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 judged from his
_Remains_, the one point of doctrine on which he laid stress, as being
inadequately recognised and taught in the then condition of the English
Church, was the primitive doctrine of the Eucharist. His other
criticisms pointed to practical and moral matters; the spirit of
Erastianism, the low standard of life and purpose and self-discipline in
the clergy, the low tone of the current religious teaching. The
Evangelical teaching seemed to him a system of unreal words. The
opposite school was too self-complacent, too comfortable, too secure in