Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and CommentsGuiney, Louise Imogen
History
Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments
Guiney, Louise Imogen
Froude, Richard Hurrell, 1803-1836
over those very men whose consciences drove them at last to leave the
Church as by Law Established in these Realms: the book bore a
confessedly vital part in the formation of William Lockhart, of James
Robert Hope-Scott, of Frederick William Faber, of William George Ward.
It is curious that the Rev. Thomas Mozley should father the statement,
that the _Remains_ ‘never brought any one to Rome.’[289] But he may
have had only direct or primary causation in mind. That prickly book,
moreover, active as Hurrell himself, may be said, without
exaggeration, to have reacted on Newman’s ‘young men’ at Oxford, who
first disturbed, and then outstripped, their master. It was the very
crux of the complaint against them that, as Newman himself was to say
so accurately of Froude, they were ‘powerfully drawn to the Mediæval,
not to the Primitive Church.’ We know how the cross-currents, coming
from Ward, Oakeley, Dalgairns, and the other extremists, cut across
the path of Newman turned anchorite, like a spring freshet from
unimagined hills. The ‘new party’ spoken of in Stephens’ _Life_ of
Dean Hook,[290] as being ‘as different in its teachings from the
original Tractarians as they had been from the Evangelicals,’ were men
almost all of whom entered the Catholic Church of the Roman Obedience.
They were filled with the idea of the ever-living Interpretative
Voice, as against the mere bookish appeal to Christian antiquity. They
were strong in zeal, will, and prayer, and self-sacrificing; they were
also rash, notional, irrepressibly gay. Newman, whom they so worried,
did not suspect their descent; no critic seems to have suspected it
since: but were they not the true and immediate seed of Hurrell
Froude? If they were not, then, in the language of the heralds, _obiit
sine prole_. How difficult it were to accept that as part of the
epitaph of so generative a spirit! No school of thought in any
communion, since 1836, has reproduced so markedly the singular
physiognomy of the author of the _Remains_. To them alone he was not
in the least ‘dangerous.’ But it is clear that in what has been called
the Church of Lord Halifax, there are a thousand young Froudians, a
collateral kindred with plenty of trouble before them, flying his
crest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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