‘Yet the will to subvert the doctrines and discipline of the Reformation is not wanting, and is not concealed. Mr. Froude himself, were he still living, might, indeed, object to be judged by his careless and familiar Letters. No such objection can, however, be made by the eminent persons who have deliberately given them to the world on account “of the truth and extreme importance of the views to which the whole is meant to be subservient,” and in which they record their “own general concurrence.” Of these weighty truths take the following examples: “You will be shocked at my avowal that I am every day becoming a less and less loyal son of the Reformation. It appears to me plain that in all matters which seem to us indifferent, or even doubtful, we should conform our practices to those of the Church which has preserved its traditionary practices unbroken. We cannot know about any seemingly indifferent practice of the Church of Rome that it is not a development of the Apostolic ἦθος, and it is to no purpose to say that we can find no proof of it in the writings of the first six centuries: they must find a disproof if they would do anything.”—“I think people are injudicious
who talk against the Roman Catholics for worshipping Saints and honouring the Virgin and images, etc. These things may perhaps be idolatrous: I cannot make up my mind about it.”—“P. called us the Papal Protestant Church, in which he proved a double ignorance, as we are Catholics without the Popery, and Church of England men without the Protestantism.”—“The more I think over that view of yours about regarding our present Communion Service, etc., as a judgement on the Church, and taking it as the crumbs from the Apostles’ table, the more I am struck with its fitness to be dwelt upon as tending to check the intrusion of irreverent thoughts, without in any way interfering with one’s just indignation.”—“Your trumpery principle about Scripture being the sole rule of faith in fundamentals (I nauseate the word), is but a mutilated edition, without the breadth and axiomatic character, of the original.”—“Really I hate the Reformation and the Reformers more and more, and have almost made up my mind that the Rationalist spirit they set afloat is the ψευδοπροφήτης of the Revelations.”—“Why do you praise Ridley? Do you know sufficient good about him to counterbalance the fact that he was the associate of Cranmer, Peter Martyr, and Bucer?”—“I wish you could get to know something of S. and W.” (Southey and Wordsworth), “and un-Protestantise, un-Miltonise them.”—“How is it WE are so much in advance of our generation?” Spirit of George Whitfield! how would thy voice, rolled from “the secret place of thunders,” have overwhelmed these puny protests against the truths which it was the one business of thy life to proclaim from the rising to the setting sun!
* * * * *
‘Penetrating the design and seizing the spirit of the Gospels, the Reformers inculcated the faith in which the sentient and the spiritual in man’s compound nature had each its appropriate office: the one directed to the Redeemer in His palpable form, the other to the Divine Paraclete in His hidden agency; while, united with these, they exhibited to a sinful, but penitent, race the parental character of the omnipresent Deity. Such is not the teaching of the restored theology. The most eminent of its professors have thrown open the doors of Mr. Froude’s oratory, and have invited all passers-by to notice in his prayers
and meditations “the absence of any distinct mention of our Lord and Saviour.” They are exhorted not to doubt that there was a real though silent “allusion to Christ” under the titles in which the Supreme Being is addressed; and are told that “this circumstance may be a comfort to those who cannot bring themselves to assume the tone of many popular writers of this day, who yet are discouraged by the peremptoriness with which it is exacted of them. The truth is, that a mind alive to its own real state often shrinks to utter what it most dwells upon; and is too full of awe and fear to do more than silently hope what it most wishes.”
‘It would indeed be presumptuous to pass a censure, or to hazard an opinion, on the private devotions of any man; but there is no such risk in rejecting the apology which the publishers of those secret exercises have advanced for Mr. Froude’s departure from the habits of his fellow-Christians. Feeble, indeed, and emasculate must be the system, which, in its delicate distaste for the “popular writers of the day,” would bury in silence the Name in which every tongue and language has been summoned to worship and to rejoice. Well may “awe and fear” become all who assume and all who invoke it. But an “awe” which “shrinks to utter”[316] the Name of Him Who was born at Bethlehem, and yet does not fear to use the Name which is ineffable; a “fear” which can make mention of the Father, but may not speak of the Brother, of all;—is a feeling which fairly baffles comprehension. There is a much more simple though a less imposing theory. Mr. Froude permitted himself, and was encouraged by his correspondents, to indulge in the language of antipathy and scorn towards a large body of his fellow-Christians. It tinges his Letters, his Journals, and is not without its influence even on his devotions. Those despised men too often celebrated the events of their Redeemer’s life, and the benefits of His Passion, in language of offensive familiarity, and invoked Him with fond and feeble epithets. Therefore, a good Oxford Catholic must envelope in mystic terms all allusion to Him round Whom, as its centre, the whole Christian system revolves. The line of demarcation between themselves and these coarse sentimentalists
must be broad and deep, even though it should exclude those by whom it is drawn, from all the peculiar and distinctive ground on which the standard of the reformed Churches has been erected…. The martyrs of disgust and the heroes of revolutions are composed of entirely opposite materials, and are cast in quite different moulds. Nothing truly great or formidable was ever yet accomplished, in thought or action, by men whose love for truth was not strong enough to triumph over their dislike of the offensive objects with which truth may chance to be associated.
‘Mr. Froude was the helpless victim of such associations. Nothing escapes his abhorrence which has been regarded with favour by his political or religious antagonists. The Bill for the Abolition of Slavery was recommended to Parliament by an Administration more than suspected of Liberalism in matters ecclesiastical. The “witness to Catholic views,” “in whose sentiments, as a whole,” his Editors concur, visits the West Indies, and they are not afraid to publish the following report of his feelings: “I have felt it a kind of duty to maintain in my mind an habitual hostility to the niggers, and to chuckle over the failures of the new system, as if these poor wretches concentrated in themselves all the Whiggery, dissent, cant, and abomination that have been ranged on their side.” Lest this should pass for a pleasant extravagance, the Editors enjoin the reader not to “confound the author’s view of the negro cause and of the abstract negro with his feelings towards any he should actually meet”; and Professor Thöluck is summoned from Germany to explain how the “originators of error” may lawfully be the objects of a good man’s hate, and how it may innocently overflow upon all their clients, kindred, and connections. Mr. Froude’s feelings towards the “abstract negro” would have satisfied the learned Professor in his most malevolent mood. “I am ashamed,” he says, “I cannot get over my prejudices against the niggers.”—“Every one I meet seems to me like an incarnation of the whole Anti-Slavery Society, and Fowell Buxton at their head.”—“The thing that strikes me as most remarkable in the cut of these niggers is excessive immodesty, a forward stupid familiarity intended for civility, which prejudices me against them worse even than Buxton’s
cant did. It is getting to be the fashion with everybody, even the planters, to praise the emancipation and Mr. Stanley.”
‘Mr. Froude, or rather his Editors, appear to have fallen into the error of supposing that their profession gives them not merely the right to admonish, but the privilege to scold. Lord Stanley and Mr. Buxton have, however, the consolation of being railed at in good company. Hampden is “hated” with much zeal, though, it is admitted, with imperfect knowledge. Louis Philippe, and his associates of the Three Days, receive the following humane benediction: “I sincerely hope ‘the march of mind’ in France may yet prove a bloody one.”—“The election of the wretched B. for ——, and that base fellow H. for ——, in spite of the exposure,” etc. Again, the Editors protest against our supposing that this is a playful exercise in the art of exaggeration. “It should be observed,” they say, “as in other parts of this volume, that the author used these words on principle, not as abuse, but as expressing matters of fact, as a way of bringing before his own mind things as they are.”