and Incarnation, Original Sin, Total Depravity, Salvation by Christ, Regeneration, remain unsettled and open still. No definition, no statement, has been found large enough to satisfy the mind of the Church with respect to any one of them.

These are all open questions; and not the less because every age, sect, and party have tried to close them. Orthodox dogmatists and heretical dogmatists have alternately considered themselves as giving the final unanswerable argument for or against these ideas. One conviction, however, has been gradually emerging from this conflict of opinion,that, namely, which was declared by Paul in the thirteenth chapter of first Corinthians; that no intellectual statement of a truth is, or can be, final. Whatever knowledge we have concerning Christian doctrine will vanish away; because all knowledge is partial, and therefore a limitation. All dogmatism, bigotry, and intolerance have come from the ignorance of this distinction between truth in itself and our knowledge of it; between religion and theology; between faith and belief; between Christ in the heart, and opinions in the head about him. So long as salvation was thought to depend on a particular view in theology, there could be no free criticism or discussion of such a doctrine, either by its friends or foes. Some satisfactory statement will be reached only when the friends and opponents of a doctrine, looking at it from both sides, unite their efforts to formulate it anew.

ART. VII.-FROUDE'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

History of England, from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Eight vols. 8vo. London: 1858-1863. New York: 4

vols. 1865.

"HAVE you dined with Fouché?" This was the oracular question which one hanger-on at the Congress of Vienna put to another. And he, poor man, addressed,-who had, before,

thought himself so situated as to know something of affairs, was obliged to confess that he had not. "You can know nothing about it," was the bold statement then made to him, "you can know nothing about it, unless you have dined with Fouché."

All of us have found ourselves engaged in discussions of contemporary history with some such high authority. The hackneyed quotation, "As for history, I know that that is false," sprang from a kindred consciousness of what is of course true, that, in the conduct of affairs where at the moment utter secrecy is required for success, secrets are often so well kept that they are kept for ever. Because this is so, every person who gets behind the curtain at all, exaggerates the special value of the little hole through which he peeps upon the passage of events. If a man has discovered a unique pamphlet, or has unearthed some boxes of his greatgrandfather's letters, or has lounged at a watering-place with some communicative old wire-puller of a generation gone by, or has made personal acquaintance with the orderly of some successful general, if, in short, he has dined with any Fouché of his time, he overrates the value of the "broken lights," which he has gained for history, and, if he is a man of genius, presents history to us in a form so new as to be startling.

Within the present generation, there have been a good many illustrations of this tendency in the historical literature of England. The herculean work of the Record Commission has resulted in placing the State papers of Great Britain in admirable order, with full series of indexes, so carefully edited as to be in themselves historical works of great value, and with a body of Heads of Department so fully trained, each in his special branch of research, that they may be regarded as very high authorities in matters of history. Having thus got the materials of history for a thousand years ready for use, the English government, with most intelligent liberality, throws open this collection to the study of all persons who are really interested in historical research. There one may sit for years if he will, and read the private correspondence

or the most secret despatches of Elizabeth, of Cecil, of Walsingham, of Raleigh, or of anybody else, from Egbert down to William the Third, who knew how to write, and who left a scrap of paper or of parchment in any cabinet or closet of any palace or bureau of the English court within a thousand years. Now, to all transactions there is an inside view and an outside view. The inside view of the planet Mars makes him go to the left, while, to the outside view of a person standing in Jupiter, Mars goes to the right; and it happens particularly often in the affairs of governments, that the inside view which is taken by those who direct those affairs is widely different from the outside view which is taken by the Pepyses, the Halls, the Holinsheds, the newspapers, and other ill-informed gossips of the times. When General Burnside took his newly recruited Ninth Corps across the Potomac last year, to assist in the battles of the Wilderness, the newspaper quid-nuncs and military dilletanti assured us that his movement was languid and slow. We have now the "inside view" of the commander-in-chief, who says it was made with a remarkable and commendable degree of rapidity. This is a convenient illustration of the discrepancies which will always be found between the inside and outside views of history. In days when diplomacy, and what they called Statecraft, were among the mysterious sciences, so that the very word "secretary" was coined to show that an officer of State was keeping secrets always, when the people was regarded as so nearly "cursed," that all knowledge of affairs was to be kept from them as much as possible, such discrepancies were much more considerable than they are now. So it happens that, as Lingard and Froude and Dixon and Macaulay are turned into this uncropped pasture of historical memorial, the first-fruits which they single out for the public amazement being quite dissimilar from any thing which people had tasted before, -the historians themselves, as we have said, being well disposed to state, to the very full, the value of their new discoveries, they produce new digests of history which so far leave out what was known before, and state so fully what is just now learned, that an indignant world declares that all

