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2. Journal of Lord Acton: Rome 1857

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2011

H. Butterfield
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Cambridge Historical Journal , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , 1946 , pp. 186 - 204
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1946

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References

1 Cambridge University Library Manuscripts, Add. 5752, 358-60. In this index item I is ‘Möhler's Patrologia, Extracts from’; no. 2 is ‘German literature’; no. 3 is ‘Error, Doubt and Truth’, and we pass in no. 6 to ‘Newman on Education’ and no. 7 to ‘Papal Infallibility’. Some of the items clearly have reference to conversations with the Munich Professor Lasaulx, and then we have: no. 21, ‘Audita on the journey’; no. 22, ‘July 11-July 24, 1852’; no. 23, ‘Lasaulx. March 28 1852’; no. 24, ‘Walk about the same time’; no. 25, ‘Nov. 11 1852-Jan. 25, 1853’; no. 26, ‘State of the Pagan World’, etc., etc.

2 Add. 4862, much of which seems to consist of pages torn out of notebooks. The document in question is entitled, ‘My mother's wishes. Thursday morning, 27 October 1859’; cf. Fitzmaurice, Life of Lord Granville, for the corresponding account of the situation by Acton's step-father. One of the most human features of Acton's narrative is the account of the way in which he pleased his mother by responding to her obvious desire that he should make his second cousin, Marie, his wife.

3 Add. 5527-9 and 5752.

4 Add. 5751.

5 Acton wrote to Dollinger in later years: ‘It was only when we got into the train that I realized that we were not going to Rome.’ [Johann]·Friedrich, [Ignaz von Döllinger] (Munich, 1899), III, 111. Descriptions of the visits made to North Italy (and Switzerland) in 1850, 1853 arid 1854 are to be found Ibid. III, 76, 111-14, 141.

6 Essays on Liberty, p. 375.

7 At one time Acton seems not to know what influence the journey had. He writes: ‘He [Döllinger] says distinctly that he formed his later opinions about 1857—after his return.’ Then he adds: ‘How did that set him thinking?’ [Add. 4905]. On other occasions he seems to be turning the matter over in his mind: ‘1857 [Döllinger] not struck. But deeply interested—pondered over it all—and somewhat taken aback by what he found. The most central and universal scene’ [Ibid.]. ‘1857 destroyed the halo—abolished confidence, admiration, respect—But did not produce any strong sense of condemnation.’ [Ibid.] ‘1857 only made it [Rome] contemptible, not odious.’ [Add. 4903.] We do not know the chronological order of these notes and perhaps it is wrong to see a crescendo; but on one of the slips Acton is enumerating the stages in the development of Dollinger, and at no. 6, after the Frankfurt Assembly, he surprises us with the thesis: ‘Experience of Rome. Luther not so very wrong after all.’ Cf. Add. 5001: ‘Once as we walked down from the Capitol to the Coliseum, in answer to my question: How long will all this last? He said: As long as it is felt to be beneficial to religion and no longer.’ On the other hand, Acton himself says in Add. 4903: ‘His journey to Rome had not exposed to him the weakness of the Church.’ In Add. 4905 he writes: ‘Change in Rome—not perceived in 1857.’ In the essay on ‘Döllinger's Historical Work’, Essays on Liberty, p. 375, we read: ‘He did not come away charged with visions of scandal in the spiritual order, of suffering in the temporal or of tyranny in either.’ In Add. 4912 he says: Döllinger ‘not a good traveller. Too thoughtful to be observant.’ See also nn. 8, 9, below.

8 ‘D. to C.B. 22 January 1870’; transcribed by Acton in Add. 4911. Cf. Döllinger to Jorg, 22 May 1857, in Friedrich, in, 178: ‘I have on the whole been well received here and in respect of the use of manuscripts I have been afforded great facilities, beyond my expectations. So it was in my mind to strike while the iron was hot, and I have devoted the best of my time to the libraries, especially to the Vatican Library. That has certainly had the effect of making me neglect men and things more than I ought to have done.’ Friedrich also quotes Jörg as having said: ‘The Eternal City interested him [Döllinger] above all in his capacity as a scholar.’

