‘Unwilling as I am to hazard conjectures on the subject, especially against the judgement of any among his more intimate friends, I do not think it unreasonable to conclude, from a comparison of these passages, that Mr. Froude’s objections were chiefly directed against imaginary abuses, or possible relaxations of discipline, which time and reflection would have shown him to be entirely independent of the real merits of the controversy. I find it also difficult to believe that, as the principle of the English Reformation received these illustrations in the Established Church which we have lived long enough to see,――as her constituted tribunals were found to give up, in succession, the grace of the Sacraments, the authority of the Church, and even the inspiration of Holy Scripture itself, as necessary truths,――his clear and honest mind would not have accepted some or all of these tokens of apostasy as a summons to enter the True Fold. Assuredly, too, we have known no instance of a mind equally candid, intelligent, and instructed, whose advances in the direction of the Truth (especially when assisted by extraordinary acuteness of conscience and purity of life) have stopped short, as time has gone on, of the logical conclusions, except in cases where the progress of such a mind has been arrested by conflicting tendencies of deeply ingrained Protestant or national prepossession: such as in his case were singularly absent. ‘There is, however, one phase of Mr. Froude’s mind with which it is far more difficult to reconcile the belief of his probable conversion than any other. This phase, indeed, seems to have been a characteristic of himself as compared with nearly all of those who took a leading part in the Movement, including even Mr. Keble, who was the nearest to Mr. Froude in general character. The peculiarity to which I refer is that of an extraordinary leaning to the side of religious dread, and a correspondent suppression of the sentiments of love and joy. Mr. Froude’s religion, as far as it can be gathered from his published Journal, seems to have been (if the expression be not too strong) more like that of a humble and pious Jew under the Old Dispensation, than that of a Christian living in the full sunshine of Gospel privileges. The apology for this feature in his religious character, and for any portion of it which appears in those of other excellent men of the same period,[339] is to be found in the ungraceful and often irreverent form in which the warmer side of the Christian temper was exhibited in the party called Evangelical: whose language, based as it often was upon grievous errors of doctrine, had a tendency to react, in religious minds, on the side of severity and reserve. Such a form of religious spirit, however, where exhibited in the somewhat unusual proportions which it assumes in Mr. Froude, must undergo almost a complete revolution before it can be naturally