modest self-distrust; inculcates a morality which pervades and sanctifies the most minute, not less than the more considerable of our actions; and demands a piety which is to be avowed not by the utterance of religious sentiments, nor by a retreat from the ordinary pursuits or pleasures of the world, but by the silent tenor of a devout life. If among the teachers of this new or restored divinity, Oxford should raise up another Whitfield, the principles for which the martyrs of the Reformation died might be in peril of at least a temporary subversion, in that church which has for the last three centuries numbered Cranmer, Hooper, and Ridley, amongst her most venerated fathers. The extent of the danger will be best estimated by a short survey of the career of the only confessor of Oxford Catholicism, who has yet taken his place in ecclesiastical biography.

Richard Hurrell Froude was born "on the Feast of the Annunciation" in 1803, and died in 1836. He was an Etonion; a fellow of Oriel college; a priest in holy orders; the writer of journals, letters, sermons, and unsuccessful prize essays; an occasional contributor to the periodical literature of his theological associates; and, during the last four years of his life, a resident alternately in the south of Europe and the West Indies. If the progress of his name to oblivion shall be arrested for some brief interval, it will be owing to the strange discretion with which his surviving friends have disclosed to the world the curious and melancholy portraiture drawn by his own hand of the effects of their peculiar system. "The extreme importance of the views to the development of which the whole is meant to be subservient," and " the instruction derivable from a full exhibition of his character as a witness to those views," afford the inadequate apology for inviting the world to read a selfexamination as frank and unreserved as the most courageous man could have committed to paper in this unscrupulous and inquisitive generation. Yet, if the editors of Mr. Froude's papers are the depositaries of those which his mother appears to have written, and will publish them also, it will be impossible to refuse them absolution from whatever penalties they may have already incurred. These volumes contain but one letter from that lady; and it contrasts with the productions of her son as the voice of a guardian angel with the turbulent language of a spirit to which it had been appointed to minister. She read his heart with a mother's sagacity, and thus revealed it to himself with a mother's tenderness and truth.

stupid and sullen; and kind patience had not sufficient power over his feelings to force him to govern himself. After a statement of such great faults, it may seem an inconsistency to say, that he nevertheless still bore about him strong marks of a promising character. In all points of substantial principle his feelings were just and high. He had (for his age) an unusually deep feeling of admiration for every thing which was good and noble; his relish was lively and his taste good, for all the pleasures of the imagination; and he was also quite conscious of his own faults, and (untempted) had a just dislike to them."

His

Though the mother and the child are tcth beyond the reach of all human opinion, it seems almost an impiety to transcribe her estimate of his early character, and to add, that, when developed and matured in his riper years, it but too distinctly fulfilled her less favourable judgment. Exercising a stern and absolute dominion over all the baser passions, with a keen perception of the beautiful in na ture and in art, and a deep homage for the sublime in morals; imbued with the spirit of the classical authors, and delighting in the strenuous exercise of talents which, if they fell short of excellence, rose far above mediocrity, Mr. Froude might have seemed to want no promise of an honourable rank in literature, or of distinction in his sacred office. career was intercepted by a premature death, but enough is recorded to show that his aspirations, however noble, must have been defeated by the pride and moroseness which his mother's wisdom detected, and which her love disclosed to him; united as they were to a constitutional distrust of his own powers and a weak reliance on other minds for guidance and support. A spirit at once haughty and unsustained by genuine self-confidence; subdued by the stronger will or intellect of other men, and glorying in that subjection; regarding its opponents with an intolerance exceeding their own; and, in the midst of all, turning with no infrequent indignation on itself— might form the basis of a good dramatic sketch, of which Mr. Froude_might not unworthily sustain the burden. But a "dialogue of the dead," in which George Whitfield and Richard Froude should be the interlocutors, would be a more appropriate channel for illustrating the practical uses of "the second reformation," and of the "Catholic restoration," which it is the object of their respective biographies to illustrate. Rhadamanthus having dismissed them from his tribunal, they would compare together their juvenile admiration of the drama, their ascetic discipline at Oxford, "From his very birth his temper has been their early dependence on stronger or more peculiar; pleasing, intelligent, and attaching, resolute minds, their propensity to self-observawhen his mind was undisturbed and he was in tion and to record its results on paper, their the company of people who treated him reason- opinions of the negro race, and the surprise ably and kindly; but exceedingly impatient with which they witnessed the worship of the under vexatious circumstances; very much Church of Rome in lands where it is still tridisposed to find his own amusement in teasing umphant. So far all is peace, and the conand vexing others; and almost entirely incorri- cordes animæ exchange such greetings as pass gible when it was necessary to reprove him. between disembodied spirits. But when the I never could find a successful mode of treat- tidings brought by the new denizen of the ing him. Harshness made him obstinate and Elysian fields to the reformer of the eighteenth gloomy; calm and long displeasure made him | century, reach his affrighted shade, the regions

