side of ecclesiastical history will find other
histories much more useful. It has been said that his work is
imperfect as a book of reference, for while the great events and
personages are discussed with a fulness that leaves little to be
desired, many of the more insignificant transactions or more obscure
periods are passed over or barely noticed. Critics of different
religious schools have also complained that his mind was essentially
secular; that he had a low sense of the certainty and the importance
of dogma; that there were some classes of ecclesiastical writers who
have been deeply revered in the Church with whom he had no real
sympathy; that the spirit of criticism was stronger in his book than
the spirit of reverence; that he did not do full justice to the
spiritual and inner side of the religion he described. He looked upon
it, they said, too externally. He valued it as a moral revolution, the
introduction of new principles of virtue and new rules for individual
and social happiness. Much of this criticism would probably have been
accepted with but little qualification by Milman himself. He would
have said that what these writers complained of was in the main
inseparable from an historical as distinguished from a devotional
treatment of his subject. He would have added that no form of human
history reveals so clearly as ecclesiastical history the fallibility,
the credulity, the intolerance of the human mind, or requires more
imperatively the constant exercise of independent judgment and of
fearless and unsparing criticism, and that, if the history of the
Church is ever to be written with profit, it must be written in such a
spirit. Of his own deeper convictions he seldom spoke; but in the
concluding page of his 'Latin Christianity' there is a passage of
profound interest. Leaving it, as he says, to the future historian of
religion to say what part of the ancient dogmatic system may be
allowed to fall silently into disuse, and what transformations the
interpretation of the Sacred Writings may still undergo, he adds these
significant words:

'As it is my own confident belief that the words of Christ, and his
words alone (the primal indefeasible truths of Christianity), shall
not pass away, so I cannot presume to say that men may not attain to a
clearer, at the same time more full, comprehensive, and balanced sense
of those words, than has as yet been generally received in the
Christian world. As all else is tra