The History of Freedom Part 25

Lacordaire in the cathedral pulpit offering his thanks to Voltaire for the good gift of religious toleration, was a figure alien to his spirit.

He never subst.i.tuted politics for religion as the test of progress, and never admitted that they have anything like the dogmatic certainty and sovereignty of religious, or of physical, science. He had all the liberality that consists of common sense, justice, humanity, enlightenment, the wisdom of Canning or Guizot. But revolution, as the breach of continuity, as the renunciation of history, was odious to him, and he not only refused to see method in the madness of Marat, or dignity in the end of Robespierre, but believed that the best measures of Leopold, the most intelligent reformer in the era of repentant monarchy, were vitiated and frustrated by want of adaptation to custom.

Common party divisions represented nothing scientific to his mind; and he was willing, like De Quincey, to accept them as corresponding halves of a necessary whole. He wished that he knew half as much as his neighbour, Mrs. Somerville; but he possessed no natural philosophy, and never acquired the emanc.i.p.ating habit which comes from a life spent in securing progress by shutting one's eyes to the past. "Alle Wissenschaft steht und ruht auf ihrer historischen Entwicklung, sie lebt von ihrer traditionellen Vergangenheit, wie der Baum von seiner Wurzel."

He was moved, not by the gleam of reform after the conclave of Pius IX., but by Pius VII. The impression made upon him by the character of that pope, and his resistance to Napoleon, had much to do with his resolution to become a priest. He took orders in the Church in the days of revival, as it issued from oppression and the eclipse of hierarchy; and he entered its service in the spirit of Sailer, Cheverus, and Doyle. The mark of that time never left him. When Newman asked him what he would say of the Pope's journey to Paris, for the coronation of the emperor, he hardly recognised the point of the question. He opposed, in 1853, the renewal of that precedent; but to the end he never felt what people mean when they remark on the proximity of Notre-Dame to Vincennes.

Dollinger was too much absorbed in distant events to be always a close observer of what went on near him; and he was, therefore, not so much influenced by contact with contemporary history as men who were less entirely at home in other centuries. He knew about all that could be known of the ninth: in the nineteenth his superiority deserted him.

Though he informed himself a.s.siduously his thoughts were not there. He collected from Hormayr, Radowitz, Capponi, much secret matter of the last generation; and where Brewer had told him about Oxford, and Plantier about Louis Philippe, there were landmarks, as when k.n.o.blecher, the missionary, set down Krophi and Mophi on his map of Africa. He deferred, at once, to the competent authority. He consulted his able colleague Hermann on all points of political economy, and used his advice when he wrote about England. Having satisfied himself, he would not reopen these questions, when, after Hermann's death, he spent some time in the society of Roscher, a not less eminent economist, and of all men the one who most resembled himself in the historian's faculty of rethinking the thoughts and realising the knowledge, the ignorance, the experience, the illusions of a given time.

He had lived in many cities, and had known many important men; he had sat in three parliamentary a.s.semblies, had drawn const.i.tutional amendments, had been consulted upon the policy and the making of ministries, and had declined political office; but as an authority on recent history he was scarcely equal to himself. Once it became his duty to sketch the character of a prince whom he had known. There was a report that this sovereign had only been dissuaded from changing his religion and abolis.h.i.+ng the const.i.tution by the advice of an archbishop and of a famous parliamentary jurist; and the point of the story was that the Protestant doctrinaire had prevented the change of religion, and the archbishop had preserved the const.i.tution. It was too early to elucidate these court mysteries; instead of which there is a remarkable conversation about religion, wherein it is not always clear whether the prince is speaking, or the professor, or Sch.e.l.ling.

Although he had been translated into several languages and was widely known in his own country, he had not yet built himself a European name.

At Oxford, in 1851, when James Mozley asked whom he would like to see, he said, the men who had written in the _Christian Remembrancer_ on Dante and Luther. Mozley was himself one of the two, and he introduced him to the other at Oriel. After thirty-two years, when the writer on Dante occupied a high position in the Church and had narrowly escaped the highest, that visit was returned. But he had no idea that he had once received Dollinger in his college rooms and hardly believed it when told. In Germany, the serried learning of the _Reformation_, the author's energy and decisiveness in public a.s.semblies, caused him to stand forth as an accepted spokesman, and, for a season, threw back the reticent explorer, steering between the shallows of anger and affection.

In that stage the _Philosophumena_ found him, and induced him to write a book of controversy in the shape of history. Here was an anonymous person who, as Newman described it, "calls one pope a weak and venal dunce, and another a sacrilegious swindler, an infamous convict, and an heresiarch _ex cathedra_." In the Munich Faculty there was a divine who affirmed that the Church would never get over it. Dollinger undertook to vindicate the insulted See of Rome; and he was glad of the opportunity to strike a blow at three conspicuous men of whom he thought ill in point both of science and religion. He spoke of Gieseler as the flattest and most leathern of historians; he accused Baur of frivolity and want of theological conviction; and he wished that he knew as many circ.u.mlocutions for untruth as there are Arabian synonyms for a camel, that he might do justice to Bunsen without violation of courtesy. The weight of the new testimony depended on the discovery of the author.

