This was the period, as everybody knows, of the Oxford Movement, in which Hurrell Froude acted as a pioneer.  Hurrell’s ideal was the Church of the Middle Ages represented by Thomas Becket.  In the vacations he brought some of his Tractarian friends home with him, and Anthony listened to their talk.  Strange talk it seemed.  They found out, these young men, that Dr. Arnold, one of the most devoutly religious men who ever lived, was not a Christian.  The Reformation was an infamous rebellion against authority.  Liberalism, not the Pope, was antichrist.  The Church was above the State, and the supreme ruler of the world.  Transubstantiation, which the Archdeacon abhorred, was probably true.  Hurrell Froude was a brilliant talker, a consummate dialectician, and an ardent proselytising controversialist.  But his young listener knew a little history, and perceived that, to put it mildly, there were gaps in Hurrell’s knowledge.

When he heard that the Huguenots were despicable, that Charles I. was a saint, that the Old Pretender was James iii., that the Revolution of 1688 was a crime, and that the Non-jurors were the true confessors of the English Church, it did not seem to square with his reading, or his reflections.  Perhaps, after all, the infallible Hurrell might be wrong.  One fear he had never been able to instil into his brother, and that was the fear of death.  When asked what would happen if he were suddenly called to appear in the presence of God, Anthony replied that he was in the presence of God from morning to night and from night to morning.  That abiding consciousness he never lost, and when his speculations went furthest they invariably stopped there.

Left with his father and one sister, the boy drank in the air of Dartmoor, and grew to love Devonshire with an unalterable affection.  He also continued his reading, and invaded theology.  Newton on the Prophecies remarked that “if the Pope was not Antichrist, he had bad luck to be so like him,” and Renan had not yet explained that Antichrist was neither the Pope nor the French Revolution, but the Emperor Nero.  From Pearson on the Creed he learned the distinction between “believing” and “believing in.”  When we believe in a person, we trust him.  When we believe a thing, we are not sure of it.  This is one of the few theological distinctions which are also differences.  Meanwhile, the Archdeacon had been watching his youngest son, and had observed that he had at least a taste for books.  Perhaps he might not be the absolute dolt that Hurrell pronounced him.  He had lost five years, so far as classical training was concerned, by the mismanagement of the Archdeacon himself.  Still, he was only seventeen, and there was time to repair the waste.  He was sent to a private tutor’s in preparation for Oxford.  His tutor, a dreamy, poetical High Churchman, devoted to Wordsworth and Keble, failed to understand his character or to give him an interest in his work, and a sixth year was added to the lost five.