Page:History of Freedom.djvu/445

 DÖLLINGER'S HISTORICAL \VORK 4 01

certain conclusions which colour to the root every phase and scene of universal history. He believes in upward progress, because it is only recent times that have striven deliberately, and \vith a zeal according to knowledge, for the increase and security of freedom. He is not only tolerant of error in religion, but is specially indulgent to the less dogmatic forms of Christianity, to the sects which have restrained the churches. He is austere in judging the past, imputing not error and ignorance only, but guilt and crime, to those who, in the dark succession of ages, have resisted and retarded the growth of liberty, which he identifies \vith the cause of morality, and the condition of the reign of conscience. Döllinger never subjected his 111ighty vision of the stream of time to correction accord- ing to the principles of this unsympathising philosophy, never reconstituted the providential economy in agree- ment \vith the Whig Théodicée. He could understand the Zoroastrian simplicity of history in black and \vhite, for he wrote: "obgleich man allerdings sagen kann, das tiefste Thema der Weltgeschichte sei der Kampf der Knechtschaft oder Gebundenheit, mit der Freiheit, auí clem intellectuellen, religiösen, politischen und socié}len Gebiet." But the scene which lay open before his mind was one of greater complexity, deeper design and infinite intellect. He imagined a way to truth through error, and outside the Church, not through unbelief and the diminished feign of Christ. Lacordaire in the cathedral pulpit offering his thanks to Voltaire for the good gift of religious toleration, was a figure alien to his spirit He never sub- stituted politics for religion as the test of progress, and never admitted that they have anything like the dogmatic certainty and sovereignty of religious, or of physical, science. He had all the liberality that consists of common sense, justice, humanity, enlightenment, the \visdom of Canning or Guizot. But revolution, as the breach of continuity, as the renunciation of history, was odious to him, and he not only refused to see method in the madness of l\larat, or dignity in the end of Robespierre, but believed that the best measures of Leopold, the most intelligent 2 D