He starts with a notion that the fittest engine to redeem England from the mischiefs and mistakes of oligarchical feudalism was to be found in the imposing machinery and deception of the Roman Church; overlooking the great truth that it was not the Romish Church, but the genius of Christianity, working its vast but silent change, which was really guiding on the chariot of civilization; but in this broad principle there was not enough of the picturesqueness of detail to captivate his mind.  It would not suit him to distinguish between the Church of Christ and the web of corruptions that had grown about her, but could not effectually arrest the benignant influence inherent in her mainspring.  He therefore leads his readers to infer that Christianity came first to Britain with St. Austin, and for aught that Mr. Macaulay condescends to inform us, the existence of a prior Anglo-Saxon Church was a monkish fiction.  The many unhappy circumstances of the position taken up by the Romish Church in its struggles for power—­some of them unavoidable, it may be, if such a battle were to be fought—­are actually displayed as so many blessings, attainable only by a system which the historian himself condemns elsewhere as baneful and untrue.  He maintains these strange paradoxes and contradictions with a pertinacity quite surprising.  He doubts whether a true form of Christianity would have answered the purposes of liberty and civilization half so well as the acknowledged duplicities of the Church of Rome.

  It may perhaps be doubted whether a purer religion might not have been
  found a less efficient agent.—­i. 23.

  There is a point in the life both of an individual and a society at
  which submission and faith, such as at a later period would be justly
  called servility and credulity, are useful qualities.—­i. 47.

These are specimens of the often exposed fallacies in which he delights to indulge.  Place right and wrong in a state of uncertainty by reflected lights, and you may fill up your picture as you like.  And such for ever is Mr. Macaulay’s principle of art.  It is not the elimination of error that he seeks for, but an artistic balance of conflicting forces.  And this he pursues throughout:  deposing the dignity of the historian for the clever antithesis of the pamphleteer.  At last, on this great and important point of religious history—­a point which more than any other influences every epoch of English progress, he arrives at this pregnant and illustrative conclusion—­

  It is difficult to say whether England owes more to the Roman Catholic
  religion or to the Reformation.—­i. 49.

England owes nothing to “the Roman Catholic religion.”  She owes everything to CHRISTIANITY, which Romanism injured and hampered but could not destroy, and which the Reformation freed at least from the worst of those impure and impeding excrescences.