Froudes Essays in Literature and History | Page 3

equals of his own rejected that
determinism to which he was bound, and that the Pagan world might be
presented in a fashion very different from his own. And in that
perpetual--often gratuitous --affirmation you have no sign of limitation
in him but rather of eagerness for battle.
It is an admirable fault or perhaps no fault at all, or if a fault an
appendage to the most considerable virtue a writer of his day could
have had: the virtue of courage.
See how he thrusts when he comes to lay down the law, not upon what
the narrow experience of readers understands and agrees with him
about, but upon some matter which he knows them to have decided in a
manner opposed to his own. See how definite, how downright, and how
clean are the sentences in which he asserts that Christianity is Catholic
or nothing:--
". . . This was the body of death which philosophy detected but could
not explain, and from which Catholicism now came forward with its
magnificent promise of deliverance.
"The carnal doctrine of the sacraments, which they are compelled to
acknowledge to have been taught as fully in the early Church as it is
now taught by the Roman Catholics, has long been the stumbling-block
to Protestants. It was the very essence of Christianity itself. Unless the
body could be purified, the soul could not be saved; or, rather, as from
the beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable, without

his flesh, man was lost, or would cease to be. But the natural
organization of the flesh was infected, and unless organization could
begin again from a new original, no pure material substance could exist
at all. He, therefore, by whom God had first made the world, entered
into the womb of the Virgin in the form (so to speak) of a new organic
cell, and around it, through the virtue of His creative energy, a material
body grew again of the substance of His mother, pure of taint and clean
as the first body of the first man when it passed out under His hand in
the beginning of all things."
Throughout his essay on the Philosophy of Christianity, where he was
maintaining a thesis odious to the majority of his readers, he rings as
hard as ever. The philosophy of Christianity is frankly declared to be
Catholicism and Catholicism alone; the truth of Christianity is denied.
It is called a thing "worn and old" even in Luther's time (upon page
194), and he definitely prophesies a period when "our posterity" shall
learn "to despise the miserable fabric which Luther stitched together
out of its tatters."
His judgments are short, violent, compressed. They are not the
judgments of balance. They are final not as a goal reached is final, but
as a death-wound delivered. He throws out sentences which all the
world can see to be insufficient and thin, but whose sharpness is the
sharpness of conviction and of a striving determination to achieve
conviction in others ---or if he fails in that, at least to leave an enemy
smarting. Everywhere you have up and down his prose those short
parentheses, those side sentences, which are strokes of offence. Thus on
page 199, "We hear---or we used to hear when the High Church party
were more formidable than they are," &c.; or again, on page 210, "The
Bishop of Natal" (Colenso) has done such and such things, "coupled
with certain arithmetical calculations far which he has a special
aptitude." There are dozens of these in every book he wrote. They
wounded, and were intended to wound.
His intellect may therefore be compared, as I have compared it, to an
instrument or a weapon of steel, to a chisel or a sword. It was hard,
polished, keen, stronger than what it bit into, and of its nature enduring.

This was the first of the characters that gave him his secure place in
English letters.
The second is his universality--the word is not over-exact, but I can
find no other. I mean that Froude was the exact opposite of the sciolist
and was even other than the student. He was kneaded right into his own
time and his own people. The arena in which he fought was small, the
ideas he combated were few. He was not universal as those are
universal who appeal to any man in any country. But he was eager
upon these problems which his contemporaries wrangled over. He was
in tune with, even when he directly opposed, the class from which he
sprang, the mass of well-to-do Protestant Englishmen of Queen
Victoria's reign. Their furniture had nothing shocking for him nor their
steel engravings. He took for granted their probity, their common sense,
and their reading. He knew what