Chapter XVII: Part II: ――comments (6)

‘The chief aim of the Fellowship [at Oriel] was to test dialectical power; a chief occupation of the Common Room was to practise it…. Newman himself, who did more than any other man to divert the College from criticism to submission, has left a vivid picture … of his own argumentative _brusquerie_ in the congenial atmosphere of the Oriel Common Room. And it is noticeable, both in his case and that of Richard Hurrell Froude, his chief coadjutor in sowing the seed of the coming Tractarianism in College, that their method was essentially dialectic and modern, even though its effect, on themselves and others, was to lead them into “fierce thoughts” against the modern spirit and the modern trend of things. Pusey might bury himself in theology, and Keble might be the singer and sweet saint of a revived devotion; but Newman and Froude, even when the gates of authority seemed about to close on them for ever, were questioners and controversialists and gladiators, striving to rationalise reason out of its own supremacy.

* * * * *

‘In hurrying on the birth of the new issue, both at Oriel and beyond it, the influence of Richard Hurrell Froude was very great. We have seen that he was elected a Fellow of Oriel in 1826. He was an Oriel man throughout, and had taken a double second in 1824. He was the eldest son of the Archdeacon of Totnes, and the eldest of three eminent brothers, all Oriel men: William, the engineer, born in 1810, and James Anthony, the historian, born in 1818. Hurrell was born in 1803. Always delicate, he fell into consumption early in the Thirties, and died in 1836. But though his career was short and enfeebled, and though there is little of him in print but what the affectionate appreciation of his friends put there, it is certain that Hurrell Froude had in his College an influence both intense and peculiar, which radiated widely, and was answerable for some of the most marked phenomena of Tractarianism. Froude was perhaps the most convinced, the most outspoken, the most throughgoing Mediævalist among the young men who thought the Church of England in an unsatisfactory condition; and he had the incommunicable and inexplicable gift of great personal influence, which, in his case, took the most irresistible of all its forms: that of impressing others with his equal pre-eminence in intellect and character. While the other Tractarian propagandists of the immediate future were recoiling in fear and anxiety from the advance of the Liberal and Erastian tide, Froude was ardently counselling reaction, loudly and scornfully proclaiming the loveliness and rightness of at least a large number of Roman opinions and practices, and laying a zealous axe at the root of the Protestantism of the Church of England.

* * * * *

‘In fact, one can plainly see that the religious revival which was coming to the English Church was the real cause of the tutorial quarrel at Oriel in 1830. The Tutors had the new wine of it in their veins; they were the subjects of an enthusiasm which they were impelled to communicate, and which was intolerant of restraint; whilst the Provost [Hawkins] was, and was to remain, outside the range of the new ideas. In such a situation compromise was impracticable…. This change had certain important and well-marked results on the College. In the first place, it riveted the authority of Provost Hawkins, and made him for the rest of his life the dominant force in Oriel. In the second place, as the deprived Tutors remained Fellows and attached members of the College, it did nothing to reduce the spread of their influence in Common Room, and indirectly, in College generally, but rather tended to increase it, by opposition. Lastly, and most important of all, it dealt a blow to the intellectual prestige of the College, from which it never recovered during Hawkins’s long reign.’

From ‘THE OXFORD COUNTER-REFORMATION’ IN ‘SHORT STUDIES ON GREAT
SUBJECTS.’ Series IV. By JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE. London: Longmans,
Green & Co., 1883.

[By the kind permission of Miss Froude and of Messrs. Longmans.]

‘… The last forty or fifty years will be memorable hereafter in the history of English opinion. The number of those who recollect the beginnings of the Oxford Revival is shrinking fast; and such of us as survive may usefully note down their personal recollections as a contribution, so far as it goes, to the general narrative. It is pleasant, too, to recall the figures of those who played the chief parts in the drama. If they had not been men of ability, they could not have produced the revolution that was brought about by them. Their personal characters were singularly interesting. Two of them were distinctly men of real genius. My own brother was, at starting, the foremost of the party; the flame, therefore, naturally burnt hot in my own immediate environment. The phrases and formulas of Anglo-Catholicism had become household words in our family, before I understood coherently what the stir and tumult was about.

‘We fancy that we are free agents. We are conscious of what we do; we are not conscious of the causes which make us do it; and therefore we imagine that the cause is in ourselves. The Oxford leaders believed that they were fighting against the spirit of the age. They were themselves most completely the creatures of their age. It was one of those periods when conservative England had been seized with a passion for reform. Parliament was to be reformed; the municipal institutions were to be reformed; there was to be an end of monopolies and privileges. The Constitution was to be cut in pieces and boiled in the Benthamite caldron, from which it was to emerge in immortal youth. In a reformed State there needed a reformed Church. My brother and his friends abhorred Bentham and all his works. The Establishment, in its existing state, was too weak to do battle with the new enemy. Protestantism was the chrysalis of Liberalism. The Church, therefore, was to be unprotestantised. The Reformation, my brother said, “was a bad setting of a broken limb.” The limb needed breaking a second time, and then it would be equal to its business.

