DÖLLINGER'S HISTORICAL WORK 395
communities that hold it he stood in order of battle, and believed that he could scarcely hit too hard. But he distinguished very broadly the religion of the reformers from the religion of Protestants. Theological science had moved away from the symbolical books, the root dogma had been repudiated and contested by the most eminent Protestants, and it was an English bishop ,vho wrote: " Fuit haec doctrina jam a multis annis ipsissimum Refor- matae Ecclesiae opprobrium ac dedecus.- Est error non levis, error putidissimus." Since so many of the best writers resist or modify that which was the main cause, the sole ultimate cause, of disunion, it cannot be logically iInpossible to discover a reasonable basis for discussion, Therefore conciliation was ahvays in his thoughts; even his Refor1Jzation was a treatise on the conditions of reunion. He long purposed to continue it, in narro\ver limits, as a history of that central doctrine by which Luther meant his church to stand or faU, of the reaction against it, and of its decline. In 188 I, \vhen Ritschl, the author of the chief work upon the subject, spent some days with Döllinger, he found him still full of these ideas, and pos- sessing Luther at his fingers' ends, This is the reason why Protestants have found him so earnest an opponent and so \varm a friend. It was this that attracted him to\vards Anglicans, and made very many of them admire a Roman dignitary who knew the Anglo- Catholic library better than De Lugo or Ripalda. In the same spirit he said to Pusey: "Tales cum sitis jam nostri estis," always spoke of Newman's Justification as the greatest masterpiece of theology that England has pro- duced in a hundred years, and described Baxter and Wesley as the most eminent of English Protestants- meaning Wesley as he \vas after I st December I 767, and Baxter as the life-long opponent of that theory which was the source and the soul of the Reformation. Severa] Englishmen \vho went to consult him-Hope Scott and Archdeacon Wilberforce-became Catholics. I kno\v not whether he urged them. Others there were, whom he did not urge, though his influence over them might have been
