[By the kind permission of Wilfrid Ward, Esq., and of Messrs. Macmillan & Co.] ‘… The scheme which Newman proposed, to restore to the Anglican Church in some measure the discipline and doctrine of the Fathers, was bold and captivating to [Mr. Ward’s] imagination; but it seemed to [him] to be bolder and more drastic in the change it must in consistency require, than its authors were aware. It was plain to him that nothing short of an explicit avowal that the principles of the Reformation were to be disowned, and its work undone, could meet the logical requirements of the situation. And the leaders hesitated to go thus far…. On the appearance of the first part of Froude’s _Remains_ early in 1838, in which the Reformation was avowedly condemned, and its condemnation tacitly[318] adopted by the two Editors, Newman and Keble, Mr. Ward acknowledged to himself the direction which his views were taking. “From that time,” he wrote to Dr. Pusey, “began my inclination to see Truth where I trust it is.” The final influence which determined his conversion was the series of lectures by Newman on The Scripture Proof of the Doctrines of the Church, published afterwards as Tract 85. Newman, in these lectures, dealt with the philosophical basis of latitudinarianism on the one hand, and of the Anglo-Catholic view of the Church on the other, with a power which did not fail to give satisfaction to his new disciple, and to justify, on intellectual grounds, the position which was now invested, in Ward’s mind, with all the charm of Froude’s romantic conception of Catholic sanctity, the fire of his reforming genius, the unhesitating completeness of his programme of action…. Dean Scott (the late Dean of Rochester), who saw Mr. Ward daily in the Common Room at Balliol, notes some points of interest as to the impression produced on his friends by the change which Froude’s _Remains_ wrought in his attitude:――“I can speak with perfect assurance of their purport [the purport of Mr. Ward’s remarks on the volumes published in 1838]. They were substantially these: ‘This is what I have been looking for. Here is a man who knows what he means, and says it. This is the man for me! He speaks out.’ But though we were amused, and gave him credit for having achieved the feat which the pseudo-scholastic doctor ascribes to the angels, of passing from one extreme to the other without passing through the middle, I do not really think that those words indicated the actual turning-point. As I look back on them, they seem to me to imply that the turn had taken place, but that he was looking for a pledge, on the part of those to whom he was attaching himself, that they were in earnest, and knew what they meant.” The appearance of Froude’s _Remains_ was indeed an epoch in Mr. Ward’s life. “The thing that was utterly abhorrent with him,” writes Lord Blachford, “was to stop short”; and this was precisely what the _via media_, with all its attractiveness, had hitherto appeared to do.