xxvi OBITUARY NOTICES OF MEMBERS DECEASED. 



Nothing could exceed the care and patience with which he in- 

 vestigated the sources from which lie drew his materials. He veri- 

 fied every reference, he neglected no out-of-the-way authority from 

 which information could be obtained. Few recent writers have had 

 their statements so seldom questioned, and rarely indeed was he 

 proved to be in error. He rightly held accuracy to be the first of 

 all the historian's aims and the highest test of the historian's excel- 

 lence. The splendid library which he accumulated by the labor 

 of many years, fortunately enabled him to have on his own shelves 

 an unusually large number of the books that he required, while his 

 means were sufficiently large to bear the cost of procuring copies 

 of manuscripts preserved in European collections. Neither trouble 

 nor expense was spared in procuring these essential materials. It 

 need hardly be said that whoever travels through unexplored terri- 

 tory, relying upon original sources, many of which have never been 

 properly scrutinized, needs a high measure of critical insight. 

 Whether nature gave Mr. Lea that capacity, or whether he acquired 

 it by long experience, it certainly had reached in him an unusually 

 high development, and this is one of the features of his books which 

 gives them their permanent worth. In accompanying him one feels 

 one's self always on firm ground. 



Some of the subjects which he treated at great length, such as 

 his monumental histories of the Incjuisition in Southern France and 

 in Spain and his history of clerical celibacy, deal with subjects in 

 which freedom from any bias or prepossession, whether religious or 

 political, is specially needful, and indeed one may say essential in 

 order to secure the confidence of all readers, whctlier Roman Catholic 

 or Protestant. Mr. Lea was a Protestant by birth and conviction, 

 but he was, as a scholar ought to be, perfectly fair in his treatment 

 of ecclesiastical and religious questions. One may indeed say that 

 scholarship fails to bear one of its best fruits if it fails to make 

 a man impartial in handling ecclesiastical history. His books were 

 never written with any purpose or bias save that of eliciting the 

 facts. To write in sucli a spirit was far rarer in tlie days when 

 Mr. Lea began his work than it is in our time. Religious prejudices 

 were so strong and so general among both Protestants and Roman 

 Catholics that it was quite unusual to find a writer in whom you 



