Page:History of Freedom.djvu/429

 DÖLLINGER'S HISTORICAL WORK 385

foundation of his review, which causes Delbrück to complain that 1\1acaulay, \vho could see facts so \vell, could not see that they are revelations, which Baur defines with- out disguise in his DreieÙligkeitslehre: "AIle geschicht- lichen Personen sind für uns blosse N amen," The two posthumous works of Hegel which turned events into theories had not then appeared. Döllinger, setting life and action above theory, omitted the progress of doctrine. He proposed that Möhler should take that share of their common topic, and the plan, entertained at first, was interrupted, \vith much besides, by death. He felt too deeply the overwhelming unity of force to yield to that atomic theory which was provoked by the Hegelian excess: "L'histoire n'est pas un simple jeu d'abstractions, et les hommes y sont plus que les doctrines. Ce n'est pas une certaine théorie sur la justification et la rédemption qui a fait la Réforme: c'est Luther, c'est Calvin." But he allows a vast scope to the variable will and character of man. The object of religion upon earth is saintliness, and its success is shown in holy individuals. He leaves law and doctrine, moving in their appointed orbits, to hold up great men and examples of Christian virtue. Döl1inger, who had in youth acted as secretary to Hohenlohe, was ahvays reserved in his use of the super- natural. In the vision of Constantine and the rebuilding of the temple, he gives his reader both the natural explanation and the miraculous. He thought that the witness of the fathers to the continuance of miraculous powers could not be resisted \vithout making history a priori, but later on, the more he sifted and compared authorities, the more severe he became. He deplored the uncritical credulity of the author of the lVlonks of the West J. and, in examining the Stigmata, he cited the experience of a Spanish convent where they \vere so common that it became a sign of reprobation to be \vithout them. Historians, he said, have to look for natural causes:'" enough will remain for the action of Providence, whe.re we cannot penetrate. In his unfinished book on Ecclesiastical Prophecy he enumerates the illusions of mediæval saints 2 C