Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and CommentsGuiney, Louise Imogen
History
Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments
Guiney, Louise Imogen
Froude, Richard Hurrell, 1803-1836
be, on many points that are only gradually opening on us! Surely, you
should reserve ‘blasphemous,’ ‘impious,’ etc., for denial of the
articles of Faith.”[369]
‘With this passage we close Mr. Froude’s _Remains_. Peace be to him!
is our parting salutation. The hope which an Ambrose expressed for a
Valentinian,[370] who died yet a Catechumen, we willingly will hold of
him. His ardent desires were with the Truth; his heart was not a
stranger to its love. He was one, we firmly believe, whom no sordid
views, or fear of men’s tongues, would have deterred from avowing his
full convictions, and embracing their consequences, had time and
opportunity been vouchsafed him for a longer and closer search. He is
another instance of the same mysterious Providence which guided a
Grotius and a Leibnitz to the threshold of Truth, but allowed them not
the time to step within it, into the hallowed precincts of God’s
Visible Church.’[371]
From ‘THE ANGLICAN CAREER OF CARDINAL NEWMAN,’ BY EDWIN A. ABBOTT.
London: Macmillan & Co., 1892.
[By the kind permission of Dr. Abbott and of Messrs. Macmillan & Co.]
‘Newman was now [1826] on the point of making a new friend who would
do more than any other human being, perhaps more than any other single
external influence, to direct his course, or to determine its final
direction. “Bye-the-bye,” says Newman to his mother, telling her of
the election to the Oriel Fellowship, March 31, 1826, “I have not told
you the name of the other successful candidate: Froude of Oriel. We
were in grave deliberation till near two this morning…. Froude is one
of the acutest and clearest and deepest men in the memory of man.”
Clearly, Froude had had, not only Newman’s vote, but also his
strenuous advocacy in that prolonged deliberation. And it was no bad
preparation for the reception of Froude’s influence into Newman’s
heart, that the latter should thus have favoured and befriended him….
What took Newman, in Froude, was his originality and suggestiveness,
his hatred of shams, his downright and aggressive earnestness, and
perhaps, too, some glimpse of what was afterwards revealed in him: an
anxious, ascetic, and almost superstitious aspiration after a mediæval
type of holiness…. There were walks that Froude tells us of, in which
the two talked a good deal together. Froude complains that he allowed
himself to say to Newman more than he intended, revealed too much,
suffered himself to be drawn into argument, and was puzzled … but if
the older beat the younger in argument, that would rather help than
hinder the influence of the latter. Expert in logical fence, Newman
could not help gaining victories which he disdained as soon as won;
but Froude was effective in protests, and all the more with one who,
most vulnerable when victorious, had just achieved a dialectical
triumph.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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