vatism, but constantly counterbalancing each other on points where it is not easy for a single mind to see both sides.

For, on this question, a man's religious beliefs cannot fail to affect his judgment, human nature being what it is. The orthodox Roman Catholic is necessarily on the defensive; and, of course, on the other side, a critic may be none the less unfair for not being professionally prejudiced; the wildest paradoxes are often purely temperamental, nursed and preached by men of whom we could never guess, a priori, whether they would jump to one extreme or to another. It is essential, therefore, that we should read both sides, but let us choose the best informed writers on both sides. The other volumes on this list can be recommended only to those who have fortified themselves by previous dispassionate study, and who can therefore note their faults of commission and (far more important) their faults of omission. Such readers will find little use for the anti-clerical Llorente who, indeed, to the credit of the modern public, has lost his vogue. But, again, they will scarcely fail to notice the weak points of those others, whose propagandist enthusiasm leads them to see things in other perspective than our first four, from the fervid Ultramontane champion De Maistre and the Bishop of Beauvais down to Mr. Nickerson and Mr. Maycock.

For this latest contribution to the subject, while it sums up many of Lea's and De Cauzons' researches, also sums up the wild notions with which, during the last few years, enthusiastic amateurs have attempted to put a favourable interpretation on facts which are no longer contestable. And the book may be said also to concentrate their amateurism. Nothing can illustrate this better than Mr. Maycock's treatment of Lea. Lord Acton had the highest opinion of this writer; and Acton was not only sparing of praise, but the man from whose pen, above all others, praise was precious. For he was the most learned of living Roman Catholic historians; and, in all English historiography, Gibbon and Hallam and Macaulay are the only three who can even be named with him for erudition. He wrote of Lea's three volumes in The English Historical Review as a book of extraordinary learning, and, on the whole, of great impartiality. The book "will assuredly be accepted as the most important contribution of the New World to the religious history of the Old."*

*Reprinted in Acton, " Hist. of Freedom," etc. (1907), PP. 551, 574.

Yet Mr. Maycock writes of Lea that he is " almost always accurate on points of fact, even when he is most exasperating in his utter lack of the realising imagination so necessary to the modern historian of the Middle Ages" (p. 70).

Who, then, is this author who has the right of judging so differently and so contemptuously? He is, if we are not mistaken, the young man who was placed in the third class of the Mechanical Sciences Tripos at Cambridge in 1921, and who, four years afterwards, published in a monthly magazine two articles which form the nucleus of this present book. Let this be said without any animus whatever against Mr. Maycock himself, whose book reflects an engaging personality; he is evidently a religious enthusiast trying to be as fair to opponents as his creed and his historical limitations will permit. Nor, on the other hand, is it his amateur status, as such, which would really prejudice professional teachers against him. Much admirable work in history has been done by amateurs exploring limited areas of this huge field in a scientific spirit; and there is no time and place in which such a man, old or young, working intelligently upon original documents, is more secure of grateful recognition than in modern English universities. But it is for the amateur to calculate his own forces. Is it not quite as difficult for a mechanician to explore rapidly and securely one of the most tangled jungles of the past, as for an historian to extemporize, with equal haste, some comprehensive volume upon a complex mechanical problem? The feat, in either case, can only be performed by a strict economy of original investigation; such a book must be compiled at second or third or fourth hand: the method must be that of Peter Pindar's two cheap broom-vendors, one of whom had made his wares from "conveyed" materials, while the more successful rival stole his ready-made. Those contemptuous words about Lea, for instance, are "conveyed " verbatim from Mr. Hoffman Nickerson, from whom Mr. Maycock borrows with a generouslyacknowledged freedom, and to whom, indeed, he is indebted for by far the greater part of his ideas.* Who, again, is Mr. Nicker

In the first half of the book, Mr. Nickerson is appealed to eight times by name, and sometimes quoted to the extent of more than half a page; frequent also are the appeals to Mr. Belloc's authority, and to that of dilettante persons like Henry Adams and Ralph Adams Cram. My impression is that Mr. Nickerson occurs less frequently in the second half, where Mr. Maycock is much concerned with details into which his master goes less fully.

son? He is a New York journalist, by creed an Anglo-Catholic, of that city in which Anglo-Catholicism is most sky-scraping; moreover, he is a politician inflamed with righteous zeal for repeal of the "Dry Laws." He himself tells us how his book

was begun during a term in the New York State Legislature, when I endured Prohibition lobbyists and cast about for something which might serve as an historical precedent in the way of religio-political oppression on so vast a scale. I was not long before discovering that traditional Christianity had more to say for the Inquisitors than for the Prohibitionists, so that the parallel with Prohibition has been thrust into an epilogue. (Introd., p. 3.)

