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:--

". . . This was the body of death which philosophy detected
but could not explain, and from which Catholicism now
came forward with its magnificent promise of deliverance.

"The carnal doctrine of the sacraments, which they are
compelled to acknowledge to have been taught as fully in