ent with conjecture, with probable
explanations and obvious motives. We must constantly allow the benefit
of the doubt, and reserve sentence. The science of character comes in
with modern history. Doellinger had lived too long in the ages during
which men are seen mostly in outline, and never applied an historical
psychology distinct from that of private experience. Great men are
something different from an enlarged repetition of average and familiar
types, and the working and motive of their minds is in many instances
the exact contrary of ordinary men, living to avoid contingencies of
danger, and pain, and sacrifice, and the weariness of constant thinking
and far-seeing precaution.

We are apt to judge extraordinary men by our own standard, that is to
say, we often suppose them to possess, in an extraordinary degree,
those qualities which we are conscious of in ourselves or others.
This is the easiest way of conceiving their characters, but not the
truest They differ in kind rather than in degree.

We cannot understand Cromwell or Shaftesbury, Sunderland or Penn, by
studies made in the parish. The study of intricate and subtle character
was not habitual with Doellinger, and the result was an extreme dread of
unnecessary condemnation. He resented being told that Ferdinand I. and
II., that Henry III. and Lewis XIII. were, in the coarse terms of common
life, assassins; that Elizabeth tried to have Mary made away with, and
that Mary, in matters of that kind, had no greater scruples; that
William III. ordered the extirpation of a clan, and rewarded the
murderers as he had rewarded those of De Witt; that Lewis XIV. sent a
man to kill him, and James II. was privy to the Assassination Plot. When
he met men less mercifully given than himself, he said that they were
hanging judges with a Malthusian propensity to repress the growth of
population. This indefinite generosity did not disappear when he had
long outgrown its early cause. It was revived, and his view of history
was deeply modified, in the course of the great change in his attitude
in the Church which took place between the years 1861 and 1867.

Doellinger used to commemorate his visit to Rome in 1857 as an epoch of
emancipation. He had occasionally been denounced; and a keen eye had
detected latent pantheism in his _Vorhalle_, but he had not been
formally censured. If he had once asserted the value of nationality in
the Church, he was vehement against