severe on his
theological ethics.

Meinerseits habe ich noch eine andre schwere Anklage gegen ihn zu
erheben, naemlich die, dass er durch seine falsche Imputationslehre
das sittlich-religioese Bewusstseyn der Menschen auf zwei Jahrhunderte
hinaus verwirrt und corrumpirt hat (3rd July 1888).

The revolution of 1848, during which he did not hold his professorship,
brought him forward uncongenially in active public life, and gave him
the means of telling the world his view of the constitution and policy
of the Church, and the sense and limits of liability in which he gave
his advocacy. When lecturing on canon law he was accustomed to dwell on
the strict limit of all ecclesiastical authority, admitting none but
spiritual powers, and invoking the maxims of pontiffs who professed
themselves guardians, not masters, of the established legislation--"Canones
ecclesiae solvere non possumus, qui custodes canonum sumus." Acting on
these principles, in the Paulskirche, and at Ratisbon, he vindicated Rome
against the reproach of oppression, argued that society can only gain by
the emancipation of the Church, as it claims no superiority over the State,
and that both Gallicans and Jesuits are out of date. Addressing the
bishops of Germany in secret session at Wuerzburg, he exhorted them to
avail themselves fully of an order of things which was better than the old,
and to make no professions of unconditional allegiance. He told them that
freedom is the breath of the Catholic life, that it belongs to the Church
of God by right divine, and that whatever they claimed must be claimed for
others.

From these discourses, in which the scholar abandoned the details by
which science advances for the general principles of the popular orator,
the deductions of liberalism proceed as surely as the revolution from
the title-page of Sieyes. It should seem that the key to his career lies
there. It was natural to associate him with the men whom the early
promise of a reforming pope inspired to identify the cause of free
societies with the papacy which had Rosmini for an adviser, Ventura for
a preacher, Gioberti for a prophet, and to conclude that he thus became
a trusted representative, until the revolving years found him the
champion of a vanished cause, and the Syllabus exposed the illusion and
bore away his ideal. Harless once said of him that no good could be
expected from a man surrounded by a ring of liberals. When Doellinger
made pe