‘My brother exaggerated the danger, and underestimated the strength, which existing institutions and customs possess, so long as they are left undisturbed. Before he and his friends undertook the process of reconstruction, the Church was perhaps in the healthiest condition which it had ever known…. The average English incumbent of fifty years ago was a man of private fortune, the younger brother of the landlord perhaps, and holding the family living; or it might be the landlord himself, his advowson being part of the estate. His professional duties were his services on Sunday, funerals and weddings on week-days, and visits, when needed, among the sick. In other respects he lived like his neighbours, distinguished from them only by a black coat and white neckcloth, and greater watchfulness over his words and actions. He farmed his own glebe; he kept horses; he shot and hunted moderately, and mixed in general society. He was generally a magistrate; he attended public meetings, and his education enabled him to take a leading part in county business. His wife and daughters looked after the poor, taught in the Sunday school, and managed the penny clubs and clothing clubs. He himself was spoken of in the parish as “the master,” the person who was responsible for keeping order there, and who knew how to keep it. The labourers and the farmers looked up to him. The family in the “great house” could not look down upon him. If he was poor, it was still his pride to bring up his sons as gentlemen; and economies were cheerfully submitted to at home to give them a start in life at the University, or in the Army or Navy.

‘Our own household was a fair representative of the order. My father was Rector of the parish. He was Archdeacon, he was Justice of the Peace. He had a moderate fortune of his own, consisting chiefly in land, and he belonged, therefore, to the “landed interest.” Most of the magistrates’ work of the neighbourhood passed through his hands. If anything was amiss, it was his advice which was most sought after; and I remember his being called upon to lay a troublesome ghost. In his younger days, he had been a hard rider across country. His children knew him as a continually busy, useful man of the world, a learned and cultivated antiquary, and an accomplished artist. My brothers and I were excellently educated, and were sent to School and College. Our spiritual lessons did not go beyond the Catechism. We were told that our business in life was to work, and to make an honourable position for ourselves. About doctrine, Evangelical or Catholic, I do not think that in my early boyhood I ever heard a single word, in Church or out of it. The institution had drifted into the condition of what I should call moral health. It did not instruct us in mysteries, it did not teach us to make religion a special object of our thoughts; it taught us to use religion as a light by which to see our way along the road of duty. Without the sun, our eyes would be of no use to us; but if we look _at_ the sun we are simply dazzled, and can see neither it nor anything else. It is precisely the same with theological speculations. If the beacon lamp is shining, a man of healthy mind will not discuss the composition of the flame. Enough if it shows him how to steer, and keep clear of shoals and breakers. To this conception of the thing we had practically arrived. Doctrinal controversies were sleeping. People went to Church because they liked it, because they knew that they ought to go, and because it was the custom. They had received the Creeds from their fathers, and doubts about them had never crossed their minds. Christianity had wrought itself into the constitution of their natures. It was a necessary part of the existing order of the universe, as little to be debated about as the movements of the planets or the changes of the seasons.

‘Such the Church of England was, in the country districts, before the Tractarian Movement. It was not perfect, but it was doing its work satisfactorily. It is easier to alter than to improve, and the beginning of change, like the beginning of strife, is like the letting out of water. Jupiter, in Lessing’s fable, was invited to mend a fault in human nature. The fault was not denied, but Jupiter said that man was a piece of complicated machinery, and if he touched a part he might probably spoil the whole.

‘But a new era was upon us. The miraculous nineteenth century was coming of age, and all the world was to be remade…. History was reconstructed for us. I had learned, like other Protestant children, that the Pope was Antichrist, and that Gregory VII. HAD BEEN A SPECIAL REVELATION OF THAT BEING. I WAS NOW TAUGHT THAT GREGORY VII. was a Saint. I had been told to honour the Reformers. The Reformation became the Great Schism, Cranmer a traitor, and Latimer a vulgar ranter. Milton was a name of horror, and Charles I. was canonised and spoken of as the holy and blessed Martyr St. Charles. I asked once whether the Church of England was able properly to create a Saint? St. Charles was immediately pointed out to me. Similarly, we were to admire the Nonjurors, to speak of James III. instead of The Pretender; to look for Antichrist, not in the Pope, but in Whigs and revolutionists and all their works. Henry of Exeter,[377] so famous in those days, announced once, in my hearing, that the Court of Rome had regretted the Emancipation Act as a victory of Latitudinarianism. I suppose he believed what he was saying….

