resies pressing in from without, regarded now as unheard-of novelties,
and again as old enemies in new masks. The modern Jesuit-Catholic
historian indeed exhibits, in certain circumstances, a manifest
indifference to the task of establishing the _semper idem_ in the faith
of the Church, but this indifference is at present regarded with
disfavour, and, besides, is only an apparent one, as the continuous
though inscrutable guidance of the Church by the infallible teaching of
the Pope is the more emphatically maintained.[16]

It may be maintained that the Reformation opened the way for a critical
treatment of the history of dogma.[17] But even in Protestant Churches,
at first, historical investigations remained under the ban of the
confessional system of doctrine and were used only for polemics.[18]
Church history itself up to the 18th century was not regarded as a
theological discipline in the strict sense of the word, and the history
of dogma existed only within the sphere of dogmatics as a collection of
testimonies to the truth, _theologia patristica_. It was only after the
material had been prepared in the course of the 16th and 17th centuries
by scholars of the various Church parties, and, above all, by excellent
editions of the Fathers,[19] and after Pietism had exhibited the
difference between Christianity and Ecclesiasticism, and had begun to
treat the traditional confessional structure of doctrine with
indifference,[20] that a critical investigation was entered on.

The man who was the Erasmus of the 18th century, neither orthodox nor
pietistic, nor rationalistic, but capable of appreciating all these
tendencies, familiar with English, French and Italian literature,
influenced by the spirit of the new English Science,[21] while avoiding
all statements of it that would endanger positive Christianity. John
Lorenz Mosheim, treated Church history in the spirit of his great
teacher Leibnitz,[22] and by impartial analysis, living reproduction,
and methodical artistic form raised it for the first time to the rank of
a science. In his monographic works also, he endeavours to examine
impartially the history of dogma, and to acquire the historic
stand-point between the estimate of the orthodox dogmatists and that of
Gottfried Arnold Mosheim, averse to all fault-finding and polemic, and
abhorring theological crudity as much as pietistic narrowness and
undevout Illuminism, aimed at an actual correct knowledge of history, in