. A pupil on whose friendship he relied, made
an effort to rescue the legends of the conversion of Germany; but the
master preferred the unsparing demolitions of Rettberg. Capponi and Carl
Hegel were his particular friends; but he abandoned them without
hesitation for Scheffer Boichorst, the iconoclast of early Italian
chronicles, and never consented to read the learned reply of Da Lungo.

The _Pope Fables_ carried the critical inquiry a very little way; but he
went on with the subject. After the Donation of Constantine came the
Forged Decretals, which were just then printed for the first time in an
accurate edition. Doellinger began to be absorbed in the long train of
hierarchical fictions, which had deceived men like Gregory VII., St.
Thomas Aquinas, and Cardinal Bellarmine, which he traced up to the false
Areopagite, and down to the Laminae Granatenses. These studies became the
chief occupation of his life; they led to his excommunication in 1871,
and carried him away from his early system. For this, neither syllabus
nor ecumenical council was needed; neither crimes nor scandals were its
distant cause. The history of Church government was the influence which
so profoundly altered his position. Some trace of his researches, at an
early period of their progress, appears in what he wrote on the occasion
of the Vatican Council, especially in the fragment of an ecclesiastical
pathology which was published under the name of Janus. But the history
itself, which was the main and characteristic work of his life, and was
pursued until the end, was never published or completed. He died without
making it known to what extent, within what limit, the ideas with which
he had been so long identified were changed by his later studies, and
how wide a trench had opened between his earlier and his later life.
Twenty years of his historical work are lost for history.

The revolution in method since he began to write was partly the better
use of old authorities, partly the accession of new. Doellinger had
devoted himself to the one in 1863; he passed to the other in 1864. For
definite objects he had often consulted manuscripts, but the harvest was
stacked away, and had scarcely influenced his works. In the use and
knowledge of unpublished matter he still belonged to the old school, and
was on a level with Neander. Although, in later years, he printed six or
seven volumes of Inedita, like Mai and Theiner he did not excel as an
editor: and