on
Dante occupied a high position in the Church and had narrowly escaped
the highest, that visit was returned. But he had no idea that he had
once received Doellinger in his college rooms and hardly believed it when
told. In Germany, the serried learning of the _Reformation_, the
author's energy and decisiveness in public assemblies, caused him to
stand forth as an accepted spokesman, and, for a season, threw back the
reticent explorer, steering between the shallows of anger and affection.

In that stage the _Philosophumena_ found him, and induced him to write a
book of controversy in the shape of history. Here was an anonymous
person who, as Newman described it, "calls one pope a weak and venal
dunce, and another a sacrilegious swindler, an infamous convict, and an
heresiarch _ex cathedra_." In the Munich Faculty there was a divine who
affirmed that the Church would never get over it. Doellinger undertook to
vindicate the insulted See of Rome; and he was glad of the opportunity
to strike a blow at three conspicuous men of whom he thought ill in
point both of science and religion. He spoke of Gieseler as the flattest
and most leathern of historians; he accused Baur of frivolity and want
of theological conviction; and he wished that he knew as many
circumlocutions for untruth as there are Arabian synonyms for a camel,
that he might do justice to Bunsen without violation of courtesy. The
weight of the new testimony depended on the discovery of the author.
Adversaries had assigned it to Hippolytus, the foremost European writer
of the time, venerated as a saint and a father of the Church. Doellinger
thought them right, and he justified his sincerity by giving further
reasons for a conclusion which made his task formidable even for such
dexterity as his own. Having thus made a concession which was not
absolutely inevitable, he resisted the inference with such richness of
illustration that the fears of the doubting colleague were appeased. In
France, by Pitra's influence, the book was reviewed without making known
that it supported the authorship of Hippolytus, which is still disputed
by some impartial critics, and was always rejected by Newman.
_Hippolytus und Kallistus_, the high-water mark of Doellinger's official
assent and concurrence, came out in 1853. His next book showed the ebb.

He came originally from the romantic school, where history was
honeycombed with imagination and conjecture; and the first important
book