‘Aug. 31.—… It has lately come into my head that the present state of things in England makes an opening for reviving the monastic system. I think of putting the view forward under the title of “Project for Reviving Religion in Great Towns.” Certainly colleges of unmarried priests (who might, of course, retire to a living, when they could and liked) would be the cheapest possible way of providing effectively for the spiritual wants of a large population…. I must go about the country to look for the stray sheep of the true fold: there are many about, I am sure; only that odious Protestantism sticks in people’s gizzard. I see Hammond takes that view of the Infallibility of the Church which P[almer] says was the old one. We must revive it. Surely the promise, “I am with you always,” means something?’
It is extraordinary how Hurrell’s talk runs not so much on existing outer problems as on notions which ‘have lately come into my head.’ The others were content to face emergencies the moment they arose. He knew not how to wait till things turned up: he went forward to turn them up. His vocation was less to lead than to prompt the men born to be leaders. The hard necessity of his lot, the denial to so vigorous a spirit of the physical fuel to keep it alight, imposed this upon him: to be what Emerson calls ‘the seeing eye, not the helping hand.’ Yet his enforced contemplative life kept those active brother lives together; he riveted their armour, mounted their banners, and re-tipped their spears. It was his destiny to give very much more than they could use, so highly congested and quintessential were his ideas, and the verbal hints born of them:
‘Such sounds as make deep silence in the heart,
For Thought to do her part.’
He is the vision of a pilgrim entering from the Middle Ages, barely laying down his staff and wallet before turning roadwards again, yet managing to blurt out, irrespective of the tavern conversation, fragments of his own correlated thought, immemorial things which he, at least, seems never to have forgotten. He is no opportunist, and chooses neither the audience nor the hour. ‘What to assume and what to prove,’
as he says, do not sort themselves in his mind. He is only oracular. He instructs Newman, in relation to no particular topic whatever, but on a mere salutary general principle: ‘Do keep writing to Keble, and stirring his rage. He is my fire, but I may be his poker.’ His influence over Keble’s fearless intelligence, felt from the first, was ultimately very great. His influence over Newman will hardly bear analysis, for Newman and he were one: the gnomon and the disk of a dial, or the arrow and the bow of some busy archer. We have all seen just such influence as Froude, invalided, had upon the Movement, privately exercised by Ministers of State, or by wives with a ripe understanding of their husbands’ practical concerns. It is the uncatalogued and intangible power, almost a plaything to its possessor, least known among the powers which move human society; and, therefore, perhaps it is the grimmest reality of all.
On September 9, Newman burst forth with the famous first sentence of his famous first Tract: ‘I am but one of yourselves, a Presbyter.’ Hurrell wrote no comment on the move; he was intimately aware of it from the beginning, and the earliest and hungriest reader. By the 16th, he is deep in study; there is a new historical theory to start, opening with an ironic reference to Mr. Keble’s ‘friends’:
‘… I have been reading a good deal lately about your friends the Puritans in Queen Elizabeth’s time; and really I like poor Penry very much. I think of writing An Apology for the Early Puritans, whose case I think to be this. The Church of England had relinquished its claim to the jus divinum, and considered Ordination to emanate ultimately from the Queen. These poor fellows, i.e., Penry and Co. (not Beza and Co., nor Knox and Co.), detested so abominable a notion: but what could they do? They had been bred up in a horror of trusting history in matters of religion, so they could look for a divine institution and a priesthood nowhere except in the Bible. Here, then, they looked, assuming as an axiom that they must find; and finding nothing more reasonable than the platform, they caught at this. In the meantime our people, and the smug[152] fellows on the Continent, were
going on with their civilities to one another, and servilities to their respective Governments, and left these poor men to fight for a jus divinum, though not the true one. It seems to me that Saravia and Bancroft are the revivers of orthodoxy in England, and that the Puritans shielded them from martyrdom. Had it not been for their pertinacity in claiming a jus divinum, that tyrant[153] would certainly have smothered the true one. Such are my crude speculations, on a rough survey: if you think me hopelessly wrong, floor me at once, and save me from wasting my time. How do you like my “Appointment of the Bishops?”[154] I have sent one on “State Interference in Matters Spiritual,” very dry and matter-of-fact, and mean to have a touch at the King’s supremacy, which I think Hooker would not justify under present circumstances. I think, if we manage well, we may make the idea of a Lay Synod popular. Its members should be elected by universal suffrage among the communicants, more primitivo. I find this view most effective in conversation. I am very well, and don’t think of going abroad this winter, though you seem to say I must. Time and money are two good things, and I don’t like wasting more of them. I have done enough in that line already…. I am quite surprised to see how much less of a conservative [Rose?] is than he was six months since. I do believe the progress of events is converting every one, and that we shall not have much longer to encounter the stigma of ultraism.’
Froude supplied, at most, but four of what George Eliot called The Tracts Against the Times, if we are to count as his only what he wrote out with his own hand. Of these, the earliest, briefest, and most comprehensive is No. 8, The Gospel a Law of Liberty, the authorship of which was, and is, frequently assigned to Newman.[155] It somewhat complicates matters that in Newman’s printed correspondence are various remarks addressed to him as responsible for No. 8, which bear no