Adversaries had a.s.signed it to Hippolytus, the foremost European writer of the time, venerated as a saint and a father of the Church. Dollinger thought them right, and he justified his sincerity by giving further reasons for a conclusion which made his task formidable even for such dexterity as his own. Having thus made a concession which was not absolutely inevitable, he resisted the inference with such richness of ill.u.s.tration that the fears of the doubting colleague were appeased. In France, by Pitra's influence, the book was reviewed without making known that it supported the authors.h.i.+p of Hippolytus, which is still disputed by some impartial critics, and was always rejected by Newman.

_Hippolytus und Kallistus_, the high-water mark of Dollinger's official a.s.sent and concurrence, came out in 1853. His next book showed the ebb.

He came originally from the romantic school, where history was honeycombed with imagination and conjecture; and the first important book he gave to a pupil in 1850 was Creuzer's _Mythology_. In 1845 he denounced the rationalism of Lobeck in investigating the _Mysteries_; but in 1857 he preferred him as a guide to those who proceed by a.n.a.logy.

With increase of knowledge had come increase of restraining caution and sagacity. The critical ac.u.men was not greater in the _Vorhalle_ that when he wrote on the _Philosophumena_, but instead of being employed in a chosen cause, upon fixed lines, for welcome ends, it is applied impartially. Ernst von Lasaulx, a man of rich and n.o.ble intellect, was lecturing next door on the philosophy and religion of Greece, and everybody heard about his indistinct mixture of dates and authorities, and the spell which his unchastened idealism cast over students.

Lasaulx, who brilliantly carried on the tradition of Creuzer, who had tasted of the mythology of Sch.e.l.ling, who was son-in-law to Baader and nephew to Gorres, wrote a volume on the fall of h.e.l.lenism which he brought in ma.n.u.script and read to Dollinger at a sitting. The effect on the dissenting mind of the hearer was a warning; and there is reason to date from those two hours in 1853 a more severe use of materials, and a stricter notion of the influence which the end of an inquiry may lawfully exert on the pursuit of it.

_Heidenthum und Judenthum_, which came out in 1857, gave Lasaulx his revenge. It is the most positive and self-denying of histories, and owes nothing to the fancy. The author refused the aid of Scandinavia to ill.u.s.trate German mythology, and he was rewarded long after, when Caspari of Christiania and Conrad Maurer met at his table and confirmed the discoveries of Bugge. But the account of Paganism ends with a significant parallel. In December 69 a torch flung by a soldier burnt the temple on the Capitol to the ground. In August 70 another Roman soldier set fire to the temple on Mount Sion. The two sanctuaries perished within a year, making way for the faith of men still hidden in the back streets of Rome. When the h.e.l.lenist read this pa.s.sage it struck him deeply. Then he declared that it was hollow. All was over at Jerusalem; but at Rome the ruin was restored, and the smoke of sacrifice went up for centuries to come from the altar of Capitoline Jove.

In this work, designed as an introduction to Christian history, the apologist betrays himself when he says that no Greek ever objected to slavery, and when, out of 730 pages on paganism, half a page is allotted to the moral system of Aristotle. That his Aristotelian chapter was weak, the author knew; but he said that it was not his text to make more of it. He did not mean that a Christian divine may be better employed than in doing honour to a heathen; but, having to narrate events and the action of causes, he regarded Christianity more as an organism employing sacramental powers than as a body of speculative ideas. To cast up the total of moral and religious knowledge attained by Seneca, Epictetus, and Plutarch, to measure the line and rate of progress since Socrates, to compare the point reached by Hermas and Justin, is an inquiry of the highest interest for writers yet to come. But the quant.i.tative difference of acquired precept between the later pagan and the early Christian is not the key to the future. The true problem is to expose the ills and errors which Christ, the Healer, came to remove. The measure must be taken from the depth of evil from which Christianity had to rescue mankind, and its history is more than a continued history of philosophical theories. Newman, who sometimes agreed with Dollinger in the letter, but seldom in the spirit, and who distrusted him as a man in whom the divine lived at the mercy of the scholar, and whose burden of superfluous learning blunted the point and the edge of his mind, so much liked what he heard of this book that, being unable to read it, he had it translated at the Oratory.