9 Döllinger was seeking materials on the subject of medieval heresies [Friedrich, III, 178]; and Acton repeatedly notes the importance of the journey for the development of Döllinger's manuscript studies, though in Add. 4905 and Add. 4912 he makes it clear that now in Rome, as earlier in Paris, Florence and Prague he only went to manuscripts ‘for particular things’, and not until 1864 (the visits to Vienna and Venice) did the habit of manuscript study have a decisive effect on the character of his work; cf. n. 18 below. Döllinger seems to have left Italy with no high opinion of Italian scholarship in general. In Add. 4809 Acton writes: ‘This journey to Rome 1857 confirmed his impression. The work done at Rome in his time dis-appointed him. He ceased, after his journey there to follow it up…’; cf. Add. 5644, p. 71: ‘1857 made him indifferent to Roman literature.’

The effect of the Roman journey on another side of Döllinger's development as a scholar is discussed in Add. 4905: ‘The visit to Rome opened another channel to his thoughts. It shows little of the magic but it is full of modern memories in all its monuments as well as in its collections. Reminded him of the scenes in the lives of the popes and prelates since the Renaissance. He began to study this for the first time.…’

10 These are chiefly in Add. 4911; see for example nn. 13, 16 and 17; cf. however nn. 14, 16, 19 and 38 below.

11 It is clear that Acton is here summarizing the view of Peter Ernst Lasaulx (1805-61, and Professor of Philology in Munich since 1844), after a conversation that preceded the stay in Rome. If there were any doubt this would be set at rest by a note in Add. 5643, which is a characterization of Lasaulx and is partly baSed on this entry in the journal: ‘…Opinion of Plato and Aristotle…history to him only dealt with ideas.…Paganism helped him to understand Christianity…avoided the drudgery that attends the pursuit of history…thought little of Montesquieu and Burke—scooping the cream of history.…’

In the Letters…to Mary Gladstone (1913), p. 57, Acton says that Lasaulx ‘was one of the best friends I ever had. For two years I followed his lectures on ancient literature, philosophy, etc., and he left his library to me when he died’; cf. Lord Acton's Correspondence, I, 13 and n. In The Rambler (July 1858), p. 331, Acton, writing on Buckle, describes Lasaulx as ‘the most eloquent and accomplished philosopher in Germany’. Here, as in so many other cases, Acton's later views were more critical; see for example Essays on Liberty, p. 405.

12 Concerning Stahl (1802–61) Acton seemed to be gathering hostile reports in this period. In a note in Add. 5609 he writes: ‘Stahl Romantik in politics. Gneist assured me in 1855, at the height of his success, that he knew no branch of legal science.’ His later opinion (1881) was enthusiastic; see Letters…to Mary Gladstone, p. 72: ‘Stahl, a man without birth or for-tune, became the leader of the Prussian conservative and reactionary party. He led them from about 1850 to 1860, when he died; and he was intellectually far superior to Disraeli—I should say, the greatest reasoner that has ever served the conservative cause. But he never obtained power or determined any important political event.’

13 This is a summary of views put forward by Döllinger; and the fact is recorded in the case of the remark about Newman, which Acton transcribed in Add. 4911. Also Döllinger states something similar on the subject of Newman in a letter to the latter of 5 November 1857; Wilfrid Ward, The Life…of Newman (1927), 1,444. The work by Newman, to which Döllinger refers, must be the Lectures on Justification, 1838.

14 Acton was fond of transcribing this story. In Add. 4908 he further tells us that the work by Stalin was on Wurttemberg and that Hermann was one of the Bavarian judges. He also gives a different reason for Döllinger's opposition to Mommsen. ‘He was repelled—he distrusted the terrible definiteness and certitude—confidence—of the great philol.’

15 Since on Tuesday 12 May Acton reports that Döllinger and he have been in Rome for three weeks, it seems likely that this entry belongs to 27 rather than 20 April.

Concerning Theiner (1804-74) Acton writes [Add. 4903]: ‘Father Augustin Theiner of the Oratory was the keeper of the Secret Archives of the Papacy’; cf. Add. 4908: ‘Theiner could not be set aside, because, although his mind was not exceedingly true nor his judgment sound, he possessed the final material

both as to recent Roman History

but especially respecting the Council of Trent.’

Cf. nn. 16, 18 below.

16 When Acton relates this in Add. 4911 he quotes Dollinger as his authority. In Add. 4908 he writes: ‘Theiner undertook to publish the Correspondence of the Legates [at the Council of Trent] with Rome. But he died without accomplishing it.’ Cf. n. 18 and p. 195 below. He was forbidden to show a printed copy of it to any bishop in 1870. It appeared in 1874.

