things actually existing and acting.’ That remark would not need to be made now, when a people who owe nothing to their Tudor organisers have won back by the power of what Sir Thomas Browne calls ‘reminiscential evocation,’ so much of the spirit of the religion which is their heritage. But when it was made, the remark was curiously accurate. Even Froude, in his _Becket_, cites the never-suspended usage of religious houses in having books read aloud in the refectory, as an English custom of ‘those times.’ As in trifles, so in graver matters: Froude, and the contemporaries never quite abreast of him, knew nothing of the continuity of family habit in the historic Church. Newman tells us that while he was in Italy, (and it can hardly have been otherwise with his friend,) he did not guess at the significance of the burning sanctuary lamps in Churches. ‘Radiantly sure of his position,’ as Canon Scott Holland says, Froude was indeed; he had no personal misgivings; his good faith was intact. Yet even he feared for his ‘Branch’;[287] and he laid stress upon something in himself higher than loyalty. If certain reforms did not follow, he would set up for a ‘separatist.’[288] He did not live long enough to make his choice; but those reforms have not followed. It stands for little that some of his nearest relatives, and especially the one friend whom he had most breathed upon, were constrained to go the ‘separatist’ way; it stands for something more that to a group of able observers of various creeds, he himself has seemed a moving aurora, and not a fixed star of the Anglican heaven. The speculation whether or no Froude would have been ‘out in the ‘45’ has no lasting pertinence; but it has its illicit unavoidable interest. No one who studies him tries to blink it. Some among the distinguished High Churchmen who have written of him are practically unanimous in the conviction that longer lease of life would have made no difference in his views, or that in any case he would have dwelt always in the tents where he died. But the majority, having broached the contrary opinion, encourage it, and lean towards it: of this company are the Nonconformists, the Deists, the Catholics. Dr. Rigg, a profound student of ethics, goes so far as to say ‘there can be no doubt’ that Hurrell Froude would have changed his creed; Dr. Abbott’s strong arraignment implies nothing less; many reviewers of Dean Church’s history propound the question and assent to it; and Mr. James Anthony Froude saw fit to play with it. The men of the ‘extreme Left,’ in this convocation, speak after a non-committal fashion, yet there is no mistaking their longing, partly unexpressed: M. Thureau-Dangin, Cardinal Wiseman, and the rest of their following, seem to be ever thinking what only Canon Oakeley quotes: _Cum talis sis, utinam noster esses!_ They might make, with perfect justice, the indisputable claim that the _Remains_ exerted the deeper influence