‘The only one of these remarkable men who has passed into the region of history[329] is he who, though the youngest of the whole number in years, deserves to be commemorated as the first who took a comprehensive view of the bearings and character of the Movement. Mr. Froude was a College contemporary of my own, and I enjoyed at one time the privilege of constant intercourse and familiar acquaintance with him. Those who have formed their impression of him from his published Remains will scarcely, perhaps, be prepared to hear how little there appeared, in his external deportment, while he was at Oxford, of that remarkable austerity of life which he is now known to have habitually practised, even then. To a form of singular elegance, and a countenance of that peculiar and highest kind of beauty which flows from purity of heart and mind, he added manners the most refined and engaging. That air of sunny cheerfulness which is best expressed by the French word riant, never forsook him (at the time when I knew him best), and diffused itself, as is its wont, over every circle in which he moved. I have seen him in spheres so different as the Common-Rooms of Oxford, and the after-dinner company of the high aristocratic society of the West of England; and I well remember how he mingled even with the last in a way so easy, yet so dignified, as at once to conciliate its sympathies and direct its tone. He was one of those who seemed to have extracted real good out of an English Public School education, while unaffected by its manifold vices. Popular among his companions for his skill in all athletic exercises, as well as for his humility, forbearance, and indomitable good temper, he had the rare gift of changing the course of dangerous conversation without uncouth abruptness or unbecoming dictation; and he almost seemed, as is recorded of St. Bernardine of Sienna, to check, by his mere presence, the profane jibe, or unseemly équivoque. To his great intellectual powers his published Remains bear abundant witness; nor do we, in fact, need any other proof of them than the deference yielded to his opinions by such men as those who have acknowledged him for their example and their guide. Let it not be supposed that this high panegyric is prompted by the partiality of friendship. Although I enjoyed constant opportunities of intercourse with Mr. Froude, and made his character a study, yet I have no claim whatever to be considered his intimate friend. We were not, indeed, at that time, in anything like complete religious accord; and I remember his once saying to me, in words which subsequent events made me regard as prophetic: “My dear O., I believe you will come right some day; but you are a long time about it.” Poor Hurrell Froude! May it be allowed to one who was your competitor in more than one academical contest, and your inferior in everything (save in his happy possession of those religious privileges which you were cut off too early to allow of your attaining), to pay you, after many years, this feeble tribute of gratitude and admiration! Never again will Anglicanism produce such a disciple; never, till she is Catholic, will Oxford boast of such a son.

As I have begun this quotation, I may as well go on with it:

‘The estimate taken [of the Reformers and] of their work by Mr. Froude, Mr. Keble, and Mr. Newman became sufficiently manifest on the publication of Mr. Froude’s Remains, with the remarks prefixed to them by the friends just mentioned. Mr. Froude had described the English Reformers in general, as “a set with whom he wished to have less and less to do.” He declared his opinion that Bishop Jewel was no better than “an irreverent Dissenter,” and expressed himself as sceptical whether Latimer (of whom, as a “Martyr,” he did not wish to speak disrespectfully) were not “something in the Bulteel line.” Dr. Pusey was too humble and forbearing to enter any kind of public protest against statements and views so different from his own. But he was generally believed not to go along with the tenour of these expressions, nor to approve, otherwise than by passive acquiescence, of the publication of those parts of the work in which they were contained…. [Living,] Mr. Froude’s frankness and attractive personal qualities gained from the rising generation of Oxford a favourable hearing for the (to them) original views, which he so ably and dashingly inculcated…. No one can read Mr. Froude’s Remains … without seeing that with him and with those with whom he corresponded, the ethical system of Oxford had exercised no small influence in the formation of mental habits. Those who, like myself, were personally acquainted with Mr. Froude, will remember how constantly he used to appeal to [the] great moral teacher of antiquity, “Old ‘Stotle,” as he used playfully to call him, against the shallow principles of the day. There is a sense, I am convinced, in which the literature of heathenism is often more religious than that of Protestantism. Thus, then, it was that the philosophical studies of Oxford tended to form certain great minds on a semi-Catholic type.

‘Towards the close of his mortal career, his opinions appear to have undergone some change which was perceptible to many of his friends even in his outward demeanour. He associated less than formerly with the old High Church party of the Establishment, as he became convinced that the ills of the Church must be cured by sterner and more unworldly methods of discipline than that party was prepared to accept. An air of gravity, and a tone of severity, even in general society (so far as he mixed with it), had replaced that bright and sunny cheerfulness which was characteristic of his earlier days; and this change of exterior was greater than could be explained by his declining health, against which he bore up with exemplary fortitude. Together with a more anxious view of the state and prospects of the Establishment, he had apparently taken up a less favourable opinion of the Catholic Church, at least in its actual manifestation. A visit to the Continent had operated (from whatever cause) unfavourably upon his judgment of Catholics, whom he now first stigmatised as “Tridentines”: a strange commentary, certainly, on the view put forth later by Mr. Newman, to the effect that the prevalent Catholic system was erroneous in that it had deviated from the Tridentine rule, not in that it represented that rule! This and similar dicta, some of a still more painful import, have led such of Mr. Froude’s friends as have clung to the Established Church to believe that, had he lived, he would have remained on their side. Such a question will naturally be determined, to a great extent, according to the personal views and wishes of those who speculate upon it. Certain at any rate it is, that had he come to us, the Church would have secured the humble obedience and faithful service of a rarely gifted intellect; while, had he stayed behind, he would have added one more to the number of those whose absence is the theme of our lamentation, and whose conversion, the object of our prayers. It is part, however, of the historian’s office to investigate such questions according to the evidence at his disposal; and in the instance before us, that evidence is far more accessible and far more satisfactory than is usually the case in posthumous inquiries. Mr. Froude’s Letters to Friends, published in his Remains, give an insight into his character and feelings, with all their various developments and vicissitudes, such as is commonly the privilege of intimate personal acquaintance, and of that alone. His bosom friends could hardly have known him better than the careful student of these Letters may know him, if he desire it: indeed, it is to such friends that he discloses himself in those Letters with almost the plain-spokenness of the Confessional.

