For years Milman,
though a man of exquisite literary and lofty historical gifts, as
well as of most honourable character, was debarred from preferment
and outstripped by ecclesiastics vastly inferior to him in
everything save worldly wisdom; for years he was passed in the race
for honours by divines who were content either to hold briefs for
all the contemporary unreason which happened to be popular, or to
keep their mouths shut altogether. This opposition to him extended
to his works. For many years they were sneered at, decried, and
kept from the public as far as possible.
Fortunately, the progress of events lifted him, before the closing
years of his life, above all this opposition. As Dean of St. Paul's
he really outranked the contemporary archbishops: he lived to see
his main ideas accepted, and his _History of Latin Christianity_
received as certainly one of the most valuable, and no less
certainly the most attractive, of all Church histories ever written.
The two great English histories of Greece--that by Thirlwall, which
was finished, and that by Grote, which was begun, in the middle
years of the nineteenth century--came in to strengthen this new
development.
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