ABSTRACT
Re ... reading, sometimes after a very long interval, the ceuvre of Sir Herbert Butterfield, I have been struck by two permanent, highly personal, and extremely important attitudes in his writings on all topics. The first of these is his gentle but firm stress on the importance of the historical phenomenon called 'sin'. Nothing is more penetrating in his numerous notes on Lord Acton than his friendly irony at the identification which Acton made between Providence and Progress. For long before this naive
view that Providence and Progress were working hand in hand or that in any real sense Progress was progressing, long before Belsen and Hiroshima, Herbert Butterfield's own Christian position, one might say his Christian pessimism, had saved him from the innocence which many of Acton's judgments reveal. Indeed, having had to re ... read recently for totally different pur ... poses some of the essays ofMacaulay, I was struck by the fact that although the rhetorical style of Macaulay is very unlike that of Acton, a great deal of Macaulay could be translated straight into Actonese, and vice versa. Macaulay, we may assume, believed in 'the religion of all sensible men'. We have the recent testimony of Mr Douglas Woodruff that Acton's Catholic belief and piety were deep. But the gap between ourselves and the optimistic agnostics and the optimistic Christians of the nineteenth century is so great, that even the most friendly account of Macaulay or of Acton underlines what must seem to us a curious credulity. And the credulity is seen peculiarly clearly when it is contem ... plated by a believing Christian like Sir Herbert Butterfield, who believes (I have no personal authority for this) in the permanence of the meaning of original sin and does not believe it can be exorcized or ended by any form of political change or, indeed, by any form of new psychological technique. I suspect, again without any personal authority, that Sir Herbert Butterfield may, among other reasons for doubting the judgment of Sir Lewis Namier, have been affected by the discovery that Namier had a somewhat credulous belief in the utility of modern psychological theory applied to historical personalities and so to historical problems. Again and again, and not only in a book like Christianity and History, Sir Herbert Butterfield reveals the degree to which his Christian pessimism and his consciousness of evil and not merely of misjudgment is a part of history that can only be wished away or dodged with great historical lies. This is not to say that Sir Herbert Butterfield is as confident as Acton was and as Macaulay was that the duty of the historian is to give historical judgments on past figures in history. Even Macaulay, who was far more willing to allow for the different standards of morality of different ages, did not doubt that although allowances had to be made, allowances of a kind that Acton would not have
made, the historian was a judge of the morality of past historical figures.
