It was part of his religion to live much in the past, to realise every phase of thought, every crisis of controversy, every stage of progress the Church has gone through. So that the events and ideas of his own day lost much of their importance in comparison, were old friends with new faces, and impressed him less than the multitude of those that went before. This caused him to seem absent and indifferent, rarely given to admire, or to expect. He respected other men's opinions, fearing to give pain, or to tempt with anger by contradiction, and when forced to defend his own he felt bound to assume that every one would look sincerely for the truth, and would gladly recognise it. But he could not easily enter into their motives when they were mixed, and finding them generally mixed, he avoided contention by holding much aloof. Being quite sincere, he was quite impartial, and pleaded with equal zeal for what seemed true, whether it was on one side or on the other. He would have felt dishonest if he had unduly favoured people of his own country, his own religion, or his own party, or if he had entertained the shadow of a prejudice against those who were against them, and when he was asked why he did not try to clear himself from misrepresentation, he said that he was silent both from humility and pride. At last I understood that what we had disliked in him was his virtue itself. J.N.F. R.V.L. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: There is no foundation for the statement of Canon Meyrick in his _Reminiscences_, that Acton, had he lived on the Continent, would have undoubtedly become an Old Catholic. He did very largely live on the Continent. Nor did even Doellinger, of whom Dr. Meyrick also asserts it, ever become an adherent of that movement.] I THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM IN ANTIQUITY[2]