Page:Studies of a Biographer 3.djvu/240

 conclusions, was at last profoundly impressed. How did the chain snap? What was the 'fence' which he refused to clear? Was it at the sermon which Froude describes so strikingly when Newman, after dwelling upon the Passion, gave an 'electric stroke ' to his audience by the words, 'Now I bid you recollect that he to whom these things were done was Almighty God'? Froude gives a different explanation. He spent a year, after his degree, in Ireland, in the house of an Evangelical clergyman. The circle which he entered was thoroughly Protestant. It was part of a 'missionary garrison,' and its creed kept alive by antagonism to the surrounding element. The whole tone was devout and serious, without cant or affectation. The misery and squalor of the Catholic population suggested doubts as to the social effect of their creed. He had been taught at Oxford to despise the Evangelicals, and now he came to respect them and to regain his reverence for the Reformers. Protestantism, he suspected, after all, might have been a revolt against intolerable corruptions. Froude returned to Oxford to meet the uproar created by the famous Tract 'No. xc.' He was still sufficiently in sympathy with his old friends to be invited to contribute to the Lives of the Saints.