The work thus heralded never went beyond the first volume, completed in the autumn of 1860, which was received by the _Kirchenzeitung_ of Berlin as the most acceptable narrative of the founding of Christianity, and as the largest concession ever made by a Catholic divine. The author, following the ancient ways, and taking, with Reuss, the New Testament as it stands, made no attempt to establish the position against modern criticism. Up to this, prescription and tradition held the first place in his writings, and formed his vantage-ground in all controversy. His energy in upholding the past as the rule and measure of the future distinguished him even among writers of his own communion. In _Christenthum und Kirche_ he explained his theory of development, under which flag the notion of progress penetrates into theology, and which he held as firmly as the balancing element of perpetuity: "In dem Maa.s.s als dogmenhistorische Studien mehr getrieben werden, wird die absolute innere Nothwendigkeit und Wahrheit der Sache immer allegingr einleuchten." He conceived no bounds to the unforeseen resources of Christian thought and faith. A philosopher in whose works he would not have expected to find the scientific expression of his own idea, has a pa.s.sage bearing close a.n.a.logy to what he was putting forward in 1861:

It is then in the change to a higher state of form or composition that development differs from growth. We must carefully distinguish development from mere increase; it is the acquiring, not of greater bulk, but of new forms and structures, which are adapted to higher conditions of existence.

It is the distinction which Uhhorn draws between the terms _Entfaltung_ and _Entwickelung_. Just then, after sixteen years spent in the Church of Rome, Newman was inclined to guard and narrow his theory. On the one hand he taught that the enactments and decisions of ecclesiastical law are made on principles and by virtue of prerogatives which _jam antea lat.i.tavere_ in the Church of the apostles and fathers. But he thought that a divine of the second century on seeing the Roman catechism, would have recognised his own belief in it, without surprise, as soon as he understood its meaning. He once wrote: "If I have said more than this, I think I have not worked out my meaning, and was confused--whether the minute facts of history will bear me out in this view, I leave to others to determine." Dollinger would have feared to adopt a view for its own sake, without knowing how it would be borne out by the minute facts of history. His own theory of development had not the same ingenious simplicity, and he thought Newman's brilliant book unsound in detail.

But he took high ground in a.s.serting the undeviating fidelity of Catholicism to its principle. In this, his last book on the Primitive Church, as in his early lectures, he claims the unswerving unity of faith as a divine prerogative. In a memorable pa.s.sage of the _Symbolik_ Mohler had stated that there is no better security than the law which pervades human society, which preserves harmony and consistency in national character, which makes Lutheranism perpetually true to Luther, and Islamism to the Koran.

Speaking in the name of his own university, the rector described him as a receptive genius. Part of his career displays a quality of a.s.similation, acquiescence, and even adaptation, not always consistent with superior originality or intense force of character. His _Reformation_, the strongest book, with the _Symbolik_, which Catholics had produced in the century, was laid down on known lines, and scarcely effected so much novelty and change as the writings of Kampschulte and Kolde. His book on the first age of the Church takes the critical points as settled, without special discussion. He appeared to receive impulse and direction, limit and colour, from his outer life. His importance was achieved by the force within. Circ.u.mstances only conspired to mould a giant of commonplace excellence and average ideas, and their influence on his view of history might long be traced. No man of like spirituality, of equal belief in the supreme dignity of conscience, systematically allowed as much as he did for the empire of chance surroundings and the action of home, and school, and place of wors.h.i.+p upon conduct. He must have known that his own mind and character as an historian was not formed by effort and design. From early impressions, and a life spent, to his fiftieth year, in a rather unvaried professional circle, he contracted homely habits in estimating objects of the greater world; and his imagination was not p.r.o.ne to vast proportions and wide horizons. He inclined to apply the rules and observation of domestic life to public affairs, to reduce the level of the heroic and sublime; and history, in his hands, lost something both in terror and in grandeur. He acquired his art in the long study of earlier times, where materials are scanty. All that can be known of Caesar or Charlemagne, or Gregory VII., would hold in a dozen volumes; a library would not be sufficient for Charles V. or Lewis XVI. Extremely few of the ancients are really known to us in detail, as we know Socrates, or Cicero, or St. Augustine. But in modern times, since Petrarca, there are at least two thousand actors on the public stage whom we see by the revelations of private correspondence. Besides letters that were meant to be burnt, there are a man's secret diaries, his autobiography and table-talk, the recollections of his friends, self-betraying notes on the margins of books, the report of his trial if he is a culprit, and the evidence for beatification if he is a saint.

Here we are on a different footing, and we practise a different art when dealing with Phocion or Dunstan, or with Richelieu or Swift. In one case we remain perforce on the surface of character, which we have not the means of a.n.a.lysing: we have to be content with conjecture, with probable explanations and obvious motives. We must constantly allow the benefit of the doubt, and reserve sentence. The science of character comes in with modern history. Dollinger had lived too long in the ages during which men are seen mostly in outline, and never applied an historical psychology distinct from that of private experience. Great men are something different from an enlarged repet.i.tion of average and familiar types, and the working and motive of their minds is in many instances the exact contrary of ordinary men, living to avoid contingencies of danger, and pain, and sacrifice, and the weariness of constant thinking and far-seeing precaution.

