ART. II.-1. Studies in European History, being Academical Addresses delivered by JOHN IGNATIUS VON DÖLLINGER, D.D., late Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Munich. Translated at the request of the Author by Margaret Warre. London, 1890.

2. Briefe und Erklärungen von J. von Döllinger über die Vaticanischen Decrete, 1869-1887. Munich, 1890.

3. The Pope and the Council. By Janus. English translation. London, 1869.

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HE year which has just closed has deprived the religious world of two of its most conspicuous figures, Newman and Döllinger. Born within a year of each other,* they 1 ended their long pilgrimage of nearly ninety years at an interval of a few months. They had seen three generations of men; the reign of Napoleon, the Revolution of 1848, the Vatican Decrees. To the one, outward events were but the waves beating against the ship of the Church; to the other, they were a part of the discipline of the Church, ordained as she was to mingle with and colour the stream of human affairs. The one began his life as a member of a 'schismatic' Church, and ended it in peaceful possession of the highest Roman th dignity; the other commenced his long career of study as a pa defender of the Roman Church, and died excommunicate. To

the one, authority was the ultimate judge; to the other, reason re also was the guide of conscience and the interpreter of authority: de and in this difference lies the separation between their minds and their fortunes. A little more or less, and Newman might have been the outcast and Döllinger the Cardinal; for it is partly choice and partly chance which ranges Erasmus and Pascal on the side of Rome, and Calvin in the opposite camp. But the difference between the minds of the two men who have passed away was deeper than can be expressed by the dignities or the anathemas of the Roman Church, and the end of each was the natural result of the life. Newman was acute, imaginative, logical; content with the deductive method even to paradox; occupied more with the problems of humanity than those of history, and interested rather in religion than theology; a poet, not a man of massive learning—a more beautiful, if not a more venerable, figure than Döllinger. Newman will be remembered when Döllinger is forgotten, for the sacred fire of genius burns in all that he wrote, and he helps men to feel by feeling with them. But as a man of learning and a historian (and

* Newman was born Feb. 21, 1800; Döllinger, Feb. 27, 1799. Vol. 172.-No. 343.

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Döllinger

Döllinger acknowledged his merit in that line of literature) Newman cannot be mentioned in the same category as Döllinger. To Newman, indeed, it may be said that legend was as good as history, when the character of a saint or a period of the Church was concerned; not that he was indifferent to the claims of truth, or unfair in judging the adverse cause, but because to his mind the supernatural was as familiar as the natural, and he did not apply rigid tests to facts, the outcome of which fell in with his belief. He was always true to logic, but he did not always insist on the validity of his premisses. And so, though as we read him we are dazzled and hurried along, half consenting, by a magnificent display of rhetoric in logical forms, our assent is won rather by force than by persuasion. Take, for instance, one of the finest passages to be found in Newman's works, the comparison in the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine' of the Church of Rome in modern times with the primitive Church of Christ. The parallel is admirably drawn, but it contains only points of agreement, and with a few alterations of facts it might apply as well to Quakerism or Judaism as to Catholicism. The method of cumulative argument is a favourite one with Newman; and there is no method in which the premisses have to be more carefully weighed.

This is not the case with Döllinger. His arguments carry conviction by weight, not brilliancy. He surveys the whole field, and he is one of the few who have the right to say, as he did, that some historical inductions are of the nature of mathematical proof. Broad, rational, and practical, his intelligence comprehends not a view nor a portion, but the whole of his subject. He knows the facts and what has been said of them. He is a historian rather of the type of Ranke than of Mommsen or Stubbs; a scholar whose knowledge is powerful by its extent and depth, rather than by the glance of genius, or by the force of accuracy and the insistence of detail. It might be interesting to speculate what would have been Döllinger's career if he had lived in Berlin instead of Munich, and had been brought up as a Protestant. The theologian in him, to some extent, cramped the historian, at least in choice of subjects. But though he cared much for dogma, he cared more for truth. He deserved the praise given him by the University of Oxford in 1871, that in treating controversies he had accomplished the difficult task of showing himself rather a judge than a litigant.' He deals with Church questions of the early and Middle Ages as freely as Milman, and (in his later works at least) from much the same point of view.

A priest

A priest and a devout Catholic, it would be impossible for him to be indifferent to religious truth, as set forth by the Church of Rome; but his conclusions are for the most part those of a philosopher rather than a theologian. He makes a saving clause for theology, but his conclusions show that the bent of his intellect is scientific, whatever his religious creed may be. And in this he differs from Newman. It was his fate to come into antagonism with the ruling powers of the Church to which he owed (and never refused) obedience. He was opposed to the monarchical and centralizing tendencies of Rome. He will be remembered with the champions of liberty in earlier ages, the objects of his admiration whether Catholic or heretical, Grosseteste, Gerson, Sarpi, Bossuet, all those who had maintained the rights of national churches; for Döllinger was, as he called himself, Germanissimus Germanorum,' and it was as a supposed advocate of the national rights of the Church in Germany that he was first looked coldly upon by the Roman Curia.

