Page:William John Sparrow-Simpson - Roman Catholic Opposition to Papal Infallibility (1909).djvu/208



became Professor at Munich in 1825. In a mixed University, where Protestant and Roman teachers addressed their students in close proximity, and Schelling taught Philosophy while Mohler lectured on Symbolism, and Klee on the Fathers, a knowledge of modern thought, an abandonment of obsolete methods, became natural and necessary among Roman Catholic advocates. The stricter Italian School looked with grave misgivings on these Liberal tendencies and looser ways. But circumstances rendered this larger freedom more or less inevitable. It is curious to reflect that Dóllinger began life as an Ultramontane, under the influence of the works of that paradoxical extremist Joseph de Maistre; for whom Lord Acton professed a distant regard, coupled with a devout determination to exclude the contributions of the entire school from the pages of his journals. Döllinger's change from the Roman to the Catholic standpoint was the outcome of independent critical and historical study. Cold and critical by nature, essentially intellectual, he was endowed with enormous vigour and insatiable desire for learning. His intention was to write a history of the Papacy. He found the approaches choked with legend. "Many of these were harmless,