ed
to the moral system of Aristotle. That his Aristotelian chapter was
weak, the author knew; but he said that it was not his text to make more
of it. He did not mean that a Christian divine may be better employed
than in doing honour to a heathen; but, having to narrate events and the
action of causes, he regarded Christianity more as an organism employing
sacramental powers than as a body of speculative ideas. To cast up the
total of moral and religious knowledge attained by Seneca, Epictetus,
and Plutarch, to measure the line and rate of progress since Socrates,
to compare the point reached by Hermas and Justin, is an inquiry of the
highest interest for writers yet to come. But the quantitative
difference of acquired precept between the later pagan and the early
Christian is not the key to the future. The true problem is to expose
the ills and errors which Christ, the Healer, came to remove. The
measure must be taken from the depth of evil from which Christianity had
to rescue mankind, and its history is more than a continued history of
philosophical theories. Newman, who sometimes agreed with Doellinger in
the letter, but seldom in the spirit, and who distrusted him as a man in
whom the divine lived at the mercy of the scholar, and whose burden of
superfluous learning blunted the point and the edge of his mind, so much
liked what he heard of this book that, being unable to read it, he had
it translated at the Oratory.

The work thus heralded never went beyond the first volume, completed in
the autumn of 1860, which was received by the _Kirchenzeitung_ of
Berlin as the most acceptable narrative of the founding of Christianity,
and as the largest concession ever made by a Catholic divine. The
author, following the ancient ways, and taking, with Reuss, the New
Testament as it stands, made no attempt to establish the position
against modern criticism. Up to this, prescription and tradition held
the first place in his writings, and formed his vantage-ground in all
controversy. His energy in upholding the past as the rule and measure of
the future distinguished him even among writers of his own communion. In
_Christenthum und Kirche_ he explained his theory of development, under
which flag the notion of progress penetrates into theology, and which he
held as firmly as the balancing element of perpetuity: "In dem Maass als
dogmenhistorische Studien mehr getrieben werden, wird die absolute
innere Nothwendigkeit und Wahrheit