17 Once again Acton merely makes Döllinger's views his own and he ascribes this judgement to the latter when he writes out this passage in Add. 4911. His own views developed, however, and when he wrote the essay on ‘Döllinger's Historical Work’ [Essays on Liberty, p. 375]. he shows that by 1890 he regards this judgement as a sign of weakness in his teacher: ‘He was never in contact with the sinister side of things. Theiner's Life of Clement the Fourteenth failed to convince him and he listened incredulously to his indictment of the Jesuits. Eight years later Theiner wrote to him that he hoped they would now agree better on that subject than when they discussed it in Rome.’

18 In regard to this topic, also, Acton was ready at a later time to criticize the attitude of his teacher. In Add. 5609, p. 40, he writes: ‘How late he [Döllinger] understood about MSS. At Rome in 1857 he spoke as if the Council of Trent was knowh by Sarpi and Pallavicini rather than by Le Plat and Baluze, Mansi, Lagomarsini Morandi.’ Cf. p. 195 below.

Acton in the meantime had been particularly interested in the problem of the relative merits of Sarpi and Pallavicini, as historians of the Council of Trent. It represents one of the significant areas of concentration in his notes, and in Add. 4915 there is the remark: ‘N.B. In four or five notebooks I have important matter touching Sarpi and Pallavicini. Also unpublished letters of Pallavicini…’; see, for example, Add. 4864, 5016, 5568, 5599, 5613. In 1867 he published an article on Sarpi in the first issue of The Chronicle.

19 Again this is Döllinger's judgement, as Acton notes when he transcribes it in Add. 4912. Döllinger and Acton had seen much of the Marquis Gino Capponi (1792-1876) in Florence during their stay there in 1852, and according to Döllinger's account (Friedrich, III, 111-12) had found around him ‘the flower of the learned world of Florence’, and had learned for the first time of that Italian national feeling ‘the depth and universality of which I had hitherto refused to credit’. Döllinger's views about Capponi are to be found at greater length in Friedrich, III, 112—14, in his obituary notice (Akademische Vorträge, II, 241–53), and in a letter which he wrote to Acton 19 February 1876, after Capponi's death (partly transcribed by Acton in Add. 4911). Capponi became completely blind in 1844 but played an important part in the movements which led to the freeing of Italy. Acton, Essays on Liberty, p. 414, mentions his claim to have remained ‘the last Italian federalist’. In 1875 he produced a classic history of the Florentine republic.

20 Jakob Frohschammer (1823-93) was teaching at Munich University from 1850 and was appointed to a chair of philosophy there in 1855 after the publication of his Ueber den Ursprung der menschlichen Seelen. He was a critic of the Thomist system and his book was placed on the Index. According to Friedrich, III, 181, Döllinger in this conversation said ‘Do you then understand German?’ ‘No’, said Modena. ‘There are only a few who understand that tongue. However, it is sufficient if a person high in the opinion of the Vatican denounces the book, and translates the offensive passages (or gets them translated into Italian), and the book comes on to the Index on the proposal of the Referent.’ ‘The Referent who does not know German?’ asked Döllinger. ‘Passages torn out and taken away from their context often have a different meaning put into them and in this way a very wrong judgement may be made of this learned treatise.’ ‘Sone le nostre regole’, replied Modena.

21 The family of Sir Robert Throckmorton, Acton's uncle. See Mathew, Acton, pp. 43-5.

22 The reference is to the special mission of Lord Granville to Russia for the coronation of Alexander II, August-September 1856. Acton made a preliminary journey, evidently to prepare the way, and then went out with his step-father, as private secretary. See the detailed account of the mission by the ambassador in Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, Lord Granville, I, 181-218.

23 The Roman Republic, February to July, 1849. On pp. 170-80 of this diary are further notes on this period of Roman history.

