The life and letters of Benjamin Jowett, M. A., master of Balliol college, Oxford.

74

Lzfe of Benjamin Jowett

[CHAP. IV

colleague so vivacious as Ward must have been far
more influential. In a conversational intercourse that
never flagged, difficulties raised by Bentham, John Stuart
Mill, or Auguste Comte were laid by the authority of
the Fathers. Such were the strange cross-currents of the
time. Years afterwards Jowett used to speak of Ward
as a kind of Silenus-Socrates, whose delight it was to
deliver young men of their doubts. For a brief while
his influence drew Jowett powerfully in the direction of
Newmanism 1.
'I sometimes think,' said Jowett once (about 1856),
'that but for some divine providence I might have
become a Roman Catholic. I had resolved to read through
the Fathers, and if I found Puseyism there I was to
become a Puseyite. It is not unlikely that I might have
found it, but before I had gone through my task the
vacation ended, and on returning to Oxford we found
that Ward was going to be married! After that the
Tractarian impulse subsided, and while some of us took
to German Philosophy, others turned to lobster suppers
and champagne. They called that 'being unworldly."'
Those words were lightly spoken, and at a later time.
But in the early years of his Fellowship, with Ordination
in prospect, theological difficulties had a serious practical
import, especially in connexion with the then burning
1 Some yearsafterthis, January, us German, and who considers
I849, he wrote to Stanley from human nature to be a sign of inBonn, with reference to young terrogation which finds its answer
Cruickshank (see above, p. 21): in the Church: and the other,
'I think there are two classes just the opposite class of persons,
of persons who turn Roman whose feelings are too deep for
Catholics: one, the rationalizers them ever to get on in the
like Capes and Ward, of whom my highways of the world, and who
present type is a student or rather find the Church a home for the
Ph. D. who comes here to teach lonely.'