of Machiavelli. In
the same way he denied the legitimacy of every form of government, every
economic wrong, every party creed, which sacrificed to the pleasures or
the safety of the few the righteousness and salvation of the many. His
one belief was the right of every man not to have, but to be, his best.

This fact gives the key to what seems to many an unsolved contradiction,
that the man who said what he did say and fought as he had fought should
yet declare in private that it had never occurred to him to doubt any
single dogma of his Church, and assert in public that communion with it
was "dearer than life itself" Yet all the evidence both of his writings
and his most intimate associates confirms this view. His opposition to
the doctrine of infallibility was ethical and political rather than
theological. As he wrote to Doellinger, the evil lay deeper, and
Vaticanism was but the last triumph of a policy that was centuries old.
Unless he were turned out of her he would see no more reason to leave
the Church of his baptism on account of the Vatican Decrees than on
account of those of the Lateran Council. To the dogma of the Immaculate
Conception he had no hostility. And could not understand Doellinger's
condemnation of it, or reconcile it with his previous utterances. He had
great sympathy with the position of Liberal High Anglicans; but there is
not the slightest reason to suppose that he ever desired to join the
English Church. Even with the old Catholic movement he had no sympathy,
and dissuaded his friends from joining it.[1] All forms of Gallicanism
were distasteful to Acton, and he looked to the future for the victory
of his ideas. His position in the Roman Church symbolises in an acute
form what may be called the soul's tragedy of the whole nineteenth
century, but Acton had not the smallest inclination to follow either
Gavazzi or Lamennais. It was, in truth, the unwavering loyalty of his
churchmanship and his far-reaching historical sense that enabled him to
attack with such vehemence evils which he believed to be accidental and
temporary, even though they might have endured for a millennium. Long
searching of the vista of history preserved Acton from the common danger
of confusing the eternal with what is merely lengthy. To such a mind as
his, it no more occurred to leave the Church because he disapproved some
of its official procedure, than it would to an Englishman to surrender
his nationality when his politi