24 The Munich circle was somewhat hostile to Ranke. See, for example, Add. 4907 (quoting Döllinger's views): ‘Ranke on the Popes avoids real difficulties. The research is neither consecutive nor profound. In the Reformation there is more solidity, but not so much that is new’; ‘Döllinger's Historical Work’ [Essays on Liberty, p. 396]: ‘Döllinger had pronounced the theology of the Deutsche Reformation slack and trivial’; cf. the later note, Add. 4908: ‘Döllinger long afraid of reading Ranke’. Of Döllinger's friend and amanuensis, Jorg, we read [Add. 5527, p. 72 (c. 1858)]: ‘Jörg considers Ranke not honest in his Reformation…abundance of facts rather than ideas.… Dislike of deep philosophy.’ Acton often returned to the subject of Ranke in these early days, as on p. 223 of the 1857 journal and f. 69b and f. 70 of Add. 5528; cf. Gasquet [Lord Acton and his Circle], p. 109: Ranke, he said, ‘has never shown a knowledge of antiquity’. ‘There is…a want of comprehensiveness in his intelligence of history.’ He ‘thoroughly fails in the higher, simpler religious characters’. His very deficiencies make him most suitable for a character such as Richelieu. His own personality makes the period of about 1500 most fitting for him. His ‘peculiar knowledge and views of modern history’ are derived from the fact that he sees things through the eyes of Venetian ambassadors whose ‘cold-blooded acuteness…suits and attracts and often misleads him’.

25 Carl von Reisach (1800-69) had been Archbishop of Munich from 1847 until September 1855, when he was created a cardinal. He had once been a friend of Döllinger, who had lately come to be distrusted by ecclesiastical authority, though he was evidently regarded by some of his friends as a possible successor to the Archbishopric [Friedrich, in, 172]. The painter Cornelius relates [ibid, in, 178] that when Reisach saw Döllinger in the street in Rome in 1857 he said: ‘Here conies Döllinger with his long nose so that he can poke it into our affairs.’ Already Döllinger and Acton had half expected persecution, but they were compelled to admit that they had been well received on the whole in Rome. Reisach in fact appears to have been hospitable to them in 1857; and in Add. 4903 Acton writes: ‘Reisach took him [Döllinger] round.’ In his essay on the Vatican Council [Essays on Liberty, p. 501], Acton describes how Reisach was to have been President of the Council. He proceeds: ‘During his long residence in Rome he rose to high estimation, because he was reputed to possess the secret, and to have discovered the vanity, of German science.… The German bishops complained that he betrayed their interests…and the [papal] Court knew that there was no Cardinal on whom it was so safe to rely.’ Cf. Friedrich, III, 169-71.

26 Anton von Günther (1783-1863) was a Catholic philosopher who resided as a private ecclesiastic in Vienna, having been connected with the Jesuits, 1822-4. He rejected professorships offered by Munich, etc., apparently in the hope of securing a Chair in his own city. In attacking some of the tendencies of modern German secular philosophy and attempting to find a philosophical basis for nineteenth-century Christianity, he founded an important school and secured some distinguished disciples, and Munich had much sympathy with his work, giving him an honorary degree in 1833. Döllinger was one of his admirers, but from 1852 the Congregation of the Index were investigating Günther's work, and Döllinger's name occurred in the documents concerning the cases [Friedrich, III, 180-1]. At the beginning of 1857 Günther's works were placed on the Index, and after that date he published nothing more. This episode, combined with that of Frohschammer [see n. 20 above], at a time when it was being apprehended that ‘henceforward the Index will become busier every day’, represented a victory for those who were reasserting the claims of scholasticism, and showed what the adherents of modern German scientific thought had to expect. On 15 June 1857, in fact, the Pope in a Brief from Bologna specified Günther's errors and reasserted Aristotelian views adopted by scholastic writers. The case touched Döllinger and Acton closely, and the former realized that by this time he himself was somewhat suspect.

27 It is probable that this is a record of Döllinger's opinion, though there is no reason to suppose that Acton disagreed with it at this date, in spite of the fact that at a date which he placed not long before the beginning of his stay in Munich—i.e. not long before 1850—he had tried in vain to gain admission to a Cambridge college. For his views on the subject of a Catholic University see pp. 201–2 and n. 35 below.

28 It would not be safe to assume that the young Acton kept this good resolution and avoided arrogance or prevented the irritation that would be caused by repeated accusations and gibes concerning the neglect of German scholarship. See, for example, his short notices of O'Hagan on Joan of Arc and Arnold on Alcibiades [The Rambler, August 1858, pp. 136-7]; his determination to ‘show Buckle up’ [Ibid. pp. 88-104; cf. Gasquet, p. 14]; and his remarks about Gladstone, n. 32 below. Cf. Gasquet, p. 56; Wilfrid Ward, The Life of…Newman, I, 510; and the device of bringing in a German scholar, as a trump card, so to speak [Gasquet, pp. 34, 37], to rescue The Rambler in December 1858, after a double attempt [May-June, p. 388, and then August 1858, p. 135, in a short notice of Chéruel's Marie Stuart et Cathérine de Médicis] to create a stir by provocative statements relative to the point that ‘St Augustine was the father of Jansenism’.

