modest self-distrust; inculcates a morality | stupid and sullen; and kind patience had not 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 snrvey 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. "From his very birth his temper has been peculiar; pleasing, intelligent, and attaching, when his mind was undisturbed and he was in the company of people who treated him reasonably and kindly; but exceedingly impatient under vexatious circumstances; very much disposed to find his own amusement in teasing and vexing others; and almost entirely incorrigible when it was necessary to reprove him. I never could find a successful mode of treating him. Harshness made him obstinate and gloomy; calm and long displeasure made him 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." Though the mother and the child are both 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 nature 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. His 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 con. stitutional 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 itselfmight 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, their early dependence on stronger or more resolute minds, their propensity to self-observation and to record its results on paper, their opinions of the negro race, and the surprise with which they witnessed the worship of the Church of Rome in lands where it is still triumphant. So far all is peace, and the concordes animæ exchange such greetings as pass between disembodied spirits. But when the tidings brought by the new denizen of the Elysian fields to the reformer of the eighteenth century, reach his affrighted shade, the regions of the blessed are disturbed by an unwonted discord; and the fiery soul of Whitfield blazes with intense desire to resume his wanderings through the earth, and to lift up his voice against the new apostasy. 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. better shot than I had described myself. I had an impulse, too, to let it be thought I had only three shots when I really had had four. It was slight, to be sure, but I felt it."-"I have 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 confessions. I cannot make up my mind to that," replies the penitent, "but I think I can see many points in which it will be likely to do me good to be cut off for some time from these records." On such a subject the author of "The Christian Year" was entitled to more deference. The great ornament of the College de Propaganda at Oxford, he also had used the mental microscope to excess. Admonishing 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 they looked comfortable and nice, and that I 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 of riddles. So long as religious men must reveal their "expe- | unbroken. We cannot know about any seemriences," 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 00s, and it is to no purpose to say that we ness itself aspires for the candour with which it is combined, and the acuteness by which it is embellished. can find no proof of it in the writings of the first six centuries-they must find a disproof 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 judg ment 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) 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."-is but a mutilated edition, without the breadth "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 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 vdorpons 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?"-“[ 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?" 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 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 revolu tions 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 United States, and, in loathing against the 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 Mr. Froude was the victim of these associanot to doubt that there was a real though silent tions. Nothing escapes his abhorrence which "allusion to Christ" under the titles in which has been regarded with favour by his political the Supreme Being is addressed; and are told or religious antagonists. The Bill for the that "this circumstance may be a comfort to Abolition of Slavery was recommended to those who cannot bring themselves to assume Parliament by an administration more than the tone of many popular writers of this day, suspected of liberalism. The "Witness to who yet are discouraged by the peremptori- Catholic Views," "in whose sentiments as a ness with which it is exacted of them. The whole," his editors concur, visits the West truth is, that a mind alive to its own real state Indies, and they are not afraid to publish the often shrinks to utter what it most dwells following report of his feelings:-"I have felt upon; and is too full of awe and fear to do it a kind of duty to maintain in my mind an more than silently hope what it most wishes." habitual hostility to the niggers, and to chuckle It would indeed be presumptuous to pass a over the failures of the new system, as if these censure, or to hazard an opinion, on the pri- poor wretches concentrated in themselves all vate devotions of any man; but there is no the whiggery, dissent, cant, and abomination such risk in rejecting the apology which the that have been ranged on their side." Lest publishers of those secret exercises have ad- this should pass for a pleasant extravagance, vanced for Mr. Froude's departure from the the editors enjoin the reader not to "confound habits of his fellow Christians. Feeble, in- the author's view of the negro cause and of deed, and emasculate must be the system, the abstract negro with his feelings towards which, in its delicate distaste for the "popular any he should exactly meet;" and Professor writers of the day," would bury in silence the Tholuck is summoned from Germany to exname in which every tongue and language has plain how the "originators of error" may lawbeen summoned to worship and to rejoice. fully be the objects of a good man's hate, and Well may "awe and fear" become all who how it may innocently overflow upon all their assume and all who invoke it. But an "awe" clients, kindred, and connexions. Mr. Froude's which "shrinks to utter" the name of Him feelings towards the "abstract negro" would who was born at Bethlehem, and yet does not have satisfied the learned professor in his fear to use the name which is ineffable;-a most indignant mood. "I am ashamed," he "fear" which can make mention of the Father, says, "I cannot get over my prejudices against but may not speak of the Brother, of all-is a the niggers."-"Every one I meet seems to feeling which fairly baffles comprehension. me like an incarnation of the whole AntiThere is a much more simple, though a less Slavery Society, and Fowell Buxton at their imposing theory. Mr. Froude permitted him- head."-"The thing that strikes me as most self, and was encouraged by his correspond- remarkable in the cut of these niggers is ents, to indulge in the language of antipathy excessive immodesty, a forward, stupid famiand scorn towards a large body of his fellow liarity intended for civility, which prejudices Christians. It tinges his letters, his journals, me against them worse even than Buxton's and is not without its influence even on his cant did. It is getting to be the fashion with devotions. Those despised men too often cele-every body, even the planters, to praise the brated the events of their Redeemer's life, and emancipation and Mr. Stanley.' Mr. Froude, the benefits of his passion, in language of or rather his editors, appear to have fallen into offensive familiarity, and invoked him with the error of supposing that his profession gave fond and feeble epithets. Therefore, a good him not merely the right to admonish, but the Oxford Catholic must envelope in mystic privilege to scold. Lord Stanley and Mr. terms all allusion to Him round whom as its Buxton have, however, the consolation of centre the whole Christian system revolves. being railed at in good company. Hampden The line of demarcation between themselves is "hated" with much zeal, though, it is admitand these coarse sentimentalists must be broad ted, with imperfect knowledge. Louis Philippe, and deep, even though it should exclude those and his associates of the Three Days, receive by whom it is run, from all the peculiar and the following humane benediction-"I sindistinctive ground on which the standard of cerely hope the march of mind in France may the Protestant churches has been erected. yet prove a bloody one." "The election of the D wretched B. for - and that base fellow, H. for, in spite of the exposure," &c. Again, 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." 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 which most disgusted me in his (not in my sense of the word) poetry."-" A lady told me yesterday that you wrote the article of Sacred Poetry, &c. I thought it did not come up to what I thought your standard of aversion to Milton." Mr. Froude and his editors must be delivered over to the secular arm under the writ De Heretico Comburando for their wilful obstinacy in rejecting the infallible sentence of the fathers and oecumenical counsels of the church poetical, on this article of faith. There is no room for mercy. They did not belong to the audience, meet but few, to whom the immortal addressed himself-to that little company to which alone it is reserved to estimate the powers of such a mind, and reverently to notice its defects. They were of that multitude who have to make their choice between repeating the established creed and holding their peace. Why are free-thinkers in literature to be endured more than in religion? The 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 book than the preceding quotations might ap pear to promise. If given as specimens of 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. Whenever the time shall be ripe for writing the ecclesiastical history of the last and the present age, a curious chapter may be devoted to the rise and progress of the Evangelical body in England from the days of Whitfield to our own. It will convey many important lessons. It will manifest the irresistible power of the doctrines of the Reformation when proclaimed with honesty and zeal, even though its teachers be unskilled in those studies which are essential to a complete and comprehensive theology. It will show that infirmities which, not without some reason, offend the more cultivated, and disgust the more fastidious members of the Catholic Church amongst us, are but as the small dust in the balance, when weighed against the mighty energy of those cardinal truths in the defence of which Wycliffe and Luther, Knox and Calvin, Ridley and Latimer, lived and laboured, and died. It may also prove that recondite learning, deep piety and the purest virtue may be all combined 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 Divine 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 |