orbits, to hold up
great men and examples of Christian virtue.

Doellinger, who had in youth acted as secretary to Hohenlohe, was always
reserved in his use of the supernatural. In the vision of Constantine
and the rebuilding of the temple, he gives his reader both the natural
explanation and the miraculous. He thought that the witness of the
fathers to the continuance of miraculous powers could not be resisted
without making history _a priori_, but later on, the more he sifted and
compared authorities, the more severe he became. He deplored the
uncritical credulity of the author of the _Monks of the West_; and, in
examining the Stigmata, he cited the experience of a Spanish convent
where they were so common that it became a sign of reprobation to be
without them. Historians, he said, have to look for natural causes:
enough will remain for the action of Providence, where we cannot
penetrate. In his unfinished book on _Ecclesiastical Prophecy_ he
enumerates the illusions of mediaeval saints when they spoke of the
future, and describes them, as he once described Carlyle and Ruskin, as
prophets having nothing to foretell. At Frankfort, where he spoilt his
watch by depositing it in unexpected holy water, and it was whispered
that he had put it there to mend it, everybody knew that there was
hardly a Catholic in the Parliament of whom such a fable could be told
with more felicitous unfitness.

For twenty years of his life at Munich, Goerres was the impressive
central figure of a group reputed far and wide, the most intellectual
force in the Catholic world. Seeing things by the light of other days,
Nippold and Maurenbrecher describe Doellinger himself as its most eminent
member. There was present gain and future peril in living amongst a
clever but restricted set, sheltered, supported, and restrained by
friends who were united in aims and studies, who cherished their
sympathies and their enmities in common, and who therefore believed that
they were divided by no deep cleft or ultimate principle. Doellinger
never outlived the glamour of the eloquence and ascendancy of Goerres,
and spoke of him long after his death as a man of real knowledge, and of
greater religious than political insight Between the imaginative
rhetorician and the measured, scrutinising scholar, the contrast was
wide. One of the many pupils and rare disciples of the former complained
that his friend supplied interminable matter for the sterile and
unavaili