The contrary might be objected by some foreign observer, or by some one who had a larger acquaintance with European history than had he.  I can imagine a French or an Irish critic pointing to a mass of assertion with no corresponding admission that it is assertion only:  such a critic might quote even from these few pages phrase after phrase in which Froude poses as certain what are still largely matters of debate.  Thus upon page 144 he takes it for granted that no miracles have been worked by contact with the bodies of saints.  He takes it for granted on page 161 that the checking of monastic disorders, and the use of strong language in connection with them, was peculiar to the generation which saw at its close the dissolution of the monasteries.  He takes it for granted on page 125 that what we call “manifestations” or what not,—­spirit rappings, table-turnings, and the rest—­are deceptions of the senses to which superstition alone would give credence.

He ridicules (upon p. 128) the tradition of St. Patrick which all modern research has come to accept.  He says downright (upon pp. 186-187) that the Ancient world did not inquire into the problem of evil.  On p. 214 he will have it that the ordinary man rejects, “without hesitation,” the interference of will with material causes.  In other words, he asserts that the ordinary man is a fatalist—­for Froude knew very well that between the fatalist and the believer in a possibility of miracle there is no conceivable position.  He will have it (on p. 216) that a modern doctor always regards a “vision” as an hallucination.  On p. 217 he denies by implication the stigmata of St. Francis—­and so forth—­one might multiply the instances indefinitely.  All Froude’s works are full of them, they are part and parcel of his method—­but their number is to no purport.  One example may stand for all, and their special value to our purpose is not that they are mere assertions, but that they are assertions which Froude must have known to be personal, disputable, and dogmatic.

He knew very well that the vast majority of mankind accepted the virtue of relics, that intellects the equals of his own rejected that determinism to which he was bound, and that the Pagan world might be presented in a fashion very different from his own.  And in that perpetual—­often gratuitous —­affirmation you have no sign of limitation in him but rather of eagerness for battle.

It is an admirable fault or perhaps no fault at all, or if a fault an appendage to the most considerable virtue a writer of his day could have had:  the virtue of courage.

See how he thrusts when he comes to lay down the law, not upon what the narrow experience of readers understands and agrees with him about, but upon some matter which he knows them to have decided in a manner opposed to his own.  See how definite, how downright, and how clean are the sentences in which he asserts that Christianity is Catholic or nothing:—­