We are apt to judge extraordinary men by our own standard, that is to say, we often suppose them to possess, in an extraordinary degree, those qualities which we are conscious of in ourselves or others.

This is the easiest way of conceiving their characters, but not the truest They differ in kind rather than in degree.

We cannot understand Cromwell or Shaftesbury, Sunderland or Penn, by studies made in the parish. The study of intricate and subtle character was not habitual with Dollinger, and the result was an extreme dread of unnecessary condemnation. He resented being told that Ferdinand I. and II., that Henry III. and Lewis XIII. were, in the coa.r.s.e terms of common life, a.s.sa.s.sins; that Elizabeth tried to have Mary made away with, and that Mary, in matters of that kind, had no greater scruples; that William III. ordered the extirpation of a clan, and rewarded the murderers as he had rewarded those of De Witt; that Lewis XIV. sent a man to kill him, and James II. was privy to the a.s.sa.s.sination Plot. When he met men less mercifully given than himself, he said that they were hanging judges with a Malthusian propensity to repress the growth of population. This indefinite generosity did not disappear when he had long outgrown its early cause. It was revived, and his view of history was deeply modified, in the course of the great change in his att.i.tude in the Church which took place between the years 1861 and 1867.

Dollinger used to commemorate his visit to Rome in 1857 as an epoch of emanc.i.p.ation. He had occasionally been denounced; and a keen eye had detected latent pantheism in his _Vorhalle_, but he had not been formally censured. If he had once a.s.serted the value of nationality in the Church, he was vehement against it in religion; and if he had joined in deprecating the dogmatic decree in 1854, he was silent afterwards. By Protestants he was still avoided as the head and front of offending ultramontanism; and when the historical commission was inst.i.tuted at Munich, by disciples of the Berlin school, he was pa.s.sed over at first, and afterwards opposed. When public matters took him to Berlin in 1857, he sought no intercourse with the divines of the faculty. The common idea of his _Reformation_ was expressed by Kaulbach in a drawing which represented the four chief reformers riding on one horse, pursued by a scavenger with the unmistakable features of their historian. He was received with civility at Rome, if not with cordiality. The pope sent to Cesena for a ma.n.u.script which it was reported that he wished to consult; and his days were spent profitably between the Minerva and the Vatican, where he was initiated in the mysteries of Galileo's tower. It was his fortune to have for pilot and instructor a prelate cla.s.sified in the pigeon-holes of the Wilhelmsstra.s.se as the chief agitator against the State, "dessen umfangreiches Wissen noch durch dessen Feinheit und geistige Gewandtheit ubertroffen wird." He was welcomed by Pa.s.saglia and Schrader at the Collegio Romano, and enjoyed the privilege of examining San Callisto with De Rossi for his guide. His personal experience was agreeable, though he strove unsuccessfully to prevent the condemnation of two of his colleagues by the Index.

There have been men connected with him who knew Rome in his time, and whose knowledge moved them to indignation and despair. One bishop a.s.sured him that the Christian religion was extinct there, and only survived in its forms; and an important ecclesiastic on the spot wrote: _Delenda est Carthago_. The archives of the Culturkampf contain a despatch from a Protestant statesman sometime his friend, urging his government to deal with the Papacy as they would deal with Dahomey.

Dollinger's impression on his journey was very different. He did not come away charged with visions of scandal in the spiritual order, of suffering in the temporal, or of tyranny in either. He was never in contact with the sinister side of things. Theiner's _Life of Clement the Fourteenth_ failed to convince him, and he listened incredulously to his indictment of the Jesuits. Eight years later Theiner wrote to him that he hoped they would now agree better on that subject than when they discussed it in Rome. "Ich freue mich, da.s.s Sie jetzt erkennen, da.s.s mein Urtheil uber die Jesuiten und ihr Wirken gerecht war.--Im kommenden Jahr, so Gott will, werden wir uns hoffentlich besser verstehen als im Jahr 1857." He thought the governing body unequal to the task of ruling both Church and State; but it was the State that seemed to him to suffer from the combination. He was anxious about the political future, not about the future of religion. The persuasion that government by priests could not maintain itself in the world as it is, grew in force and definiteness as he meditated at home on the things he had seen and heard. He was despondent and apprehensive; but he had no suspicion of what was then so near. In the summer of 1859, as the sequel of Solferino began to unfold itself, he thought of making his observations known. In November a friend wrote: "Je ne me dissimule aucune des miseres de tout ordre qui vous ont frappe a Rome." For more than a year he remained silent and uncertain, watching the use France would make of the irresistible authority acquired by the defeat of Austria and the collapse of government in Central Italy.

