though inscrutable guidance of the Church by the infallible teaching of the Pope is the more emphatically maintained.[16] It may be maintained that the Reformation opened the way for a critical treatment of the history of dogma.[17] But even in Protestant Churches, at first, historical investigations remained under the ban of the confessional system of doctrine and were used only for polemics.[18] Church history itself up to the 18th century was not regarded as a theological discipline in the strict sense of the word, and the history of dogma existed only within the sphere of dogmatics as a collection of testimonies to the truth, _theologia patristica_. It was only after the material had been prepared in the course of the 16th and 17th centuries by scholars of the various Church parties, and, above all, by excellent editions of the Fathers,[19] and after Pietism had exhibited the difference between Christianity and Ecclesiasticism, and had begun to treat the traditional confessional structure of doctrine with indifference,[20] that a critical investigation was entered on. The man who was the Erasmus of the 18th century, neither orthodox nor pietistic, nor rationalistic, but capable of appreciating all these tendencies, familiar with English, French and Italian literature, influenced by the spirit of the new English Science,[21] while avoiding all statements of it that would endanger positive Christianity. John Lorenz Mosheim, treated Church history in the spirit of his great teacher Leibnitz,[22] and by impartial analysis, living reproduction, and methodical artistic form raised it for the first time to the rank of a science. In his monographic works also, he endeavours to examine impartially the history of dogma, and to acquire the historic stand-point between the estimate of the orthodox dogmatists and that of Gottfried Arnold Mosheim, averse to all fault-finding and polemic, and abhorring theological crudity as much as pietistic narrowness and undevout Illuminism, aimed at an actual correct knowledge of history, in accordance with the principle of Leibnitz, that the valuable elements which are everywhere to be found in history must be sought out and recognised. And the richness and many-sidedness of his mind qualified him for gaining such a knowledge. But his latitudinarian dogmatic stand-point as well as the anxiety to awaken no controversy or endanger the gradual naturalising of a new science and culture, caused him to put aside the most important problems of the history of dogma and devote his attention to political Church history as well as to the more indifferent historical questions. The opposition of two periods which he endeavoured peacefully to reconcile could not in this way be permanently set aside.[23] In Mosheim's sense, but without the spirit of that great man, C.W.F. Walch taught on the subject and described the religious controversies of the Church with an effort to be impartial, and has thus