‘Now, it must be admitted that these Letters leave the question as to the probability of his conversion very much in that evenly-balanced state in which, as I have just said, the wishes of friends or partisans come in to determine it on either side. His Letters contain, on the one hand, many passages from which, if they stood alone, it might be concluded that he was, at certain times, almost ripe for conversion. They also contain others apparently of an opposite tenour. In the former class must be reckoned those indications of antipathy, continually deriving fresh fuel from new researches, to the English Reformation and Reformers.[330] Mr. Froude’s theological sentiments had long passed the mark of the Laudian era, and settled at the point of the Nonjurors.[331] He thinks one might take for an example Francis de Sales, whom, by the way, he classes with “Jansenist Saints.”[332] Again, he was most deeply sensitive to the shortcomings and anomalies of his communion: he calls it an “incubus” on the country, and ascribes to it the blighting properties of the “upas-tree.” It is evident that he was in advance both of Mr. Keble and Mr. Newman: he twits the former, in friendly expostulation, with the Protestantism of his phraseology in parts of The Christian Year, and laments the backwardness of the latter on some questions of the day. On the other hand, and in the same direction of thought, he expresses admiration of Cardinal Pole; he scruples about speaking against the Catholic system, even its “seemingly indifferent practices”;[333] he can understand, on the principle of reverence, the Communion under one species,[334] perhaps the greatest of all practical difficulties to many Anglican minds. Moreover, when at Rome, he evidently opened the subject of reconciliation to a distinguished prelate whom he met there.[335] Per contra, we have painful sayings against supposed practical abuses in the Church. “He really thought,” as he tells us, that “certain practices which he witnessed abroad are idolatrous”; he charges priests with irreverence, ecclesiastical authorities with laxity, etc.[336] Yet even these opinions he partially qualifies, and is disposed to attribute to defective information.[337] He shrinks from speaking against Rome as a Church.[338]

‘Unwilling as I am to hazard conjectures on the subject, especially against the judgement of any among his more intimate friends, I do not think it unreasonable to conclude, from a comparison of these passages, that Mr. Froude’s objections were chiefly directed against imaginary abuses, or possible relaxations of discipline, which time and reflection would have shown him to be entirely independent of the real merits of the controversy. I find it also difficult to believe that, as the principle of the English Reformation received these illustrations in the Established Church which we have lived long enough to see,—as her constituted tribunals were found to give up, in succession, the grace of the Sacraments, the authority of the Church, and even the inspiration of Holy Scripture itself, as necessary truths,—his clear and honest mind would not have accepted some or all of these tokens of apostasy as a summons to enter the True Fold. Assuredly, too, we have known no instance of a mind equally candid, intelligent, and instructed, whose advances in the direction of the Truth (especially when assisted by extraordinary acuteness of conscience and purity of life) have stopped short, as time has gone on, of the logical conclusions, except in cases where the progress of such a mind has been arrested by conflicting tendencies of deeply ingrained Protestant or national prepossession: such as in his case were singularly absent.

‘There is, however, one phase of Mr. Froude’s mind with which it is far more difficult to reconcile the belief of his probable conversion than any other. This phase, indeed, seems to have been a characteristic of himself as compared with nearly all of those who took a leading part in the Movement, including even Mr. Keble, who was the nearest to Mr. Froude in general character. The peculiarity to which I refer is that of an extraordinary leaning to the side of religious dread, and a correspondent suppression of the sentiments of love and joy. Mr. Froude’s religion, as far as it can be gathered from his published Journal, seems to have been (if the expression be not too strong) more like that of a humble and pious Jew under the Old Dispensation, than that of a Christian living in the full sunshine of Gospel privileges. The apology for this feature in his religious character, and for any portion of it which appears in those of other excellent men of the same period,[339] is to be found in the ungraceful and often irreverent form in which the warmer side of the Christian temper was exhibited in the party called Evangelical: whose language, based as it often was upon grievous errors of doctrine, had a tendency to react, in religious minds, on the side of severity and reserve. Such a form of religious spirit, however, where exhibited in the somewhat unusual proportions which it assumes in Mr. Froude, must undergo almost a complete revolution before it can be naturally susceptible of the impression which Catholic devotion has a tendency to produce, or even tolerant of the language which pervades our approved Manuals. It is certainly difficult to find in the Mr. Froude of the Remains, a compartment for devotion to Our Blessed Lady,[340] for instance, or even to the Sacred Humanity of Our Lord, in all its attractive and endearing fulness. Yet, taking the phenomena of his case as a whole, and duly estimating the respective powers of the two conflicting forces, I cannot help thinking that the Church would more easily have conquered his prejudices than the Establishment have retained his allegiance.’