ying the present moment, he would have sternly denied that
pleasure, however refined, could be a legitimate aim in life. He was
a disciple of the porch, and not of the garden. It was deeds of
chivalry and endurance that he held up to the admiration of mankind.
The hero of his History, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was not a man
of brilliant gifts or dazzling attainments, but a sober, solid,
servant of duty and of the State. To most people Burghley is a far
less interesting figure than his haughty and splendid sovereign, or
the beautiful and seductive queen against whom he protected her.
Froude judged Burghley, as he judged Elizabeth Tudor and Mary
Stuart, by the standards of political integrity and personal honour.
The secret of Froude's influence and the source of his power is that
beneath the attraction of his personality and the seductiveness of
his writing there lay a bedrock of principle which could never be
moved.

Professor Sanday, who preached the first University sermon at Oxford
after Froude's death, referred to his "fifty years of unwearied
literary activity." The period of course included, and was meant to
include, The Nemesis of Faith.

"We all know," continued Dr. Sanday, "how the young and ardent
Churchman followed his reason where it seemed to lead, and
sacrificed a Fellowship, and, as it seemed, a career, to scruples of
conscience .... Now we can see that the difficulties which led to it
were real difficulties. It was right and not wrong that they should
be raised and faced." It is the fashion to regard scruples of
conscience as morbid, and the last man who troubled himself about a
test was not a young and ardent Churchman, but Charles Bradlaugh.
Froude was "ever a fighter," who wished always to fight fair. He
preferred resigning his Fellowship to fighting for it on purely
legal grounds, and holding it, if he could have held it, in the
teeth of the College Statutes. More than twenty years elapsed before
the tests which condemned him were abolished, and in that time there
must have been many less orthodox Fellows than he. It was more than
twenty years before he could lay aside the orders which in a rash
moment under an evil system he had assumed. But he was a preacher,
though a lay one, and his life was a struggle for the causes in
which he believed. Ecclesiastical controversies never really
interested him, except so far as they touched upon national life and
character. He wished to see the work, of t