the exposition of doctrines, but who, in narrative, description, and
knowledge of character, was neither first nor second, resolved that his
mission was history.

In early life he had picked up chance copies of Baronius and Petavius,
the pillars of historic theology; but the motives of his choice lay
deeper. Church history had long been the weakest point and the cause of
weakness among the Catholics, and it was the rising strength of the
German Protestants. Therefore it was the post of danger; and it gave to
a theologian the command of a public of laymen. The restoration of
history coincided with the euthanasia of metaphysic; when the foremost
philosophic genius of the time led over to the historic treatment both
of philosophy and religion, and Hamilton, Cousin, Comte, severally
converted the science into its history. Many men better equipped for
speculation than for erudition went the same way; the systematic
theology was kept up in the universities by the influence of Rome, where
scholasticism went on untouched by the romantic transformation. Writing
of England, Wiseman said: "There is still a scholastic hardness in our
controversial theology, an unbendingness of outward forms in our
explanations of Catholic principles, which renders our theologians dry
and unattractive to the most catholicly inclined portion of our
Protestants." The choice which these youths made, towards 1830, was,
though they did not know it, the beginning of a rift that widened.

Doellinger was more in earnest than others in regarding Christianity as
history, and in pressing the affinity between catholic and historical
thought. Systems were to him nearly as codes to Savigny, when he
exhorted his contemporaries not to consolidate their law, lest, with
their wisdom and knowledge, they should incorporate their delusions and
their ignorance, and usurp for the state what belonged to the nation. He
would send an inquiring student to the _Historia Congregationis de
Auxiliis_ and the _Historia Pelagiana_ rather than to Molina or Lemos,
and often gave the advice which, coming from Oriel, disconcerted Morris
of Exeter: "I am afraid you will have to read the Jesuit Petavius." He
dreaded the predominance of great names which stop the way, and
everything that interposes the notions of an epoch, a region, or a
school between the Church and the observer.

To an Innsbruck professor, lamenting that there was no philosophy which
he could heartily adopt, he replie