Page:History of Freedom.djvu/454

 4 10

ESSAYS ON LIBERTY

tingencies of danger, and pain, and sacrifice, and the \\Teari- ness of constant thinking and far-seeing precaution.

\Ve are apt to judge extraordinary Olen by our own standard, that is to say, we often suppose them to possess, in an extra- ordinary degree, those qualities which we are conscious of in ourselves or others. This is the easiest way of conceiving their characters, but not the truest. They differ in kind rather than in degree.

We cannot understand Cromwell or Shaftesbury, Sunder- land or Penn, by studies made in the parish. 'The study of intricate and subtle character ,vas not habitual vvith Döllinger, and the result ,vas an extreme dread of unnecessary condemnation. He resented being told that Ferdinand 1. and II., that Henry III. and Lewis XIIL,were, in the coarse terms of common life, assassins; that Elizabeth tried to have Mary made away with, and that Mary, in matters of that kind, had no greater scruples; that vVilliam III. ordered the extirpation of a clan, and re\varded the murderers as he had rewarded those of De Witt; that Lewis XIV. sent a man to kill him, and James I I. was privy to the Assassination Plot. When he met men less n1crcifully given than himself, he said that they were hanging judges with a Malthusian propensity to repress the growth of population. This indefinite generosity did not disappear when he had long outgrown its early cause. It was revived, and his view of history was deeply modified, in the course of the great change in his attitude in the Church which took place bet\veen the years 186 I and 1867. Döllinger used to commemorate his visit to Rome in 1857 as an epoch of etri"tncipation. He had occasionally been denounced; and a keen eye had detected latent pantheism in his Vorhalle, but he had not been formally censured. If he had once asserted the value of nationality in the Church, he was vehement against it in religion; and if he had joined in deprecating the dogmatic decree in 1 854, he was silent afterwards. By Protestants he was still avoided as the head and front of offending ultra,

-,

\