Page:History of Freedom.djvu/478

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

434

ESSAYS ON LIBERTY

.

admiranda atque imitanda fere censemus, ea in Doellingerc maxime splendent." The patriotic quality was recognised in the address of the Berlin professors, ,\Tho say that by upholding the independence of the national thought, whilst he enriched it with the best treasure of other lands, he realised the ideal of the historian. He became more German in extreme old age, and less impressive in his idiomatic French and English than in his own language. The lamentations of men he thought good judges, Mazade and Taine, and the first of literary critics, Montégut, diluted somewhat his admiration for the country of St. Bernard and Bossuet. In spite of politics, his feeling for English character, for the moral quality of English litera- ture, never changed; and he told his own people that their faults are not only very near indeed to their virtues, but are sometimes more apparent to the observer. The belief in the fixity and influence of national type, confirmed by his authorities, Ganganelli and Möhler, continued to determine his judgments. In his last letter to Mr. Glad- stone, he illustrated the Irish question by means of a chronicle describing Ireland a thousand years ago. Everybody has felt that his po\ver was out of propor- tion to his work, and that he kne\v too much to wtite. It \vas so much better to hear him than to read all his books, that the memory of what he was will pass away with the children whom he loved. Hcfele called him the first theologian in Germany, and Höfler said that he surpassed all men in the knowledge of historical literature; but Hefele \vas the bishop of his predilection, and Höfler had been fifty years his friend, and is the last survivor of the group which once made Munich the capital of citramontane Catholicity. Martensen, the most brilliant of Episcopalian divines, describes hin1 as he talked with equal knowledge and certainty of every age, and understood all characters and all situations as if he had lived in the midst of them. The best ecclesiastical historian ,no,v living is the fittest judge of the great ecclesiastical historian \vho is dead. Harnack has assigned causes \vhich limited his greatness as a ,vriter, perhaps even as a thinker; but he has declared