esign, and infinite
intellect. He imagined a way to truth through error, and outside the
Church, not through unbelief and the diminished reign of Christ.
Lacordaire in the cathedral pulpit offering his thanks to Voltaire for
the good gift of religious toleration, was a figure alien to his spirit.
He never substituted politics for religion as the test of progress, and
never admitted that they have anything like the dogmatic certainty and
sovereignty of religious, or of physical, science. He had all the
liberality that consists of common sense, justice, humanity,
enlightenment, the wisdom of Canning or Guizot. But revolution, as the
breach of continuity, as the renunciation of history, was odious to him,
and he not only refused to see method in the madness of Marat, or
dignity in the end of Robespierre, but believed that the best measures
of Leopold, the most intelligent reformer in the era of repentant
monarchy, were vitiated and frustrated by want of adaptation to custom.
Common party divisions represented nothing scientific to his mind; and
he was willing, like De Quincey, to accept them as corresponding halves
of a necessary whole. He wished that he knew half as much as his
neighbour, Mrs. Somerville; but he possessed no natural philosophy, and
never acquired the emancipating habit which comes from a life spent in
securing progress by shutting one's eyes to the past. "Alle Wissenschaft
steht und ruht auf ihrer historischen Entwicklung, sie lebt von ihrer
traditionellen Vergangenheit, wie der Baum von seiner Wurzel."

He was moved, not by the gleam of reform after the conclave of Pius IX.,
but by Pius VII. The impression made upon him by the character of that
pope, and his resistance to Napoleon, had much to do with his resolution
to become a priest. He took orders in the Church in the days of revival,
as it issued from oppression and the eclipse of hierarchy; and he
entered its service in the spirit of Sailer, Cheverus, and Doyle. The
mark of that time never left him. When Newman asked him what he would
say of the Pope's journey to Paris, for the coronation of the emperor,
he hardly recognised the point of the question. He opposed, in 1853, the
renewal of that precedent; but to the end he never felt what people mean
when they remark on the proximity of Notre-Dame to Vincennes.

Doellinger was too much absorbed in distant events to be always a close
observer of what went on near him; and he was, therefore, not so much