The Reign of Henry the Eighth | Page 2

ecclesiastical statesman of modern times was Archbishop Laud. Charles I. was a martyr, and the Revolution of 1688 an inglorious blunder. To the day of his death--in spite of the harsh discipline which he received at his hands in boyhood, in spite of wide divergence of opinion in later years in all matters secular and religious--Froude never ceased to worship at his brother's shrine. Out of regard for his memory, more than from any passionate personal conviction, he associated himself while at Oxford with the Anglican movement. His affectionate admiration for Newman, neither time nor change served to impair. If Carlyle was his prophet in later years, his influence happily did not affect his style. That was based on the chaste model of Newman. He owed his early friendship with Newman to that great man's association with Hurrell Froude. Many years after, when Freeman had venomously accused him of "dealing stabs in the dark at a brother's almost forgotten fame"--poor Froude's offence was that he dared to write an essay on Thomas �� Becket--he defended himself with rare emotion against the charge. "I look back upon my brother," he said, "as on the whole the most remarkable man I have ever met in my life. I have never seen any person--not one--in whom, as I now think him, the excellences of intellect and character were combined in fuller measure."
As Froude's powers developed and matured, and as his experience of the world broadened, he cast away his brother's yoke, and reverted more to his father's school of thought. As his father was to him the ideal clergyman of the Church of England, so the Church before 1828 remained to him the model of what an established religion should be. He was a thorough Erastian, who believed in the subordination of the Church to the state. He detested theological doctrinalism of all kinds; he revolted against the idea that the clergy should form a separate order. The pretensions of Whitgift and Laud, the High Anglican school of Keble and Pusey, the whole conception of the Church and the priesthood which underlay the Oxford Movement, were things obnoxious to him. In a characteristic passage in the chapter on the Massacre of St. Bartholomew he reveals his hatred and distrust of dogmatism. "Whenever the doctrinal aspect of Christianity has been prominent above the practical," he wrote, "whenever the first duty of the believer has been held to consist in holding particular opinions on the functions and nature of his Master, and only the second in obeying his Master's commands, then always, with a uniformity more remarkable than is obtained in any other historical phenomena, there have followed dissension, animosity, and in later ages bloodshed. Christianity, as a principle of life, has been the most powerful check upon the passions of mankind. Christianity as a speculative system of opinion has converted them into monsters of cruelty."
Holding such decided views on doctrinalism, it might have been thought that Froude would have visited all the warring sects of the sixteenth century with equal judgment. No Church was more doctrinal than that of Geneva; no Calvinist ever was more dogmatic than John Knox. But the men who fought the battle of the Reformation in England and Scotland were, in the main, the Calvinists; and to Froude the Reformation was the beginning of a new and better era, when the yoke of the priest had been finally cast away. "Calvinism," he said in one of his addresses at St. Andrews, "was the spirit which rises in revolt against untruth." John Knox was too heroic a figure not to rouse the artistic sense in Froude. "There lies one," said the Regent Morton over his coffin, "who never feared the face of mortal man." Froude has made this epitaph the text of the noblest eulogy ever delivered on Knox. "No grander figure can be found, in the entire history of the Reformation in this island, than that of Knox." He surpassed Cromwell and Burghley in integrity of purpose and in purity of methods. He towered above the Regent Murray in intellect, and he worked on a larger scale than Latimer. "His was the voice that taught the peasant of the Lothians that he was a free man, the equal in the sight of God with the proudest peer or prelate that had trampled on his forefathers. He was the one antagonist whom Mary Stuart could not soften nor Maitland deceive. He it was who had raised the poor commons of his country into a stern and rugged people, who might be hard, narrow, superstitious, and fanatical, but who nevertheless were men whom neither king, noble, nor priest could force again to submit to tyranny." Yet even here, Froude could not refrain from quoting the sardonic comment of the English ambassador at