of British independence.  He was devoid of theological prejudice, and never reviled Catholicism as Newman reviled it before his conversion.  But he held that the reformers, alike in England, in France, and in Germany, were fighting for truth, honesty, and private judgment against priestcraft and ecclesiastical tyranny.  The scepticism and cynicism of which he was often accused were on the surface.  They were provoked by what he felt to be hypocrisy and sham.  They were not his true self.  He believed firmly unflinchingly, and always in “the grand, simple landmarks of morality,” which existed before all Churches, and would exist if all Churches disappeared.

Ou gar tanun ge kachthes, all’ aei pote
Ze tauta, koudeis oiden ex hotou phane

["For they are not of today or yesterday, but these things live for ever, but no one knows from whence they appear.”  Sophocles, Antigone, 456.]

Before Abraham was they were, and it is impossible to imagine a time when they will have ceased to be.

—­ * Lectures on the Council of Trent, p. 1. —­

Froude was an Erastian, holding that the Church should be subordinate to the State.  True religion is incompatible with persecution.  But true religion is rare, and the best modern security against the persecutor is the secular power.  Mr. Spurgeon once excited great applause from members of his Church by declaring that the Baptists had never persecuted.  When the cheers had subsided he explained that it was because they had never had a chance.  Froude was convinced that ecclesiastics could not be trusted, and that they would oppress the laity unless the laity muzzled them.  He held that the reformers had been calumniated, that their services were in danger of being forgotten, and that the modern attempt to ignore the Reformation was not only unhistorical, but disingenuous.  He wrote partly to rehabilitate them, and partly to prove that Henry viii. had conferred great benefits upon England by his repudiation of Papal authority.  He took, as he considered it his duty to take, the side of individual liberty against ecclesiastical authority, and of England against Rome.  The idea that an historian was to have no opinions of his own, or that, having them, he was to conceal them, never entered his mind.

That Froude had any prejudice against the Church of England as such is a baseless fancy.  He believed in the Church of his childhood, and, unless the word be used in the narrow sense of the clerical profession, he never left it to the end of his days.  It was to him, as it was to his father, a Protestant Church, out of communion with Rome, cut off from the Pope and his court by the great upheaval of the sixteenth century.  It is unreasonable, and indeed foolish, to say that that opinion disqualified him to be the historian of Henry viii., and Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth.  The Catholicism of Lingard is not considered to be a disqualification by sensible Protestants.