latter are taken and the former left. Miracles are not doubted as
such, but are divided into two classes, those tending to prove an
accepted doctrine which are true, and those which support some papal
institution which are branded as "first-class lies." The
correspondence between Christ and King Abgarus is used as not having
been proved a forgery, and the absurd legend of the female Pope Joan is
never doubted. The psychology of the authors is as bad as their
criticism. All opposition to the pope, especially that of the German
Emperors, is represented as caused by religion.

[Sidenote: _Annales_ of Baronius, 1583-1607]

However poor was the work of the authors of the Magdeburg Centuries,
they were at least honest in arraying their sources. This is more than
can be said of Caesar Baronius, whose _Annales Ecclesiastici_ was the
official Catholic counterblast to the Protestant work. Whereas his
criticism is no whit better than theirs, he adopted the cunning policy,
unfortunately widely obtaining since his day, of simply ignoring or
suppressing unpleasant facts, rather than of refuting the inferences
drawn from them. His talent for switching the attention to a
side-issue, and for tangling instead of clearing problems, made the
Protestants justly regard him as "a great deceiver" though even the
most learned of them, J. J. Scaliger, who attempted to refute him,
found the work difficult.

Naturally the battle of the historians waxed hottest over the
Reformation itself. A certain class of Protestant works, of which
Crespin's _Book of Martyrs_, [Sidenote: 1554] Beza's _Ecclesiastical
History_ [Sidenote: 1589] and John Foxe's _Acts and Monuments_ (first
English edition, 1563), are examples, catered to the passions of the
multitude by laying the stress of their presentation on the heroism and
sufferings of the witnesses to the faith and the cruelty of the
persecutors. For many men the {586} detailed description of isolated
facts has a certain "thickness" of reality--if I may borrow William
James's phrase--that is found by more complex minds only in the
deduction of general causes. Passionate, partisan and sometimes
ribald, Foxe [Sidenote: Foxe] won the reward that waits on demagogues.
When it came to him as an afterthought to turn his book of martyrs into
a general history, he plagiarized the _Magdeburg Centuries_. The
reliability of his original narrative has been impugned with some
success, though it has not been