* * * * *

‘These were the views which we used to hear in our home-circle, when the Tracts were first beginning. We had been bred, all of us, Tories of the old school. This was Toryism in ecclesiastical costume. My brother was young, gifted, brilliant, and enthusiastic. No man is ever good for much who has not been carried off his feet by enthusiasm, between twenty and thirty; but it needs to be bridled and bitted; and my brother did not live to be taught the difference between fact and speculation. Taught it he would have been, if time had been allowed him. No one ever recognised facts more loyally than he, when once he saw them. This I am sure of, that when the intricacies of the situation pressed upon him, when it became clear to him that if his conception of the Church, and of its rights and position, was true at all, it was not true of the Church of England in which he was born, and that he must renounce his theory as visionary or join another Communion, he would not have “minimised” the Roman doctrines that they might be more easy for him to swallow, or have explained away plain propositions till they meant anything or nothing. Whether he would have swallowed them, or not, I cannot say; I was not eighteen when he died, and I do not so much as form an opinion about it; but his course, whatever it was, would have been direct and straightforward; he was a man far more than a theologian: and if he had gone, he would have gone with his whole heart and conscience, unassisted by subtleties and nice distinctions. It is, however, at least equally possible that he would not have gone at all….

* * * * *

‘The terminus, however, towards which he and his friends were moving, had not come in sight in my brother’s lifetime. He went forward, hesitating at nothing, taking the fences as they came, passing lightly over them all, and sweeping his friends along with him. He had the contempt of an intellectual aristocrat for private judgement and the rights of a man. In common things, a person was a fool who preferred his own judgement to that of an expert. Why, he asked, should it be wiser to follow private judgement in religion? As to rights, the right of wisdom was to rule, and the right of ignorance was to be ruled. But he belonged himself to the class whose business was to order rather than obey. If his own Bishop had interfered with him, his theory of episcopal authority would have been found inapplicable in that particular instance.

* * * * *

‘… The triumvirs who became a national force, and gave its real character to the Oxford Movement, were Keble, Pusey, and John Henry Newman. Newman himself was the moving power; the two others were powers also, but of inferior mental strength. Without the third, they would have been known as men of genius and learning; but their personal influence would have been limited to and have ended with themselves. Of Pusey I knew but little, and need not do more than mention him. Of Keble I can only venture to say a few words…. The inability to appreciate the force of arguments which he did not like saved him from Rome, but did not save him from Roman doctrine. It would, perhaps, have been better if he had left the Church of England, instead of remaining there to shelter behind his high authority a revolution in its teaching. The Mass has crept back among us, with which we thought we had done for ever, and the honourable name of Protestant, once our proudest distinction, has been made over to the Church of Scotland and the Dissenters.

‘Far different from Keble, from my brother, from Dr. Pusey, from all the rest, was the true chief of the Catholic revival――John Henry Newman. Compared with him, they were all but as ciphers, and he the indicating number.’

Controversy from ‘THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEW’ AND ‘THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY’ between Prof. E. A. FREEMAN AND MR. JAMES ANTHONY
FROUDE.

[From _The Contemporary Review_ for March, 1878, xxxi., 822 _et
seq._ By E. A. Freeman.][378]

‘… Mr. Froude, in his present attempt to paint the picture of the great men of the twelfth century, puts on the outward garb of one who has read and tested his materials, and has come to a critical judgement on what he has read and tested. But he happily leaves a little cranny open which enables us to look within. The very first words of Mr. Froude’s _Life and Times of Thomas Becket_ are enough to show us that the seeming historical inquiry is really designed as a manifesto against a theological party which once numbered its author among its members. To those who know the whole literature of the subject, it has a look more unpleasant still. Those whose study of twelfth-century history goes back to times when those who are now in their second half-century were young, will not fail to remember a time when the name of Froude reminded them of another, an earlier, and (I have no hesitation in saying) a worthier treatment of the same subject. And some of those who go back so far may be tempted to think that natural kindliness, if no other feeling, might have kept back the fiercest of partisans from ignoring the honest work of a long-deceased brother, and from dealing stabs in the dark at a brother’s almost forgotten fame…. [Mr. Froude] is controversial, something more than controversial, from the beginning. He undertakes the study, not to throw fresh light on the history of the twelfth century, but to deal a blow at a party in the nineteenth. His first words are: “Among the earliest efforts of the modern sacerdotal party in the Church of England was an attempt to re-establish the memory of the Martyr of Canterbury.” It is not everybody who reads this who will fully take in what is here meant. The first attempt made, within the memory of our own generation, to examine and compare the materials for the great controversy between King and Primate, was made by Richard Hurrell Froude of Oriel College: the Froude of the once famous _Remains_, the elder brother of the man who makes this somewhat unbrotherly reference. The elder Froude doubtless belonged to what the younger calls “the sacerdotal party.” His wish undoubtedly was “to re-establish the memory of the Martyr of Canterbury.” To those with whom historic truth comes foremost, and who have no special fanaticism, sacerdotal or anti-sacerdotal, the effort of a “sacerdotal party” to re-establish the memory of Thomas of Canterbury may seem at least as worthy an object as to re-establish the memory of Flogging Fitzgerald, or of King Harry himself. To re-establish the memory of Thomas is, at the worst, a question of words and names, and of a certain law: it does not, like the other two re-establishments, imply the defence of any matter of wrong, or wicked lewdness. And the elder Froude’s history of controversy, if undertaken with a purpose of theological partisanship, was still a piece of creditable historical work. Done forty years or so ago, it was, of course, not up to the level of modern criticism on the subject. But it was the beginning of modern criticism on the subject. The elder Froude is entitled, at the hands of everyone who writes or reads the story of Thomas, to that measure of respectful thanks which belongs to a pioneer on any subject. As for his spirit of partisanship, those who stand outside the arena of all such partisanship might say that when the elder Froude wrote, it was time that the other side should be heard, in its turn. The name of Thomas à Becket had been so long the object of vulgar and ignorant scorn; his character and objects had been treated with such marked unfairness, even by historians of real merit, that fair play might welcome a vindication, even if it went too far the other way. Such a vindication was the object of the elder Froude: in the course of it, he got rid of several prevalent errors, and made ready the way for more impartial and critical examination at the hands of others. The elder Froude did something to put one who, whatever were his objects, whatever were his errors, was still a great and heroic Englishman, in a historic place more worthy of him. At all events, he deserves better than to have his work thus sneeringly spoken of by his own younger brother: “And while Churchmen are raising up Becket as a brazen serpent on which the world is to look to be healed of its incredulities, the incredulous world may look with advantage at him from its own point of view; and if unconvinced that he was a Saint, may still find instruction in a study of his actions and his fate.” This way of speaking may seem startling to those who know the relation between the long-deceased champion of the one side, and the living champion of the other…. The point of view of those whose sole object is historic truth may well be different either from the point of view of “Churchmen,” or from that of the “incredulous world.” At all events, historic truth has nothing to do with the point of view of either.’

