"How does Froude stand in this matter of the rejoicings at Rome?"
"Froude has too melodramatic a mind, if I may use the expression, to be a good historian. He has a dangerous gift of sarcasm and invective, and a fatal knack of putting things together so as to make an effective situation. If an inconvenient truth pops up to mar the scene, he quietly knocks it on the head, and arranges the stage to suit himself. For instance, he wants to paint the duplicity of Charles, so he mentions his lying bulletins to the pope and the other sovereigns; but he also wants to impress us with the heartless bigotry of the pontiff; so, after showing on one page that the pope could not know the truth, he coolly assumes on the next that he did know it."
"I think the best account of the massacre I ever read in a Protestant publication is that in The New American Cyclopaedia. Not a perfect book, of course, but upon the whole, very honest."
"Yes, if you want to get a plain statement of facts, without party coloring, you must go to some work in which many heads and hands have worked together. You know an ordinary refracting telescope of the old sort shows distant objects, not as they really are, but tinged with prismatic colors, because no one lens has the power of transmitting all rays with equal impartiality; but by a combination of lenses we get at the exact truth; one corrects another. So, if you want a thoroughly impartial, achromatic account of anything, let a number of men work at it together For this reason, a good cyclopaedia is better than a volume of history; it is perfectly cold-blooded."
"Our friend Willson," I said, turning over the leaves as I spoke, "is certainly a telescope of the old sort. His book is as gay with prismatic colors as a parlor candelabrum. See here: 'The doctrine of infallibility means the pope's entire exemption from liability to err;' 'Indulgences are billets of salvation, professing to remit the punishment due to sins even before the commission of the contemplated crime.' Mr. Willson knows that neither of these definitions is correct."
"No, I don't believe he does. Remember what we said just now about thistles. To you and to me these statements seem—I don't know whether to say ludicrous or shocking. We know, as well as we know the alphabet, that while the church cannot err in defining dogmas, the pope, as a private individual, is as liable to err as Mr. Willson himself; that no sin can be forgiven before it is committed, and no past sin pardoned so long as the culprit purposes committing another; but I dare say Mr. Willson is ignorant of all this. There is a certain class of unfortunate Christians, now happily dying out, who are catechised in their youth into a hatred of the pope and all his works. They look upon his holiness as a superior sort of devil, rather more wicked and dangerous upon the whole than Satan, and not half so much of a gentleman. Willson was crammed full of these sentiments when he was a boy, and now he is trying to cram the coming generation. Here is a specimen of the moral nutriment which men of his stamp are brought up on. I cut it out of an old number of The Sunday-School Advocate, where it appeared as a comment on a picture of a Spanish flower-girl. There must be a funny twist in the mind of the writer who could get a lesson against popery out of that.
"'SELLING FLOWERS.
"'You never saw such a flower-seller, did you? You have not unless you have lived in Spain. The picture is meant to show you a Spanish lady, a Spanish flower-dealer, and a Spanish mule.
"'Spain is a beautiful land, but the people are not as happy as they are here. Why? Because they are Roman Catholics. Once they were a brave, powerful, rich, liberty-loving people; but a set of priests, called Jesuits, stole into the country, quenched their love of liberty, put out the lights of learning, trampled upon the true religion, and made the Spaniards boasters, bigots, and almost slaves to their kings and queens. Pity the Spaniards, my children, and pray to your heavenly Father to save this glorious land from ever being ruined by that great enemy to all that is good—the Roman Catholic Church.
x. x.'