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ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
Inen has done and left undone in sixty years, can estimate the scientific level of an age ,vhere such a dream could be dreamed by such a man, misled neither by imagination nor ambition, but knowing his own limitations and the imlneasurable \vorld of books. Experience slo\vly taught him that he who takes all history for his province is not the man to write a compendium. The four volumes of Church History which gave him a name in literature appeared between 1833 and 1838, and stopped short of the Reformation. In writing mainly for the horizon of seminaries, it was desirable to esche\v voyages of discovery and the pathless border-land. The materials were all in print, and were the daily bread of scholars. A celebrated Anglican described Döllinger at that time as more intentional than Fleury; while Catholics objected that he was a candid friend; and Lutherans, probing deeper, observed that he resolutely held his ground wherever he could, and as resolutely abandoned every position that he found untenable. I-Ie has since said of himself that he always spoke sincerely, but that he spoke as an advocate-a sincere advocate who pleaded only for a cause which he had convinced himself was just. The cause he pleaded was the divine government of the Church, the fulfilment of the promise that it would be preserved from error, though not from sin, the uninterrupted employment of the powers committed by Christ for the salvation of man. By the absence of false arts he acquired that repute for superior integrity \vhich caused a Tyrolese divine to speak of him as the most chivalrous of the Catholic celebrities; and the nuncio who was at Munich during the first ten years called him the" professeur Ie pI us éclairé, Ie plus religieux, en un mot Ie plus distingué de l'université." Taking his survey from the elevation of general history, he gives less space to all the early heresies together than to the rise of Mohammedanism. His \vay lies between Neander, who cares for no institutions, and Baur, ,vho cares for no individuals. He ,vas entirely exempt from that impersonal idealism which Sybel laid do\vn at the