It was with no unmanly dread of the probe, but from want of skill or leisure to employ it, that the self-scrutiny of Whitfield seldom or never penetrated much below the surface. Preach he must; and when no audience could be brought together, he seized a pen and exhorted himself. The uppermost feeling, be it what it may, is put down in his journal honestly, vigorously and devoutly. Satan is menaced and upbraided. Intimations from Heaven are recorded without one painful doubt of their origin. He prays and exults, anticipates the future with delight, looks back to the past with thankfulness, blames himself simply because he thinks himself to blame, despairs of nothing, fears nothing, and has not a moment's ill-will to any human being.

of the blessed are disturbed by an unwonted | better shot than I had described myself. discord; and the fiery soul of Whitfield blazes had an impulse, too, to let it be thought I had with intense desire to resume his wanderings only three shots when I really had had four. It through the earth, and to lift up his voice was slight, to be sure, but I felt it."-"I have against the new apostasy. read my journal, though I can hardly identify myself with the person it describes. It seems like leaving some one under one's guardianship who was an intolerable fool, and exposed himself to my contempt every moment for the most ridiculous and trifling motives; and while I was thinking all this, I went into L.'s room to seek a pair of shoes, and on hearing him coming got away as silently as possible. Why did I do this? Did I think I was doing what L. did not like, or was it the relic of a sneaking habit? I will ask myself these questions again."-"I have a sort of vanity which aims at my own good opinion, and I look for any thing to prove to myself that I am more anxious to mind myself than other people. I was very hungry, but because I thought the charge unreasonable, I tried to shirk the waiter; sneaking!"-"Yesterday I was much put out by an old fellow chewing tobacco and spitting across me; also bad thoughts of various kinds kept presenting themselves to my mind when it was vacant."-"I talked sillily to-day as I used to do last term, but took no pleasure in it, so I am not ashamed. Although I don't recollect any harm of myself, yet I don't feel that I have made a clean breast of it.""I forgot to mention that I had been

Mr. Froude conducts his written soliloquies in a different spirit. His introverted gaze analyzes with elaborate minuteness the various motives at the confluence of which his active powers receive their impulse, and, with perverted sagacity, pursues the self-examination, until, bewildered in the dark labyrinth of his own nature, he escapes to the cheerful light of day by locking up his journal. "A friend" (whose real name is as distinctly intimated under its initial letter as if the patro-looking round my rooms and thinking that nymic were written at length) "advises burning they looked comfortable and nice, and that I confessions. I cannot make up my mind to said in my heart, Ah, ha! I am warm.”—“ It that," replies the penitent, "but I think I can always suggests itself to me that a wise thought see many points in which it will be likely to is wasted when it is kept to myself, against do me good to be cut off for some time from which, as it is my most bothering temptation, these records." On such a subject the author I will set down some arguments to be called of "The Christian Year" was entitled to more to mind in time of trouble."-"Now I am deference. The great ornament of the Col- proud of this, and think that the knowledge it lege de Propaganda at Oxford, he also had shows of myself implies a greatness of mind."— used the mental microscope to excess. Admo-"These records are no guide to me to show nishing men to approach their Creator not as isolated beings, but as members of the Universal Church, and teaching the inmates of her hallowed courts to worship in strains so pure, so reverent, and so meek, as to answer not unworthily to the voice of hope and reconciliation in which she is addressed by her Divine Head, yet had this "sweet singer" so brooded over the evanescent processes of his own spiritual nature, as not seldom to throw round his meaning a haze which rendered it imperceptible to his readers and probably to himself. With what sound judgment he counselled Mr. Froude to burn his books may be judged from the following entries in them:

"I have been talking a great deal to B. about religion to-day. He seems to take such straightforward practical views of it that, when I am talking to him, I wonder what I have been bothering myself with all the summer, and almost doubt how far it is right to allow myself to indulge in speculations on a subject where all that is necessary is so plain and obvious." "Yesterday when I went out shooting, I fancied I did not care whether I hit or not, but when it came to the point I found myself anxious, and, after having killed, was not unwilling to let myself be considered a

the state of my mind afterwards; they are so far from being exercises of humility, that they lessen the shame of what I record just as professions and good-will to other people reconcile us to our neglect of them."

