He had poured forth various misgivings in the ear of the ever sympathetic Rogers. ‘Indeed, though I did not tell Neander (as who would?) yet I did tell his sister, and gave her leave to tell him…. I suppose, however, he will cut me. I cannot help it. At any rate, you must not…. Nor again, am I without a feeling of the danger, as you know, of married priests in these days of trouble and rebuke; but I have taken my line.’
‘It is needless to say,’ adds Miss Mozley in her narrative notes, ‘that “Neander” did not “cut” the writer of this letter, whose firstborn was subsequently his godson.’
But to return to Newman’s letter to Froude, which goes on:
‘I have long come to the conclusion that our time is not come, i.e., that other persons can do the day’s work as well as, or better than we can, our business being only to give them a shove now and then. You send home flaming papers, but, after all, I fall back to what I said last year on your articles about the Præmunire. Not that it is not right, very right, to accustom men’s imaginations to the prospect of changes; but they cannot realise the arguments: they are quite beyond them…. This is our gain, and I intend to make use of it…. Meanwhile let us read, and prepare ourselves for better things…. As to Rose, he is a fine fellow, certainly he is, and complains that he has no one, all through London, in whom he can confide. O that you were well enough to assist him in London! You are not fit to move of yourself, but you would act through Rose as spirit acts on external matter through a body. He has everything which you are without, and is so inflammable that not even muscles are more sensitive of volition than he would be of you.’
The ‘flaming papers,’ as Newman calls them, were the disconnected, wide-branching chapters dealing with various aspects of Rationalism in relation to doctrine, composed entirely at Barbados during 1834, and pieced together and published in 1839 from four incomplete manuscripts. Fragmentary as they are, they would, under careful editing, and coupled with the State Interference and Church Discipline, display Froude’s tangential and remorseless intelligence at its very best.
The proposed conjunction of Froude with Rose was less than a dream: a flat impossibility. It is wonderful that
Newman, who loved Rose truly in a measure, should never have quite sounded the reasons why he and Froude were not in closer accord and amity. When they were both in their untimely graves, Newman associated their memories as fellow-workers of the Will of God, in his comforting letter to Mr. Rose’s widow. But the two, clearly, were temperamental antipodes, partners in nothing but their stainless zeal, and their uncomplaining battle with long disease.
Once settled as instructor of mathematics to his young theologians, Hurrell pays epistolary dues to his father, and offers some ghostly counsel of a then drastic kind.
To the Ven. Archdeacon Froude, August 22, 1834.
‘… I am now at Codrington College, where Mr. P[inder][184] the Principal, and his wife, have made me very comfortable indeed. I am quite ashamed to think how much trouble they have taken. I have two rooms about thirteen by fourteen each, twelve high; the sitting room looks out on the Atlantic, which is about half a mile off at the bottom of a very steep hill to which the Babbacombe[185] one is nothing. The view is very pretty: the foreground is the Principal’s garden, which is the most English thing in the West Indies, they say: then comes some very rough uncultivated ground, some part of which is quite parkish; and at the bottom a beautiful little bay which just now, while the wind is south, is as still as a millpond.