He comes before us as the latest instance to show the world how unchangeable is the principle of the Roman Church, to allow no learning and no government beyond her pale, unless under protest. That so orthodox and pious a divine should have died under ecclesiastical censure is a fresh proof that Rome has abandoned none of her pretensions, and that, if she ever regains her old authority, princes may again have to go to Canossa and enquirers to the stake. A short notice of his life may throw some light upon the character and the studies which are incompatible with the Roman rule of faith, and may be not without instruction in showing the modern tendencies of Catholicism.

Joseph Ignatius Döllinger, the son of a well-known physician at Bamberg, entered the priesthood at an early age, and was already at the age of twenty-seven known as a learned theologian. The year 1826 saw his first important work, a dissertation on the Eucharistic doctrine of the first three centuries; and for nearly forty years after this date he was looked upon as the champion of Catholicism in Germany, entering the lists with such antagonists as Ranke himself; but always earning the reputation of a fair-minded disputant, one whose love of truth was as great as his erudition, and who was never led into dishonesty by the exigencies of controversy or the desire to make out a case for the Church. This polemical attitude was forced upon him by his position as a sincere Catholic and a learned man. His natural bent was that of an enquirer, not an apologist ; D 2

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and in the course of enquiry he arrived at results which were not in agreement with his earlier works. Thus when he was asked not many years ago to re-edit his book on Church History, published in 1838, he replied that he had learnt so much in the interval that the whole work would have to be rewritten. A progressive character of mind is looked upon with suspicion by ecclesiastics, and accounts for the growing dislike in which he was held at Rome. We cannot regard it as altogether a subject of regret that Döllinger began life in harmony with the Ultramontane party. It is a gain, not a loss, to a historian to be religious; and it may well be that the defensive habit of mind secured him from the extreme views so common in Germany. In the book before us there is little to distinguish the writer from the spirit in which Ranke writes; and there is little doubt that the hostility, which he incurred in connection with the Vatican Council, freed his hands, and showed him that his way of thinking had been throughout his life liberal rather than orthodox, though piety and humility and loyalty to his Church had kept him within the bounds of obedience.

This is not the occasion for a review of the whole compass of Dr. von Döllinger's work—we will only say in passing, that his writings, besides their principal function of elucidating history, had from the Catholic point of view a polemical, and from the liberal side a political, bearing. Thus he dealt with the question of mixed marriages, the emancipation of the Jews, the Tractarian movement, the separation of Church and State, as well as the history of the primitive and medieval Church and the Reformation. The volume of Lectures before us, translated from the original (no unworthy tribute to the great scholar's memory) by Miss Margaret Warre, touches on several sides of German history, on some aspects of the medieval Church, and on the influence exercised by Madame de Maintenon upon the Gallican Church. It is the work of a Churchman; but a Churchman who held that the Church has to take as well as to give, and must be willing to learn from philosophers and statesmen. The book is interesting also, as containing Döllinger's latest thoughts on many subjects of importance.

We have spoken of the Revolution of 1848 as characteristic of the second age of Döllinger's life. In the term 1848 we include the action of Lamennais, twenty years earlier, as well as that of Montalembert, when the two friends parted company. Döllinger tried to combine the two. In loyalty to the Roman Church he thought with Montalembert; in his desire to free the Church from State interference he agreed with Lamennais, who

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had endeavoured in 1830 to gain the assent of Rome to his schemes for Church reform. But he did not yet perceive that Lamennais' action as well as his own was incompatible with the policy of the Curia. Döllinger had no great personal sympathy with Lamennais, whom he distrusted as a fanatic, and possibly disliked as a Frenchman. But he approved Lamennais' principles, the freedom of the Press, of association, and of education, and the doctrine that State and Church ought to be separate and independent, with its corollary, that the Church had suffered in liberty and spirituality whenever (as in France) it had enjoyed State patronage, and that the temporal sovereignty of the Popes was an excrescence and a burden on the Papacy.

The twenty years which followed were occupied partly with political life, but much more in that unceasing literary labour to which were devoted nearly twelve hours of every day. Döllinger never professed to be, like his father, a great teacher; but his lectures on Church History were greatly valued by students, and his fame as a historian and his reputation as an ecclesiastical leader increased year by year. Like Ranke, he was well acquainted with the general literature and politics of his time, as is shown, for instance, by his book on The Church and the Churches'; like him, too, he was consulted by sovereigns and statesmen, and regarded as a man of the world as well as a scholar. The breadth and soundness of his culture are borne witness to by his numerous English friends, and especially in some interesting papers by Dr. Plummer of Durham, lately contributed to the Expositor.'* Nothing was too minute, nothing too remote for him; and to every subject he brought the same temperate judgment and the same kindly and impartial temper.

The years between 1830 and 1860 were among the happiest and most prosperous of Dr. Döllinger's life. His reputation as a scholar was spreading over Europe as well as in Germany. He was the counsellor of princes, and exercised an influence in the affairs of his country. He enjoyed great honour there and held high official positions. He was even dignified at Rome with the title of Monsignore.' A wide correspondence brought him into contact and familiar intercourse with learned men of all countries, among the chief of whom may be mentioned Lord Acton, Dr. Liddon, Bishop Forbes, Dr. Pusey, and Mr. Gladstone. His learning was of that fruitful sort which brings the resources of the whole mind to bear on each point, and which is continually enriching itself from its own stores.

* Nos. III., IV., VI., VIII., March, April, June, August, 1890.

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