29 Cf. Add. 4903: ‘Theiner showed the MS. of Galileo's trial to L'Espinois 1866, also to D. Berti in Febr. 1870. It had been restored by France only in 1846 [see p. 197]. Marina's book, 1850, really prepared by Theiner.’ Marino-Marini made public part of the documents, and Henri de l'Epinois made more complete revelations in 1867 in the Revue des Questions historiques. In 1876 Berti published Il Processo óriginate di Galileo Galilei and in 1877 L'Epinois replied to critics in Les Pièces du Procès de Galilée.

30 Cf. Acton's outline of a political message for English Roman Catholics in his letter to Simpson, 16 February 1858, Gasquet, p. 4: ‘…We need no longer humiliate ourselves and eat dirt to obtain the support of the Liberal or Radical party. We have got about as much as we shall get from them, and it would be well to see whether this alliance is a safe one.… Whom do we thank for emancipation? Neither the Irish Catholics nor the Whigs.’

31 Monsignor [George] Talbot, cameriere and ‘intimate friend’ of Pius IX.

32 Acton's early views on the subject of Gladstone give little promise of the close association that was to exist between the two men at a later date. Reviewing Gladstone's Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age in The Rambler for June 1858 (Gasquet, p. 19), Acton said: ‘Mr Gladstone has failed to get up his subject as well as he might have done.… It appears to us that his basis is arbitrary, his method bad, and his conclusions fanciful and uncertain.’ In The Rambler for the following August, p. 137 (cf. Gasquet, p. 28), he wrote: ‘The reputation of English critical scholarship has lately been dragged through the mire by such writers as Sir George Lewis, Colonel Mure and Mr Gladstone.’ In Add. 5528, which is partly a journal, Acton writes, f. 203a (in the autumn of 1859): ‘Gladstone was always very able, disputatious but humble, never giving up his own point. He has not the instincts of a gentleman, nothing handsome or chivalrous.’ In August 1859, he wrote to Simpson (Gasquet, p. 82, cf. pp. 68,70): ‘I have not lost all hope in Gladstone, but all faith and most of my charity. I have softened one expression.’ This refers to the notes on ‘Contemporary Events’ which he was preparing for The Rambler of the following month.

33 Cf. the letter of Acton's step-father, Lord Granville, 28 October 1857, in Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, Life of Lord Granville, I, 262: ‘Johnny Acton is busy about an historical work, which from what I hear will be remarkable.’ In Gasquet, pp. 149-52, there is a letter which the editor dates 28 November 1859, where Acton writes: ‘I have got together materials on the modern history of the Popes and would give anything for a quiet half year among my books at Aldenham.’

34 This remained one of the permanent bases of Acton's liberalism; cf. Add. 4870 f. 1: ‘Liberty enables us to do our duty unhindered by the state’; f. 2: ‘Duty not taught by the state’; f. 9: ‘Liberty of conscience is the first of liberties, because it is the liberty to avoid sin’; f. 10: ‘We don't learn our duty from the state. The ancients did.’ Add. 5009: ‘Conscience requires as its condition liberty. Liberals alone thoroughly conscientious. Theory of conscience leads up to liberty.’ Add. 5013: ‘The ethical element in Liberalism. Identity of Liberalism and morality. The object of Liberalism is not political or national or ecclesiastical but moral.’

35 In Add. 4987, amongst Acton's collection of notes on Newman, is the pencil note: ‘In 1851 N. was invited over to Ireland to found a Catholic University and he devoted most of his time to this enterprise until 1858.’ A further slip, dated 1872, says: ‘The hope of the University being English as well as Irish was quite at an end. This was a reason for resigning.’ In another note Acton transcribes part of a letter from Newman to Grant, dated 7 March 1856: ‘I am personally alarmed at the notion of the bishops of England allowing, (should they allow,) young Catholics to go to the English Protestant Universities.’ He adds the note: ‘Oxford had just been opened to C[atholics].’ Further notes, to the same effect, may be found, for example:

‘He had hoped that failing the Irish, English students would come to Dublin.’ See similar notes in Add. 4989, where Acton also deals with Newman's later attempt to establish Roman Catholics in Oxford. Cf. Wilfrid Ward, The Life of…Newman (1927), II, 47-78.

