phases; to which he will belong when, as the very vindication of his foregone career, helping to breathe into successive generations the spirit of cleansing scrutiny and renewing faith, Catholicism shall triumph in England. With that thought, we come suddenly out, as through a black mountain-pass, into a quiet-coloured vista rolling between us and the dawn. It is only too possible, in the beclouded state of fallen man, to mistake some stage of a vast progress for a disconnected trivial episode. But who are they so unblest as to do it in this instance? Chiefly those enemies who belong to the household. It was a convert squire of Leicestershire, the friend of Montalembert, who in the boldness of sanguine charity welcomed the very first _Tracts_ as nothing less than a pledge, given as it were in sleep, of ‘the return of the Church [of England] to Catholic Unity and the See of Peter’;[285] and it was an Oxford Dean, long after, who denied any orthodox future or any legitimate past to the Ritualists of his day, refusing to connect them or their great popularising leaven with the theoretic fathers that begat them. There is little morality in this preference for reducing everything to scraps and segments. Those who dare search for processes rather than for dead issues may at least be respected. To them, in an hour of all Latin degeneracy, the old sap of the strongest of the northern races laughs in a stock long barren but sound. Great outlooks call for great patience, lest they strain the sight; and so with a spiritual event, believed-in, and hardly descried. The lens of controversy will never bring it nearer; only constant prayer, like an eye purged and made new, can peer forward, and rest on the horizon-brink. If Catholicism indeed triumph in England, Hurrell Froude’s cannot ultimately remain a hidden and homeless name. Is it not undeniable that he is to his own communion to-day, exactly what he was long ago, a Hard Saying? Who have fought shy of him, who have even belittled, hushed, buried him, if not they? Has a single one of the vital questions which his restless agitation opened, been settled by the exerted authority of the corporate Church of England? In her immense miraculous increase of ‘Catholic-mindedness,’ who has gone beyond this wild, pathetic, precursive child in groping towards the fulness of Revealed Truth, yet groping in the dark? He loved reality, and entity: they were there next his hand, and he felt them not. He seems never to have surmised the existence beside him of the down-trodden _Ecclesia Anglicana_ of Continental sympathy, which in his brief day timidly lifted up her long-shrouded penal head. But she, on her part, saw him reconstruct, as in a worshipping dream, her every lineament. It was a remark of Mr. Bernard Smith’s[286] which impressed Dr. Wiseman, that ‘my friends at Oxford all think and speak of Catholic practices and institutions as past or possible, not as