‘Both Rose and Palmer,’ wrote Newman on the other hand, after he had heard from those allies, ‘think Froude and Perceval very deficient in learning, and therefore rash.’ Considerable time had been spent in revising the _Churchman’s Manual_, by Mr. Perceval. Books, committees, bylaws, and such tangible machinery, seemed important to Mr. Rose, who was intelligently planning a great local campaign, to improve the position of his disadvantaged party. Froude, ahead of Newman or Keble, seems from the first to have outrun anything of this sort. To these three, the very existence of religion, whether expressed in the public worship and formularies, or in the conduct and belief of Englishmen, was at stake. He alone lacked a just conception of minor needs, what was the nature of these, or how far they should be satisfied: he felt only the need of supernaturalism in a society again grown godless since Wesley’s time. He did not, therefore, march forward in order, but by a long leap threw himself half-blindly upon ‘incomprehensibles, and thoughts of things which thoughts do but tenderly touch.’ Certainly, cohesion, as not being the note of the Church of England, was not the note of the conference at Hadleigh. Froude especially, with his terrible consistency, his capacity for getting all there was to get out of the mere innuendoes and half-lights of circumstance, his passion (to employ a serviceable expression of Locke’s) ‘to bottom everything,’ must have obstructed unconsciously the deliberations of a great liturgiologist and a true ecclesiastical statesman, both born to move with caution, and to end in the deltas of compromise or sheer weariness. Froude felt then, as afterwards, what he calls his ‘stigma of ultraism’; what really worried him more than that, was the slow foot of reform, toiling behind his own. He wished nothing less, as we have seen, than a ‘blow-up,’ and reconstruction. His poetic foresight made him implacable; consequences, not processes, were in his foreground. He had the individual vision. Galahad-like, he saw, while wise men were spurring up and down upon the quest. Mr. Palmer’s adjectives were well chosen: Hurrell was not ‘learned,’[149] and he was ‘rash.’ But it is also true that learning will call anything rashness which travels towards a given goal by a shorter route than its own. An extremely fine definition of Froude’s might be wrested from its context, and applied to his discomfiture at Hadleigh, and his position in general. ‘The understanding,’ he says, ‘pursues something which it does not know by means which it does; while genius endeavours to effect what it has a previous idea of, by means of which it has to ascertain the use.’[150] The ‘bold rider across country’ would perhaps look unnatural as a mounted collaborator in a procession. It is to be feared that the Rev. Richard Hurrell Froude was a difficult factor, a Montagnard, in the debates of nascent Anglo-Catholicism.