‘Penetrating the design and seizing the spirit of the Gospels, the Reformers inculcated the faith in which the sentient and the spiritual in man’s compound nature had each its appropriate office: the one directed to the Redeemer in His palpable form, the other to the Divine Paraclete in His hidden agency; while, united with these, they exhibited to a sinful, but penitent, race the parental character of the omnipresent Deity. Such is not the teaching of the restored theology. The most eminent of its professors have thrown open the doors of Mr. Froude’s oratory, and have invited all passers-by to notice in his prayers and meditations “the absence of any distinct mention of our Lord and Saviour.” They are exhorted not to doubt that there was a real though silent “allusion to Christ” under the titles in which the Supreme Being is addressed; and are told that “this circumstance may be a comfort to those who cannot bring themselves to assume the tone of many popular writers of this day, who yet are discouraged by the peremptoriness with which it is exacted of them. The truth is, that a mind alive to its own real state often shrinks to utter what it most dwells upon; and is too full of awe and fear to do more than silently hope what it most wishes.” ‘It would indeed be presumptuous to pass a censure, or to hazard an opinion, on the private devotions of any man; but there is no such risk in rejecting the apology which the publishers of those secret exercises have advanced for Mr. Froude’s departure from the habits of his fellow-Christians. Feeble, indeed, and emasculate must be the system, which, in its delicate distaste for the “popular writers of the day,” would bury in silence the Name in which every tongue and language has been summoned to worship and to rejoice. Well may “awe and fear” become all who assume and all who invoke it. But an “awe” which “shrinks to utter”[316] the Name of Him Who was born at Bethlehem, and yet does not fear to use the Name which is ineffable; a “fear” which can make mention of the Father, but may not speak of the Brother, of all;――is a feeling which fairly baffles comprehension. There is a much more simple though a less imposing theory. Mr. Froude permitted himself, and was encouraged by his correspondents, to indulge in the language of antipathy and scorn towards a large body of his fellow-Christians. It tinges his Letters, his Journals, and is not without its influence even on his devotions. Those despised men too often celebrated the events of their Redeemer’s life, and the benefits of His Passion, in language of offensive familiarity, and invoked Him with fond and feeble epithets. Therefore, a good Oxford Catholic must envelope in mystic terms all allusion to Him round Whom, as its centre, the whole Christian system revolves. The line of demarcation between themselves and these coarse sentimentalists must be broad and deep, even though it should exclude those by whom it is drawn, from