The moral side of religion had been from the first a prominent subject in the teaching of the movement Its protests had been earnest and constant against intellectual self-sufficiency, and the notion that mere shrewdness and cleverness were competent judges of Christian truth, or that soundness of judgment in religious matters was compatible with arrogance or an imperfect moral standard; and it revolted against the conventional and inconsistent severity of Puritanism, which was shocked at dancing but indulged freely in good dinners, and was ostentatious in using the phrases of spiritual life and in marking a separation from the world, while it surrounded itself with all the luxuries of modern inventiveness.  But this moral teaching was confined to the statement of principles, and it was carried out in actual life with the utmost dislike of display and with a shrinking from strong professions.  The motto of Froude’s Remains, which embodied his characteristic temper, was an expression of the feeling of the school: 

  Se sub serenis vultibus
  Austera virtus occulit: 
  Timet videri, ne suum,
  Dum prodit, amittat decus,[117]

The heroic strictness and self-denial of the early Church were the objects of admiration, as what ought to be the standard of Christians; but people did not yet like to talk much about attempts to copy them.  Such a book as the Church of the Fathers brought out with great force and great sympathy the ascetic temper and the value put on celibacy in the early days, and it made a deep impression; but nothing was yet formulated as characteristic and accepted doctrine.

It was not unnatural that this should change.  The principles exemplified in the high Christian lives of antiquity became concrete in definite rules and doctrines, and these rules and doctrines were most readily found in the forms in which the Roman schools and teachers had embodied them.  The distinction between the secular life and the life of “religion,” with all its consequences, became an accepted one.  Celibacy came to be regarded as an obvious part of the self-sacrifice of a clergyman’s life, and the belief and the profession of it formed a test, understood if not avowed, by which the more advanced or resolute members of the party were distinguished from the rest.  This came home to men on the threshold of life with a keener and closer touch than questions about doctrine.  It was the subject of many a bitter, agonising struggle which no one knew anything of; it was with many the act of a supreme self-oblation.  The idea of the single life may be a utilitarian one as well as a religious one.  It may be chosen with no thought of renunciation or self-denial, for the greater convenience and freedom of the student or the philosopher, the soldier or the man of affairs.  It may also be chosen without any special feeling of a sacrifice by the clergyman, as most helpful for his work.  But the idea of celibacy, in those