Отрывок из книги
Herbert W. Paul
Published by Good Press, 2019
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—* Short Studies on Great Subjects, 4th series, p. 205. —
Perplexed by this dilemma, Froude at Oxford as a graduate, taking pupils in what was then called science, and would now be called philosophy, for the Honour School of Literae Humaniores. He was soon offered, and accepted, a tutorship in Ireland. His pupils father, Mr. Cleaver, was rector of Delgany in the county of Wicklow. Mr. Cleaver was a dignified, stately clergyman of the Evangelical school. Froude had been taught by his brother at home, and by his friends at Oxford, to despise Evangelicals as silly, ignorant, ridiculous persons. He saw in Mr. Cleaver the perfect type of a Christian gentleman, cultivated, pious, and well bred. Mrs. Cleaver was worthy of her husband. They were both models of practical Christianity. They and their circle held all the opinions about Catholicism and the Reformation which Newman and the Anglo-Catholics denounced. The real thing was always among them, and they did not want any imitation. "A clergyman," says Froude, "who was afterwards a Bishop in the Irish Church, declared in my hearing that the theory of a Christian priesthood was a fiction; that the notion of the Sacraments as having a mechanical efficacy irrespective of their conscious effect upon the mind of the receiver was an idolatrous superstition; that the Church was a human institution, which had varied in form in different ages, and might vary again; that it was always fallible; that it might have Bishops in England, and dispense with Bishops in Scotland and Germany; that a Bishop was merely an officer; that the apostolical succession was probably false as a fact—and, if a fact, implied nothing but historical continuity. Yet the man who said these things had devoted his whole life to his Master's service—thought of nothing else, and cared for nothing else."*
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