one examines
them closely, are found to be ignorant of the French
language, to have read no philosophy between Aristotle and
Hobbes, and to issue above their signatures such errors of
plain dates and names as make one blush for English
scholarship and be glad that no foreigner takes our historical
school seriously.

There is always left to any man who deals with the writings
of Froude, a task impossible to complete but necessarily to be
attempted. He put himself forward, in a set attitude, to
combat and to destroy what he conceived to be--in the
moment of his attack--the creed of his countrymen. He was
so literary a man that he did this as much by accepting as by
denying, as much by dating from Elizabeth all we are as by
affirming unalterable material sequence and the falsity of
every transcendental acceptation. His time smelt him out
even when he flattered it most. Even when he wrote of the
Revenge the England of his day--luckily for him--thought
him an enemy.

Upon the main discussion of his life it is impossible to
pass a judgment, for the elements of that discussion are now
destroyed; the universities no longer pretend to believe.
And "free discussion" has become so free that the main
doctrines he assailed are no longer presented or read without
weariness in the class to which he appealed and from which
he sprang.

The sects, then, against which he set himself are dead:
but upon a much larger question which is permanent, and
which in a sort of groping way he sometimes handled,
something should be said here, which I think has never been
said before. He was perpetually upon the borderland of the
Catholic Church.

Between him and the Faith there stood no distance of space,
but rather a high thin wall; the high thin wall of his own
desperate conviction. If you will turn to page 209 of this
book you will see it said of the denial of the Sacrament
by the Reformers and of Ridley's dogma that it was bread
only "the commonsense of the country was of the same
opinion, and illusion was at an end." Froude knew that
the illusion was not at an end. He probably knew (for we
must continue to repeat that he was a most excellent historian)
that the "commonsense of the country" was, by the time
Ridley and the New English Church began denying the real
presence, and turning that denial into a dogma, profoundly
indifferent to all dogmas whatsoever. What "the common-sense
of the country" wanted was to keep out swarthy men,
ch