Page:History of Freedom.djvu/420

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ESSAYS ON LIBERTY

energy and an unlimited command of books. His international habit sprang from the inadequacy of the national supply, and the search for truth in every century naturally became a lecturer whose function it was to unfold from first to last the en tire life of the Church, whose range extended over all Christian ages, and who felt the inferiority of his own. Döl1inger's conception of the science which he was appointed to carry forward, in conformity with new requirements and new resources, differed from the average chiefly by being more thorough and comprehensive. At two points he was touched by currents of the day. Savigny, the legal expert of a school recruited from both denominations and gravitating to- wards Catholicism, had expounded law and society in that historic spirit which soon pervaded other sciences, and restored the significance of national custom and character. By his writings Protestant literature overlapped. The exam pIe of the conspicuous jurist served as a suggestion for divines to realise the patient process of hï"story; and Döllinger continued to recognise him as a master and originator of true scientific methods when his influence on jurisprudence was on the wane. On the same track, Drey, in 18 19, defended the theory of development as the vital prerogative of Rome over the fixity of other churches. Möhler was the pupil of Drey, and they made Tübingen the seat of a positive theology, broader and more progressive than that of Munich. The first eminent thinker \vhom he saw and heard was Baader, the poorest of \vriters, but the most instruc- tive and impressive talker in Germany, and the one man \vho appears to have influenced the direction of his mind. Bishop Martensen has described his amazing powers; and Döllinger, who remembered him with more scant esteem, bore equal testimony to the wealth and worth of his religious philosophy. He probably owed to hirn his persistent disparagement of Hegel, and more certainly that familiarity with the abstruse literature of mysticism \vhich made him as clear and sure of vision in the twilight of Petrucci and St.