ected to a particular end,
that of guarding the Catholic view of a popular religion from formidable
objections.

The moral side of religion had been from the first a prominent subject
in the teaching of the movement Its protests had been earnest and
constant against intellectual self-sufficiency, and the notion that mere
shrewdness and cleverness were competent judges of Christian truth, or
that soundness of judgment in religious matters was compatible with
arrogance or an imperfect moral standard; and it revolted against the
conventional and inconsistent severity of Puritanism, which was shocked
at dancing but indulged freely in good dinners, and was ostentatious in
using the phrases of spiritual life and in marking a separation from the
world, while it surrounded itself with all the luxuries of modern
inventiveness. But this moral teaching was confined to the statement of
principles, and it was carried out in actual life with the utmost
dislike of display and with a shrinking from strong professions. The
motto of Froude's _Remains_, which embodied his characteristic temper,
was an expression of the feeling of the school:

Se sub serenis vultibus
Austera virtus occulit:
Timet videri, ne suum,
Dum prodit, amittat decus,[117]

The heroic strictness and self-denial of the early Church were the
objects of admiration, as what ought to be the standard of Christians;
but people did not yet like to talk much about attempts to copy them.
Such a book as the _Church of the Fathers_ brought out with great force
and great sympathy the ascetic temper and the value put on celibacy in
the early days, and it made a deep impression; but nothing was yet
formulated as characteristic and accepted doctrine.

It was not unnatural that this should change. The principles exemplified
in the high Christian lives of antiquity became concrete in definite
rules and doctrines, and these rules and doctrines were most readily
found in the forms in which the Roman schools and teachers had embodied
them. The distinction between the secular life and the life of
"religion," with all its consequences, became an accepted one. Celibacy
came to be regarded as an obvious part of the self-sacrifice of a
clergyman's life, and the belief and the profession of it formed a test,
understood if not avowed, by which the more advanced or resolute members
of the party were distinguished from the rest. This came home to men on
the threshold of life with a k