Men hurry to and fro; but he the while
Hath found the Haven where he fain would be.’
From ‘Cardinal Newman,’ by Richard H. Hutton. London: Methuen & Co., 1891. [English Leaders of Religion.]
[By the kind permission of the executors of Mr. Hutton, and of Messrs. Methuen & Co.]
‘The friendship between Newman and Mr. Hurrell Froude, the elder brother of the historian, which commenced in 1826, and became intimate in 1829, lasting thence to Mr. Froude’s death from consumption in 1836, was certainly one of the most important influences which acted on Newman’s career at the most critical period of his life. Newman’s was one of the minds which mature slowly; and it was not till he was
twenty-six years of age that it became clear whether he would be, in the main, a religious leader, or one of the pillars of the Whately party; that is, the party who threw their influence into the scale of minimising the spiritual aspect and spiritual significance of Revelation, rather than of maximising it. Newman himself mentions that for two or three years before 1827, he was “beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral,” or, in other words, “drifting in the direction of Liberalism.” “I was rudely awakened from my dream, at the end of 1827, by two great blows, illness and bereavement.” And then, in 1829, came fuller intimacy with Hurrell Froude, which seems to have fully determined, if anything were then needed to determine, the direction in which his mind would proceed. Mr. Hurrell Froude was, as Newman describes him, a man of the highest gifts, gentle, tender, playful, versatile and “of the most winning patience and considerateness in discussion.” … I feel little doubt that Dr. Newman’s wrath against “Liberalism” (as for many years afterwards he always called it, identifying, as he did, Liberalism with Latitudinarianism) was, to a very considerable extent, a moral contagion caught from Hurrell Froude.
‘There are a few singularly beautiful lines, added by Newman after Hurrell Froude’s death, to the exquisite poem called “Separation of Friends,” written in 1833; and these sufficiently prove the tenderness of Newman’s friendship for Hurrell Froude, and the intimacy of the relation between them. The poem, as it was first written, on the separation of friends caused by death, ran thus:
‘“Do not their souls, who neath the altar wait
Until their second birth,