The precept "know thyself," came down from heaven; but such self-knowledge as this has no heavenward tendency. It is no part of the economy of our nature, or of the will of our Maker, that we should so cunningly unravel the subtle filaments of which our motives are composed. If a man should subject to such a scrutiny the feelings of others to himself, he would soon lose his faith in human virtue and affection; and the mind which should thus put to the question its own workings in the domestic or social relations of life would ere long become the victim of a still more fatal skepticism. Why dream that this reflex operation, which, if directed towards those feelings of which our fellow-creatures are the object, would infallibly eject from the heart all love and all respect for man, should strengthen either the love or the fear of God? A well-tutored conscience aims at breadth rather than minuteness of survey; and tasks itself much more to ascertain general results than to find out the solution Käde

long as religious men must reveal their "expe- | unbroken. We cannot know about any seem riences," and self-defamation revels in its pre-ingly indifferent practice of the Church of sent impunity, there is no help for it, but in Rome that is not a development of the apostowithholding the applause to which even lowli- lic 2005, and it is to no purpose to say that we ness itself aspires for the candour with which can find no proof of it in the writings of the it is combined, and the acuteness by which it first six centuries-they must find a disproof is embellished. if they would do any thing."-"I think people are injudicious who talk against the Roman Catholics for worshipping saints and honouring the Virgin and images, &c. These things may, perhaps, be idolatrous; I cannot make up my mind about it."-"P. called us the Papal Protestant Church, in which he proved a double ignorance, as we are Catholics without the popery, and Church of England men without the protestantism."-"The more I think over that view of yours about regarding our present communion service, &c., as a judgment on the Church, and taking it as the crumbs from the apostle's table, the more I am struck with its fitness to be dwelt upon as tending to check the intrusion of irreverent thoughts, without in any way interfering with one's just indignation."-"Your trumpery principle about Scripture being the sole rule of faith in fundamentals (I nauseate the word) is but a mutilated edition, without the breadth and axiomatic character, of the original.""Really I hate the Reformation and the reformers more and more, and have almost made up my mind that the rationalist spirit they set afloat is the Eudoxpoprns of the Revelation." Why do you praise Ridley? Do you know sufficient good about him to counterbalance the fact, that he was the associate of Cranmer, Peter Martyr, and Bucer?"-“I wish you could get to know something of S. and W. (Southey and Wordsworth) and unprotestantize and un-Miltonize them."-" How is it we are so much in advance of our generation ?"

It is not by these nice self-observers that the creeds of hoar antiquity, and the habits of centuries are to be shaken; nor is such high emprize reserved for ascetics who can pause to enumerate the slices of bread and butter from which they have abstained. When Whitfield would mortify his body, he set about it like a man. The paroxysm was short, indeed, but terrible. While it lasted his diseased imagination brought soul and body into deadly conflict, the fierce spirit spurning, trampling, and well-nigh destroying the peccant carcass. Not so the fastidious and refined "witness to the views" of the restorers of the Catholic Church. The strife between his spiritual and animal nature is recorded in his journal in such terms as these:-"Looked with greediness to see if there was goose on the table for dinner.""Meant to have kept a fast, and did abstain' from dinner, but at tea ate buttered toast." "Tasted nothing to-day till tea-time, and then only one cup and dry bread."-"I have kept my fast strictly, having taken nothing till near nine this evening, and then only a cup of tea and a little bread without butter, but it has not been as easy as it was last."-"I made rather a more hearty tea than usual, quite giving up the notion of a fast in W.'s rooms, and by this weakness have occasioned another slip."

Whatever may be thought of the propriety of disclosing such passages as these, they will provoke a contemptuous smile from no one who knows much of his own heart. But they may relieve the anxiety of the alarmists. Luther and Zuingle, Cranmer, and Latimer, may still rest in their honoured graves. "Take courage, brother Ridley, we shall light up such a flame in England as shall not soon be put out," is a prophecy which will not be defeated by the successors of those who heard it, so long as their confessors shall be vacant to record, and their doctors to publish, contrite reminiscences of a desire for roasted goose, and of an undue indulgence in buttered toast.

