The Bishop’s attitude was held very generally to denote the kind of breadth which is so easy where there is no strong conviction. But this view was quite erroneous. Creighton’s contempt might be too lightly expressed, but it was not lightly entertained. He had a reason for every dislike, and even behind every prejudice. He managed somehow to reconcile the Catholic view of the English Church with pure Erastianism. In one place one finds him ridiculing the notion that truth varies with longitude and latitude; in another he holds that “the general trend of the Church must be regulated by their (the people’s) wishes,” and that “the Church cannot go too far from the main ideas of the people”—who might conceivably, of course, become polygamists and fire-worshippers fifty years hence. In truth, this great historian often thought as cloudily and locally as a country curate, and, far more than he was aware, was influenced by the insularity he so often derided. Where he did not take the English view he took the German, being soaked, like most Victorians, in Teutonism; and he really objected to “religious observances of an exotic kind” less because they were exotic than because they were Latin.
“The Church of Rome,” he said once, “is the Church of decadent peoples.” On another occasion he observed that the Roman communion is “a small body in England, which stands in no relation to the religious life of the nation.... To join that Church is simply to stand on one side and cut yourself off from your part in striving to do your duty for the religious future of your country.” I am not concerned in the sectarian question involved; I only quote the passages to show that Creighton, with all his learning and cleverness, could talk solemn nonsense as well as the lighter kind. Yet he would have been quick to see the logical lapse of some old barbarian who condemned Christianity as the religion of under-sized people, or of the Roman governor under Nero who sent saints to the lions because this new faith of “Chrestus” stood in no relation to the religious life of a polytheistic Empire, so that for a Roman citizen to join it was to “cut himself off from his past in striving to do his duty for the religious future of his country.”