The two greatest geniuses of the age, as he thought them, agreeing in little else, agreed that Christianity did not rest upon reason.

Then upon what did it rest?
Reason appeals to one.

Faith is the appanage of a few.

From Carlyle Froude went to Goethe, then almost unknown at Oxford, a true philosopher as well as a great poet, an example of dignity, a liberator of the human soul.
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.