Yet the will to subvert the doctrines and discipline of the Reformation is not wanting, and is not concealed. Mr. Froude himself, were he still living, might, indeed, object to be judged by his careless and familiar letters. No such objection can, however, be made by the eminent persons who have deliberately given them to the world on account of "the truth and extreme importance of the views to which the whole is meant to be subservient," and in which they record their "own general concurrence." Of these weighty truths take the following examples:

"You will be shocked at my avowal that I am every day becoming a less and less loyal son of the Reformation. It appears to me plain, that in all matters which seem to us indifferent, or even doubtful, we should conform our practices to those of the Church, which has preserved its traditionary practices

Spirit of George Whitfield! how would thy voice, rolled from "the secret place of thunders," have overwhelmed these puny protests against the truths which it proclaimed from the rising to the setting sun! In what does the modern creed of Oxford differ from the ancient faith of Rome? Hurried along by the abhorred current of advancing knowledge and social improvement, they have indeed renounced papal dominion, and denied papal infallibility, and rejected the grosser superstitions which Rome herself at once despises and promotes. But a prostrate submission to human authority (though veiled under words of vague and mysterious import)—the repose of the wearied or indolent mind on external observances-an escape from the arduous exercise of man's highest faculties in the worship of his Maker-the usurped dominion of the imaginative and sensitive over the intellectual powers-these are the common characteristics of both systems.

The Reformation restored to the Christian world its only authentic canon, and its one Supreme Head. It proclaimed the Scriptures as the rule of life; and the Divine Redeemer as the supreme and central object to whom every eye must turn, and on whom every hope must rest. It cast down not only the idols erected for the adoration of the vulgar, but the

United States, and, in loathing against the tobacconized republic, becomes an absolutist. A "double first-class" theologian overhears the Evangelical psalmody, and straightway turns Catholic. But Congress will not dissolve at the bidding of the fair; nor will Exeter hall be closed to propitiate the fastidious. The martyrs of disgust and the heroes of revolutions are composed of opposite materials, and are cast in very different moulds. Nothing truly great or formidable was ever yet accomplished, in thought or action, by men whose love for truth was not strong enough to triumph over their dislike of the offensive objects with which it may be associated.

idolatrous abstractions to which the worship | There is nothing to dread from such hostility of more cultivated minds was rendered. Pene- and such enemies. A fine lady visits the trating 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" 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 run, from all the peculiar and distinctive ground on which the standard of the Protestant churches has been erected.

Mr. Froude was the victim of these associations. Nothing escapes his abhorrence which has been regarded with favour by his politica. or religious antagonists. The Bill tor the Abolition of Slavery was recommended to Parliament by an administration more than suspected of liberalism. The "Witness to Catholic Views," "in whose sentiments as a whole," his editors concur, visits the West Indies, and they are not afraid to publish the following report of his feelings: :-"I have felt it a kind of duty to maintain in my mind an habitual hostility to the niggers, and to chuckle over the failures of the new system, as if these poor wretches concentrated in themselves all the whiggery, dissent, cant, and abomination that have been ranged on their side." Lest this should pass for a pleasant extravagance, the editors enjoin the reader not to "confound the author's view of the negro cause and of the abstract negro with his feelings_towards any he should exactly meet;" and Professor Tholuck is summoned from Germany to explain how the "originators of error" may lawfully be the objects of a good man's hate, and how it may innocently overflow upon all their clients, kindred, and connexions. Mr. Froude's feelings towards the "abstract negro" would have satisfied the learned professor in his most indignant mood. "I am ashamed," he says, “I cannot get over my prejudices against the niggers."-"Every one I meet seems to me like an incarnation of the whole AntiSlavery Society, and Fowell Buxton at their head."-"The thing that strikes me as most remarkable in the cut of these niggers is excessive immodesty, a forward, stupid fami liarity intended for civility, which prejudices me against them worse even than Buxton's cant did. It is getting to be the fashion with every body, even the planters, to praise the emancipation and Mr. Stanley." Mr. Froude, or rather his editors, appear to have fallen into the error of supposing that his profession gave him not merely the right to admonish, but the privilege to scold. Lord Stanley and Mr. Buxton have, however, the consolation of being railed at in good company. Hampden is "hated" with much zeal, though, it is admitted, with imperfect knowledge. Louis Philippe, and his associates of the Three Days, receive the following humane benediction-"I sincerely hope the march of mind in France may yet prove a bloody one." "The election of the

wretched B. for

and that base fellow, H. | book than the preceding quotations might ap for in spite of the exposure," &c. Again, pear to promise. If given as specimens of the editors protest against our supposing that this is a playful exercise in the art of exaggeration. It should be observed," they say, as in other parts of this volume, that the author used these words on principle, not as abuse, but as expressing matters of fact, as a way of bringing before his own mind things as they are."

