s, he puts but one inexorable question,
"What did you do for the people?" and according to their answer they
stand or fall before him. It is just here that one notices (what
entirely escaped previous generations), that the "people" here means
that part of it now called, in current cant, "the bourgeoisie," that
educated middle class with some small property and with the vote. For
the ignorant laborer and the pauper Michelet had as little concern as
he had small patience with king and noble and priest. One thing that
he and his contemporaries prized in Luther was just that bourgeois
virtue that made him a model husband and father, faithfully performing
a daily task for an adequate reward. Luther's joys, he assures us,
were "those of the heart, of the man, the innocent happiness of family
and home. What family more holy, what home more pure?" But he returns
ever and again to the thought that the Huguenots were the republicans
of their age and that, "Luther has been the restorer of liberty. If
now we exercise in all its fullness this highest prerogative of human
intelligence, it is to him we are indebted for it. {717} To whom do I
owe the power of publishing what I am now writing, save to this
liberator of modern thought?" Michelet employed his almost matchless
rhetoric not only to exalt the Reformers to the highest pinnacle of
greatness, but to blacken the character of their adversaries, the
obscurantists, the Jesuits, Catherine de' Medici.

[Sidenote: Froude]

English liberalism found its perfect expression in the work of Froude.
Built up on painstaking research, readable as a novel, cut exactly to
the prejudices of the English Protestant middle class, _The History of
England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada_
won a resounding immediate success. Froude loved Protestantism for the
enemies it made, and as a mild kind of rationalism. The Reformers, he
thought, triumphed because they were armed with the truth; it was a
revolt of conscience against lies, a real religion over against "a
superstition which was but the counterpart of magic and witchcraft" and
which, at that time, "meant the stake, the rack, the gibbet, the
Inquisition dungeons and the devil enthroned." It was the different
choice made then by England and Spain that accounted for the greatness
of the former and the downfall of the latter, for, after the Spaniard,
once "the noblest, grandest and most enlightened people in the