The war of 1859, portending danger to the temporal power, disclosed divided counsels. The episcopate supported the papal sovereignty, and a voluntary tribute, which in a few years took shape in tens of millions, poured into the treasury of St. Peter. A time followed during which the Papacy endeavoured, by a series of connected measures, to preserve its political authority through the aid of its spiritual. Some of the most enlightened Catholics, Dupanloup and Montalembert, proclaimed a sort of holy war. Some of the most enlightened Protestants, Guizot and Leo, defended the Roman government, as the most legitimate, venerable, and necessary of governments. In Italy there were ecclesiastics like Liverani, Tosti, Capecelatro, who believed with Manzoni that there could be no deliverance without unity, or calculated that political loss might be religious gain. Pa.s.saglia, the most celebrated Jesuit living, and a confidential adviser of the pope, both in dogma and in the preparation of the Syllabus, until Perrone refused to meet him, quitted the Society, and then fled from Rome, leaving the Inquisition in possession of his papers, in order to combat the use of theology in defence of the temporal power. Forty thousand priests, he said, publicly or privately agreed with him; and the diplomatists reported the names of nine cardinals who were ready to make terms with Italian unity, of which the pope himself said: "Ce serait un beau reve." In this country, Newman did not share the animosity of conservatives against Napoleon III. and his action in Italy. When the flood, rising, reached the papal throne, he preserved an embarra.s.sed silence, refusing, in spite of much solicitation, to commit himself even in private. An impatient M.P. took the train down to Edgbaston, and began, trying to draw him: "What times we live in, Father Newman! Look at all that is going on in Italy."--"Yes, indeed! And look at China too, and New Zealand!"

Lacordaire favoured the cause of the Italians more openly, in spite of his Paris a.s.sociates. He hoped, by federation, to save the interests of the Holy See, but he was reconciled to the loss of provinces, and he required religious liberty at Rome. Lamoriciere was defeated in September 1860, and in February the fortress of Gaeta, which had become the last Roman outwork, fell. Then Lacordaire, disturbed in his reasoning by the logic of events, and by an earnest appeal to his priestly conscience, as his biographer says: "ebranle un moment par une lettre eloquente," broke away from his friends:--

Que Montalembert, notre ami commun, ne voie pas dans ce qui se pa.s.se en Italie, sauf le mal, un progres sensible dans ce que nous avons toujours cru le bien de l'eglise, cela tient a sa nature pa.s.sionnee.

Ce qui le domine aujourd'hui c'est la haine du gouvernement francais.--Dieu se sert de tout, meme du despotisme, meme de l'egosme; et il y a meme des choses qu'il ne peut accomplir par des mains tout a fait pures.--Qu'y puis-je? Me declarer contre l'Italie parce que ses chaines tombent mal a propos? Non a.s.surement: je laisse a d'autres une pa.s.sion aussi profonde, et j'aime mieux accepter ce que j'estime un bien de quelque part qu'il vienne.--Il est vrai que la situation temporelle du Pape souffre presentement de la liberation de l'Italie, et peut-etre en souffrira-t-elle encore a.s.sez longtemps: mais c'est un malheur qui a aussi ses fins dans la politique mysterieuse de la Providence. Souffrir n'est pas mourir, c'est quelquefois expier et s'eclairer.

This was written on 22nd February 1861. In April Dollinger spoke on the Roman question in the Odeon at Munich, and explained himself more fully in the autumn, in the most popular of all his books.

The argument of _Kirche und Kirchen_ was, that the churches which are without the pope drift into many troubles, and maintain themselves at a manifest disadvantage, whereas the church which energetically preserves the principle of unity has a vast superiority which would prevail, but for its disabling and discrediting failure in civil government. That government seemed to him as legitimate as any in the world, and so needful to those for whose sake it was inst.i.tuted, that if it should be overthrown, it would, by irresistible necessity, be restored. Those for whose sake it was inst.i.tuted were, not the Roman people, but the catholic world. That interest, while it lasted, was so sacred, that no sacrifice was too great to preserve it, not even the exclusion of the clerical order from secular office.

The book was an appeal to Catholics to save the papal government by the only possible remedy, and to rescue the Roman people from falling under what the author deemed a tyranny like that of the Convention. He had acquired his politics in the atmosphere of 1847, from the potential liberality of men like Radowitz, who declared that he would postpone every political or national interest to that of the Church, Capponi, the last Italian federalist, and Tocqueville, the minister who occupied Rome. His object was not materially different from that of Antonelli and Merode, but he sought it by exposing the faults of the papal government during several centuries, and the hopelessness of all efforts to save it from the Revolution unless reformed. He wrote to an English minister that it could not be our policy that the head of the Catholic Church should be subject to a foreign potentate:--

Das harte Wort, mit welchem Sie im Parlamente den Stab uber Rom gebrochen haben--_hopelessly incurable_, oder _incorrigible_,--kann ich mir nicht aneignen; ich hoffe vielmehr, wie ich es in dem Buche dargelegt habe, das Gegentheil. An die Dauerhaftigkeit eines ganz Italien umfa.s.senden Piemontesisch-Italianischen Reiches glaube ich nicht.--Inzwischen troste ich mich mit dem Gedanken, da.s.s in Rom zuletzt doch _vexatio dabit intellectum_, und dann wird noch alles gut werden.

