wrongs of Ireland did not appeal to him.  That Protestantism was the religion of the English pale, and of the Scottish Presbyterians in Ulster, not of the Irish people, was a fact outside his thoughts.  He saw two things clearly enough.  One was the strength and beauty of the religious faith by which the Cleavers and their friends lived.  The other was the misery, squalor, and chronic discontent of the Catholic population, then almost twice as large as after the famine it became.  He did not pause to reflect upon what had been done by laws made in England, or upon the iniquity of taxing Ireland in tithes for the Church of a small minority.  He concluded simply that Protestantism meant progress, and Catholicism involved stagnation.  He heard dark stories of Ribbonism, and was gravely assured that if Mr. Cleaver’s Catholic coachman, otherwise an excellent servant, were ordered to shoot his master, he would obey.  Very likely Mr. Cleaver was right, though the event did not occur.  What was the true origin of Ribbonism, what made it dangerous, why it had the sympathy of the people, were questions which Froude could hardly be expected to answer, inasmuch as they were not answered by Sir Robert Peel.

While Froude was at Delgany there appeared the once famous Tract Ninety, last of the series, unless we are to reckon Monckton Milnes’s One Tract More.  The author of Tract Ninety was Newman, and the ferment it made was prodigious.  It was a subtle, ingenious, and plausible attempt to prove that the Articles and other formularies of the English Church might be honestly interpreted in a Catholic sense, as embodying principles which the whole Catholic Church held before the Reformation, and held still.  Mr. Cleaver and his circle were profoundly shocked.  To them Catholicism meant Roman Catholicism, or, as they called it, Popery.  If a man were not a Protestant, he had no business to remain in the United Church of England and Ireland.  If he did remain in it, he was not merely mistaken, but dishonest, and sophistry could not purge him from the moral stain of treachery to the institution of which he was an officer.  Froude’s sense of chivalry was aroused, and he warmly defended Newman, whom he knew to be as honest as himself, besides being saintly and pure.  If he had stopped there, all might have been well.  Mr. Cleaver was himself high-minded, and could appreciate the virtue of standing up for an absent friend.  But Froude went further.  He believed Newman to be legally and historically right.  The Church 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.