36 Cf. p. 187 above.

37 This would seem to be Döllinger's view, but it would appear that Acton held it at this time. In Add. 5009 there is a slip which reads: ‘Therefore history liberalises. It teaches not to interfere, to do justice to the other side, to leave men to their own judgments.’ Possibly Acton is merely making a debating-point when in the draft of a letter to Lord Clifford in Add. 4863 he writes: ‘One of the things people learn from history is to abstain from unnecessary judgment, and it was not relevant to my purpose to determine the guilt of Fénélon.’ Cf. Add. 5010: ‘The morality of Historians consists of those things which affect veracity.’

On the issue of moral judgements in history, however, he came later into a conflict with Döllinger which was evidently much more momentous for him—more distressing to him personally—than his famous controversy with Creighton. In Add. 4863 there are some ‘Notes of an important Conversation’, dated 16 July 1882, in which Acton says: ‘The disagreement…has been growing since the day when the Professor gave his sanction to a paper describing a defender of the Syllabus as a venerable Christian prelate’; and it is clear from other notes that Acton's intransigeance on the question of moral judgements was connected with his insistence on the condemnation of ecclesiastical authorities. The notes continue: ‘Our disagreement, which revealed itself unexpectedly, but at last almost continuously on a variety of subjects, seemed reducible to one principal cause. We almost always differed in our estimate of character, and my judgments were generally severe. I wished to judge by manifest canons and not by sympathy.… Murder being in the view of society the worst of crimes, seemed the most decisive test of character.’ It is clear that this difference with Döllinger cut deeply into Acton, who in Add. 5402 on slip no. 7 wrote in pencil:’ My point is to know definitely and apart from the perplexities of controversy, whether in the one decisive point of history and ethics I am with the Professor or against him.’ Next to other notes on this subject, we read in Add. 4904, ‘In questions of life and death there must be a decision. Both cannot be right.’ In Add. 5403, nos. 19–35 and 67, are pencil notes of what appears to be the draft of a letter written in the late 1880's on the subject of the difference with Döllinger: ‘I am absolutely alone in my essential ethical position and therefore useless.… So far as I can see I have thoroughly misunderstood the Professor and have had to spend 5 years in merely trying to find out his real sentiments.… In a great number of men…he sees virtue where I see vice—Gerson, Arnauld, Luther, Bossuet, Pius VII, St Bernard, Lacordaire…argument of time, surroundings, education, authority, ignorance.… The Professor put me off with imperfect statements…and at last in 1883 he made it clear that it was time for our conversations to cease, for this world. Every summer since I have spent all my time and energy trying to discover whether we really differ so widely.… He thinks an Ultr[amontane] may be saved.… The difference is fundamental and as wide as the firmament.…’

38 This passage is transcribed into Acton's notes in Add. 4907, and is there recorded as the opinion of Döllinger. Elsewhere in Add. 4907 Acton writes: ‘Providence not shown by success—Examples—But by continual extraction of good from evil.’ Acton later modified these ideas and his earlier view of the whole past as outlined in The Rambler of July 1858, pp. 63-5, in his lively review of K. K. Philp, A History of Progress in Great Britain. In Add. 4906 we find the note: ‘Providence has a large part in the things that have lasted.’ Add. 5626, f. 11b: ‘God overrules man in the long run. What lasts expresses God's will. Permanence is divine.’ In Add. 5011, under the date 24 January 1893, we read: ‘Providence means Progress. Liberty supposes progress.’ In Add. 5641, p. 43, Acton writes: ‘My theory is that divine government is not justified without progress. There is no raison d'être for the world’; and in Add. 4987: ‘Not to believe in Progress is to question the divine government.’ In, for example, Add. 4987, Acton repeatedly illustrates the contrast between his own views and those of Newman, who ‘discovered no progress’, and saw ‘no evidence of divine government in the course of things’. ‘Not that N. denies the government of the world. Providence does not manifest itself in history.’ ‘History, apart from biography, is [therefore, for Newman,] a world without God.’