Note 472 — Chapter VI

The Rev. Mr. Dowling, who looks back with great regret to this happy period, says, ‘Writers were almost universally ecclesiastics. Literature was scarcely anything but a religious exercise; for everything that was studied, was studied with a reference to religion. The men, therefore, who wrote history, wrote ecclesiastical history.’ Dowling's Introduction to the Critical Study of Ecclesiastical History, 8vo, 1838, p. 56; a work of some talent, but chiefly interesting as a manifesto by an active party.