holas V. in 1455. This great work was published in two
instalments--the first three volumes in 1854, and the remaining three
in the following year--and it gave its author indisputably the first
place among the ecclesiastical historians of England and a high place
among the historians of the nineteenth century. He possessed, indeed,
in an eminent degree some of the qualities that are most rare, and at
the same time most valuable, in ecclesiastical history. A large
proportion of the most learned ecclesiastical historians have been men
who have devoted their whole lives to this single department of
knowledge, who derived from it all their measures of probability and
canons of criticism, and who, treating it as an isolated and mainly
supernatural thing, have taken very little account of the intellectual
and political secular influences that have largely shaped its course.
Most of them also have been men who undertook their task with
convictions and habits of thought that were absolutely incompatible
with real independence and impartiality of judgment in estimating
either the events or the characters they described. Milman was wholly
free from these defects. His wide knowledge, his cool, critical,
admirably trained judgment, were never better shown than in the many
pages in which he has pointed out the analogies or resemblances
between Jewish and other Oriental beliefs; the manner in which
national characteristics or secular intellectual tendencies affected
theological types; the countless modifications in belief or practice
which grew up, as the Church accommodated itself to the conditions of
successive ages and entered into alliance or conflict with different
political systems; the many indirect, subtle, far-reaching ways in
which the world and the Church interacted upon each other in all the
great departments of speculation, art, industry, social and political
life. A certain aloofness and coldness of judgment in dealing with
sacred subjects was the reproach which was most frequently brought
against him. As he himself said, he wrote rather as an historian than
a religious instructor, and he dealt with his subject chiefly in its
temporal, social, and political aspects. Justice and impartiality of
judgment to friend and foe he deemed one of the first moral duties of
an historian, and Dean Church was not wrong in ascribing to him a
quite 'unusual combination of the strongest feeling about right and
wrong with the largest equi