3 80
ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
of a public of laymen. The restoration of history coincided with the euthanasia of metaphysic; when the foremost philosophic genius of the time led over to the historic treatment both of philosophy and religion, and Hamilton, Cousin, Comte, severally converted the science into its history. Many men better equipped for specu- lation than for erudition went the same way; the systernatic theology was kept up in the universities by the influence of Rome, where scholasticism went on untouched by the romantic transformation. Writing of England, Wiseman said: "There is still a scholastic hardness in our controversial theology, an un bendingness of outward forms in our explanations of Catholic principles, which renders our theologians dry and unattractive to the most catholicly inclined portion of our Protestants." The choice which these youths made, towards I 830, was, though they did not know it, the beginning of a rift that widened. Döllinger was more in earnest than others in regard- ing Christianity as history, and in pressing the affinity between catholic and historical thought. Systems were to him nearly as codes to Savigny, when he exhorted his contemporaries not to consolidate their law, lest, with their wisdom and kno\vledge, they should incorporate their delusions and their ignorance, and usurp for the state what belonged to the nation. He would send an inquir- ing student to the Historla Congregatzonis de Auxiliis and the Historia Pelagiana rather than to Molina or Lemos, and often gave the advice which, coming from Oriel, dis- concerted Morris of Exeter: "I am afraid you will have to read the Jesuit Petavius." He dreaded the predomi- nance of great names which stop the way, and everything that interposes the notions of an epoch, a region, or a school between the Church and the observer. To an Innsbruck professor, lamenting that there was no philosophy which he could heartily adopt, he replied that philosophies do not subsist in order to be adopted. A Thomist or a Cartesian seemed to him as a captive, or a one-armed combatant. Prizing metaphysicians for the
