Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and CommentsGuiney, Louise Imogen
History
Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments
Guiney, Louise Imogen
Froude, Richard Hurrell, 1803-1836
‘He was not very easy even under conventional vulgarity, still less
under the vulgarity of egotism; but, being essentially a partisan, he
could put up with both in a man who was really in earnest and on the
right side. Nothing, however, I think, would have induced him to
tolerate false sentiment, and he would, I think, if he had lived, have
exerted himself very trenchantly to prevent his cause being
adulterated by it. He was, I should say, sometimes misled by a theory
that genius cut through a subject by logic or intuition, without
looking to the right or left, while common sense was always testing
every step by consideration of surroundings (I have not got his terse
mode of statement), and that genius was right, or at least had only to
be corrected, here and there, by common sense. This, I take it, would
hardly have answered if his trenchancy had not been in practice
corrected by J. H. N.’s wider political circumspection. He submitted,
I suppose, to J. H. N.’s axiom, that if the Movement was to do
anything it must become “respectable”; but it was against his nature.
‘He would (as we see in the _Remains_) have wished Ken to have the
“courage of his convictions” by excommunicating the Jurors in William
III.’s time, and setting up a little Catholic Church, like the
Jansenists in Holland. He was not (as has been observed) a theologian,
but he was as jealous for orthodoxy as if he were. He spoke
slightingly of Heber as having ignorantly or carelessly communicated
with Monophysites. But he probably knew no more about that and other
heresies than a man of active and penetrating mind would derive from
text-books. And I think it likely enough, not that his reverence for
the Eucharist, but that his special attention to the details of
Eucharistic doctrine, was due to the consideration that it was the
foundation of ecclesiastical discipline and authority: matters on
which his mind fastened itself with enthusiasm.’
From ‘APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA,’ BY JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, D.D., of the
Oratory of St. Philip Neri. London: Longmans, Green, Reader &
Dyer, 1873.
[By the kind permission of the Rev. W. P. Neville of the Oratory,
and of Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments — John Shaqi
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