ed. There was the plausible
plea of deference to the emperor and his passport; there was the
imperative consideration for the religious future of Bohemia. The
reforming divines were free to pursue their own scheme of justice, of
mercy, and of policy. The scheme they pursued has found an assiduous
apologist in their new historian. "To accuse the good fathers of
Constance of conscious bad faith" is impossible. To observe the
safe-conduct would have seemed absurd "to the most conscientious jurists
of the council." In a nutshell, "if the result was inevitable, it was
the fault of the system and not of the judges, and their conscience
might well feel satisfied."

There may be more in this than the oratorical precaution of a scholar
wanting nothing, who chooses to be discreet rather than explicit, or the
wavering utterance of a mind not always strung to the same pitch. It is
not the craving to rescue a favourite or to clear a record, but a fusion
of unsettled doctrines of retrospective contempt. There is a
demonstration of progress in looking back without looking up, in finding
that the old world was wrong in the grain, that the kosmos which is
inexorable to folly is indifferent to sin. Man is not an abstraction,
but a manufactured product of the society with which he stands or falls,
which is answerable for crimes that are the shadow and the echo of its
own nobler vices, and has no right to hang the rogue it rears. Before
you lash the detected class, mulct the undetected. Crime without a
culprit, the unavenged victim who perishes by no man's fault, law
without responsibility, the virtuous agent of a vicious cause--all these
are the signs and pennons of a philosophy not recent, but rather
inarticulate still and inchoate, which awaits analysis by Professor
Flint.

No propositions are simpler or more comprehensive than the two, that an
incorrigible misbeliever ought to burn, or that the man who burns him
ought to hang. The world as expanded on the liberal and on the hegemonic
projection is patent to all men, and the alternatives, that Lacordaire
was bad and Conrad good, are clear in all their bearings. They are too
gross and palpable for Mr. Lea. He steers a subtler course. He does not
sentence the heretic, but he will not protect him from his doom. He does
not care for the inquisitor, but he will not resist him in the discharge
of his duty. To establish a tenable footing on that narrow but needful
platform is the epilogue th