Acton's famous library of some sixty thousand volumes bearing on the history of Liberty. He decided not to keep it himself but to give it to Cambridge University, where it rests, a dumb instrument, expecting evermore to be woken to life by the magic touch of a master who returns not again.

In one respect Acton greatly puzzled his acquaintance. As Lord Morley puts it, 'The union of devoted faith in liberty with devoted adherence to the Church of Authority was a standing riddle.' The correspondence which has now appeared throws a good deal of fresh light on this enigma. In a letter of great interest, addressed to Lady Blennerhassett in 1879, Acton discovers the story of his

mind.

'It is the story,' he writes, of a man who started in life believing himself a sincere Catholic and a sincere Liberal; who therefore renounced everything in Catholicism which was not compatible with Liberty and everything in Politics which was not compatible with Catholicity.'

Believing, then, in civil and religious liberty, he had to reconcile his principles with the opinion that since the twelfth century the violation of religious liberty had been associated,' though 'not exactly identified,' with the Papacy.

'The Papacy,' he continues in a most characteristic passage, 'contrived murder and massacre on the largest and also on the most cruel and inhuman scale. .. Was it better to renounce the Papacy out of horror for its acts, or to condone the acts out of reverence for the Papacy? The Papal party preferred the latter alternative. It appeared to me that

such men are infamous in the last degree. I did not accuse them of error, as I might impute it to Grotius or Channing, but of crime. I thought that a person who imitated them for political or other motives (was) worthy of death. But those whose motive was religious seemed to me worse than the others, because that which is in others the last resource of conversion, is with them the source of guilt. The spring of repentance is broken, the conscience is not only weakened but warped. Their prayers and sacrifices appeared to me the most awful sacrilege. The idea of putting on the same level an Ultramontane priest and a priest of licentious life was to me not only monstrous but unintelligible.

'I understood the movement for the glorification of the Papacy as a scheme for the promotion of sin. . . . I heralded the Council by pointing out that the Popes had, after long endeavours, nearly succeeded in getting all the Calvinists murdered. It meant: give them any authority or credit that may be their due, but let it be always subject to that limit and condition. Let everything be conceded to them that is compatible with their avowed character and traditions; but see that you do nothing that could shelter them from the scorn and execration of mankind. It is well that an enthusiast for monarchy be forced to bear in mind the story of Nero and Ivan, of Louis XIV and Napoleon; that an enthusiast for democracy be reminded of St Just and Mazzini. It is more essential that an enthusiast of the papacy be made to contemplate its crimes, because its influence is nearer the Conscience, and the spiritual danger of perverted morals is greater than the evil of perverted politics. It is an agency constantly active, pervading life, penetrating the soul by many channels, in almost every sermon and in almost everyprayer-book. It is the fiend skulking behind the Crucifix....

'That is my entire capital. It is no reminiscence of Gallicanism. I do not prefer the Sorbonne to the Congregations or the Councils to the Popes. It is no reminiscence of Liberal Catholicism. Rosmini and Lacordaire, Hefele and Falloux, seem to me no better than De Maistre, Veuillot and Perrone. It is nothing but the mere adjustment of religious history to the ethics of Whiggism.'

Such, then, was Acton's own reading of the riddle that puzzled others. His position was altogether singular. His master in historical study opposed the 1870 definition of Papal Infallibility on the ground of doctrine; the Pope was claiming powers, Döllinger urged, for which there was no warranty in the history of the Church. But his own opposition was based upon a subtler point of morals. The decree, if it were carried, would, he contended, seem in some sense a reaffirmation of much that he deplored in the history of religious persecution. Thus, while Döllinger left the Church, Acton found it easy to give Manning the explicit assurance that he had no private gloss or favourite interpretation for the Vatican Decrees'; that the Acts of the Council alone constituted the law which he recognised.'

The Vatican Council of 1870.

He certainly took a strange way, both before and after the Decrees were carried, to signify his assent. None of his co-religionists would find it easy to explain, much less to defend, the appeals for secular interference to save the Council from itself, which he addressed to Mr Gladstone. He pleaded that pressure to stop the passage of the Decrees should be brought to bear on the Vatican, not alone by the Catholic Governments of France and Bavaria, but by the Protestant Governments of England and Prussia. Then, when the issue was decided, he took occasion to contribute to the 'Times' more than one letter calculated to throw into strong relief some of the ugliest episodes in the annals of the Papacy. In striking at the 'fiend skulking behind the Crucifix,' he seemed to some, like Newman, to be in danger of wounding the hands that sustained the Cross. The foes of the Papacy will certainly find in his writings material of war. But his candour is double-edged; and it is possible to discover in it a nicely balanced vindication of his creed:

'I know,' he wrote, that there are some whose feelings of reverence and love are, unhappily, wounded by what I have said. I entreat them... to ask themselves seriously the question whether the laws of the Inquisition are, or are not, a scandal and a sorrow to their souls. It would be well if men had never fallen into the error of suppressing truth and encouraging error for the better security of religion. Our Church stands, and our faith should stand, not on the virtues of men, but on the surer ground of an institution and a guidance that are divine. . . . I should dishonour and betray the Church if I entertained a suspicion that the evidences of religion could be weakened, or the authority of councils sapped, by a knowledge of the facts with which I have been dealing, or of others which are not less grievous or less certain because they remain untold.'

