Page:History of Freedom.djvu/467

 DÖLLINGER'S HISTORICAL WORK 4 2 3

to keep history and controversy apart. His hand was forced at last by his friends abroad. Whilst he pursued his isolating investigations he remained aloof from a question which in other countries and other days was a summary and effective test of impassioned controversy. Persecution was a problem that had never troubled him. I t was not a topic with theoretical Germans; the necessary books were hardly available, and a man might read all the popular histories and theologies without getting much further than the Spanish Inquisition. Ranke, averse from what is unpleasant, gave no details. The gravity of the question had never been brought home to Döllinger in forty years of public teaching.. When he approached it, as late as 186 I, he touched lightly, representing the in- tolerance of Protestants to their disadvantage, while that of Catholics was a bequest of Imperial Rome, taken up in an emergency by secular powers, in no way involving the true spirit and practice of the Church. With this light footfall the topic which has so powerful a leverage slipped into the current of his thought. The view found favour with Ambrose de Lisle, who, having read the Letters to a Prebendary, was indignant with those \vho commit the Church to a principle often resisted or ignored. N e\vman would admit to no such compromise: Is not the miraculous infliction of judgments upon blasphemy, lying, profaneness, etc., in the apostles' day a sanction of infliction upon the same by a human hand in the times of the Inquisition? Ecclesiastical rulers n1ay punish with the sword, if they can, and if it is expedient or necessary to do so. The church has a right to make 1aws and to enforce them with temporal punisho1ents. The question came forward in France in the wake of the temporal power. Liberal defenders of a government which made a principle of persecution had to decide whether they approved or condemned it. Where \vas their liberality in one case, or their catholicity in the other? It was the simple art of their adversaries to pre5S this point, and to make the most of it; and a French priest took upon him to declare that intolerance, far from