Two of Froude’s pet hobbies may be found in his Inaugural Lecture.  There is the theory that judgment falls upon idleness and vice, which he adopted from Carlyle.  There is his own doctrine that the Statute Book furnishes the most authentic material of history.  It is no answer to say that preambles are inserted by Ministers, who put their own case and not the case of the nation.  In the use or reception of all evidence allowance must be made for the source from which it comes.  But even Governments do not invent out of their own heads, or put into statutes what is foreign to the public mind.  They employ the arguments most likely to prevail, and these must be closely connected with the circumstances of the day.  No recital in an Act of parliament can prove incontestably that the monasteries were stews, or worse.  That such a thing could be plausibly alleged, and generally believed, is itself important, and history must take account of popular views.  Debates were not reported in the sixteenth century, nor was freedom of speech in Parliament recognised by the Crown.  There was nothing to ensure a fair trial for the victims of a royal prosecution, and testimony obtained by torture was accepted as authentic.  All these are facts, and to neglect them is to go astray.  But they do not prove that every public document is untrustworthy; or that the words of a statute have no more to do with reality than the words of a romance.  It is a question of degree.  Historical narrative could not be written under the conditions most properly imposed upon criminal proceedings in a court of law.  If nothing which cannot be proved beyond the possibility of reasonable doubt is admitted into the pages of history, they will be bare indeed.  It is significant that Froude laid down in 1892 the same propositions for which he had contended in the Oxford Essays of 1855.  He had suffered many things in the meantime of The Saturday Review, but he held to his old opinions with unshaken tenacity.  All Froude’s changes were made early in life.  When once he had shaken himself free of Tractarianism, The Nemesis of Faith, and Elective Affinities, he remained a Protestant, Puritan, sea-loving, priest-hating Englishman.

The subject with which Froude began his brief career as Professor was the Council of Trent.  The Council of Trent has been described by one of the great historians of the world, Fra Paolo Sarpi, whom Macaulay considered second only to Thucydides.  Entirely ineffective for the purpose of securing universal concord, it did in reality separate Protestant from Catholic Europe, and establish Papal authority over the Church of Rome.  When the Council met, the Papacy was no part of orthodox Catholicism, and Henry viii. never dreamt that in repudiating the jurisdiction of the Pope he severed himself from the Catholic Church.  If Luther had been only a heretic, the Council might have put him down.  But he had behind him the bulk of the laity, and Cardinal Contarini told Paul iii. that the