Probably Mr. Adams’s account of the English Reformation, and of Henry VIII. and his instruments, is far nearer the truth than Froude’s. But his view of the evils upon which the reformers as a whole waged war, and of the spirit which lay behind the real leaders and spurred them on, is certainly less accurate than the view given by Froude in his _Erasmus_ and _Council of Trent_. It can be partly corrected by the study of a much less readable book--Mr. Henry C. Lea’s work on _The Inquisition_. Yet Mr. Adams’s description of the English Reformation is very powerful, and has in it a vein of bitter truth; though on the whole it is perhaps not so well done as his account of the suppression of the Templars in France. If he can be said to have any heroes, the Templars must certainly be numbered among them. He is at his best in describing the imaginative man, and especially the imaginative man whose energy manifests itself in the profession of arms. His description of the tremendous change which passed over Europe during the centuries which saw, what is commonly called, the decay of faith is especially noteworthy. In no other history are there to be found two sentences which portray more vividly the reasons for the triumph of the great Pope Hildebrand over the Emperor Henry, than these: “To Henry’s soldiers the world was a vast space peopled by those fantastic beings which are still seen on Gothic towers. These demons obeyed the monk of Rome, and his army, melting from the Emperor under a nameless horror, left him helpless.” His account of the contrast between the relations of Philip Augustus and of Philip the Fair with the Church is dramatic in its intensity. To Mr. Adams, Philip the Fair, even more than Henry VIII., is the incarnation of the economic spirit in its conflict with the Church; and he makes him an even more repulsive, though perhaps an abler, man than Henry. In this he is probably quite right. His account of the hounding down of Boniface, and the cruel destruction of the Templars, is as stirring as it is truthful; but he certainly pushes his theory to an altogether impossible extreme when he states that the moneyed class, the _bourgeoisie_, was already the dominant force in France. The heroes of Froissart still lay in the future; and for centuries to come the burgher was to be outweighed by king, priest, and noble. The economic man, the man of trade and money, was, at that time, in no sense dominant.