How, then, has this anti-prohibitionist journalist, in this volume which "Who's Who in America" records as his first adventure into book form, set out to supersede, in 250 pages, the five volumes of Lea and De Cauzons ? He does it under the inspiration of "our good friend Belloc, the master of those who would celebrate the Middle Ages in the English tongue." Here, then, is a farther depth to plumb; and we ask how Mr. Belloc has acquired such a mastery over medieval history. For Mr. Belloc himself is never weary of telling the world that he learnt nothing worth learning in the Oxford History School; and, of all his most confident asseverations, this is perhaps the one which he could establish by the most irrefragable documentary evidence. Moreover, he has lived ever since by the easy faith that historians are born, not made, and that the royal road to learning is that of perpetual writing. Up to a certain point, of course, this faith works very well. There is quite a considerable reading public which is prepared a priori to endorse Mr. Belloc's claim that "a Catholic is not relatively right in his blame [when he writes of medieval history], he is absolutely right," therefore a book built upon this bedrock, if attractively written, commands a secure sale. This, perhaps, is why amateurs are more prone to wide and sweeping generalisations in history than in other departments of human knowledge.

If Mr. Belloc, having learned no good in mechanics at Oxford, had tried to spend his later years less in learning what is to be known than in telling professional mechanicians what mechanics ought really to be, then even the friendliest publishers would have suggested printing at the author's own expense. Or if, again, in the same spirit of religious confidence, he had grappled with those

practical tests to which mechanicians are sometimes exposed, then the laws of nature would probably have asserted themselves with a certain violence; something would have broken, either the machine or Mr. Belloc. But it is the fortune or the misfortune of history that she can command no such practical test to Mr. Belloc's fundamental theory; she can only refer us coldly to the Day of Judgment, a date which is not entered in even the most provident publisher's ledger.

And that is why Mr. Maycock, being an attractive writer, needs no better vouchers than he here produces. In any matter which the plain man can bring to a plainer test, publishers might answer, like Falstaff's tailor: "He said, sir, you should procure him better assurance than Bardolph, he would not take his bond and yours; he liked not the security." But in history there is little risk; the history of Christ's Church, in especial, is a recognised playground for random speculation, and the rashest statements are too often condoned when they are evidently prompted by some sincere denominational belief. Therefore it is the more necessary that, here and there, those who have laboriously tried to shape their views by the testimony of the original records should give plain warning to the public. By all means let us have books from fervent believers; the more the better. But, on the other hand, let us never admit any man's belief as a moral substitute for the facts to which that belief may here and there have blinded him.

Let us insist upon that maxim of Lord Acton which Mr. Maycock quotes only in practical repudiation: “I exhort you (wrote Acton)" never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxims that govern your own life, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict upon wrong." Upon which our author comments: "This

*I speak here of the conclusions which stamp his book as characteristic; his references to more solid authors are comparatively insignificant.

†(p. 260.) In only one other place does Mr. Maycock quote this greatest of modern Roman Catholic historians, and that is to misrepresent him very seriously (pp. 83-5). Acton, citing an early record, concludes from it that " nothing is better authenticated in the life of the Saint (Dominic) than the fact that he condemned heretics "; Mr. Maycock writes: "We have no direct evidence that St. Dominic ever condemned any single heretic."

exhortation, I say, fine and inspiring though it is, is a counsel of perfection which few historians would have the temerity to apply in its literal fulness." And he acts very definitely upon this divergence of opinion. Acton, writing in confidence to a trusted correspondent, pronounced: "The principle of the Inquisition is murderous, and a man's opinion of the papacy is regulated and determined by his opinion about religious assassination." Mr. Maycock, on the other hand, holds that "when one comes across in historical text-books such phrases as pious butchery,'' the saintly homicides,' and so forth, one simply draws the conclusion that the writer has lost touch with his subject" (p. 17). Let us by all means avoid crude phrases; yet let us test the apologists strictly by the evidence of facts.

The Inquisition may be briefly described in a few sentences which no accredited historian would be likely to deny under crossexamination, though there would be considerable divergence when it came to interpreting the facts here to be stated. Those divergences, however, can be discussed later, when once we have laid out the ground common to all students of the original documents.

Officially organized violence* grew slowly in the medieval Church. The emperors, after making Christianity the State religion, did indeed legislate against pagans and heretics, often severely; but during the Dark Ages these, like many other imperial laws, were to a great extent, if not entirely, forgotten. Therefore, though men were far from tolerant, they were not so officially intolerant as might be expected. When, with the revival of learning which characterized the eleventh and twelfth centuries, heresy also became more prominent, it found the hierarchy undecided as to the use of force. In 1144, the Bishop of Liège formally consulted Pope Lucius II as to the proper penalty for heresy, but no answer has been recorded. Many heretics, in different parts of Europe, were put to death between 1020 and 1150; but more often by princes or by lynch-law than by regular ecclesiastical authority. We know of five cases in which prelates disapproved of this irregular violence, one of the protesters being St. Bernard; moreover, Petrus Cantor, far more distinguished morally and intellectually than the average of bishops, was of the same mind.

*I use this word, as less question-begging than persecution, to denote the repression of religious opinions by physical force.