of the
Reformation. Several Englishmen who went to consult him--Hope Scott and
Archdeacon Wilberforce--became Catholics. I know not whether he urged
them. Others there were, whom he did not urge, though his influence over
them might have been decisive. In a later letter to Pusey he wrote: "I
am convinced by reading your _Eirenicon_ that we are united inwardly in
our religious convictions, although externally we belong to two
separated churches." He followed attentively the parallel movements that
went on in his own country, and welcomed with serious respect the
overtures which came to him, after 1856, from eminent historians. When
they were old men, he and Ranke, whom, in hot youth, there was much to
part, lived on terms of mutual goodwill. Doellinger had pronounced the
theology of the _Deutsche Reformation_ slack and trivial, and Ranke at
one moment was offended by what he took for an attack on the popes, his
patrimony. In 1865, after a visit to Munich, he allowed that in religion
there was no dispute between them, that he had no fault to find with the
Church as Doellinger understood it. He added that one of his colleagues,
a divine whose learning filled him with unwonted awe, held the same
opinion. Doellinger's growing belief that an approximation of part of
Germany to sentiments of conciliation was only a question of time, had
much to do with his attitude in Church questions after the year 1860. If
history cannot confer faith or virtue, it can clear away the
misconceptions and misunderstandings that turn men against one another.
With the progress of incessant study and meditation his judgment on many
points underwent revision; but with regard to the Reformation the change
was less than he supposed. He learnt to think more favourably of the
religious influence of Protestantism, and of its efficacy in the defence
of Christianity; but he thought as before of the spiritual consequences
of Lutheranism proper. When people said of Luther that he does not come
well out of his matrimonial advice to certain potentates, to Henry and
to Philip, of his exhortations to exterminate the revolted peasantry, of
his passage from a confessor of toleration to a teacher of intolerance,
he would not have the most powerful conductor of religion that
Christianity has produced in eighteen centuries condemned for two pages
in a hundred volumes. But when he had refused the test of the weakest
link, judging the man by his totals, he was not less