papal court with a judicial calmness and impartiality which the modern advocates of religious tolerance might well admire." When speaking of Gemistus, the last original thinker of the tolerant eastern church, he passes unheeded the most curious passage of the Laws : ον καί σοφιστών, ήν τις παρά τας ήμετέρας δόξας σοφιζόμενος άλώ, ζών καί οντος κεκανσεται. He declares that it is unjust to brand Sixtus IV. as a persecutor because he granted the powers asked for in the shape of the Spanish Inquisition. And this is prompted by no tenderness for the memory of Sixtus ; for we find elsewhere that "he allowed himself to become an accomplice in a scheme for assassination which shocked even the blunted conscience of Italy." It may be safely said that Mr. Creighton esteems Ximenes a better specimen of the Christian priest than Julius or Leo, with all their religious liberality.
The spirit of retrospective indulgence and reverence for the operation of authority, whether it be due to want of certitude or to definite theory, is an advantage in writing on this portion of history. From a less conservative point of view the scenery is more gloomy, and the contending parties, tarred with the same brush, are apt to prove less interesting. Mr. Creighton is able to be considerate and appreciative both to popes and reformers. He has no love for the Italian humanists, and may reserve his harshest censures for the pseudonymous liberalism of More and Socinus. It is not necessary, he says, to moralise at every turn ; and he neither worries and vilipends his culprits, like Carlyle and Taine, nor adapts his judgments to dogma, like Hook and Mozley. He goes farther, and declares that it is not becoming to adopt an attitude of lofty superiority over any one who ever played a prominent part in European affairs, or charitable to lavish undiscriminating censure. Of course this does not imply that justice has one law for the mighty and another for the fallen. If it means that every age ought to be tried by its own canons, the application of that sliding scale is a branch of ethical and historical inquiry that is yet in its teens, and practically
