ges, and gathered, if they were intelligent, some notion of the meaning
of history; but nobody ever learnt from him the mechanism by which it is
written.

Brougham advised the law-student to begin with Dante; and a
distinguished physician informs us that Gibbon, Grote, and Mill made him
what he is. The men to whom Doellinger owed his historic insight and who
mainly helped to develop and strengthen and direct his special faculty,
were not all of his own cast, or remarkable in the common description of
literary talent. The assistants were countless, but the masters were
few, and he looked up with extraordinary gratitude to men like Sigonius,
Antonius Augustinus, Blondel, Petavius, Leibniz, Burke, and Niebuhr, who
had opened the passes for him as he struggled and groped in the
illimitable forest.

He interrupted his work because he found the materials too scanty for
the later Middle Ages, and too copious for the Reformation. The
defective account of the Albigensian theology, which he had sent to one
of his translators, never appeared in German. At Paris he searched the
library for the missing information, and he asked Resseguier to make
inquiry for the records of the Inquisition in Languedoc, thus laying the
foundations of that _Sektengeschichte_ which he published fifty years
later. Munich offered such inexhaustible supplies for the Reformation
that his collections overran all bounds. He completed only that part of
his plan which included Lutheranism and the sixteenth century. The third
volume, published in 1848, containing the theology of the Reformation,
is the most solid of his writings. He had miscalculated, not his
resources, of which only a part had come into action, but the
possibilities of concentration and compression. The book was left a
fragment when he had to abandon his study for the Frankfort barricades.

The peculiarity of his treatment is that he contracts the Reformation
into a history of the doctrine of justification. He found that this and
this alone was the essential point in Luther's mind, that he made it the
basis of his argument, the motive of his separation, the root and
principle of his religion. He believed that Luther was right in the
cardinal importance he attributed to this doctrine in his system, and he
in his turn recognised that it was the cause of all that followed, the
source of the reformer's popularity and success, the sole insurmountable
obstacle to every scheme of restoration. It wa