disclaimer in any note or parenthesis supplied by himself. It is also noticeable that he writes to Hurrell on November 13, 1833: ‘Evangelicals, as I anticipated, are struck with The Law of Liberty, and The Sin of the Church. The subject of Discipline, too, I cannot doubt, will take them. Surely my game lies among them.’[156] He might have said ‘our game,’ but he does not. Nor does The Gospel a Law of Liberty appear in Froude’s Remains. Dean Burgon, however, prints in the Appendix to his Twelve Good Men an extract from a letter of the Rev. Charles Marriott to the Rev. A. Burn of Chichester, Jan. 29, 1840. ‘You ought to know,’ says that gentle and unimpeachable authority, ‘that Froude was the author of the Tract, The Gospel a Law of Liberty, which is the subject of No. 8.’ Froude and Newman may well have devised this No. 8 in concert. So far as the wording goes, Newman’s light galloping touch is certainly upon it. In idea it is intensely Froude-like in its concentrated suggestiveness: in it we see the very pupa, as it were, of the wide-winged theory of Dogmatic Development, broached at Littlemore so long after. No. 8, with its staccato marcato form, is perhaps the most typical of the early Tracts, and most expressive of the spirit in which they were conceived. These shared in common (in the opinion of Dr. Pusey’s conjoint biographers, men who usually see things as they are) a ‘startling and peremptory language.’ ‘First rouse,’ ran Hurrell’s business-like programme, ‘then modify.’ Newman certainly, in his office of rouser, availed to set gentle and simple by the ears. Briefly, pungently, he did his inimitable work. Dr. Pusey, with his serious grasp, his moral weight, his immense learning, by contributing to the series his great signed Tract on Baptism, changed the fashion as we know. To ‘modify’ began with him, and progressed with him. He had the genius of explicit statement. It might even be said that his whole influence and care, especially from 1845 on, were on the side of expounding and applying, as Newman’s and Froude’s had been preponderately on that of naked presentment, full of novelty, excitement, and ‘danger.’ The little guided Israel which had followed the pillar of fire by night,
found it well, in due course, to follow the pillar of cloud by day.
Froude’s other contributions to the Tracts were No. 9, On Shortening the Church Services; No. 59, Church and State (incorporated in the Remains as the concluding section of State Interference in Matters Spiritual); and No. 63, on The Antiquity of Existing Liturgies. The last-named was intended to display the novel features of the Communion Service in the Book of Common Prayer, as contrasted with those Uses having inter-resemblance and an unbroken Apostolic derivation. It is shown that every Ordo except the English contains a memento of the dead; a sacrificial oblation; and a prayer ‘that God may make the bread and wine the Body and Blood of Christ.’ The method adopted by Froude in printing the Forms of Consecration is that of the parallel column: an early instance of the employment of that practical and sometimes deadly modern device. He calls the Tract, elsewhere, ‘my analysis of Palmer,’ and it was certainly fitted to concentrate fresh attention on Mr. Palmer’s Origines Liturgicæ, as well as on the norm of the matter it deals with.
Hurrell’s hands were full of writing in 1833; and being so busied with larger matters, he ceased to compose and preach sermons. Two very fine sombre ones, on S. John Baptist, and Riches a Temptation, date from June of this year; but they were his last. His true work lay in a less trodden field. The strong essays signed ‘F.’ in The British Magazine are in a happier vein than any of the sermons, and far more spontaneously worded. Like Dr. Johnson, Hurrell had a writing language, and a talking language which made faces at it. The only papers of his which approach in animation the unconventional utterances of his living voice and of all his letters, are just those upon historic-ecclesiastical, not secular subjects. There he sends up rockets too, though with a certain resigned decorum, and would have filled the sky had he not been curbed, as time went on, both by Rose and by Newman.
He came up to Oriel on October 5. Newman, now in the thick of affairs, and overjoyed to have him close at hand, writes privately to Keble, whom it ‘grieved to the heart’: ‘I
fear that Calvert,[157] whom you may recollect here, and a physician now, has pronounced about Froude (not to him) a judgment so unfavourable that I cannot bear to dwell upon it, or to tell it. Pray exert your influence to get him sent to the West Indies. I know he has a great prejudice against it; but, still, what other place is hopeful? They say Madeira is not. He might take a cargo of books with him. N.B.—Could you not manage to send Isaac Williams too?’ On Oct. 26, Hurrell left Oxford for home, Keble going with him as far as Bath. He sailed away on his second long voyage a month later. During the interval, he takes up his tireless pen.
To the Rev. J. H. Newman, Oct. 29, 1833.
‘Thank I[saac Williams] for a Thomas à Kempis he sent me, and tell him to know more about the other Sanctus Thomas before he draws invidious comparisons. I have got here without increasing my cough at all…. We will have a vocabularium apostolicum, and I will start it with four words: “pampered aristocrat,” “resident gentlemen,” “smug parsons,” “pauperes Christi.”[158] I shall use the first on all occasions: it seems to me just to hit the thing…. Love to C[hristie] the prefect, and all the sub-Apostolicals. I am like the man[159]
who “fled full soon on the first of June, but bade the rest keep fighting.”… Mind and write me all the news as it comes to hand; else I shall go to sleep at Barbados entirely…. Tony Buller[160] was here yesterday. He is a capital fellow, and is anxious to assist us with trouble and money in any way he can. I told him it was better not to say anything about money yet, till we had given people a longer trial of us. It is no use to form expectations of people, but I am willing to hope that he is a most zealous fellow, and will not start aside like some other broken bows.’
By early November the address of the clergy to the Archbishop (Howley) of Canterbury, which covered much ground, took many revisions, and ultimately was so well received, was afoot. Hurrell was ready, with his own uncompromising diction, to help it into being, leaving it to others to ‘supply the etiquette about “the undersigned clergy, etc.”’ Rhetorical drapery was hardly in his line. He sends to Newman some pithy sentences about ‘the misapplication to which some of the Services [of the Church of England] are exposed by the practical disuse of the Rubrics prefixed to them, and the inefficiency of attempting to act on these Rubrics without first completing the ecclesiastical system they presuppose.’ Also, he would have the reformers declare their conviction that ‘measures such as these, affecting the spiritual welfare of the Church, ought to originate only with its spiritual rulers, and that in such matters they deprecate every kind of extra-ecclesiastical interference.’ ‘Satis hæc lusisse,’ he breaks off. ‘I am very well indeed;—not had so little cough as to-day and yesterday, since the Lazaretto at Malta.’