If we may say it must have been, they might say so.

And they might, and indeed must, have concluded, each at their several date, that the highest historical person known to them must have been the Incarnate God; so that unless the Incarnation was the first fact in human history, there must have been a time when they would have used the argument and it would have led them wrong." Concerning Kingsley's Socialism, especially as shown in Hypatia, Froude was cold and critical.

"It is by no means as yet clear to me," he wrote about this time, "that all good people are Socialists, and that therefore whoever sticks to the old thing is a bad fellow.
Whatever is has no end of claims on us.

I have no doubt that we could not get on without the devil.

If it had not been so, he would not have been.