of Balliol’s pregnant lectures on Church and State in the Middle Ages, based on the 8,000 documents of the eleven years of the rule of Innocent IV in the middle of the thirteenth century.  The study of these documents, he tells us, stirred him to admiration of the organization of the Papacy, and convinced him of its enormous superiority over its secular contemporaries as a centre not merely of religion but of law and government; but he adds that he derived an equally profound impression of the abuses which ate into the heart of the system, of the growing bitterness which it inspired, and of the devastating effects of the passion to erect a powerful principality in the heart of Italy.

No Protestant historian is tempted to glorify the record of the Papacy in the last two centuries before the Reformation; but it is generally agreed that in the earlier half of the Middle Ages the example and influence of the Church were a bright light shining in a dark world.  This notion has been recently challenged by Mr. Coulton, who, angered by the special pleading of Cardinal Gasquet and other professional apologists, hotly denounces the exaltation of the Ages of Faith.  The Middle Ages, he complains, are the one domain of history into which, in England at any rate, the scientific spirit has not yet penetrated.  Taking as his text the autobiography of the Franciscan Fra Salimbene, the most precious authority for the ordinary life of Catholic folk at the high-water mark of the Middle Ages, he draws a sombre picture of manners and morals and maintains that hideous vices existed in all the Orders long before the thirteenth century.  ‘Imagination’, he cries, ‘staggers at the moral gulf that yawns between that age and ours.’  His condemnation of the life and influence of the Church re-echoes in somewhat shrill tones the verdict of Henry Charles Lea, whose massive treatise on the Inquisition was rightly described by Lord Acton as the most important contribution of the New World to the religious history of the old, and whose volumes on Sacerdotal Celibacy constitute a formidable indictment of mediaeval Catholicism.

Next to the origins of Christianity the most controversial of the larger problems of history is the Reformation; and here Protestants of all schools are ranged in a solid phalanx against Catholics.  That the Church was in need of reform is agreed by both sides; but the Catholic contends that the evils to be remedied have been fantastically exaggerated, that there was no need for a revolt, and that the revolution inaugurated by Luther left Germany far worse than it found her.  Realizing that the Protestant view most authoritatively presented in Ranke’s classical work on the Reformation held the field, Janssen compiled a cultural history of the German people from the end of the Middle Ages to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War.  Based throughout on original sources, and illustrating his thesis from every angle, his eight massive volumes were hailed with gratitude and enthusiasm by Catholics all over the world.  No Catholic historical work of the nineteenth century, and certainly no attack on the Reformation since Bossuet’s Variations of Protestantism, obtained such resounding success or led to so much controversy.