The Church as a profession is not suitable to a man in Froude’s state of mind.  But in Oxford at that time there flourished a lamentable system which would have been felt to be irreligious if the authorities of the place had known what religion really was.  Most Fellows lost their Fellowships in a very short time unless they took orders, and Froude’s Fellowship was in that sense a clerical one.  They were ordained as a matter of course, the Bishop requiring no other title.  They were not expected, unless they wished it, to take any parochial duty, and the notion that they had a “serious call” to keep their Fellowships can only be described as absurd.  Froude had no other profession in view, and he persuaded himself that a Church established by law must allow a wider range of opinion than a voluntary communion could afford to tolerate.  As we have seen, he had defended Tract Ninety, and he claimed for himself the latitude which he conceded to Newman.  It was in his case a mistake, as he very soon discovered.  But the system which encouraged it must bear a large part of the blame.  Meanwhile he had been employed by Newman on an uncongenial task.  After the discontinuance of Tracts for the Times, Newman projected another series, called Lives of the Saints.  The idea was of course taken from the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum.  But Newman had a definite polemical purpose.  Just as he felt the force of Hume’s argument against the probability of miracles, so he realised the difficulty of answering Gibbon’s inquiry when miracles ceased.  Had they ever ceased at all?  Many Roman Catholics, if not the most enlightened and instructed, thought not.  Newman conceived that the lives of English and Irish saints held much matter for edification, including marvels and portents of various kinds.  He desired that these things should be believed, as he doubtless believed them.  They proved, he thought, if they could be proved themselves, that supernatural power resided in the Church, and when the Church was concerned he laid his reason aside.

He was extraordinarily sanguine.  “Rationalise,” he said to Froude, “when the evidence is weak, and this will give credibility for others, when you can show that the evidence is strong.”  Froude chose St. Neot, a contemporary of Alfred, in whose life the supernatural played a comparatively small part.  He told his story as legend, not quite as Newman wanted it.  “This is all,” he said at the end, “and perhaps rather more than all, that is known of the life of the blessed St. Neot.”  His connection with the series ceased.  But his curiosity was excited.  He read far and wide in the Benedictine biographies.  No trace of investigation into facts could he discover.  If a tale was edifying, it was believed, and credibility had nothing to do with it.  The saints were beatified conjurers, and any nonsense about them was swallowed, if it involved the miraculous element.  The effect upon Froude may be left to his own words.  “St. Patrick I found once lighted a fire with icicles, changed a French marauder into a wolf, and floated to Ireland on an altar stone.  I thought it nonsense.  I found it eventually uncertain whether Patricius was not a title, and whether any single apostle of that name had so much as existed.”