In this unsparing and absorbing warfare, what did Froude aim at—­what was the object he sought to bring about, what were the obstacles he sought to overthrow?

He was accused, as was most natural, of Romanising; of wishing to bring back Popery.  It is perfectly certain that this was not what he meant, though he did not care for the imputation of it.  He was, perhaps, the first Englishman who attempted to do justice to Rome, and to use friendly language of it, without the intention of joining it.  But what he fought for was not Rome, not even a restoration of unity, but a Church of England such as it was conceived of by the Caroline divines and the Non-jurors.  The great break-up of 1830 had forced on men the anxious question, “What is the Church as spoken of in England?  Is it the Church of Christ?” and the answers were various.  Hooker had said it was “the nation”; and in entirely altered circumstances, with some qualifications.  Dr. Arnold said the same.  It was “the Establishment” according to the lawyers and politicians, both Whig and Tory.  It was an invisible and mystical body, said the Evangelicals.  It was the aggregate of separate congregations, said the Nonconformists.  It was the parliamentary creation of the Reformation, said the Erastians.  The true Church was the communion of the Pope, the pretended Church was a legalised schism, said the Roman Catholics.  All these ideas were floating about, loose and vague, among people who talked much about the Church.  Whately, with his clear sense, had laid down that it 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