From _The Nineteenth Century_ for April, 1878, iii., 621. ‘A Few
Words on Mr. Freeman,’ by J. A. Froude.

‘Mr. Freeman commences with a sentence which is grossly impertinent. “Natural kindliness,” he says, “if no other feeling, might have kept back the fiercest of partisans from ignoring the work of a long-forgotten brother.” How can Mr. Freeman know my motive for not speaking of my brother in connection with Becket, that he should venture upon ground so sensitive? I mentioned no modern writers, except, once, Dean Stanley. Natural kindliness would have been more violated if I had specified my brother as a person with whose opinions on the subject I was compelled to differ. I spoke of rehabilitation of Becket as among the first efforts of the High Church school. My brother’s _Remains_ were brought out by the leaders of that school after his death, as a party manifesto; and, for my own part, I consider the publication of the _Remains_ the greatest injury that was ever done to my brother’s memory. But this is venial, compared with what follows. He goes on: “And from dealing stabs in the dark at a brother’s almost forgotten fame.” “Stabs in the dark?” Can Mr. Freeman have measured the meaning of the words which he is using? If I had written anonymous articles attacking my brother’s work, “stabs in the dark” would have been a correct expression; and Mr. Freeman has correctly measured the estimate likely to be formed of a person who could have been guilty of doing anything so discreditable. Irrespective of “natural kindliness,” I look back upon my brother as, on the whole, the most remarkable man I have ever met in my life. I have never seen any person,――not one! in whom, as I now think of him, the excellences of intellect and character were combined in fuller measure. Of my personal feeling towards him I cannot speak. I am ashamed to have been compelled, by what I can describe only as an inexcusable insult, to say what I have said.’

From _The Contemporary Review_, May, 1879, xxxv., 218 _et seq._
‘Last Words on Mr. Froude,’ by E. A. Freeman.

‘… With regard to Mr. Froude’s treatment of his brother’s writings, I see that what I have said has pained Mr. Froude. I am so far sorry for it; but I do not admit that I said anything beyond fair criticism. I know that the friends of Mr. R. H. Froude were deeply pained by what Mr. J. A. Froude wrote in his _Life and Times of Thomas Becket_. I cannot say that I was pained, because I never knew Mr. R. H. Froude. He was, to me, neither a friend nor a kinsman, nor a man in whom I had any personal or party interest. But as a student of twelfth-century history, I do owe him a certain measure of thanks as a pioneer in one of my subjects of study. Therefore, if not pained, like his personal friends, I was indignant: because I thought that he was unworthily treated, and that the treatment was the more unworthy because it came from the hands of his own brother. When I spoke of “stabs in the dark,” I meant that the victim (I must use the word) was in the dark. Very few of Mr. Froude’s readers would know that it was his own brother of whom Mr. Froude was speaking, in a way which, brother or no brother, I hold to be wholly undeserved.

‘But if any impartial judge thinks that I ought not to have mentioned the fact of the kindred between the two writers, I regret having done so.’

From ‘THE REMAINS OF THE REV. RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE, M.A., Fellow
of Oriel’ [edited by the Rev. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN and the Rev.
JOHN KEBLE]. London: Rivingtons, 1838. 2 vols.

