e it even good policy to deny the rest;
and he demanded with passion that history should set the follies and the
crimes of ecclesiastical authority in no better light than those of
civil.

We cannot understand Acton aright, if we do not remember that he was an
English Roman Catholic, to whom the penal laws and the exploitation of
Ireland were a burning injustice. They were in his view as foul a blot
on the Protestant establishment and the Whig aristocracy as was the St.
Bartholomew's medal on the memory of Gregory XIII., or the murder of the
duc d'Enghien on the genius of Napoleon, or the burning of Servetus on
the sanctity of Calvin, or the permission of bigamy on the character of
Luther, or the September Massacres on Danton.

Two other tendencies dominant in Germany--tendencies which had and have
a great power in the minds of scholars, yet to Acton, both as a
Christian and a man, seemed corrupting--compelled him to a search for
principles which might deliver him from slavery alike to traditions and
to fashion, from the historian's vice of condoning whatever has got
itself allowed to exist, and from the politician's habit of mere
opportunist acquiescence in popular standards.

First of these is the famous maxim of Schiller, _Die Welt-Geschichte ist
das Welt-Gericht_, which, as commonly interpreted, definitely identifies
success with right, and is based, consciously or unconsciously, on a
pantheistic philosophy. This tendency, especially when envisaged by an
age passing through revolutionary nationalism back to Machiavelli's
ideals and _Realpolitik_, is clearly subversive of any system of public
law or morality, and indeed is generally recognised as such nowadays
even by its adherents.

The second tendency against which Acton's moral sense revolted, had
arisen out of the laudable determination of historians to be sympathetic
towards men of distant ages and of alien modes of thought. With the
romantic movement the early nineteenth century placed a check upon the
habit of despising mediaeval ideals, which had been increasing from the
days of the Renaissance and had culminated in Voltaire. Instead of this,
there arose a sentiment of admiration for the past, while the general
growth of historical methods of thinking supplied a sense of the
relativity of moral principles, and led to a desire to condone if not to
commend the crimes of other ages. It became almost a trick of style to
talk of judging men by the standard of