To these grateful vaticinations his correspondent replied:--

You have exhibited the gradual departure of the government in the states of the church from all those conditions which made it tolerable to the sense and reason of mankind, and have, I think, completely justified, in principle if not in all the facts, the conduct of those who have determined to do away with it.

The policy of exalting the spiritual authority though at the expense of sacrifices in the temporal, the moderation even in the catalogue of faults, the side blow at the Protestants, filling more than half the volume, disarmed for a moment the resentment of outraged Rome. The Pope, on a report from Theiner, spoke of the book as one that might do good.

Others said that it was pointless, that its point was not where the author meant it to be, that the handle was sharper than the blade. It was made much more clear that the Pope had governed badly than that Russia or Great Britain would gain by his supremacy. The cold a.n.a.lysis, the diagnosis by the bedside of the sufferer, was not the work of an observer dazzled by admiration or blinded by affection. It was a step, a first unconscious, unpremeditated step, in the process of detachment.

The historian here began to prevail over the divine, and to judge Church matters by a law which was not given from the altar. It was the outcome of a spirit which had been in him from the beginning. His English translator had uttered a mild protest against his severe treatment of popes. His censure of the Reformation had been not as that of Bossuet, but as that of Baxter and Bull. In 1845 Mr. Gladstone remarked that he would answer every objection, but never proselytised. In 1848 he rested the claims of the Church on the common law, and bade the hierarchy remember that national character is above free will: "Die Nationalitat ist etwas der Freiheit des menschlichen Willens entrucktes, geheimnissvolles und in ihrem letzen Grunde selbst etwas von Gott gewolltes." In his _Hippolytus_ he began by surrendering the main point, that a man who so vilified the papacy might yet be an undisputed saint.

In the _Vorhalle_ he flung away a favourite argument, by avowing that paganism developed by its own lines and laws, untouched by Christianity, until the second century; and as with the Gentiles, so with the sects; he taught, in the suppressed chapter of his history, that their doctrines followed a normal course. And he believed so far in the providential mission of Protestantism, that it was idle to talk of reconciliation until it had borne all its fruit. He exasperated a Munich colleague by refusing to p.r.o.nounce whether Gregory and Innocent had the right to depose emperors, or Otho and Henry to depose popes; for he thought that historians should not fit theories to facts, but should be content with showing how things worked. Much secret and suppressed antagonism found vent in 1858, when one who had been his a.s.sistant in writing the _Reformation_ and was still his friend, declared that he would be a heretic whenever he found a backing.

Those with whom he actively coalesced felt at times that he was incalculable, that he pursued a separate line, and was always learning, whilst others busied themselves less with the unknown. This note of distinctness and solitude set him apart from those about him, during his intimacy with the most catholic of Anglican prelates, Forbes, and with the lamented Liddon. And it appeared still more when the denominational barrier of his sympathy was no longer marked, and he, who had stood in the rank almost with De Maistre and Perrone, found himself acting for the same ends with their enemies, when he delivered a studied eulogy on Mignet, exalted the authority of Laurent in religious history and of Ferrari in civil, and urged the Bavarian academy to elect Taine, as a writer who had but one rival in France, leaving it to uncertain conjecture whether the man he meant was Renan. In theory it was his maxim that a man should guard against his friends. When he first addressed the university as Rector, saying that as the opportunity might never come again, he would employ it to utter the thoughts closest to his heart, he exhorted the students to be always true to their convictions and not to yield to surroundings; and he invoked, rightly or wrongly, the example of Burke, his favourite among public men, who, turning from his a.s.sociates to obey the light within, carried the nation with him. A gap was apparent now between the spirit in which he devoted himself to the service of his Church and that of the men whom he most esteemed. At that time he was nearly the only German who knew Newman well and appreciated the grace and force of his mind. But Newman, even when he was angry, a.s.siduously distinguished the pontiff from his court:

There will necessarily always be round the Pope second-rate people, who are not subjects of that supernatural wisdom which is his prerogative. For myself, certainly I have found myself in a different atmosphere, when I have left the Curia for the Pope himself.

Montalembert protested that there were things in _Kirche und Kirchen_ which he would not have liked to say in public:

Il est certain que la seconde partie de votre livre deplaira beaucoup, non seulement a Rome, mais encore a la tres grande majorite des Catholiques. Je ne sais donc pas si, dans le cas ou vous m'eussiez consulte prealablement, j'aurais eu le courage d'infliger cette blessure a mon pere et a mes freres.

