something defined and
final, to their keen, grave, unemotional professor, who said sometimes
more than he could be sure of, but who was not likely to abridge thought
by oracular responses, or to give aphorism for argument. He accepted the
necessity of the situation. A time came when everybody was invited, once
a week, to put any imaginable question from the whole of Church history,
and he at once replied. If this was a stimulus to exertion during the
years spent in mastering and pondering the immense materials, it served
less to promote originality and care than premature certitude and the
craving for quick returns. Apart from the constant duty of teaching, his
knowledge might not have been so extensive, but his views would have
been less decided and therefore less liable to change.

As an historian, Doellinger regarded Christianity as a force more than as
a doctrine, and displayed it as it expanded and became the soul of later
history. It was the mission and occupation of his life to discover and
to disclose how this was accomplished, and to understand the history of
civilised Europe, religious and profane, mental and political, by the
aid of sources which, being original and authentic, yielded certainty.
In his vigorous prime, he thought that it would be within his powers to
complete the narrative of the conquest of the world by Christ in a
single massive work. The separated churches, the centrifugal forces,
were to have been treated apart, until he adopted the ampler title of a
history of Christianity. We who look back upon all that the combined and
divided labour of a thousand earnest, gifted, and often instructed men
has done and left undone in sixty years, can estimate the scientific
level of an age where such a dream could be dreamed by such a man,
misled neither by imagination nor ambition, but knowing his own
limitations and the immeasurable world of books. Experience slowly
taught him that he who takes all history for his province is not the man
to write a compendium.

The four volumes of _Church History_ which gave him a name in literature
appeared between 1833 and 1838, and stopped short of the Reformation. In
writing mainly for the horizon of seminaries, it was desirable to eschew
voyages of discovery and the pathless border-land. The materials were
all in print, and were the daily bread of scholars. A celebrated
Anglican described Doellinger at that time as more intentional than
Fleury; while Catholics ob