trod the soil of this planet was called the Man of Sorrows.  If happiness means absence of care and inexperience of painful emotion, the best securities for it are a hard heart and a good digestion.  If morality has no better foundation than a tendency to promote happiness, its sanction is but a feeble uncertainty.”  Remembering where he stood, and speaking from the fulness of his mind, Froude exclaimed:  “Norman Leslie did not kill Cardinal Beaton down in the castle yonder because he was a Catholic, but because he was a murderer.  The Catholics chose to add to their already incredible creed a fresh article, that they were entitled to hang and burn those who differed from them; and in this quarrel the Calvinists, Bible in hand, appealed to the God of battles.”

The importance of this striking Address is largely due to the fact that it was composed immediately after the History had been finished, and may be regarded as an epilogue.  It breathes the spirit, though it discards the trappings, of Puritanism and the Reformation.  Luther “was one of the grandest men that ever lived on earth.  Never was any one more loyal to the light that was in him, braver, truer, or wider-minded in the noblest sense of the word.”  About Calvinism Froude disagreed with Carlyle, who loved to use the old formulas, though he certainly did not use them in the old sense.  “It is astonishing to find,” Froude wrote to Skelton, “how little in ordinary life the Calvinists talked or wrote about doctrine.  The doctrine was never more than the dress.  The living creature was wholly moral and political—­so at least I think myself.”  Such language was almost enough to bring John Knox out of his grave.  Could he have heard it, he would have felt that he was being confounded with Maitland, who thought God “ane nursery bogill.”  But though the attempt to represent Knox or Calvin as undogmatic may be fanciful, it is the purest, noblest, and most permanent part of Calvinism that Froude invited the students of St. Andrews to cherish and preserve.

CHAPTER V

FROUDE AND FREEMAN

Froude’s reputation as an historian was seriously damaged for a time by the persistent attacks of The Saturday Review.  It is difficult for the present generation to understand the influence which that celebrated periodical exercised, or the terror which it inspired, forty years ago.  The first editor, Douglas Cook, was a master of his craft, and his colleagues included the most brilliant writers of the day.  Matthew Arnold, who was not one of them, paid them the compliment of treating them as the special champions of Philistia, the chosen garrison of Gath.  On most subjects they were fairly impartial, holding that there was nothing new and nothing true, and that if there were it wouldn’t matter.  But the proprietor* of the paper at that time was a High Churchman, and on ecclesiastical questions he put forward his authority.  Within that sphere he would not tolerate