the jurisdiction of the Pope he severed himself
from the Catholic Church. If Luther had been only a heretic, the
Council might have put him down. But he had behind him the bulk of
the laity, and Cardinal Contarini told Paul III. that the revolt
against ecclesiastical power would continue if every priest
submitted. "The Reformation," said Froude at the beginning of his
first course, in November, 1892, "is the hinge on which all modern
history turns." He traced in it the rise of England's greatness.
When he came back in his old age to Oxford, it was to sound the
trumpet-note of private judgment and religious liberty, as if the
Oxford Movement and the Anglo-Catholic revival had never been.
Froude could not be indifferent to the moral side of historical
questions, or accept the doctrine that every one is right from his
own point of view. The Reformation did in his eyes determine that
men were responsible to God alone, and not to priests or Churches,
for their opinions and their deeds. It also decided that the Church
must be