the calm
indifference of Ranke, he was conscious that, in early life, he had been
too positive, and too eager to persuade. The Belgian scholar who,
conversing with him in 1842, was reminded of Fenelon, missed the acuter
angles of his character. He, who in private intercourse sometimes
allowed himself to persist, to contradict, and even to baffle a bore by
frankly falling asleep, would have declined the evocation of Versailles.
But in reasonableness, moderation, and charity, in general culture of
mind and the sense of the demands of the progress of civilisation, in
the ideal church for which he lived, he was more in harmony with Fenelon
than with many others who resembled him in the character of their work.

He deemed it catholic to take ideas from history, and heresy to take
them into it. When men gave evidence for the opposite party, and against
their own, he willingly took for impartiality what he could not always
distinguish from indifference or subdivision. He felt that sincere
history was the royal road to religious union, and he specially
cultivated those who saw both sides. He would cite with complacency what
clever Jesuits, Raynaud and Faure, said for the Reformation, Mariana and
Cordara against their society. When a Rhenish Catholic and a Genevese
Calvinist drew two portraits of Calvin which were virtually the same, or
when, in Ficker's revision of Boehmer, the Catholic defended the Emperor
Frederic II. against the Protestant, he rejoiced as over a sign of the
advent of science. As the Middle Ages, rescued from polemics by the
genial and uncritical sympathy of Mueller, became an object of popular
study, and Royer Collard said of Villemain, _Il a fait, il fait, et il
fera toujours son Gregoire VII._, there were Catholics who desired, by a
prolonged _sorites_, to derive advantage from the new spirit. Wiseman
consulted Doellinger for the purpose. "Will you be kind enough to write
me a list of what you consider the best books for the history of the
Reformation; Menzel and Buchholz I know; especially any exposing the
characters of the leading reformers?" In the same frame of mind he asked
him what pope there was whose good name had not been vindicated; and
Doellinger's reply, that Boniface VIII. wanted a friend, prompted both
Wiseman's article and Tosti's book.

In politics, as in religion, he made the past a law for the present, and
resisted doctrines which are ready-made, and are not derived from
experience. Cons