The Life of Froude | Page 8

him. The sense of being valued by another person made him value himself. He became ambitious, and worked hard for his degree. He remembered how the master of his first school had prophesied that he would be a Bishop. He did not want to be a Bishop, but he began to think that such grandeur would not have been predicted of a fool. Abandoning his idle habits, he read night and day that he might distinguish himself in the young lady's eyes. After six months her father interfered. He had no confidence in the stability of this very young suitor's character, and he put an end to the engagement. Froude was stunned by the blow, and gave up all hope of a first class. In any case there would have been difficulties. His early training in scholarship had not been accurate, and he suffered from the blunders of his education. But under the influence of excitement he had so far made up for lost time that he got, like Hurrell, a second class in the final classical schools. His qualified success gave him, no satisfaction. He was suffering from a bitter sense of disappointment and wrong. It seemed to him that he was marked out for misfortune, and that there was no one to help him or to take any trouble about him. Thrown back upon himself, however, he conquered his discouragement and resolved that he would be the master of his fate.
It was in the year 1840 that Froude took his degree. Newman was then at the height of his power and influence. The Tracts for the Times, which Mrs. Browning in Aurora Leigh calls "tracts against the times," were popular with undergraduates, and High Churchmen were making numerous recruits. Newman's sermons are still read for their style. But we can hardly imagine the effect which they produced when they were delivered. The preacher's unrivalled command of English, his exquisitely musical voice, his utter unworldliness, the fervent evangelical piety which his high Anglican doctrine did not disturb, were less moving than his singular power, which he seemed to have derived from Christ Himself, of reading the human heart. The young men who listened to him felt, each of them, as if he had confessed his inmost thoughts to Newman, as if Newman were speaking to him alone. And yet, from his own point of view, there was a danger in his arguments, a danger which he probably did not see himself, peculiarly insidious to an acute, subtle, speculative mind like Froude's.
Newman's intellect, when left to itself, was so clear, so powerful, so intense, that it cut through sophistry like a knife, and went straight from premisses to conclusion. But it was only left to itself within narrow and definite limits. He never suffered from religious doubts. From Evangelical Protestantism to Roman Catholicism he passed by slow degrees without once entering the domain of scepticism. Dissenting altogether from Bishop Butler's view that reason is the only faculty by which we can judge even of revelation, he set religion apart, outside reason altogether. From the pulpit of St. Mary's he told his congregation that Hume's argument against miracles was logically sound. It was really more probable that the witnesses should be mistaken than that Lazarus should have been raised from the dead. But, all the same, Lazarus was raised from the dead: we were required by faith to believe it, and logic had nothing to do with the matter. How Butler would have answered Hume, Butler to whom probability was the guide of life, we cannot tell. Newman's answer was not satisfactory to Froude. If Hume were right, how could he also be wrong? Newman might say, with Tertullian, Credo quia impossibile. But mankind in general are not convinced by paradox, and "to be suddenly told that the famous argument against miracles was logically valid after all was at least startling."*
-- * Short Studies on Great Subjects, 4th series, p. 205. --
Perplexed by this dilemma, Froude at Oxford as a graduate, taking pupils in what was then called science, and would now be called philosophy, for the Honour School of Literae Humaniores. He was soon offered, and accepted, a tutorship in Ireland. His pupils father, Mr. Cleaver, was rector of Delgany in the county of Wicklow. Mr. Cleaver was a dignified, stately clergyman of the Evangelical school. Froude had been taught by his brother at home, and by his friends at Oxford, to despise Evangelicals as silly, ignorant, ridiculous persons. He saw 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