its villains have been whitewashed, while the most spotless of its household gods are smooched into blackamoors.

As remarkable an instance as any of this indignation or surprise of the readers of English literature has been the feeling aroused by Mr. Froude's study of Henry the Eighth and the Reformation. The popular verdict on the book, perhaps, has been that it is an advocate's ingenious attempt to "whitewash" the character of Henry, which had been finally set down as hopelessly depraved. It is probable that in England some personal prejudice regarding Mr. Froude as a student, understood to have swung up to the very pale of the Catholic Church, to have looked over it upon her mysteries, and then to have recoiled in horror to the other extreme of the pendulum of opinion, may have had a good deal to do with the popular verdict upon his history. Lest the real appreciation of the book should be hindered by any such temporary or local prejudices, we propose to examine, for a moment, the grounds of general opinion regarding the history of the English Reformation, at the time when Mr. Froude made to it this very valuable contribution.

Let it be remembered, then, that the period when aversion to the Church of Rome first showed itself in England, and the subsequent period of the revolution which took place in Henry's reign, passed wholly by, quite before our present habits of printing and reading were formed. No such thing was known as our modern pamphlet, or even the older broadside, far less as our modern newspaper, giving from day to day to all readers such expositions as may be possible of fact or opinion. Public opinion formed itself almost wholly on what men heard: it was only in the most indirect manner sustained on any thing written or read. Indeed, so few people could read, that the multitude of hearers had much greater weight, in comparison with the little battalion of readers, than in the world of to-day. Now, we do not dwell on the proverbial inaccuracy of statements repeated, at second hand, which have been received by word of mouth. Inaccurate or not, the world must take the inconveniences of such transmission of information as well as it can, till we are

promoted into that higher sphere of being, described by Edward Search, in which one sensorium receives, by contact, the impressions of another, without the medium of words. We have rather to observe, that when men receive intelligence by oral transmission through many persons, certain picturesque and emblematic incidents of history receive a disproportionate share of attention. Because specially fit for language, they are easily remembered, dramatically told, and therefore more frequently repeated again. This is probably the reason why the lays or ballads of the earliest times outlive all their more recondite history; and, to take instances in later time, it would not be too much, perhaps, to say that the popular idea of the first winter of the Pilgrims at Plymouth is summed up in the picture of their all stepping on the forefathers' rock, and that the popular impression of the battle of Bunker Hill centres on Putnam's speech about "the whites of their eyes." That exciting despatch which was carried like a fiery cross from Massachusetts to Georgia, starting the day after the battle of Lexington, was, as it happens, verbally untrue in every particular; but it was a series of striking pictures, such as had passed most readily from man to man, as the news of the outbreak passed from the scene of it to Hartford, where the despatch was first put in writing. All these instances belong to the general law, under which parable or inventive example becomes the method of statement best fitted to keep essential growths in the memory of a people who do not read.

History, then, when it is written on the outside view of such materials as are in the possession of the generality of well-informed people, in a period when few public documents come to light, becomes picturesque and dramatic. It centres around a few striking incidents, pictures a few important characters as if they were the only characters upon the stage, and leaves us with a wild feeling that things were done under very different laws from those which regulate them now. In a word, it drifts steadily into romance. Such impressions once given, indolent authors take it as they find it, make the picturesqueness more pictorial, overstate the things that