nk,
completely justified, in principle if not in all the facts, the
conduct of those who have determined to do away with it.

The policy of exalting the spiritual authority though at the expense of
sacrifices in the temporal, the moderation even in the catalogue of
faults, the side blow at the Protestants, filling more than half the
volume, disarmed for a moment the resentment of outraged Rome. The Pope,
on a report from Theiner, spoke of the book as one that might do good.
Others said that it was pointless, that its point was not where the
author meant it to be, that the handle was sharper than the blade. It
was made much more clear that the Pope had governed badly than that
Russia or Great Britain would gain by his supremacy. The cold analysis,
the diagnosis by the bedside of the sufferer, was not the work of an
observer dazzled by admiration or blinded by affection. It was a step, a
first unconscious, unpremeditated step, in the process of detachment.
The historian here began to prevail over the divine, and to judge Church
matters by a law which was not given from the altar. It was the outcome
of a spirit which had been in him from the beginning. His English
translator had uttered a mild protest against his severe treatment of
popes. His censure of the Reformation had been not as that of Bossuet,
but as that of Baxter and Bull. In 1845 Mr. Gladstone remarked that he
would answer every objection, but never proselytised. In 1848 he rested
the claims of the Church on the common law, and bade the hierarchy
remember that national character is above free will: "Die Nationalitaet
ist etwas der Freiheit des menschlichen Willens entruecktes,
geheimnissvolles und in ihrem letzen Grunde selbst etwas von Gott
gewolltes." In his _Hippolytus_ he began by surrendering the main point,
that a man who so vilified the papacy might yet be an undisputed saint.
In the _Vorhalle_ he flung away a favourite argument, by avowing that
paganism developed by its own lines and laws, untouched by Christianity,
until the second century; and as with the Gentiles, so with the sects;
he taught, in the suppressed chapter of his history, that their
doctrines followed a normal course. And he believed so far in the
providential mission of Protestantism, that it was idle to talk of
reconciliation until it had borne all its fruit. He exasperated a Munich
colleague by refusing to pronounce whether Gregory and Innocent had the
right to depose emperors,