Froudes Essays in Literature and History | Page 7

countrymen. He was so literary a man that he did this as much by
accepting as by denying, as much by dating from Elizabeth all we are
as by affirming unalterable material sequence and the falsity of every
transcendental acceptation. His time smelt him out even when he
flattered it most. Even when he wrote of the Revenge the England of
his day--luckily for him--thought him an enemy.
Upon the main discussion of his life it is impossible to pass a judgment,
for the elements of that discussion are now destroyed; the universities
no longer pretend to believe. And "free discussion" has become so free

that the main doctrines he assailed are no longer presented or read
without weariness in the class to which he appealed and from which he
sprang.
The sects, then, against which he set himself are dead: but upon a much
larger question which is permanent, and which in a sort of groping way
he sometimes handled, something should be said here, which I think
has never been said before. He was perpetually upon the borderland of
the Catholic Church.
Between him and the Faith there stood no distance of space, but rather
a high thin wall; the high thin wall of his own desperate conviction. If
you will turn to page 209 of this book you will see it said of the denial
of the Sacrament by the Reformers and of Ridley's dogma that it was
bread only "the commonsense of the country was of the same opinion,
and illusion was at an end." Froude knew that the illusion was not at an
end. He probably knew (for we must continue to repeat that he was a
most excellent historian) that the "commonsense of the country" was,
by the time Ridley and the New English Church began denying the real
presence, and turning that denial into a dogma, profoundly indifferent
to all dogmas whatsoever. What "the common-sense of the country"
wanted was to keep out swarthy men, chivalrous indeed but
imperialists full of gold who owned nearly all the earth, but who, they
were determined, should not own England.
Froude was fond of such assertions, his book is full of them, and they
are more than mere violence framed for combat; they are in their
curious way definite expressions of the man's soul; for Froude was fond
of that high thin wall, and liked to build it higher. He was a dogmatic
rationalist--one hesitates to use a word which has been so portentously
misused. Renan before dying came out with one of his last dogmas; it
was to this effect, that there was not in the Universe an intelligent
power higher than the human mind. Froude, had he lived in an
atmosphere of perfectly free discussion as Renan did, would have
heartily subscribed to that dogma.
Why then do I say that he was perpetually on the borderland of the
Catholic Church? Because when he leaves for a moment the

phraseology and the material of his youth and of his neighbourhood, he
is perpetually striking that note of interest, of wonder, and of
intellectual freedom which is the note of Catholicism.
Let any man who knows what Catholicism may be read carefully the
Essay on the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the Essay on the
Philosophy of Christianity which succeeds it in this book, but which
was written six years before. Let him remember that nothing Froude
ever wrote was written without the desire to combat some enemy, and,
having made allowance for that desire, let him decide whether one
shock, one experience, one revelation would not have whirled him into
the Church. He was, I think, like a man who has felt the hands of a
woman and heard her voice, who knows them so thoroughly well that
he can love, criticise, or despise according to his mood; but who has
never seen her face.
And he was especially near to the Church in this: that having discussed
a truth he was compelled to fight for it and to wound actively in
fighting, He was an agent, He did, He saw that the mass of stuff
clinging round the mind of wealthy England was decaying, He turned
with regret towards the healthy visions of Europe and called them
illusions because they were not provable, and because all provable
things showed a flee other than that of the creed and were true in
another manner. He despised the cowardice --for it is cowardice--that
pretends to intellectual conviction and to temporal evidence of the
things of the soul. He saw and said, and he was right in saying, that the
City of God is built upon things incredible.
"Incredibilia nec crederim, nisi me compelleret ecclesiae auctoritas"
H. BELLOC.
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The following is a list of the published works