s also, for him, the
centre and the basis of his antagonism. That was the point that he
attacked when he combated Protestantism, and he held all other elements
of conflict cheap in comparison, deeming that they are not invariable,
or not incurable, or not supremely serious. Apart from this, there was
much in Protestantism that he admired, much in its effects for which he
was grateful. With the Lutheran view of imputation, Protestant and
Catholic were separated by an abyss. Without it, there was no lasting
reason why they should be separate at all. Against the communities that
hold it he stood in order of battle, and believed that he could scarcely
hit too hard. But he distinguished very broadly the religion of the
reformers from the religion of Protestants. Theological science had
moved away from the symbolical books, the root dogma had been repudiated
and contested by the most eminent Protestants, and it was an English
bishop who wrote: "Fuit haec doctrina jam a multis annis ipsissimum
Reformatae Ecclesiae opprobrium ac dedecus.--Est error non levis, error
putidissimus." Since so many of the best writers resist or modify that
which was the main cause, the sole ultimate cause, of disunion, it
cannot be logically impossible to discover a reasonable basis for
discussion. Therefore conciliation was always in his thoughts; even his
_Reformation_ was a treatise on the conditions of reunion. He long
purposed to continue it, in narrower limits, as a history of that
central doctrine by which Luther meant his church to stand or fall, of
the reaction against it, and of its decline. In 1881, when Ritschl, the
author of the chief work upon the subject, spent some days with
Doellinger, he found him still full of these ideas, and possessing Luther
at his fingers' ends.

This is the reason why Protestants have found him so earnest an opponent
and so warm a friend. It was this that attracted him towards Anglicans,
and made very many of them admire a Roman dignitary who knew the
Anglo-Catholic library better than De Lugo or Ripalda. In the same
spirit he said to Pusey: "Tales cum sitis jam nostri estis," always
spoke of Newman's _Justification_ as the greatest masterpiece of
theology that England has produced in a hundred years, and described
Baxter and Wesley as the most eminent of English Protestants--meaning
Wesley as he was after 1st December 1767, and Baxter as the life-long
opponent of that theory which was the source and the soul