Historical Lectures and Addresses

by Mandell Creighton

HISTORICAL LECTURES

AND ADDRESSES

BY

MANDELL CREIGHTON, D.D,, D.C.L., LL.D., etc.

SOMETIME BISHOP OF LONDON

EDITED BY

LOUISE CREIGHTON

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON

NEW YORK AND BOMBAY

1903

TO

HIS OLD PUPILS

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK IN THE HOPE

THAT IT MAY SPEAK TO THEM WITH HIS VOICE,

AND THAT HISTORY MAY BE

TO THEM AS IT WAS TO HIM

A LIVING STUDY,

GIVING TO THEM ALSO

NOT ONLY REVERENCE FOR THE PAST BUT GUIDANCE

FOR THE FUTURE.

PREFACE

Of the lectures in this volume those on Saint Edward the Confessor, the Picturesque in History, Heroes, and Elizabethan London have already appeared in the Cornhill Magazine, and I have to thank the Editor for kind permission to reprint them here. I have also to express my thanks to the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press, to the Curators of the Oxford University Chest, and to the Rev. Dr. A. J. Mason and the Rev. Professor W. E. Collins, for kind permissions to include in this volume the Rede lecture, the Romanes lecture, and the lecture on Laud's Position in the History of the Church of England. The two former were published at the time of their delivery, and the latter appeared in the volume issued for the Archbishop Laud Commemoration. The other lectures have never been published. Those on the Friars, Bishop Grosseteste and his Times, the English Church in the Time of Elizabeth and the Study of a Country are printed from the reporter's notes as they were delivered. Though naturally less finished productions than the others, they give a very good idea of Dr. Creighton's manner of popular lecturing. His inaugural lecture as Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History, which is here printed for the first time, shows what history meant to him, and what he tried to make it mean to others. To him its living interest lay in the fact that he saw everywhere when he looked into the past "the working of great elemental forces, which are common to human society at all times". What he cared to note in every age, whether past or present, was "the thing that was accomplished, the ideas which clothed themselves with power".

LOUISE CREIGHTON.

CONTENTS

The Teaching of Ecclesiastical History	PAGE 1
The Congregationalists	29
The Baptists	48
The Coming of the Friars	69
St. Francis of Assisi	84
The Influence of the Friars	98
Bishop Grosseteste and his Times, 1st Lecture	116
"""2nd Lecture	124
"""3rd Lecture	136
The English Church in the Reign of Elizabeth	149
Laud's Position in the History of the Church of England	164
The Early Renaissance in England	188
The English National Character	213
Saint Edward the Confessor	241
The Picturesque in History	261
The Study of a Country	285
Heroes	305
Elizabethan London	324