alf of the Middle Ages the example and
influence of the Church were a bright light shining in a dark world.
This notion has been recently challenged by Mr. Coulton, who, angered by
the special pleading of Cardinal Gasquet and other professional
apologists, hotly denounces the exaltation of the Ages of Faith. The
Middle Ages, he complains, are the one domain of history into which, in
England at any rate, the scientific spirit has not yet penetrated.
Taking as his text the autobiography of the Franciscan Fra Salimbene,
the most precious authority for the ordinary life of Catholic folk at
the high-water mark of the Middle Ages, he draws a sombre picture of
manners and morals and maintains that hideous vices existed in all the
Orders long before the thirteenth century. 'Imagination', he cries,
'staggers at the moral gulf that yawns between that age and ours.' His
condemnation of the life and influence of the Church re-echoes in
somewhat shrill tones the verdict of Henry Charles Lea, whose massive
treatise on the Inquisition was rightly described by Lord Acton as the
most important contribution of the New World to the religious history of
the old, and whose volumes on Sacerdotal Celibacy constitute a
formidable indictment of mediaeval Catholicism.

Next to the origins of Christianity the most controversial of the larger
problems of history is the Reformation; and here Protestants of all
schools are ranged in a solid phalanx against Catholics. That the Church
was in need of reform is agreed by both sides; but the Catholic contends
that the evils to be remedied have been fantastically exaggerated, that
there was no need for a revolt, and that the revolution inaugurated by
Luther left Germany far worse than it found her. Realizing that the
Protestant view most authoritatively presented in Ranke's classical
work on the Reformation held the field, Janssen compiled a cultural
history of the German people from the end of the Middle Ages to the
outbreak of the Thirty Years War. Based throughout on original sources,
and illustrating his thesis from every angle, his eight massive volumes
were hailed with gratitude and enthusiasm by Catholics all over the
world. No Catholic historical work of the nineteenth century, and
certainly no attack on the Reformation since Bossuet's _Variations of
Protestantism_, obtained such resounding success or led to so much
controversy.

Janssen's object was to show that the fifteenth century was not a p