The Life of Froude | Page 9

in
Mr. Cleaver the perfect type of a Christian gentleman, cultivated, pious,
and well bred. Mrs. Cleaver was worthy of her husband. They were
both models of practical Christianity. They and their circle held all the
opinions about Catholicism and the Reformation which Newman and
the Anglo-Catholics denounced. The real thing was always among
them, and they did not want any imitation. "A clergyman," says Froude,
"who was afterwards a Bishop in the Irish Church, declared in my
hearing that the theory of a Christian priesthood was a fiction; that the
notion of the Sacraments as having a mechanical efficacy irrespective
of their conscious effect upon the mind of the receiver was an
idolatrous superstition; that the Church was a human institution, which
had varied in form in different ages, and might vary again; that it was
always fallible; that it might have Bishops in England, and dispense
with Bishops in Scotland and Germany; that a Bishop was merely an
officer; that the apostolical succession was probably false as a fact--and,
if a fact, implied nothing but historical continuity. Yet the man who
said these things had devoted his whole life to his Master's
service--thought of nothing else, and cared for nothing else."*
-- * Short Studies on Great Subjects, 4th series, p. 212. --
Froude had been taught by his brother, and his brother's set, to believe
that Dissenters were, morally and intellectually, the scum of the earth.
Here were men who, though not Dissenters themselves, held doctrines
practically undistinguishable from theirs, and yet united the highest
mental training with the service of God and the imitation of Christ.
There was in the Cleaver household none of that reserve which the
Tractarians inculcated in matters of religion. The Christian standard
was habitually held up as the guide of life and conduct, an example to
be always followed whatever the immediate consequences that might
ensue. Mr. Cleaver was a man of moderate fortune, who could be
hospitable without pinching, and he was acquainted with the best
Protestant society in Ireland. Public affairs were discussed in his house
with full knowledge, and without the frivolity affected by public men.
O'Connell was at that time supreme in the government of Ireland,
though his reign was drawing to a close. The Whigs held office by

virtue of a compact with the Irish leader, and their Under-Secretary at
Dublin Castle, Thomas Drummond, had gained the affections of the
people by his sympathetic statesmanship. An epigrammatic speaker
said in the House of Commons that Peel governed England, O'Connell
governed Ireland, and the Whigs governed Downing Street. It was all
coming to an end. Drummond died, the Whigs went out of office, Peel
governed Ireland, and England too. Froude just saw the last phase of
O'Connellism, and he did not like it. In politics he never looked very
far below the surface of things, and the wrongs of Ireland did not
appeal to him. That Protestantism was the religion of the English pale,
and of the Scottish Presbyterians in Ulster, not of the Irish people, was
a fact outside his thoughts. He saw two things clearly enough. One was
the strength and beauty of the religious faith by which the Cleavers and
their friends lived. The other was the misery, squalor, and chronic
discontent of the Catholic population, then almost twice as large as
after the famine it became. He did not pause to reflect upon what had
been done by laws made in England, or upon the iniquity of taxing
Ireland in tithes for the Church of a small minority. He concluded
simply that Protestantism meant progress, and Catholicism involved
stagnation. He heard dark stories of Ribbonism, and was gravely
assured that if Mr. Cleaver's Catholic coachman, otherwise an excellent
servant, were ordered to shoot his master, he would obey. Very likely
Mr. Cleaver was right, though the event did not occur. What was the
true origin of Ribbonism, what made it dangerous, why it had the
sympathy of the people, were questions which Froude could hardly be
expected to answer, inasmuch as they were not answered by Sir Robert
Peel.
While Froude was at Delgany there appeared the once famous Tract
Ninety, last of the series, unless we are to reckon Monckton Milnes's
One Tract More. The author of Tract Ninety was Newman, and the
ferment it made was prodigious. It was a subtle, ingenious, and
plausible attempt to prove that the Articles and other formularies of the
English Church might be honestly interpreted in a Catholic sense, as
embodying principles which the whole Catholic Church held before the
Reformation, and held still. Mr. Cleaver and his circle were profoundly
shocked. To them Catholicism meant Roman Catholicism, or, as they

called it, Popery. If a man were not a Protestant, he had no business to
remain