over-reached themselves by their cruelty. Had they been contented to accept
the recantation, they would have left the archbishop to die broken-hearted,
pointed at by the finger of pitying scorn; and the Reformation would have
been disgraced in its champion. They were tempted, by an evil spirit of
revenge, into an act unsanctioned even by their own bloody laws; and they
gave him an opportunity of writing his name in the roll of martyrs. The
worth of a man must be measured by his life, not by his failure under a
single and peculiar peril. The Apostle, though forewarned, denied his
Master on the first alarm of danger; yet that Master, who knew his nature
in its strength and its infirmity, chose him for the rock on which he would
build his Church."

With this conscious and avowed bias in favour of undogmatic Christianity,
Froude came to write the story of the transition of England from a Catholic
to a Protestant country. He was not without sympathy with the old order of
things. We cannot but feel a thrill as we read his incomparable description
of the change which was effected in men's thoughts and ideas by the
translation of the mediæval into the modern world? "For, indeed, a change
was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction of which even still is
hidden from us, a change from era to era. The paths trodden by the
footsteps of ages were broken up; old things were passing away, and the
faith and the life of ten centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry
was dying; the abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into
ruins; and all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions, of the old world
were passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond the
western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an
infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm earth itself, unfixed
from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness
of the universe. In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built
for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer. And now it is all