Page:History of Freedom.djvu/459

 DÖLLINGER'S HISTORICAL WORK 415

the faults of the papal government during several centuries, and the hopelessness of all efforts to save it from the Revolution unless reformed. He wrote to an English minister that it could not be our policy that the head of the Catholic Church should be subject to a foreign potentate :- Das harte Wort, mit we1chem Sie im Parlamente den Stab über Rom gebrochen haben-lzoþeless(y incurable, oder incor- rzgible,-kann ich mir nicht aneignen; ich hoffe vielmehr, wie ich es in dem Buche dargelegt habe, das Gegentheil. An die Dauerhaftigkeit eines ganz ltalien umfassenden Piemontesisch- ltaliänischen Reiches glaube ich nicht.-Inzwischen tröste ich nÜch n1Ït dem Gedanken, dass in Rom zuletzt doch vexatio dabit intellectum, und dann wird noch al1es gut werden.

To these grateful vaticinations his correspondent replied :-

You have exhibited the gradual departure of the government in the states of the church from all those conditions which made it tolerable to the sense and reason of mankind, and have, I think, completely justified, in principle if not in all the facts, the conduct of those who have determined to do away with it

The policy of exalting the spiritual authority though at the expense of sacrifices in the temporal, the moderation even in the catalogue of faults, the side blow at the Protestants, filling more than half the volume, disarmed for a moment the resentment of outraged Rome. The Pope, on a report from Theiner, spoke of the book as one that might do good. Others said that it \vas pointless, that its point \vas not where the author meant it to be, that the handle was sharper than the blade. It \vas made much more clear that the Pope had governed badly than that Russia or Great Britain would gain by his supremacy. The cold analysis, the diagnosis by the bedside of the sufferer, \vas not the work of an observer dazzled by admiration or blinded by affection. It was a step, a first unconscious, unpremeditated step, in the process of detachment. The historian here began to prevail over the divine, and to judge Church matters by a