‘[Richard Hurrell Froude] was the eldest son of the Venerable Robert H[urrell] Froude, Archdeacon of Totnes, and was born, and died, in the Parsonage House of Dartington, in the county of Devon. He was born in 1803, on the Feast of the Annunciation; and he died of consumption, on the 28th of February, 1836, when he was nearly thirty-three, after an illness of four years and a half. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, having previously had the great advantage, while at Ottery Free School, of living in the family of the Rev. George Coleridge. He went to Eton in 1816, and came into residence as a Commoner of Oriel College in the spring of 1821. In 1824 he took the degree of Bachelor of Arts, after having obtained, on his examination, high, though not the highest honours, both in the _Literæ Humaniores_ and the _Disciplinæ Mathematicæ et Physicæ_. At Easter, 1826, he was elected Fellow of his College, and, in 1827, was admitted to his M.A. degree. The same year he accepted the office of Tutor, which he held till 1830. In December, 1828, he received Deacon’s Orders, and the year after, Priest’s, from the last and present Bishops of Oxford.[379] The disorder which terminated his life first showed itself in the summer of 1831; the winter of 1832, and the following spring, he passed in the south of Europe; and the two next winters, and the year between them (1834), in the West Indies. The illness which immediately preceded his death lasted but a few weeks.

‘He left behind him a considerable collection of writings, none prepared for publication: of which the following two volumes form a part. The Journal, with which the first commences, and which is continued in the Appendix, reaches from the beginning of 1826, when he was nearly twenty-three, to the spring of 1828. The Occasional Thoughts are carried on to 1829. The Essay on Fiction was written when he was twenty-three; the Sermons, from 1829 to 1833, when he was between twenty-five and thirty.[380] His Letters begin in 1823, when he was twenty, and are carried down to within a month of his death.

‘Those on whom the task has fallen of preparing these various writings for publication, have found it matter of great anxiety to acquit themselves so as to satisfy the claims of duty, which they felt pressing on them in distinct, and, sometimes, apparently opposite directions.

‘Some apology may seem requisite, in the first place, for the very magnitude of the collection: as though authority were being claimed, in a preposterous way, for the opinions of one undistinguished either by station or by known literary eminence.

‘That apology, it is believed, will be found in the truth, and extreme importance, of the views to the development of which the whole is meant to be subservient; and also in the instruction derivable from a full exhibition of the author’s character as a witness to those views. This is the plea which it is desired to bring prominently forward; nothing short of this, it is felt, would justify such ample and unreserved disclosures: neither originality of thought, nor engaging imagery, nor captivating touches of character and turns of expression.

‘Still more is this apology needed, on the more serious grounds of friendship and duty. The publication of a private Journal and private Letters is a serious thing. Too often it has been ventured on, in a kind of reckless way, with an eye singly to the good expected to be accomplished, no regard being had to the author himself, and his wishes. It is in itself painful, nay, revolting, to expose to the common gaze papers only intended for a single correspondent; and it seems little less than sacrilege to bring out the solitary memoranda of one endeavouring to feel, and to be, as much as possible alone with his God: secretly training himself, as in His presence, in that discipline which shuns the light of this world. To such a publication, it were objection enough that it would seem to harmonise but too well with the restless unsparing curiosity which now prevails.

‘No common motive, then, it may be well believed, was required to overcome the strong reluctance which even strangers of ordinary delicacy, much more kinsmen and intimate friends, must feel on the first suggestion of such a proceeding. It may be frankly allowed that gentle and good minds will naturally be prejudiced, in the outset, against any collection of the sort. But the present is a peculiar case, a case in which, if the survivors do not greatly deceive themselves, they are best consulting the wishes of the departed by publication, hazardous as that step commonly is. Let the reader, before he condemns, imagine to himself a case like the following.

‘Let him suppose a person in the prime of manhood (with what talents and acquirements is not now the question) devoting himself, ardently yet soberly, to the promotion of one great cause; writing, speaking, thinking on it for years, as exclusively as the needs and infirmities of human life would allow; but dying before he could bring to perfection any of the plans which had suggested themselves to him for its advancement. Let it be certainly known to his friends that he was firmly resolved never to shrink from anything, not morally wrong, which he had good grounds to believe would really forward that cause: and that it was real pain and disquiet to him if he saw his friends in any way postponing it to his supposed feelings or interests. Suppose, further, that having been for weeks and months in the full consciousness of what was soon likely to befall him, he departs, leaving such papers as make up the present collection in the hands of those next to him in blood, without any express direction as to the disposal of them; and that they, taking counsel with the friends on whom he was known chiefly to rely, unanimously and decidedly judged publication most desirable for that end which was the guide of his life, and which they too esteemed paramount to all others; imagine the papers appearing to them so valuable, that they feel as if they had no right to withhold such aid from the cause to which he was pledged: would it, or would it not, be their duty, as faithful trustees, in such case to overcome their own scruples? would they, or would they not, be justified in believing that they had, virtually, his own sanction for publishing such parts even of his personal and devotional memoranda, much more, of his letters to his friends, as they deliberately judged likely to aid in the general good effect?

‘This case of a person sacrificing himself altogether to one great object, is not of everyday occurrence: it is not like the too frequent instances of papers being ransacked and brought to light, because the writer was a little more distinguished, or accounted a little wiser, or better, than his neighbours: it cannot be fairly drawn into a precedent, except in circumstances equally uncommon.

