There is one moral standard for all Christians--there has never been more than one [he would say, inexorably]. The Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount have been always there. It was the wickedness of men that ignored them in the fifteenth century--it is the wickedness of men that ignores them now. Tolerate them in the past, and you will come to tolerate them in the present and future. It was in 1885 that Mr.--then recently made Professor--Creighton, showed me at Cambridge an extraordinarily interesting summary, in Lord Acton's handwriting, of what should be the principles--the ethical principles--of the modern historian in dealing with the past. They were, I think, afterward embodied in an introduction to a new edition of _Machiavelli_. The gist of them, however, is given in a letter written to Bishop Creighton in 1887, and printed in the biography of the Bishop. Here we find a devout Catholic attacking an Anglican writer for applying the epithets "tolerant and enlightened" to the later medieval Papacy. These men [i.e., the Popes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries] [he says] instituted a system of persecution.... The person who authorizes the act shares the guilt of the person who commits it.... Now the Liberals think persecution a crime of a worse order than adultery, and the acts done by Ximenes [through the agency of the Spanish Inquisition] considerably worse than the entertainment of Roman courtesans by Alexander VIth.