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Charles II. in sending his charter to Rhode Island repeated his own decision in favour of universal toleration. But the colonists were concerned with nothing save the insignificant quarrels of the innumerable Protestant sects; the King ultimately left it to the Assembly of Rhode Island to decide what it would do, and when that body issued its rules (printed in 1719) they excluded Catholics.

It is clear that in all these examples, which I have taken at random up and down the book, the writer is doing what we so continually find upon the part of academic authorities, particularly when they are indulging in an attack upon the Catholic Church—he is repeating what some other man of the same kind has said before him, and that other man is repeating something that was said before him. He has not been at the pains of consulting original authorities; and the result is valueless and inaccurate history, always wrong and sometimes the exact opposite of the truth.

When we come to the third and gravest kind of bad history, that in which the general atmosphere is falsified, we have, as I have said, a much harder task than in the case of errors in dates and facts, or of errors due to omission or ignorance of documents.

Nevertheless, the point is of such importance that it must be dealt with, and I think it will be found possible to show by fairly definite examples how thoroughly the thing he is attempting to describe has been misunderstood by the writer: how lacking he is in the preparation necessary to a grasp of his subject.

Let me take for my first example in this general matter of "atmosphere" Professor Bury's description of the medieval attitude towards the marvellous, the miraculous, and evidence in general.