was a
divine religious society, distinct in its origin and existence, distinct
in its attributes from any other. But this idea had fallen dead, till
Froude and his friends put new life into it Froude accepted Whately's
idea that the Church of England was the one historic uninterrupted
Church, than which there could be no other, locally in England; but into
this Froude read a great deal that never was and never could be in
Whately's thoughts. Whately had gone very far in viewing the Church from
without as a great and sacred corporate body. Casting aside the Erastian
theory, he had claimed its right to exist, and if necessary, govern
itself, separate from the state. He had recognised excommunication as
its natural and indefeasible instrument of government. But what the
internal life of the Church was, what should be its teaching and organic
system, and what was the standard and proof of these, Whately had left
unsaid. And this outline Froude filled up. For this he went the way to
which the Prayer Book, with its Offices, its Liturgy, its Ordination
services, pointed him. With the divines who had specially valued the
Prayer Book, and taught in its spirit, Bishop Wilson, William Law,
Hammond, Ken, Laud, Andrewes, he went back to the times and the sources
from which the Prayer Book came to us, the early Church, the reforming
Church for such with all its faults it was--of the eleventh, twelfth,
and thirteenth centuries, before the hopelessly corrupt and fatal times
of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which led to the break-up of
the sixteenth. Thus to the great question, What is the Church? he gave
without hesitation, and gave to the end, the same answer that Anglicans
gave and are giving still. But he added two points which were then very
new to the ears of English Churchmen: (1) that there were great and to
most people unsuspected faults and shortcomings in the English Church,
for some of which the Reformation was gravely responsible; (2) that the
Roman Church was more right than we had been taught to think in many
parts both of principle and practice, and that our quarrel with it on
these points arose from our own ignorance and prejudices. To people who
had taken for granted all their lives that the Church was thoroughly
"Protestant" and thoroughly right in its Protestantism, and that Rome
was Antichrist, these confident statements came with a shock. He did not
enter much into dogmatic questions. As far as can be judg