‘The censure of their friend which the Editors foresee, is that which forms their bugbear in all their theological researches: that of approaching too near the Catholic, or, as they call it, Romanist doctrines. But we must express our conviction that the Editors have not done much credit to their friend by the manner in which they have thought it right to shield his memory from the charge. It consists in a careful collection of some of the most hasty, unhandsome, and decidedly unreasonable judgements and opinions of the author, respecting chiefly what he saw in his travels…. We think we are justified in saying that proof of Mr. Froude’s disinclination to Catholicity must have been very scarce, to have led the Editors to bring together these superficial observations made during a brief residence in a Catholic city[365] not generally reputed the most edifying in its conduct! These, however, will not bear comparison with the growing and expanding tendency of his mind towards everything Catholic…. ‘… The extracts from [his] Journal present us a picture at once pleasing and distressing, of a mind yearning after interior perfection, yet at a loss about the means of attaining it; embarked on an ocean of good desires, but without stars or compass by which to steer its course. The minute scrutiny into the motives of his actions, the distress occasioned by discovering his relapses into faults which most would overlook, show a sensitiveness of conscience in the youthful writer, far more honourable to him, and far more interesting to us, than abilities of a much higher order than what he really possessed could ever have appeared…. How far it may be advisable to commit to paper, even for personal benefit, these investigations of our most secret tribunal, we have considerable doubt; and instructive as is their record in the case before us, in nothing is it more so than in the proof it gives us of the necessity of guidance for the conscience and heart such as the institutions of the Catholic Church alone provide. In the account which he gives of his own infirmities, of his almost fruitless attempts to subdue them, and of the pain and anxiety produced by his solitary struggles, he presents a picture familiar to the experienced eye of any spiritual director in our Church, and a state fully described and prescribed for by the numerous writers whom we possess upon the inward life and the direction of consciences. Many are they who are tossed in the same billows of secret tribulation, many are they who are bewildered in the same mazes of mental perplexity; but they have not at least the additional horrors of darkness and night. Ere they can sink, a hand is stretched out, if they will only grasp it. The troubles and trials which haunt minds constituted as Mr. Froude’s, many a skilful guide would have shown him to be mere illusive phantoms that only serve to turn the attention away from serious dangers, or from solid good: snares cast