Dollinger judged that the prerogative even of natural wisdom was often wanting in the government of the Church; and the sense of personal attachment, if he ever entertained it, had worn away in the friction and familiarity of centuries.

After the disturbing interlude of the Roman question he did not resume the history of Christianity. The second century with its fragments of information, its scope for piercing and conjecture, he left to Lightfoot. With increasing years he lost the disposition to travel on common ground, impregnably occupied by specialists, where he had nothing of his own to tell; and he preferred to work where he could be a pathfinder. Problems of Church government had come to the front, and he proposed to retraverse his subject, narrowing it into a history of the papacy. He began by securing his foundations and eliminating legend. He found so much that was legendary that his critical preliminaries took the shape of a history of fables relating to the papacy. Many of these were harmless: others were devised for a purpose, and he fixed his attention more and more on those which were the work of design. The question, how far the persistent production of spurious matter had permanently affected the genuine const.i.tution and theology of the Church arose before his mind as he composed the _Papstfabeln des Mittelalters_.

He indicated the problem without discussing it. The matter of the volume was generally neutral, but its threatening import was perceived, and twenty-one hostile critics sent reviews of it to one theological journal.

Since he first wrote on these matters, thirty years earlier, the advance of compet.i.tive learning had made it a necessity to revise statements by all accessible lights, and to subject authorities to a closer scrutiny.

The increase in the rigour of the obligation might be measured by Tischendorf, who, after renewing the text of the New Testament in seven editions, had more than three thousand changes to make in the eighth.

The old pacific superficial method yielded no longer what would be accepted as certain knowledge. Having made himself master of the reconstructive process that was carried on a little apart from the main chain of durable literature, in academic transactions, in dissertations and periodicals, he submitted the materials he was about to use to the exigencies of the day. Without it, he would have remained a man of the last generation, distanced by every disciple of the new learning. He went to work with nothing but his trained and organised common sense, starting from no theory, and aiming at no conclusion. If he was beyond his contemporaries in the ma.s.s of expedient knowledge, he was not before them in the strictness of his tests, or in sharpness or boldness in applying them. He was abreast as a critic, he was not ahead. He did not innovate. The parallel studies of the time kept pace with his; and his judgments are those which are accepted generally. His critical mind was pliant, to a.s.sent where he must, to reject where he must, and to doubt where he must. His submission to external testimony appeared in his panegyric of our Indian empire, where he overstated the increase of population. Informed of his error by one of his translators, he replied that the figures had seemed incredible also to him, but having verified, he found the statement so positively made that he did not venture to depart from it. If inclination ever swayed his judgment, it was in his despair of extracting a real available Buddha from the fables of Southern India, which was conquered at last by the ablest of Mommsen's pupils.

He was less apprehensive than most of his English friends in questions relating to the Old Testament; and in the New, he was disposed, at times, to allow some force to Muratori's fragment as to the person of the evangelist who is least favourable to St. Peter; and was puzzled at the zeal of the Speaker's commentator as to the second epistle of the apostle. He held to the epistles of St. Ignatius with the tenacity of a Caroline prelate, and was grateful to De Rossi for a chronological point in their favour. He rejected the attacks of Lucius on the most valued pa.s.sages in Philo, and stood with Ga.s.s against Weingarten's argument on the life of St. Anthony and the origin of Monasticism. He resisted Overbeck on the epistle to Diognetus, and thought Ebrard all astray as to the Culdees. There was no conservative antiquarian whom he prized higher than Le Blant: yet he considered Ruinart credulous in dealing with acts of early martyrs. A pupil on whose friends.h.i.+p he relied, made an effort to rescue the legends of the conversion of Germany; but the master preferred the unsparing demolitions of Rettberg. Capponi and Carl Hegel were his particular friends; but he abandoned them without hesitation for Scheffer Boichorst, the iconoclast of early Italian chronicles, and never consented to read the learned reply of Da Lungo.

The _Pope Fables_ carried the critical inquiry a very little way; but he went on with the subject. After the Donation of Constantine came the Forged Decretals, which were just then printed for the first time in an accurate edition. Dollinger began to be absorbed in the long train of hierarchical fictions, which had deceived men like Gregory VII., St.

Thomas Aquinas, and Cardinal Bellarmine, which he traced up to the false Areopagite, and down to the Laminae Granatenses. These studies became the chief occupation of his life; they led to his excommunication in 1871, and carried him away from his early system. For this, neither syllabus nor ec.u.menical council was needed; neither crimes nor scandals were its distant cause. The history of Church government was the influence which so profoundly altered his position. Some trace of his researches, at an early period of their progress, appears in what he wrote on the occasion of the Vatican Council, especially in the fragment of an ecclesiastical pathology which was published under the name of Ja.n.u.s. But the history itself, which was the main and characteristic work of his life, and was pursued until the end, was never published or completed. He died without making it known to what extent, within what limit, the ideas with which he had been so long identified were changed by his later studies, and how wide a trench had opened between his earlier and his later life.