‘On the whole, supposing what in this Preface must be supposed, the nobleness, and rectitude, and pressing nature of the end which [Mr. Froude] had in view, the principle of posthumous publication surely must, in this instance, be conceded? The only question remaining will be whether the selection has been judicious. On this, also, it may be well to anticipate certain objections not unlikely to occur to sundry classes of readers. If there be any who are startled at the strong expressions of self-condemnation occurring so frequently, both in the Journal and in the more serious parts of the Correspondence, he will please to consider that the better anyone knows, the more severely will he judge himself; and since this writer sometimes thought it his duty to be very plain-spoken in his censure of others, in fairness to him it seemed right to show that he did not fail to look at home; that he tried to be more rigid to himself than to anyone else.

* * * * *

‘Censure may be expected … [on] what will be called the intolerance of certain passages: the keen sense which the author expresses of the guilt men incur by setting themselves against the Church. In fact, both this and the alleged tendency to Romanism,[381] are objections, not to the present publication, but to the view which it is designed to support, and do not therefore quite properly come within the scope of this Preface. To defend the severe expressions alluded to would be in a great measure to defend the old Catholic writers for the tone in which they have spoken of unbelievers and corrupters of the Faith. The same portions of Holy Scripture would be appealed to in both cases; those, namely, which teach or exemplify the duty of austere reserve towards wilful heretics, and earnest zeal against heresiarchs. Perhaps it may be found that [Mr. Froude’s] demeanour and language on such subjects is a tolerably striking and consistent illustration of that sentiment of the Psalmist: “Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate Thee?” He hated them in their collective character, as God’s enemies, as the antichristian party; but to all who came in his way individually, he was, as many of his acquaintance can testify, full of unaffected, open-hearted kindness; entering into their feelings, and making allowance for their difficulties, not the less scrupulously because he sometimes found himself compelled to separate from them, or declare himself against them.

‘To judge adequately of this point, we must, further, take into account a certain strong jealousy which he entertained of his own honesty of mind. He was naturally, or on principle, a downright speaker, avoiding those words of course and of compliment, which often, it may be feared, serve to keep up a false peace at the expense of true Christian charity. His words, therefore (playfulness and occasional irony apart), may in general be taken more literally than those of most men. It is easy to see that this would make his criticisms, whether literary or moral, sound more pointed and unsparing than those in which a writer of less frankness would indulge himself. And this introduces another point, not unlikely to be animadverted on as blameable, in the present selection. Many, recoiling from his sentences, so direct, fearless, and pungent, concerning all sorts of men and things, will be fain to account them speeches uttered at random, more for present point and effect, than to declare the speaker’s real opinion; and, so judging, will of course disapprove of the collecting and publishing such sayings, especially on high and solemn subjects, as at best incautious, and perhaps irreverent. But they who judge thus must be met by a denial of the fact. The expressions in question were not uttered at random: he was not in the habit of speaking at random on such matters. This is remarkably evinced by the fact that to various friends, at various times, conversing or writing on the same subjects, he was constantly employing the same illustrations and arguments, very often the same words: as they found by comparison afterwards, and still go on to find. Now maxims and reasonings of which this may be truly affirmed, whatever else may be alleged against them, cannot fairly be thrown by as mere chance sayings. Right or wrong, they were deliberate opinions, and cannot be left out of consideration, in a complete estimate of a writer’s character and principles. The off-hand unpremeditated way in which they seemed to dart out of him, like sparks from a luminous body, proved only a mind entirely possessed with the subject; glowing, as it were, through and through.

‘Still, some will say, more selection might have been used, and many statements at least omitted, which, however well considered by himself, coming now, suddenly, as they do, on the reader, appear unnecessarily startling and paradoxical. But, really, there was little option of that kind, if justice were to be done either to him or to the reader. His opinions had a wonderful degree of consistency and mutual bearing; they depended on each other as one whole: who was to take the responsibility of separating them? Who durst attempt it, considering especially his hatred of concealment and artifice? Again: it was due to the reader to show him fairly how far the opinions recommended would carry him. There is no wish to disguise their tendencies, nor to withdraw them from such examination as will prove them erroneous, if they are so. Any homage which it is desired to render to his memory would indeed be sadly tarnished, were he to be spoken or written of in any spirit but that of an unshrinking openness like his own. Such also is the tone of the Catholic Fathers, and (if it may be urged without irreverence), of the Sacred Writers themselves. Nothing, as far as we can find, is kept back by them, merely because it would prove startling: openness, not disguise, is their manner. This should not be forgotten in a compilation professing simply to recommend their principles. Nothing, therefore, is here kept back, but what it was judged would be fairly and naturally misunderstood: the insertion of which, therefore, would have been, virtually, so much untruth.

