of the Memorial, “it will be a good cut against Newman”: but it was not a cut which made him smart.’
From ‘Essays on Various Subjects,’ by Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman. London: Dolman, 1853, 3 vols.[363]
[By kind permission of the Executors of His Eminence Cardinal Vaughan.]
‘It is not often that the leaders of opinions let the public into a view of their secret counsels and feelings; but when they do, we think it does credit to the uprightness and sincerity of their intentions…. Nay, the more unreservedly the human weaknesses of the individuals are revealed, and the more the feeling is expressed that with their exposure, or in spite of it, their cause will succeed, the more highly we shall estimate their confidence in the correctness of their views, and the disinterestedness of their zeal in propagating them. These reflections have been suggested to us by the perusal of Mr. Froude’s Remains. He was, while living, one of the most enthusiastic members of the theological school from which the Tracts for the Times have emanated. He died in 1836, having attained only the age of thirty-three;[364] and was thus prevented from arriving at that full maturity of religious ideas which was evidently preparing in his mind, and bearing him onwards towards the perception of Catholic truths.
‘A preface of twenty-two pages betrays the Editors’ anxiety to repel a twofold charge: one against themselves, the other against their deceased friend…. When one whose noble and public proofs of great virtue far outweigh the errors of youth, or whose public reputation makes his example, when evil, a warning; and when repentant, a reparation and an encouragement,—when one, in short, like St. Augustine, boldly but humbly reveals to the eyes of the Church the wretchedness of his early sinful life, we admire, in awe, the strange manifestation of a sublime spirit of Christian virtue, and we bless the Divine Wisdom that hath caused it to be vouchsafed to us. But the struggles of one who has not compensated his
weaknesses by any noble results, who withdraws from our sight a combatant, and not a victor; who only presents us the spectacle of a frail nature, such as we all may have, wrestling with daily and anxious trials, and not overcoming them; (these, too, not spontaneously exhibited, but transferred from the closet to the public arena)—have neither the grandeur nor the instruction of the other lesson. Still, there may be reasons unknown to us who are not in the secrets of the party, to justify, certainly in their own eyes, this sacrifice of private feeling to a sense of public utility…. [The Editors] would have materially strengthened their reasoning by the following passage in [Mr. Froude’s] Letters to Friends: “There was a passage in a letter I have just received from my father, which made me feel so infinitely dismal that I must write to you about it. He says you have written to him to learn something about me, and to ask what to do with my money. It really made me feel as if I was dead, and you were sweeping up my remains: and by the by, if I were dead, why should I be cut off from the privilege of helping on the Good Cause? I don’t know what money I have left,—little enough, I suspect; but whatever it was, I am superstitious enough to think that any good it could do in honorem Dei et sacrosanctæ matris ecclesiæ, would have done something, too, in salutem animæ meæ.” From these words, it appears that the author did contemplate his power of doing good to the cause wherein he was so ardently engaged, even after his death.
‘The censure of their friend which the Editors foresee, is that which forms their bugbear in all their theological researches: that of approaching too near the Catholic, or, as they call it, Romanist doctrines. But we must express our conviction that the Editors have not done much credit to their friend by the manner in which they have thought it right to shield his memory from the charge. It consists in a careful collection of some of the most hasty, unhandsome, and decidedly unreasonable judgements and opinions of the author, respecting chiefly what he saw in his travels…. We think we are justified in saying that proof of Mr. Froude’s disinclination to Catholicity must have been very scarce, to have led the Editors to bring together these superficial observations made during a
brief residence in a Catholic city[365] not generally reputed the most edifying in its conduct! These, however, will not bear comparison with the growing and expanding tendency of his mind towards everything Catholic….
‘… The extracts from [his] Journal present us a picture at once pleasing and distressing, of a mind yearning after interior perfection, yet at a loss about the means of attaining it; embarked on an ocean of good desires, but without stars or compass by which to steer its course. The minute scrutiny into the motives of his actions, the distress occasioned by discovering his relapses into faults which most would overlook, show a sensitiveness of conscience in the youthful writer, far more honourable to him, and far more interesting to us, than abilities of a much higher order than what he really possessed could ever have appeared…. How far it may be advisable to commit to paper, even for personal benefit, these investigations of our most secret tribunal, we have considerable doubt; and instructive as is their record in the case before us, in nothing is it more so than in the proof it gives us of the necessity of guidance for the conscience and heart such as the institutions of the Catholic Church alone provide. In the account which he gives of his own infirmities, of his almost fruitless attempts to subdue them, and of the pain and anxiety produced by his solitary struggles, he presents a picture familiar to the experienced eye of any spiritual director in our Church, and a state fully described and prescribed for by the numerous writers whom we possess upon the inward life and the direction of consciences. Many are they who are tossed in the same billows of secret tribulation, many are they who are bewildered in the same mazes of mental perplexity; but they have not at least the additional horrors of darkness and night. Ere they can sink, a hand is stretched out, if they will only grasp it. The troubles and trials which haunt minds constituted as Mr. Froude’s, many a skilful guide would have shown him to be mere illusive phantoms that only serve to turn the attention away from serious dangers, or from solid good: snares cast by a restlessness of spirit upon the path, to entangle the feet that tread it…. The