49 he was invited to
occupy the chair of ecclesiastical history. In 1848, when nearly every
throne in Europe was shaken by the spread of revolutionary sentiments,
he was elected delegate to the national German assembly at Frankfort,--a
sufficient proof that at this time he was regarded as no mere narrow and
technical theologian, but as a man of wide and independent views.

It has been said that his change of relations to the Papacy dated from
the Italian war in 1859, but no sufficient reason has been given for
this statement. It is more probable that, like Grosseteste, he had
imbibed in early youth an enthusiastic sentiment of attachment to the
Papacy as the only centre of authority, and the only guarantee for
public order in the Church, but that his experience of the actual
working of the papal system (and especially a visit to Rome in 1857) had
to a certain extent convinced him how little correspondence there was
between his ideal and the reality. He may also have been unfavourably
impressed with the promulgation by Pius IX. in 1854 of the dogma of the
Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin. But whatever may have been
his reasons, he ultimately became the leader of those who were
energetically opposed to any addition to, or more stringent definition
of, the powers which the Papacy had possessed for centuries. In some
speeches delivered at Munich in 1861 he outspokenly declared his view
that the maintenance of the Roman Catholic Church did not depend on the
temporal sovereignty of the pope. His book on _The Church and the
Churches_ (Munich, 1861) dealt to a certain extent with the same
question. In 1863 he invited 100 theologians to meet at Malines and
discuss the question which Lamennais and Lacordaire had prematurely
raised in France, namely, the attitude that should be assumed by the
Roman Catholic Church towards modern ideas. His address to the assembled
divines was "practically a declaration of war against the Ultramontane
party." He had spoken boldly in favour of freedom for the Church in the
Frankfort national assembly in 1848, but he had found the authorities of
his Church claiming a freedom of a very different kind from that for
which he had contended. The freedom he claimed for the Church was
freedom to manage her affairs without the interference of the state; the
champions of the papal monarchy, and notably the Jesuits, desired
freedom in order to put a stop to the dissemination of modern ideas. The
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