key to a whole situation,* or the impartial justice with which he exercises the historian's supreme right of judgment and the witty epigrams in which the judgment is delivered. These are qualities for which the history of the first three Christian centuries offers less opportunity. There we have to face not a superfluity of material, but a lack of it; and Duchesne betrays a certain impatience of the situation. He has a fine scorn for research into origins; the historian, we seem to hear him say, has so much to master, he has so large a field open to his energies, that he has neither time nor justification for reconstructing any scene of which the evidence affords only partial glimpses. Les gens experts et sensés' (he writes in his preface) 'verront bien ... pourquoi je ne me suis pas trop attardé aux toutes premières origines.' In this policy of exclusion Duchesne would find an ally, as we have seen, in Gwatkin-'our knowledge of the apostolic age is in the highest degree scanty and imperfect'; they would part company when Duchesne goes on to eschew a second line of enquiry. If with the one writer the historian merges in the theologian, the other is led alike by the bent of his mind and the circumstances of his position to emphasise, or over-emphasise, the distinction between them; 'sans négliger les théologiens et leur activité, je ne me suis pas absorbé dans la contemplation de leurs querelles.'

It was never doubtful for a moment that in Duchesne's work Christian and Catholic scholarship had demonstrated that it could more than hold its own against all rivals; no recent history of the early Church in English, French, or German could with justice be placed in comparison with his. And the note of criticism was at first hardly audible amid the general chorus of applause. But at the time when the two earlier volumes were published, the reaction which followed the death of Leo XIII had not yet gathered its full strength; nor in candour must it be forgotten that the first volume, if or because it is less brilliant than the other two, contains also less that was calculated to offend. For the fourth and fifth centuries the comparative abundance of our

* As an instance may be cited the passage on the relation of Monophysitism to Christian devotion, iii. 492.

knowledge of the personality of the actors and of the motives of their actions* gave Duchesne an opportunity of which he was not slow to take advantage. His later volumes perhaps acquire the qualities which arrest the student and fascinate the general reader exactly from their freer treatment of well-known names and great causes. Some of these names, he writes in the preface to the third volume, call for the exercise of a good deal of indulgence:

Il est tel saint de ce temps-là qui n'aurait peut-être pas passé sans difficulté par les procédures actuelles de la canonisation. Cela ne nous regarde pas. Il doit seulement être bien entendu que les situations hagiographiques acceptées par nous, sans inventaire, telles que les siècles nous les ont transmisés, ne sauraient peser sur les jugements de l'historien.'

The combination, in these volumes, of a profound deference to the Roman Church, whether in its 'procedure of canonisation' or otherwise, with an almost brusque assertion of the historian's right to pass judgment, unbiassed by theological prepossession, on the men and the matters that come under his review, cannot be more skilfully brought out than in the epigrammatic, if unkindly, language of M. Lamy :

'La nouveauté originale de cet immense labeur pourrait être définie: la collaboration d'une âme religieuse et d'une intelligence sceptique. Le Breton et le Normand, d'accord, ont marqué dans votre œuvre la part de la soumission et celle de la liberté. L'un accorde largement à l'autorité doctrinale tout le nécessaire. L'autre craint les prodigalités et ne concède rien de superflu. À celui-ci, n'échappe point que l'histoire religieuse est exposée à un risque particulier d'inexactitude.'

'Le soin de votre renommée scientifique vous a-t-il induit parfois à un peu d'ostentation dans votre réserve religieuse ? Votre impartialité a-t-elle pris jusqu'au superflu le ton du détachement et l'air de l'indifférence? Certains le pensent. Mais le droit d'attaquer par les détails une œuvre comme la vôtre ne va pas sans le devoir d'en juger l'ensemble. Or, les moins édifiés par telle de vos pages, s'ils concluent sur toutes,

* Down to the council of Nicea we have no collections of letters preserved to us except those of St Paul, St Ignatius, and St Cyprian. For the hundred and fifty years after Nicæa we have collections galore: hardly any of the great fathers is unrepresented in this form of literature.

ne peuvent contredire que, vides de piété, elles soient pleines de catholicisme. Tous vos chemins mènent à Rome. . . . Et chacune de vos pages dit en silence le mot par lequel vous terminez vôtre Histoire en parlant d'un pape qui n'avait pas hésité devant son devoir: “Dieu lui donna raison.”’*

'Ils reprochent à vôtre histoire qu'elle leur cache Dieu. L'action des hommes, en effet, y apparaît seule. À vos récits manque quelque chose: le nimbe que les vieux maîtres mettaient au front des élus. Vous ne gravissez pas le Thabor où la transfiguration s'accomplit, vous attendez, à la descente de la montagne, ceux dont le visage est redevenu humain.'

In the criticisms reported or expressed by M. Lamy there is something that is just as well as something that is unjust. Nothing could less serve the real interests of Christianity and the Church than history written on principles of 'edification'; and Mgr Duchesne deserves the gratitude of all serious Christians for resolutely refusing to admit this debasement of the historian's office. In this sense, which is not quite M. Lamy's, we can truly say 'Vous avez servi l'Église.' But on the other hand even a friendly reader cannot help noticing a number of isolated incidents, phrases dropped here and there now an unexpected shaft aimed with precision at some established reputation, now a lightning-like rapier-thrust pricking some comfortable doctrine-which, when brought together and construed in a critical spirit, might plausibly be interpreted as evidence of antiecclesiastical bias. Sometimes the blows are serious enough; sometimes they seem to be delivered at random, with malice if not with malice, in pure lightness of heart and joy of battle.