This is hardly the place to follow the controversy farther. 'The way out of the scrape,' Acton wrote in 1875, will yet be found in insisting upon the authority of tradition as the only lawful rule of interpretation.' O felices angustia! When the mists cleared away, it was found they had carried with them all the extravagant doctrine with which Louis Veuillot and others had striven

to invest the person of the Pope. The tradition of the Church of Rome had been freed from its excrescences.

So much, then, for the ecclesiastical polemics in which Acton was so heavily engaged. A later letter (in French) to Lady Blennerhassett shows that it was precisely as a scientific historian and not as a theologian that he had entered the lists. Defending himself against the charge of excessive severity in his historical judgments, he lays down as the test of political virtue a regard for the sanctity of human life:

'L'Histoire ne peut pas se servir des systèmes de morale attachés aux religions, car ils ne sont applicables que dans les limites de ces religions. Et une morale indépendante manque à la science. Il faut donc que l'Histoire se compose son propre système. D'abord, il juge par le Code Criminel. Mais là il y a peu de principes universels. Il n'y a d'absolument essentiel que la vie. Donc c'est la vie humaine qui est l'arche sainte. Personne ne peut être plus décidément caracterisé et condamné que celui qui verse le sang. . . . Plus on réussit à étendre cette épreuve, plus l'histoire s'élève audessus de l'opinion et entre dans la science.'

Interesting and suggestive as this is, it is the less part of the letter. We to whose war-aims President Wilson has imparted a rare purity of intention do not need to be shown the profundity of American idealism. But it says much for Acton's insight, or, perhaps rather, for the value of the study of history, that he who elsewhere pointed out the Prussian peril should also have laid his finger upon the real home of international idealism :

'Ce qui creuse un gouffre entre les old and new Whigs, c'est le développement, presque la découverte de la conscience. Cette notion . . . est venue lorsque le Christianisme s'est trouvé réduit à sa plus simple expression, sans église, sans sacrement, sans clergé, sans rituel, et qu'il est arrivé au point de se confondre avec la morale universelle. Dans cette formelà le Christianisme a fondé un état, et créé une constitution, où il n'y avait guère autre chose de sauvegardé que l'individualisme. . . . Ce qui rend la vie politique si digne, si intraitable, c'est l'élément qui nous vient d'Amérique. .. Le système du droit naturel, des principes abstraits, du droit absolu, du droit comme forme du devoir, de la politique entendue comme science et non comme expédient-ce système

est entré comme un fer tranchant dans le monde par les jurisconsultes de Boston et les théoriciens de Virginie.'

Amid the forests of Pennsylvania,' then, is to be sought the tree of the knowledge of political good and evil, of liberty, of international conscience, call it what you will, which in the forests of Germany' has withered away. Here, if anywhere, is to be found the faith which shall move political mountains and produce such a change in the nature and relations of men as to enable them to convert swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks, in the sure knowledge that they shall not make war any more. Did Acton believe that this could be? He is too cautious to commit himself. 'If it seem to you (he writes to Lady Blennerhassett) that I have faith in the future and in progress, that my theodicy is Whig in character, that I share the revolutionary philosophy, I must remind you that I have been tracing objectively a sequence of ideas.'

"Voyez seulement le côté religieux de la chose-on a marché de l'unité vers la diversité, du Catholicisme au Protestantisme, de la Bible aux sectes, au doute, au rationalisme, au déisme, au panthéisme, et enfin à la suprematie de la science. Qui trouve tout cela progrès croit, ou que le Catholicisme est une antiquité, ou que l'avenir sera tout autre que le passé.'

Though we have not yet quite parted company with Acton we are already upon ground where we may meet Lord Morley. Liberalism rests on two postulates-that the world is growing better, and that evil sooner or later, but still, here and now, meets with its deserts. Destroy the belief in progress and in visible retribution, and the springs of Liberalism will assuredly run dry. So we find Lord Morley in 1897 assuring an Oxford audience, which doubtless received the opinion less critically than it would have done twenty years later, that 'the world in spite of a thousand mischances and at tortoise pace has steadily moved away from Machiavelli and his Romans.' Acton's judgment on the great cynic let in no such ray of hope:

'Religion, progressive enlightenment, the perpetual vigilance of public opinion have not reduced Machiavelli's empire or disproved the justice of his conception of mankind. . . . He is