solved. On the other hand Froude's
experience of Evangelical Protestantism in Ireland, where he read
for the first time The Pilgrim's Progress, contradicted the
assumption of the Tractarians that High Catholicity was an essential
note of true religion. Gradually the young Fellow became aware that
High Church and Low Church did not exhaust the intellectual world.
He read Carlyle's French revolution, and Hero Worship, and Past and
Present. He read Emerson too. For Emerson and Carlyle the Church of
England did not exist. Carlyle despised it.

Emerson had probably not so much as given it a thought in his life.
But what struck Froude most about them was that they dealt with
actual phaenomena, with things and persons around them, with the
world as it was. They did not appeal to tradition, or to antiquity,
but to nature, and to the mind of man. The French Revolution, then
but half a century old, was interpreted by Carlyle not as
Antichrist, but as God's judgment upon sin.

Perhaps one view was not more historical than the other. But the first
was groundless, and second had at least some evidence in support of it.
God may be, or rather must be, conceived to work through other instruments
besides Christianity. "Neither in Jerusalem, nor on this mountain,
shall men worship the Father." Carlyle completed what Newman had
begun, and the dogmatic foundation of Froude's belief gave way. The
two greatest geniuses of the age, as he thought them, agreeing in
little else, agreed that Christianity did not rest upon reason. Then upon
what did it rest? Reason appeals to one. Faith is the appanage of a
few. From Carlyle Froude went to Goethe, then almost unknown at
Oxford, a true philosopher as well as a great poet, an example of
dignity, a liberator of the human soul.

The Church as a profession is not suitable to a man in Froude's
state of mind. But in Oxford at that time there flourished a lamentable
system which would have been felt to be irreligious if the
authorities of the place had known what religion really was. Most
Fellows lost their Fellowships in a very short time unless they took
orders, and Froude's Fellowship was in that sense a clerical one.
They were ordained as a matter of course, the Bishop requiring no
other title. They were not expected, unless they wished it, to take
any parochial duty, and the notion that they had a "serious call" to
keep their Fellowships can only be described as absurd. Froude had
no other profes