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ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
historian does well to keep out of the way, to be humble and self-denying, making it a religious duty to prevent the intrusion of all that betrays his own position and quality, his hopes and wishes. \Vithout aspiring to the caIrn indifference of Ranke, he was conscious that, in early life, he had been too positive, and too eager to persuade. The Belgian scholar who, conversing \vith him in 1842, \vas reminded of Fénelon, missed the acuter angles of his character. He, \vho in private intercourse sometÏI11es allowed himself to persist, to contradict, and even to baffle a bore by frankly falling asleep, would have declined the evocation of Versailles. But in reasonableness, moderation, and charity, in general culture of mind and the sense of the demands of the progress of civilisation, in the ideal church for which he lived, he \vas more in harmony with Fénelon than with many others who re- sem bled him in the character of their work. He deemed it catholic to take ideas from history, and heresy to take them, into it. When men gave evidence for the opposite party, and against their own, he willingly took for impartiality what he could not ahvays distinguish from indifference or subdivision.. He felt that sincere history was the royal road to religious union, and he specially cultivated those \vho sa \v both sides. He would cite with complacency what clever Jesuits, Raynaud and Faure, said for the Reformation, Mariana and Cordara against their society. When a Rhenish Catholic and a Genevese Calvinist drew two portraits of Calvin \vhich were virtually the same, or when, in Ficker's revision of Böhmer, the Catholic defended the Emperor Frederic 11. against the Protestant, he rejoiced as over a sign of the advent of science. As the l\1iddle Ages, rescued from polemics by the genial and uncritical sympathy of Müller, became an object of popular study, and Royer Collard said of Villemain, It a fait, it fait, et zt (era touJours son Grégoire VI I., there \vere Catholics who desired, by a prolonged sorites, to derive advantage from the ne\v spirit. Wiseman consulted Döllinger for the purpose. " \Vill you be kind enough to \vrite me a list of what you consider
