of England was designed to be comprehensive. Chatham had spoken of
it, not unfairly, as having an Arminian liturgy and Calvinist
articles. When the Book of Common Prayer assumed its present shape,
every citizen had been required to conform, and the policy of
Elizabeth was to exclude no one. The result was a compromise, and
Mr. Cleaver would have found it hard to reconcile his principles
with the form of absolution in the Visitation of the Sick. This was,
in Mr. Cleaver's opinion, sophistry almost as bad as Newman's, and
Froude's tutorship came to an end. There was no quarrel, and, after
a tour through the south of Ireland, where he saw superstition and
irreverence, solid churches, well-fed priests, and a starving
peasantry in rags, Froude returned for a farewell visit to Delgany.
On this occasion he met Dr. Pusey, who had been at Christ Church
with Mr. Cleaver, and was then visiting Bray. Dr. Pusey, however,
was not at his ease He was told by a clerical guest, afterwards a
Bishop, with more freedom than courtesy, that they wanted no Popery
brought to Ireland, they had enough of their own. The sequel is
curious. For while Newman justified Mr. Cleaver by going over to
Rome, his own sons, including Froude's pupil, became Puseyite
clergymen of the highest possible type. Froude returned to Oxford at
the beginning of 1842, and won the Chancellor's Prize for an English
essay on the influence of political economy in the development of
nations. In the summer he was elected to a Devonshire Fellowship at
Exeter, and his future seemed secure. But his mind was not at rest.
It was an age of ecclesiastical controversy, and Oxford was the
centre of what now seems a storm in a teacup. Froude became mixed up
in it. On the one hand was the personal influence of Newman, who
raised more doubts than he 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