ch he would not have liked to say in public:

Il est certain que la seconde partie de votre livre deplaira
beaucoup, non seulement a Rome, mais encore a la tres grande majorite
des Catholiques. Je ne sais donc pas si, dans le cas ou vous
m'eussiez consulte prealablement, j'aurais eu le courage d'infliger
cette blessure a mon pere et a mes freres.

Doellinger judged that the prerogative even of natural wisdom was often
wanting in the government of the Church; and the sense of personal
attachment, if he ever entertained it, had worn away in the friction and
familiarity of centuries.

After the disturbing interlude of the Roman question he did not resume
the history of Christianity. The second century with its fragments of
information, its scope for piercing and conjecture, he left to
Lightfoot. With increasing years he lost the disposition to travel on
common ground, impregnably occupied by specialists, where he had nothing
of his own to tell; and he preferred to work where he could be a
pathfinder. Problems of Church government had come to the front, and he
proposed to retraverse his subject, narrowing it into a history of the
papacy. He began by securing his foundations and eliminating legend. He
found so much that was legendary that his critical preliminaries took
the shape of a history of fables relating to the papacy. Many of these
were harmless: others were devised for a purpose, and he fixed his
attention more and more on those which were the work of design. The
question, how far the persistent production of spurious matter had
permanently affected the genuine constitution and theology of the Church
arose before his mind as he composed the _Papstfabeln des Mittelalters_.
He indicated the problem without discussing it. The matter of the volume
was generally neutral, but its threatening import was perceived, and
twenty-one hostile critics sent reviews of it to one theological
journal.

Since he first wrote on these matters, thirty years earlier, the advance
of competitive learning had made it a necessity to revise statements by
all accessible lights, and to subject authorities to a closer scrutiny.
The increase in the rigour of the obligation might be measured by
Tischendorf, who, after renewing the text of the New Testament in seven
editions, had more than three thousand changes to make in the eighth.
The old pacific superficial method yielded no longer what would be
accepted as certain knowledge.