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 DÖLLINGER'S HISTORICAL WORK 389

He seldom quotes contemporary Germans, unless to dispute \vith them, prefers old books to ne\v, and speaks of the necessary revision and renovation of history. He suspected imported views and foregone conclusions even in Neander; and although he could not say, with Macaulay, that Gieseler was a rascal, of whom he had never heard, he missed no opportunity of showing his dislike for that accomplished artificer in mosaic. Looking at the literature before him, at England, \vith Gibbon for its one ecclesiastical historian; at Germany, \vith the most profound of its divines expecting the Church to merge in the State, he inferred that its historic and organic unity would only be recognised by Catholic science, while the soundest Protestant \vould understand it least. In later years, Kliefoth, Ritschl, Gass, perhaps also Dorner and Uhlhorn, obIiged him to modify an opinion which the entire school of Schleiermacher, including the illustrious Rothe, served only to confirm. Germany, as he found it when he began to see the world, little resembled that of his old age, \vhen the work he had pursued for seventy years was carried forward, with kno\vledge and power Iike his o\vn, by the best of his countrymen. The proportion of things was changed, There was a religious literature to be proud of, to rely on: other nations, other epochs, had lost their superiority. As his own people advanced, and dominated in the branches of learning to which his life was given, in everything except literary history and epigra phics, and there was no more need to look abroad, Döllinger's cosmopolitan characteristic diminished, he \vas more absorbed in the national thought and work, and did not object to be called the most German of the Germans. The idea that reIigious science is not so much science as religion, that it should be treated differently from other matters, so that he who treats it may rightly display his soul, flourished in his vicinity, inspiring the lives of Saint Elizabeth and Joan of Arc, Möhler s fine lectures on the early fathers, and the book \vhich Gratry chose to entitle a COl1t1llentary on St, .A1"atthew. Döllinger came early to the belief that history ought to be impersonal, that the