scans had preceded, under the later Stuarts.

He seldom quotes contemporary Germans, unless to dispute with them,
prefers old books to new, and speaks of the necessary revision and
renovation of history. He suspected imported views and foregone
conclusions even in Neander; and although he could not say, with
Macaulay, that Gieseler was a rascal, of whom he had never heard, he
missed no opportunity of showing his dislike for that accomplished
artificer in mosaic. Looking at the literature before him, at England,
with Gibbon for its one ecclesiastical historian; at Germany, with the
most profound of its divines expecting the Church to merge in the State,
he inferred that its historic and organic unity would only be recognised
by Catholic science, while the soundest Protestant would understand it
least. In later years, Kliefoth, Ritschl, Gass, perhaps also Dorner and
Uhlhorn, obliged him to modify an opinion which the entire school of
Schleiermacher, including the illustrious Rothe, served only to confirm.
Germany, as he found it when he began to see the world, little resembled
that of his old age, when the work he had pursued for seventy years was
carried forward, with knowledge and power like his own, by the best of
his countrymen. The proportion of things was changed. There was a
religious literature to be proud of, to rely on: other nations, other
epochs, had lost their superiority. As his own people advanced, and
dominated in the branches of learning to which his life was given, in
everything except literary history and epigraphies, and there was no
more need to look abroad, Doellinger's cosmopolitan characteristic
diminished, he was more absorbed in the national thought and work, and
did not object to be called the most German of the Germans.

The idea that religious science is not so much science as religion, that
it should be treated differently from other matters, so that he who
treats it may rightly display his soul, flourished in his vicinity,
inspiring the lives of Saint Elizabeth and Joan of Arc, Moehler's fine
lectures on the early fathers, and the book which Gratry chose to
entitle a _Commentary on St. Matthew_. Doellinger came early to the
belief that history ought to be impersonal, that the historian does
well to keep out of the way, to be humble and self-denying, making it a
religious duty to prevent the intrusion of all that betrays his own
position and quality, his hopes and wishes. Without aspiring to