ld
supply--so comprehensive and so suggestive a description of the state of
the Protestant religion, or so impartial an account of the causes which
have brought on the crisis of the temporal power.

The _Symbolik_ of Moehler was suggested by the beginning of that movement
of revival and resuscitation amongst the Protestants, of which Doellinger
now surveys the fortunes and the result. The interval of thirty years
has greatly altered the position of the Catholic divines towards their
antagonists. Moehler had to deal with the ideas of the Reformation, the
works of the Reformers, and the teaching of the confessions; he had to
answer in the nineteenth century the theology of the sixteenth. The
Protestantism for which he wrote was a complete system, antagonistic to
the whole of Catholic theology, and he confuted the one by comparing it
with the other, dogma for dogma. But that of which Doellinger treats has
lost, for the most part, those distinctive doctrines, not by the growth
of unbelief, but in consequence of the very efforts which its most
zealous and religious professors have made to defend and to redeem it.
The contradictions and errors of the Protestant belief were formerly the
subject of controversy with its Catholic opponents, but now the
controversy is anticipated and prevented by the undisguised admissions
of its desponding friends. It stands no longer as a system consistent,
complete, satisfying the judgment and commanding the unconditional
allegiance of its followers, and fortified at all points against
Catholicism; but disorganised as a church, its doctrines in a state of
dissolution, despaired of by its divines, strong and compact only in its
hostility to Rome, but with no positive principle of unity, no ground of
resistance, nothing to have faith in but the determination to reject
authority. This, therefore, is the point which Doellinger takes up.
Reducing the chief phenomena of religious and social decline to the one
head of failing authority, he founds on the state of Protestantism the
apology of the Papacy. He abandons to the Protestant theology the
destruction of the Protestant Church, and leaves its divines to confute
and abjure its principles in detail, and to arrive by the exhaustion of
the modes of error, through a painful but honourable process, at the
gates of truth; he meets their arguments simply by a chapter of
ecclesiastical history, of which experience teaches them the force; and
he opposes to