‘Lastly, it may perhaps be thought of the Correspondence in particular, that it is eked out with unimportant details, according to the usual mistake of partial friends. The compilers, however, can most truly affirm that they have had the risk of such an error continually before their eyes, and have not, to the best of their judgement, inserted anything, which did not tell, indirectly perhaps but really, towards filling up that outline of his mind and character, which seemed requisite to complete the idea of him as a witness to Catholic views. It can hardly be necessary for them to add, what the name of Editor implies, that while they, of course, concur in his sentiments as a whole, they are not to be understood as rendering themselves responsible for every shade of opinion or expression.

‘It remains only to commend these fragments, if it may be done without presumption, to the same good Providence which seemed to bless the example and instructions of the writer while yet with us, to the benefit of many who knew him: that “being dead,” he may “yet speak,” as he constantly desired to do, a word in season for the Church of God: may still have the privilege of awakening some of her members to truer and more awful thoughts than they now have, of their own high endowments and deep responsibility.’

‘REMAINS OF THE REV. RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE, M.A., FELLOW OF ORIEL’
[EDITED BY THE REV. J. H. NEWMAN and the Rev. JOHN KEBLE].
London: Rivingtons, 1839. Part II.

‘It was of course impossible but that the quantity and variety of censure, which was elicited by the publication of the former part of these _Remains_, should be felt by the Editors as a call for much calm and patient consideration, before proceeding, in further fulfilment of their trust, to offer these additional volumes to the world. One thing has at least become evident, which was at first very uncertain: that it was a publication of some importance for good or for evil. The notice which it has attracted, favourable or otherwise, is at least a token that the Editors were not mistaken, as partial friends are so apt to be, in their estimate of the force and originality of [Mr. Froude’s] character, or of the keen, courageous, searching precision, with which he had, though it were but incidentally, put forth his ecclesiastical and theological opinions, and applied them to things as they are.

‘But in such measure as all doubt on the importance of the publication is removed, the responsibility of it is doubtless enhanced; and it seems right to preface it with something like a fair and full statement of the reasons why the Editors have judged it, on the whole, their duty to persist in this step: not wilfully slighting any man’s scruples or remonstrances, but still thinking that the cause of the Church, which is paramount to everything else, leaves them not at liberty either to withdraw any important portion of what has been already made public, or to suppress what remains. And what will be alleged for perseverance now, will be found, perhaps in a good measure, to justify the original publication; taken, as it must be, in aid and in enforcement of the considerations offered in the Preface to the first volume.

‘And first, if there be any persons, as undoubtedly there are not a few, who think, more or less explicitly, that the mere circumstance of a book’s raising an outcry constitutes a strong objection to it, they are requested to put themselves for a single moment so far in the position of the Editors, as to imagine the case of [Mr. Froude’s] views being mainly and substantially true; and then to consider how such outcry could have been avoided. For if it be found that uneasiness, discontent, clamour, nay, if you will, permanent unpopularity, are the necessary results of a certain statement, supposing it to be true, then the actual prevalence of such feelings, however undesirable in itself, is no objection to the truth of the statement, but rather an argument in its favour, as far as it goes.

‘Suppose, for example, that the common opinions of the Protestant world concerning the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist were indeed verging as near to a profane rationalism, as these _Remains_ in several passages assume: would not the charge of superstition, mysticism, and Popery be echoed all around, against both Author and Editors, much in the same way as it has been heard for the last few months? Suppose it again true, that there is some secret but real and fatal connection between the aforesaid faithless rationalism, and those views regarding the great doctrines of Christianity and their application to individual Christians, which have of late arrogated to themselves exclusively the name of vital religion: is it not certain that the disregard (for it is rather that than actual opposition) which those views constantly meet with, at the hand of this Author, would unite against him the champions of those apparently opposite schemes, just in the manner in which we see them actually united? If it should so be that there is a large portion of Churchmen whom the circumstances of these or of former times have led to form an exaggerated opinion of the necessity and sacredness of the alliance of Church and State; to sacrifice more or less of the very being of the Church, in order, as they think, to secure its well-being: could it fail to happen that such as these would be alarmed and disgusted at the fearless uncompromising tone in which the inviolability of the Church is here asserted, and the past and present tyranny of the State, in every part of Christendom, denounced? Lastly, should there be any considerable number of decent religionists in the land, who would themselves make no scruple of professing that hatred of “asceticism” is a main ingredient in their notion of Christianity, it were little trouble to point out the pages, in this work, at which they are likeliest to be startled and disgusted: and yet it might be true, all the while, that the writer’s views are Scriptural and Catholic, and those which they have glided into, discountenanced by the Bible and the Church.

‘So far, then, as the unfavourable criticism, with which these _Remains_ have been visited, may be set to the account of any or all of the four classes now mentioned, it was of course to be expected, nor is any particular deference due to it; and the bitterer and louder it is, and the longer it lasts, the more reason may it, perhaps, give, to a considerate person, for suspecting that the words which provoked it were not altogether unseasonable. But there seems to be a fear entertained, among persons worthy of all respect, of no less an evil than encouragement given to irreverence and lightness on sacred subjects, partly by certain opinions of [Mr. Froude], which would lead Englishmen (it is feared) to disparagement of their Church as it is; partly by something, in his tone and manner of writing, which many find startling, and can hardly reconcile to themselves. To these persons, and these feelings, a more particular explanation seems due: and such will, therefore, be now attempted, though in no sanguine expectation of satisfying them to any extent; yet not altogether without hope that in some instances they may be led to suspect their own misgivings, as arising from impulse and habit, rather than from sound and true views of sacred things.