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his power, they would do gross injustice to a good and able man, a ripe scholar, and a devout Christian. But as illustrations of the temper and opinions of those who now sit in Wycliffe's seat, they are neither unfair nor unimportant. And they may also convince all whom it concerns, that hitherto, at least, Oxford has not given birth to a new race of giants, by whom the evangelical founders and missionaries of the Church of England will be expelled from their ancient dominion, or the Protestant world excluded from the light of day and the free breath of heaven.

Milton, however, is the especial object of Mr. Froude's virtuous abhorrence. He is "a detestable author." Mr. Froude rejoices to learn something of the puritans, because, as he says, "It gives me a better right to hate Milton, and accounts for many of the things Whenever the time shall be ripe for writing which most disgusted me in his (not in my the ecclesiastical history of the last and the sense of the word) poetry."-"A lady told me present age, a curious chapter may be devoted yesterday that you wrote the article of Sacred to the rise and progress of the Evangelical Poetry, &c. I thought it did not come up to body in England from the days of Whitfield to what I thought your standard of aversion to our own. It will convey many important lesMilton." Mr. Froude and his editors must be sons. It will manifest the irresistible power delivered over to the secular arm under the of the doctrines of the Reformation when prowrit De Heretico Comburando for their wilful claimed with honesty and zeal, even though obstinacy in rejecting the infallible sentence its teachers be unskilled in those studies which of the fathers and oecumenical counsels of the are essential to a complete and comprehenchurch poetical, on this article of faith. There sive theology. It will show that infirmities is no room for mercy. They did not belong which, not without some reason, offend the to the audience, meet but few, to whom the im- more cultivated, and disgust the more fastimortal addressed himself to that little com- dious members of the Catholic Church amongst pany to which alone it is reserved to estimate us, are but as the small dust in the balance, the powers of such a mind, and reverently to when weighed against the mighty energy of notice its defects. They were of that multi- those cardinal truths in the defence of which tude who have to make their choice between Wycliffe and Luther, Knox and Calvin, Ridley repeating the established creed and holding and Latimer, lived and laboured, and died. their peace. Why are free-thinkers in litera- It may also prove that recondite learning, deep ture to be endured more than in religion? | piety and the purest virtue may be all comThe guilt of liberalism has clearly been contracted by this rash judgment; and Professor Tholuck being the witness, it exposes the criminals and the whole society of Oriel, nay, the entire University itself, to the diffusive indignation of all who cling to the Catholic faith in poetry.

There are much better things in Mr. Froude's

bined in bosoms which are yet contracted by narrow and unsuspected prejudices. But, above all, it may teach mutual charity; admonishing men to listen with kindness and selfdistrust even to each other's extravagant claims to an exclusive knowledge of the Di vine will, and the exclusive possession of the Divine favour.

D'AUBIGNÉ'S HISTORY OF THE GREAT
REFORMATION.*

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1839.]

ENGLISH literature is singularly defective in whatever relates to the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland, and to the lives of the great men by whom it was accomplished. A native of this island who would know any thing to the purpose, of Reuchlin or Hutten, or Luther or Melancthon, of Zuingle, Bucer or Ecolampadius, of Calvin or Farel, must betake himself to other languages than his own.

*History of the Great Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, in Germany, Switzerland, &c. By J. H. MERLE D'AUBIGNE, President of the Theological School of Geneva. 8vo. Vol. I. London, 1838.

To fill this void in our libraries, is an enter prise which might stimulate the zeal, and establish the reputation of the ripest student of Ecclesiastical History amongst us. In no other field could he discover more ample resources for narratives of dramatic interest; for the delineation of characters contrasted in every thing except their common design; for exploring the influence of philosophy, arts, and manners, on the fortunes of mankind; and for reverently tracing the footsteps of Divine Providence, moving among the ways and works of men, imparting dignity to events otherwise