39 6
ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
decisive. In a later letter to Pusey he wrote: cc I am convinced by reading your Eirenicon that we are united in\vardly in our religious convictions, although externally we belong to t\vo separated churches." He follo\ved attentively the parallel movements that went on in his own country, and welcomed \vith serious respect the overtures which came to him, after I 856, from eminent historians. When they were old men, he and Ranke, whom, in hot youth, there was much to part, lived on terms of mutual goodwill. Döllinger had pronounced the theology of the Deutsche Refor1l1ation slack and trivial, and Ranke at one moment was offended by what he took for an attack on the popes, his patrimony. In 1865, after a visit to Munich, he allowed that in religion there was no dispute between them, that he had no fault to find with the Church as Döllinger understood it. He added that one of his colleagues, a divine whose learning filled hinl with un\vonted awe, held the same opinion. Döllinger's growing belief that an approximation of part of Germany to sentiments of conciliation was only a question of time, had much to do with his attitude in Church questions after the year I 860. If history cannot confer faith or virtue, it can clear away the misconceptions anp misunderst nd- ings that turn men against one another. With the pro- gress of incessant study and meditation his judgment on many points underwent revision; but with regard to the Reformation the change was less than he supposed. He learnt to think more favourably of the religious influence of Protestantism, and of its efficacy in the defence of Christianity; but he thought as before of the spiritual consequences of Lutheranism proper. When people said of Luther that he does not come well out of his matri- monial advice to certain potentates, to Henry and to Philip, of his exhortations to exterminate the revolted peasantry, of his passage from a confessor of toleration to a teacher of intolerance, he would not have the most powerful conductor of religion that Christianity has pro- duced in eighteen centuries condemned for two pages in a hundred volumes. But when he had refused the test of
