Page:History of Freedom.djvu/419

 XI

DÖLLINGER'S HIS'fORICAL \tVORK 1

\VHEN first seen, at Würzburg, in the diaries of Platen the poet, Dr. Döllinger was an eager student of general literature, and especially of Schlegel and the rotnantic philosophy. It was an epoch in which the layman and the dilettante prevailed. In other days a divine had half a dozen distinct schools of religious thought before him, each able to develop and to satisfy a receptive mind; but the best traditions of western scholarship had died away when the young Franconian obtained a chair in the reorganised university of Munich. His own country, Bavaria, his time, the third decade of the century, furnished no guide, no master, and no model to the new professor. Exempt, by date and position, from the discipline of a theological party, he so continued, and never turned elsewhere for the dependence he escaped at home. No German theologian, of his own or other churches, bent his course; and he derived nothing from the powerful writer then dominant in the North. To a friend describing Herder as the one unprofitable classic, he replied, "Did you ever learn anything from Schleier- macher ? " And if it is doubtful which way this stroke was aimed, it is certain that he saw less than others in the Berlin teacher. Very young he knew modern languages well, though with a defective ear, and having no local or contemporary attachments he devoted himself systematically to the study of foreign divines. The characteristic universality of his later years was not the mere result of untiring 1 English Historical Review, 18 9 0. 375