Note 3-10 — Chapter III

The habit of assuming, for the conduct of men of sense and feeling, motives intelligible to the foolish, and probable to the base, gains upon every vulgar historian, partly in the ease of it, partly in the pride; and it is horrible to contemplate the quantity of false witness against their neighbours which commonplace writers commit, in the mere rounding and enforcing of their shallow sentences. "Jerome admits, indeed, with specious but doubtful humility, the inferiority of the unordained monk to the ordained priest," says Dean Milman in his eleventh chapter, following up his gratuitous doubt of Jerome's humility with no less gratuitous asseveration of the ambition of his opponents. "The clergy, no doubt, had the sagacity to foresee the dangerous rival as to influence and authority, which was rising up in Christian society."