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APPENDIX

By the kindness of Mrs. Creighton we are enabled to publish the following extracts from Acton's Letters to Creighton on the subject of the article on vols. iii. and iv. of the History of the Papacy contributed by Acton to the English Historical Review, reprinted here pp. 426-41. Acton's curiously naive view of the situation is disclosed in the original covering letter to Creighton as Editor in which he describes the article as "the work of an enemy." We do not quote the letters in full but only such portions as serve to bring out more clearly perhaps than anything else which he wrote, the uncompromising rigidity of Acton's canons of judgment. They mark the gulf which divided him alike from the sympathetic writer, who excuses everything by a facile reference to the moral atmosphere of the age he is representing, and on the other hand from the "scientific" historian, whose ideal is to state facts and observe causes, but never to pronounce sentence.

After arguing, first, that the high absolutist theory of the Papacy was the real cause of the breach with Luther, and, secondly, that the Popes were individually and collectively responsible for the policy of persecution in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Acton goes on as follows : —

The same thing is the case with Sixtus IV. and the Spanish Inquisition, what you say has been said by Hefele Gauss and others. They, at least, were, in a sort, avowed defenders of the Spanish Inquisition. Hefele speaks of Ximenes as one might speak of Andrewes or Taylor or Leighton. But in what sense is the Pope not responsible for the Constitution by which he established the new tribunal ? If we passed a law giving Dufferin powers of that sort, when asked for, we should surely be responsible. No doubt

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