Froudes History of England | Page 5

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 the only threads of light in the dark
web of his history are clerical and theurgic, not lay and human. Voltaire
is the very experimentum crucis of this ugly fact. European history
looks to him what it would have looked to his Jesuit preceptors, had the
sacerdotal element in it been wanting; what heathen history actually did
look to them. He eliminates the sacerdotal element, and nothing
remains but the chaos of apes and wolves which the Jesuits had taught
him to believe was the original substratum of society. The humanity of
his history--even of his 'Pucelle d'Orleans,--is simply the humanity of
Sanchez and the rest of those vingtquatre Peres who hang gibbeted for
ever in the pages of Pascal. He is superior to his teachers, certainly, in
this, that he has hope for humanity on earth; dreams of a new and

nobler life for society, by means of a true and scientific knowledge of
the laws of the moral and material universe; in a word, he has, in the
midst of all his filth and his atheism, a faith in a righteous and
truth-revealing God, which the priests who brought him up had not. Let
the truth be spoken, even though in favour of such a destroying Azrael
as Voltaire. And what if his primary conception of humanity be utterly
base? Is that of our modern historians so much higher? Do Christian
men seem to them, on the whole, in all ages, to have had the spirit of
God with them, leading them into truth, however imperfectly and
confusedly they may have learnt his lessons?
Have they ever heard with their ears, or listened when their fathers have
declared unto them, the noble works which God did in their days, and
in the old time before them? Do they believe that the path of
Christendom has been, on the whole, the path of life and the right way,
and that the living God is leading her therein? Are they proud of the old
British worthies? Are they jealous and tender of the reputation of their
ancestors? Do they believe that there were any worthies at all in
England before the steam-engine and political economy were
discovered? Do their conceptions of past society and the past
generations retain anything of that great thought which is common to
all the Aryan races--that is, to all races who have left aught behind
them better than mere mounds of earth--to Hindoo and Persian, Greek
and Roman, Teuton and Scandinavian, that men are the sons of the
heroes, who were the sons of God? Or do they believe that for civilised
people of the nineteenth century it is as well to say as little as possible
about ancestors who possessed our vices without our amenities, our
ignorance without our science; who were bred, no matter how, like flies
by summer heat, out of that everlasting midden which men call the
world, to buzz and sting their foolish day, and