430
ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
gestanden wärest. hättest Du nicht den allgemeinen Wahn getheilt; und er, \venn er die Dir zu Theil gewordenen Erkenntnissmittel besessen, \vürde er nicht besseren Ge- brauch davon gemacht haben, die v\Tahrheit nicht früher erkannt und bekannt haben, als Du?'" He sometimes distrusted his favourite argument of ignorance and early prepossessions, and felt that there was presumption and unreality in tendering such explana- tions to men like the Bollandist De Buck, De Rossi, whom the Institute elected in preference to Mommsen, or Windischmann, whom he himself had been accused of bringing forward as a rival to Möhler. He would say that kno\vledge may be a burden and not a light, that the facul ty of doing justice to the past is alTIOng the rarest of moral and intellectual gifts: U Man kann viel wissen, viele N otizen im Kopf haben, ohne das rechte wissens- chaftliche Verständniss, ohne den historischen Sinn. Dieser ist, \vie Sie wahl wissen, gar nicht so häufig; und wo er fehIt, da fehIt auch, scheint mir, die volle Verant... wortlichkeit für das ge\vusste." In I 879 he prepared materials for a paper on the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Here he was breaking new ground, and verging on that which it was the policy and the aspiration of his life to avoid. Many a man who gives no tears to Cranmer, Servetus, or Bruno, who thinks it just that the laws should be obeyed, who deems that actions done by order are excused, and that legality implies morality, \vill dra\v the line at midnight murder and wholesale extermination. The deed wrought at Paris and in forty towns of France in I 572, the arguments which produced it, the arguments which justified it, left no room for the mists of mitigation and compromise. The passage froln the age of Gregory IX. to that of Gregory XII!., from the Crusades to the wars of Religion, brought his \vhole system into jeopardy. The historian \vho was at the heels of the divine in 186 I, and level with him in 1867, \vould have come to the front. The discourse \vas never delivered, never composed. But the subject of toleration was absent no more from his thoughts, filling
