ivalrous indeed but imperialists full of gold who owned
nearly all the earth, but who, they were determined, should
not own England.

Froude was fond of such assertions, his book is full of them,
and they are more than mere violence framed for combat;
they are in their curious way definite expressions of the man's
soul; for Froude was fond of that high thin wall, and liked
to build it higher. He was a dogmatic rationalist--one
hesitates to use a word which has been so portentously
misused. Renan before dying came out with one of his last
dogmas; it was to this effect, that there was not in the
Universe an intelligent power higher than the human mind.
Froude, had he lived in an atmosphere of perfectly free
discussion as Renan did, would have heartily subscribed to that
dogma.

Why then do I say that he was perpetually on the borderland
of the Catholic Church? Because when he leaves for a
moment the phraseology and the material of his youth and of
his neighbourhood, he is perpetually striking that note of
interest, of wonder, and of intellectual freedom which is the
note of Catholicism.

Let any man who knows what Catholicism may be read
carefully the Essay on the Dissolution of the Monasteries,
and the Essay on the Philosophy of Christianity which succeeds
it in this book, but which was written six years before.
Let him remember that nothing Froude ever wrote was
written without the desire to combat some enemy, and, having
made allowance for that desire, let him decide whether one
shock, one experience, one revelation would not have whirled
him into the Church. He was, I think, like a man who has
felt the hands of a woman and heard her voice, who knows
them so thoroughly well that he can love, criticise, or despise
according to his mood; but who has never seen her face.

And he was especially near to the Church in this: that
having discussed a truth he was compelled to fight for it and
to wound actively in fighting, He was an agent, He did,
He saw that the mass of stuff clinging round the mind
of wealthy England was decaying, He turned with regret
towards the healthy visions of Europe and called them
illusions because they were not provable, and because all
provable things showed a flee other than that of the creed
and were true in another manner. He despised the cowardice
--for it is cowardice--that pretends to intellectual conviction
and to temporal evidence of the things of the soul. He saw
and said, and he