to ensure success, Milner certainly possessed all these qualifications in an eminent degree.  But in others, which are equally essential, he was deficient.  In the first place, his work laboured under the fatal defect of dulness.  Of all writers, perhaps the ecclesiastical historian has most need of a lively, racy style, of the art of selecting really prominent facts and representing them with vividness and picturesqueness.  The nature of his subject is drier than that of the civil historian.  He must write much which to the majority of readers will be heavy reading, unless they are carried along by the grace and attractiveness of the composition.  Milner has not the art of setting off his characters in the most effective manner.  There is a want of spring and dash about his style which has prevented many from doing justice to his real merits.

Then again, he was rather too much of a partisan, to make a good historian.  With every wish to give honour where honour was due, his mind was not evenly balanced enough for his task.  Holding, as Milner did, the very strongest and most uncompromising views of the utter depravity of mankind, he can allow no good at all to what are termed ’mere moral virtues.’  Indeed, he will hardly allow such virtues to be ’splendid sins.’  He is far too honest to suppress facts, but his comments upon facts are often tinged with a quite unconscious unfairness.  Thus, he admits the estimable qualities which Antoninus Pius possessed, but ‘doubtless,’ he adds, ’a more distinct and explicit detail of his life would lessen our admiration:  something of the supercilious pride of the Grecian or of the ridiculous vain-glory of the Roman might appear.’[823]

A kindred but graver defect is Milner’s incessant depreciation of all schools of philosophy.  Instead of seeing in these great thinkers of antiquity a yearning after that light which Christianity gives, he can see in them nothing but the deadliest enmity to Christianity.  ’The Church of Christ is abhorrent in its plan and spirit from the systems of proud philosophers.’  ’Moral philosophy and metaphysics have ever been dangerous to religion.  They have been found to militate against the vital truths of Christianity and corrupt the gospel in our times, as much as the cultivation of the more ancient philosophy corrupted it in early ages.’  The minister of Christ is warned against ’deep researches into philosophy of any kind,’ and much more to the same effect.  It was this foolish manner of talking and writing which gave the impression that the religion which the Evangelicals recommended was a religion only fitted for persons of weak minds and imperfect education.  Such sweeping and indiscriminate censures of ‘human learning’ (at least of one important branch of it) not only encouraged contemptuous opinions of Evangelicalism among its enemies, but also tended to make many of its friends think too lightly of those gifts which, after all, come as truly from ‘the