Twenty years of his historical work are lost for history.

The revolution in method since he began to write was partly the better use of old authorities, partly the accession of new. Dollinger had devoted himself to the one in 1863; he pa.s.sed to the other in 1864. For definite objects he had often consulted ma.n.u.scripts, but the harvest was stacked away, and had scarcely influenced his works. In the use and knowledge of unpublished matter he still belonged to the old school, and was on a level with Neander. Although, in later years, he printed six or seven volumes of Inedita, like Mai and Theiner he did not excel as an editor: and this part of his labours is notable chiefly for its effect on himself. He never went over altogether to men like Schottmuller, who said of him that he made no research--_er hat nicht geforscht_--meaning that he had made his mind up about the Templars by the easy study of Wilkins, Michelet, Schottmuller himself, and perhaps a hundred others, but had not gone underground to the mines they delved in. Fustel de Coulanges, at the time of his death, was promoting the election of the Bishop of Oxford to the Inst.i.tute, on the ground that he surpa.s.sed all other Englishmen in his acquaintance with ma.n.u.scripts. Dollinger agreed with their French rival in his estimate of our English historian, but he ascribed less value to that part of his acquirements. He a.s.sured the Bavarian Academy that Mr. Freeman, who reads print, but nevertheless mixes his colours with brains, is the author of the most profound work on the Middle Ages ever written in this country, and is not only a brilliant writer and a sagacious critic, but the most learned of all our countrymen. Ranke once drew a line at 1514, after which, he said, we still want help from unprinted sources. The world had moved a good deal since that cautious innovation, and after 1860, enormous and excessive ma.s.ses of archive were brought into play. The Italian Revolution opened tempting horizons. In 1864 Dollinger spent his vacation in the libraries of Vienna and Venice. At Vienna, by an auspicious omen, Sickel, who was not yet known to Greater Germany as the first of its mediaeval palaeographers, showed him the sheets of a work containing 247 Carolingian acts unknown to Bohmer, who had just died with the repute of being the best authority on Imperial charters. During several years Dollinger followed up the discoveries he now began. Theiner sent him doc.u.ments from the _Archivio Segreto_; one of his friends shut himself up at Trent, and another at Bergamo. Strangers ministered to his requirements, and huge quant.i.ties of transcripts came to him from many countries. Conventional history faded away; the studies of a lifetime suddenly underwent transformation; and his view of the last six centuries was made up from secret information gathered in thirty European libraries and archives. As many things remote from current knowledge grew to be certainties, he became more confident, more independent, and more isolated. The ecclesiastical history of his youth went to pieces against the new criticism of 1863, and the revelation of the unknown which began on a very large scale in 1864.

During four years of transition occupied by this new stage of study, he abstained from writing books. Whenever some local occasion called upon him to speak, he spoke of the independence and authority of history. In cases of collision with the Church, he said that a man should seek the error in himself; but he spoke of the doctrine of the universal Church, and it did not appear that he thought of any living voice or present instructor. He claimed no immunity for philosophy; but history, he affirmed, left to itself and pursued disinterestedly, will heal the ills it causes; and it was said of him that he set the university in the place of the hierarchy. Some of his countrymen were deeply moved by the measures which were being taken to restore and to confirm the authority of Rome; and he had impatient colleagues at the university who pressed him with sharp issues of uncompromising logic. He himself was reluctant to bring down serene research into troublesome disputation, and wished to keep history and controversy apart. His hand was forced at last by his friends abroad. Whilst he pursued his isolating investigations he remained aloof from a question which in other countries and other days was a summary and effective test of impa.s.sioned controversy. Persecution was a problem that had never troubled him. It was not a topic with theoretical Germans; the necessary books were hardly available, and a man might read all the popular histories and theologies without getting much further than the Spanish Inquisition. Ranke, averse from what is unpleasant, gave no details. The gravity of the question had never been brought home to Dollinger in forty years of public teaching. When he approached it, as late as 1861, he touched lightly, representing the intolerance of Protestants to their disadvantage, while that of Catholics was a bequest of Imperial Rome, taken up in an emergency by secular powers, in no way involving the true spirit and practice of the Church. With this light footfall the topic which has so powerful a leverage slipped into the current of his thought. The view found favour with Ambrose de Lisle, who, having read the _Letters to a Prebendary_, was indignant with those who commit the Church to a principle often resisted or ignored. Newman would admit to no such compromise:

Is not the miraculous infliction of judgments upon blasphemy, lying, profaneness, etc., in the apostles' day a sanction of infliction upon the same by a human hand in the times of the Inquisition?

Ecclesiastical rulers may punish with the sword, if they can, and if it is expedient or necessary to do so. The church has a right to make laws and to enforce them with temporal punishments.

The question came forward in France in the wake of the temporal power.