Sir James Stephen was very wroth with Froude for his attitude towards the slaves of the West Indian Colonies, deducing that attitude from some allusions of Froude’s own to ‘anti-slavery cant.’ The Editors of the Remains attest that Hurrell did not suffer (as later Mr. J. A. Froude was said to do, from other alleged causes) from negrophobia. But certainly his speech about ‘the niggers’ does not always sound
reassuring. Perhaps in this, as in other matters, he leans upon the reader’s general knowledge of him, and requires that to supply the marginal comment.
It is a common jibe against reformers, though not always a true one, that their range of ideas is disproportioned or partial. Members of the Anti-Vivisection Society are supposed to be indifferent to wife-beating. Perhaps, if known, Hurrell’s tendre for his only Roman Catholic, Monsignor Wiseman, and for ‘Roman Catholic sentiments,’ as he calls them, would seem enough to account for his limitations of sympathy on an island where he spent an unwilling year-and-a-half. It is interesting that to a Wilberforce, of all persons, he confides his final impressions, still pessimistic enough, of ‘our brothers carved in ebony.’ The Bill for the total abolition of slavery in the British dominions had received the Royal assent on August 28, 1833, and had come at last into full operation as Froude wrote. He was not wont, in other matters, to judge of the justice of a measure by its practical workings, or by the local material it had to work upon.
Hurrell approaches Keble in his most lucid and mischievous argumentative mood on the same day.
‘I have a miscellaneous jumble of things that I want to talk to you about, if I can but arrange them in any sort of order…. And first, I shall attack you for the expression “The Church teaches” so-and-so, which I observe is in the Tract[225] equivalent to “The Prayer-Book etc. teach[es] us” so-and-so. Now suppose a conscientious layman to inquire on what grounds the Prayer-Book etc., are called the teaching of the Church: how shall we answer him? Shall we tell him that they are embodied in an Act of Parliament? So is the Spoliation Bill. Shall we tell him that they were formerly enacted by Convocation in the reign of Charles II.? But what especial claim had this Convocation to monopolise the name and authority of the Church? Shall we tell him that all the clergy assented to them ever since their enactment? But to what interpretation of them have all, or even the major part of the clergy assented? For if it is the assent of the clergy that makes the Prayer-Book etc. the teaching of the Church, the
Church teaches only that interpretation of them to which all, or at least the majority of the clergy have assented; and in order to ascertain this, it will be necessary to inquire, not for what may seem to the inquirer to be their real meaning, but for the meaning which the majority of the clergy have, in fact, attached to them! It will be necessary to poll the Hoadleians, Puritans, and Laudians, and to be determined by [the] most votes. Again, supposing him to have ascertained these, another question occurs. Why is the opinion of the English clergy, since the enactment of the Prayer-Book, entitled to be called the teaching of the Church, more than that of the clergy of the sixteen previous centuries; or, again, than the clergy of France, Italy, Spain, Russia, etc., etc.? I can see no other claim which the Prayer-Book has on a layman’s deference, as the teaching of the Church, which the Breviary and Missal have not in a far greater degree…. I know you will snub me for this…. Surely no teaching nowadays is authoritative in the sense in which the Apostles’ was, except the Bible? nor any in the sense in which Timothy’s was, except that of Primitive Tradition? To find a sense in which the teaching of the modern clergy is authoritative, I confess baffles me.[226] …
‘Next, as to The Christian Year. In the Fifth of November—[as to]
‘“There present in the heart
Not in the hands,”—
how can we possibly know that it is true to say “not in the hands”?[227] Also, on the Communion … you seem cramped