repudiate any party--almost any Christian--purpose. Lingard is known
to have been a learned man, and to have examined many manuscripts
which few else had taken the trouble to look at; so his word is to be
taken, no one thinking it worth while to ask whether he has either
honestly read or honestly quoted the documents. It suited the
sentimental and lazy liberality of the last generation to make a show
of fairness by letting the Popish historian tell his side of the
story, and to sneer at the illiberal old notion that gentlemen of his
class were given to be rather careless about historic truth when they
had a purpose to serve thereby; and Lingard is now actually
recommended as a standard authority for the young by educated
Protestants, who seem utterly unable to see that, whether the man be
honest or not, his whole view of the course of British events since
Becket first quarrelled with his king must be antipodal to their own;
and that his account of all which has passed for three hundred years
since the fall of Wolsey is most likely to be (and, indeed, may be
proved to be) one huge libel on the whole nation, and the destiny
which God has marked out for it.

There is, indeed, no intrinsic cause why the ecclesiastical, or
pseudo-Catholic, view of history should, in any wise, conduce to a
just appreciation of our forefathers. For not only did our
forefathers rebel against that conception again and again, till they
finally trampled it under their feet, and so appear, prima facie, as
offenders to be judged at its bar; but the conception itself is one
which takes the very same view of nature as that cynic conception of
which we spoke above. Man, with the Romish divines, is, ipso facto,
the same being as the man of Voltaire, Le Sage, or Beaumarchais; he
is an insane and degraded being, who is to be kept in order, and, as
far as may be, cured and set to work by an ecclesiastical system; and