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ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
valued passages in Philo, and stood with Gass 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 ,vhom he prized higher than Le Blant: yet he considered Ruinart credulous in dealing with acts of early martyrs. A pupil on whose friendship 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 POþe Fables carried the critical inquiry a veJY 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. Döllinger began to be absorbed in the long train of hierarchica] fictions, \vhich had deceived men like Gregory VI!., St. Thomas Aquinas, and Cardinal Bellarmine, which he traced up to the false Areopagite, and down to the Laminæ Granatenses. These studies became the chief occupation of his life; they led to his ex- communication in 187 I, and carried him a\vay from his early system. For this, neither syllabus nor ecumenical 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 \vhich was published under the name of Janus. But the history itself, \vhich ,vas the main and character- istic work of his life, and was pursued until the end, was never published or completed. I-Ie died without making it known to what extent, within what limit, the ideas \vith which he had been so long identified were changed by his later studies, and how wide a trench had opened