‘The best way, perhaps, will be to commence by calmly recalling a few plain facts. It is no long time ago, and yet the career of events has been so rapid, that it seems far removed from us: but let us endeavour to realise for a moment the posture of mind in which sincere Churchmen found themselves, in 1832 and 1833, when the Constitution of the country had been changed by threats of violence, and the cry of Church Reform was being raised with a view to a similar process, and no person knew how much strength it might gather, or by what unscrupulous means it might be enforced. The Liturgy, in particular, seemed to be an object of attack; and the authority of Bishops was so slighted, both in and out of Parliament, as to make men apprehend that in no long time the whole functions of the Church would be usurped by the State. At that crisis, the writer of these _Remains_ felt in common with not a few others, but with a vividness and keenness of perception almost peculiarly his own, that a call was given, and a time come, for asserting in their simplicity the principles of the only Primitive and True Church: those essential rights and duties which seemed in danger of being surrendered, in mere ignorance, to preserve certain external trappings. He surrendered himself to this feeling, without reserve: he spoke, and wrote, and acted from it continually; he devoted to it what remained of life and health; and it seems to have been this, more than anything else (excepting, perhaps, an unaffected mistrust concerning the sincerity and depth of his own repentance), which caused the sort of anxiety to recover, many times traceable in his correspondence. To use the words which Walton has reported of Hooker, “he could have wished to live longer, to do the Church more service.”

‘This being so, it cannot but be interesting and useful, now that Providence has brought us a stage or two further on in the warfare which he was among the foremost to commence, to have the means of consulting such a record as the present volumes supply, of the wishes, counsels, and anticipations of a mind so rare as his, concerning the conduct and probable course of the struggle. Those who have been sharers or approving witnesses of the several gatherings (so to call them) which the events of the last six years have occasioned, tending more or less to the revival of old Church principles, will here find many a sentiment which animated them half-unconsciously at the time, not only expressed in a way to sink into men’s hearts, but brought out in its full bearings and pursued to its legitimate consequences: it was wild inarticulate music before, but now we have the words and the meaning. And conversely, events have been continually happening, which have tended in a remarkable manner to illustrate [Mr. Froude’s] remarks and confirm his prognostications: so that, already, many things which sounded paradoxical and over-bold when he first uttered them, may be ventured on with hope of a reasonable degree of acceptance. His sagacity, it begins to be found, did but anticipate the lessons of our experience. If he loved to dwell on the noble act of Convocation in censuring Hoadly, and to forebode the rising of the sun which set so brightly, the great majority of the University of Oxford has since judged a like warning, however painful on personal grounds, yet most necessary, in regard of certain opinions not very unlike Hoadly’s. If he speaks what some would call bitterly concerning any party in the State, on account of an hostility to the Church, whether conscious or instinctive, which he thought he discerned in them, it seems now to be generally acknowledged that the subsequent proceedings of that party have been such as to justify a Churchman’s aversion. If he had what were then esteemed exaggerated feelings about Parliamentary suppression of Bishoprics, we have since seen the sense of the Church so strongly expressed on that subject, as to force from the Legislature the restoration of a See which had been actually extinguished, as far as any act of theirs could extinguish it. If he deprecated the current notions about the necessity of clerical endowments, good connections, and the like, as the most effectual bar to all projects for true Church Extension; is not the Church in our Colonies, even now, applying for Bishops without endowment? and are not new Churches being everywhere consecrated, at home, with only bare nominal endowment? If he had learned of other times to regard each Bishopric as a divinely instituted monarchy, and therefore to condemn all intrusion on episcopal authority, by Parliaments or otherwise, as not only disorderly, but profane, are not the clergy of England even now, in the case of the Church Discipline Bill, asserting that same principle against the authority which, personally, they would most revere? If he had brought himself habitually to contemplate the separation of Church and State as not necessarily a fatal alternative, there have been recent declarations, lay and ecclesiastical, to the same effect, in quarters which cannot be suspected. The Church has been congratulated on having “recovered herself” so far as “to feel her own strength and look to her own resources”; on having “become sensible that however desirous to act in unison with the State, she can boast of an independent origin, and can, as she has done before, exist in a state of independence.”[382] And (to go no further in enumeration at present), if the writer of these _Remains_ thought very seriously of the importance of those arrangements in Divine Service which tend most to remind the worshipper that God’s house is a house of prayer and spiritual sacrifice, not of mere instruction, we have but to look around us on the new Churches, and new internal fittings-up of Churches, which are in progress in most parts of the country, to be convinced that on this point, also, men sympathise with him to a much greater extent than they did.