ACCORDING the Latin historian Tacitus, the chief office of history is to rescue virtue from oblivion, and that base words and deeds should have the fear of posthumus infamy. When, in the nineteenth century, professional historians came think of themselves as scientists, they conceived their only function be describe what actually happened, without teaching any lessons or pointing any morals. Theirs not accuse, nor excuse, merely expose. That they, too, like all intelligent and thoughtful men, had their points of view, their principles of selection and interpretation, seems have escaped them. Acton, Creighton, and Lea all thought of themselves as in some sense scientists and were devoted the ideals of objectivity and impartiality; yet each had decided views on the duty of historians in the matter of moral judgments on historical characters. I propose compare these views. Lord Acton, reputedly the most erudite man in England, adopted as his life mission the synthesizing of his Whiggish liberalism, critical historical scholarship, and Roman Catholicism. When his efforts were frowned upon by ecclesiastical authority, he made his submission without changing his mind and turned the task of gathering materials for a monumental history of freedom, which was never written. When Lord Rosebery as prime minister appointed him Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1895, only a few die-hard, down-with-Popery Protestants murmured. He wrote no great historical work, but his collected papers, lectures, and letters fill several volumes, the reading of which has well been described as an intellectual adventure. His last great undertaking was the planning of the Cambridge Modern History, which was have been his dreamed-of history of liberty, but he did not live carry it through. When Mandell Creighton died he was the Anglican Bishop of London, but more our purpose he had written, some years before, A History of the Papacy from the Great Schism the Sack of Rome in six masterly