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ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
that he had once received Döllinger in his college rooms and hardly believed it when told. In Germany, the serried learning of the ReforJJZation, the author's energy and decisive- ness in public assemblies, caused him to stand forth as an accepted spokesman, and, for a season, threw back the reticent explorer, steering between the shallows of anger and affection. In that stage the Philosophu1Jlena found him, and induced him to write a book of controversy in the shape of history. Here was an anonymous person \vho, as Newman described it, "calls one pope a weak and venal dunce, and another a sacrilegious swindler, an infamous convict, and an heresiarch ex catltedrd." In the Munich Faculty there was a divine who affirmed that the Church \vould never get over it. DöI1inger undertÐok to vindicate the insulted See of Rome; and he was glad of the opportunity to strike a blow at three conspicuous men of whom he thought ill in point both of science and _ religion. He spoke of Gieseler as the flattest and most leathern of historians; he accused Baur of frivolity and want of theological conviction; and he \vished that he knew as many circumlocutions for untruth as there are Arabian synonyms for a camel, that he might do justice to Bunsen without violation of courtesy. The weight of the new testimony depended on the discovery of the author. Adversaries had assigned it to Hippolytus, the foremost European writer of the time, venerated as a saint and a father of the Church. Döllinger thought them right, and he justified his sincerity by giving further reasons for a conclusion which made his task formidable even for such dexterity as his o\vn. Having thus made a concession which was not absolutely inevitable, he resisted the inference with such richness of illustration that the fears of the doubting colleague were appeased. In France, by Pitra,s influence, the book was revie\ved without making known that it supported the authorship of Hippolytus, \vhich is still disputed by some impartial critics, and \vas ahvays rejected by Newman. Hippolytus un.i K allistus, the high-\vater mark of Döllinger's officiaJ
