will come to tolerate them in the present and future.

It was in 1885 that Mr.--then recently made Professor--Creighton, showed
me at Cambridge an extraordinarily interesting summary, in Lord Acton's
handwriting, of what should be the principles--the ethical
principles--of the modern historian in dealing with the past. They were,
I think, afterward embodied in an introduction to a new edition of
_Machiavelli_. The gist of them, however, is given in a letter written
to Bishop Creighton in 1887, and printed in the biography of the Bishop.
Here we find a devout Catholic attacking an Anglican writer for applying
the epithets "tolerant and enlightened" to the later medieval Papacy.

These men [i.e., the Popes of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries] [he says] instituted a system of persecution.... The
person who authorizes the act shares the guilt of the person who
commits it.... Now the Liberals think persecution a crime of a worse
order than adultery, and the acts done by Ximenes [through the
agency of the Spanish Inquisition] considerably worse than the
entertainment of Roman courtesans by Alexander VIth.

These lines, of course, point to the Acton who was the lifelong friend
of Dollinger and fought, side by side with the Bavarian scholar, the
promulgation of the dogma of Papal Infallibility, at the Vatican Council
of 1870. But while Dollinger broke with the Church, Lord Acton never
did. That was what made the extraordinary interest of conversation with
him. Here was a man whose denunciation of the crimes and corruption of
Papal Rome--of the historic Church, indeed, and the clergy in
general--was far more unsparing than that of the average educated
Anglican. Yet he died a devout member of the Roman Church in which he
was born; after his death it was revealed that he had never felt a