Page:History of Freedom.djvu/437

 DÖLLINGER'S HISTORICAL WORK 393

records had scarcely molested the ancient reign of lives and chronicles. N one had worked harder at his science and at himself than Döllinger; and the change around him \vas not greater than the change within. In his early career as a teacher of religion he had often shrunk from books which bore no stamp of orthodoxy. It was long before he read Sarpi or the Lettres Provinciales, or even Ranke's POþes, which appeared when he was thirty-five, and which astonished him by the serene ease with which a man who knew so much touched on such delicate ground. The book which he had written in that state of mind, and with that conception of science and religion, had only a prehistoric interest for its author. He refused to reprint it, and declared that there was hardly a sentence fit to stand unchanged. He lamented that he had lost ten years of life in getting his bearings, and in learning, unaided, the most difficult craft in the world. Those years of apprenticeship without a master were the time spent on his Kirchengeschichte. The want of training remained. He could impart knowledge better than the art of learning. Thousands of his pupils have acquired connected views of religion passing through the ages, and gathered, if they were intelligent, some notion of the meaning of history; but nobody ever learnt from him the mechanism by which it is written. Brougham advised the law -student to begin with Dante; and a distinguished physician informs us that Gibbon, Grote, and Mill made him what he is. The me!) to whom Döllinger owed his historic insight and \vho mainly helped to develop and strengthen and direct his special faculty, were not all of his own cast, or remarkable in the common description of literary talent. The assist- ants were countless, but the masters were few, and he looked up with extraordinary gratitude to men like Sigonius, Antonius Augustinus, Blondel, Petavius, Leibniz, Burke, and Niebuhr, who had opened the passes for him as he struggled and groped in the illimitable forest. He interrupted his work because he found the materials too scanty for the later Middle Ages, and too copious for