'Admettre que Jésus-Christ et l'Esprit-Saint sont Dieu.. ceci, c'est la Trinité chrétienne,' as ordinary religious Christians believed it in the first century, and believe it in the twentieth : 'les théologiens en savent, ou du moins en disent, notablement plus long. Mais il s'agit ici de religion et non d'école (i, 43). The good sense of Diocletian for long held him aloof from any attempt at persecution: 'il est possible que, comme tant d'autres réformateurs, il ait été séduit par la chimère de l'unité religieuse, chimère néfaste et robuste, qui n'a pas fini

*The reference is to Pope Felix III, and his breach with Acacius of Constantinople over the monophysite controversy: Duchesne, iii. 682.

de faire des victimes' (ii, 9). We should hesitate to believe in the horrors of the last persecution, if it were not for the authority of Eusebius, a contemporary and an honest narrator: il faut donc le croire. Et d'ailleurs, des histoires moins anciennes et aussi bien attestées ne sont-elles pas là pour nous apprendre qu'en ce genre de choses tout, tout est possible?' (ii, 51).

Cæcilian, elected bishop of Carthage (he had been archdeacon) just after the close of the persecution, was opposed by all the elements which went to make up the Donatist movement:

'l'adversaire le plus redoutable était Lucilla, grande dame fort dévote, riche, influente, d'un naturel batailleur, depuis longtemps en querelle avec l'archidiacre, qui, dès avant la persécution, l'avait contrariée dans ses pratiques de dévotion. Elle saisit l'occasion de lui faire pièce. On sait ce dont sont capables de telles personnes' (ii, 106).

In such passages it is probable enough that the recent history of the Church, and especially of the French Church, was not absent from the writer's range of vision: in the fourth century, as in the twentieth, moderateminded and cautious bishops, like Mensurius and Cæcilian at Carthage or Basil at Cæsarea or Chrysostom at Constantinople, suffer at the hands of the intransigeant' party (ii, 21, 420; iii, 85). Epiphanius died on his return from sharing in the attack on St John Chrysostom; 'je ne sais s'il se repentit; les personnes de sa trempe ne se repentent guère.' Saints aspersed the orthodoxy of saints-the famous watchword 'quod semper quod ubique quod ab omnibus' was directed by St Vincent against St Augustine; and Jerome rendered into Latin the vilest abuse of Chrysostom (iii, 105, 283). The soundness of a saint and the heresy of a heretic may both be doubtful; the personal orthodoxy of Nestorius is at least as probable as the personal orthodoxy of St Cyril (iii, 449-451).

Here, then, we have what is on the one hand a History, written in a style where no word is misplaced and every word tells, lucid with a lucidity that is characteristically French, and at the same time marked deeply with a

*

It has been well said of him, 'He throws an immense amount of light on the people and events by the turn of a phrase, or (as it were) by a wink and a shrug!'

massive erudition for which we are more accustomed to look across the Rhine; while that nothing might be lacking to its success, approval had been asked for and obtained from the highest quarter in Rome. What is, on the other hand, apparent is that, while it is even rigidly Roman in its sympathies and tendencies—at least that is the view which Protestant opinion will take of it-it is as far removed as can be imagined in tone and temper, in method and equipment, from the ordinary type of ecclesiastical manual; indeed it may be thought to show some symptoms of exaggerated reaction from this type in its deference to modern 'critical' authorities * and in its general estimate of the age of the Fathers. The Christian theologian has in Duchesne been so far suppressed by the impartial historian that we miss sometimes, where it might seem to have had legitimate place, the overflow on to the printed page of enthusiasm over the triumph of the Church and over its great work in the amelioration of life and the salvation of society. Our author sees with so clear a vision the imperfections of the human instruments, the pitiful waste of energy in theological rivalries, that the preface to the third volume can only ring the changes on the phrase 'triste siècle.'

Alike for its great qualities and for the defects of its qualities,' it could not but happen that the 'Histoire ancienne de l'Église' should create a splash which would stir up a good deal of mud before the water cleared again. Just because it was epoch-making and of more than merely national importance, it was bound to be translated into other languages for the benefit of those who could not savour the grace and piquancy of the original. Of an English translation two volumes, corresponding to the two first volumes of the original, have appeared, and may be recommended as giving a good general reproduction of it. More pregnant with result was the Italian version, made by a professor of the

* There is scarcely any use made, so far as we have noticed, of English work.

+ Exception must occasionally be taken to the rendering of technical terms. Thus 'Azymes' and 'Pasch' (i, 207, 208) are, to ears unfamiliar with the Latin Vulgate or service-books, simply gibberish: why Nizan rather than Nisan (ib.)? So, too, martyria is treated as a singular (p. 183, n. 3). And when Duchesne wrote that Palmas was 'doyen' of the bishops of Pontus, he did not mean 'dean' in the English sense.