and dying. He could not read the signs of the times; and confounding
the barrenness of death with the barrenness of winter, which might be
followed by a new spring and summer, he believed that the old life-
tree of Catholicism, which in fact was but cumbering the ground,
might bloom again in its old beauty. The thing which he called
heresy was the fire of Almighty God, which no politic congregation of
princes, no state machinery, though it were never so active, could
trample out; and as, in the early years of Christianity, the meanest
slave who was thrown to the wild beasts for his presence at the
forbidden mysteries of the Gospel saw deeper, in the divine power of
his faith, into the future even of this earthly world, than the
sagest of his imperial persecutors,--so a truer political prophet
than Wolsey would have been found in the most ignorant of those poor
men for whom his police were searching in the purlieus of London, who
were risking death and torture in disseminating the pernicious
volumes of the English Testament.'


It will be seen from this magnificent passage that Mr. Froude is
distinctly a Protestant. He is one, to judge from his book; and all
the better one, because he can sympathise with whatsoever nobleness,
even with whatsoever mere conservatism, existed in the Catholic
party. And therefore, because he has sympathies which are not merely
party ones, but human ones, he has given the world, in these two
volumes, a history of the early Reformation altogether unequalled.
This human sympathy, while it has enabled him to embalm in most
affecting prose the sad story of the noble though mistaken
Carthusians, and to make even the Nun of Kent interesting, because
truly womanly, in her very folly and deceit, has enabled him likewise
to show us the hearts of the early martyrs as they never have been