St. Stephen's Review

The death of Cardinal NEWMAN carries away one of the greatest spirits of our age from the world of living men. His gigantic intellect is recognised by men of all sects and parties; but it is comparatively few only who grasp why NEWMAN was such a force in the days of our fathers, and why his name has been so mighty in our own day, even although his work was over. NEWMAN'S influence is not due to the fact that he became a Roman Catholic and a Cardinal. It is not again due to the fact that he was at one time the leader of the advanced section of the English High Church school. None ever spoke of him as they do of the Ritualist preachers of today. NEWMAN'S fame as men will some day realise, rested on the fact that he was above his age, that while other men were content to accept the popular doctrines of the {240} moment as containing implicit truth, NEWMAN seemed to think that neither in politics nor religion the England of forty years ago, with its Evangelical services, its Cobdenite political economy, and its Manchester school politics, possessed the truth in a greater measure than any other age. With a courage and chivalry that was never rivalled in the history of the world, he and his friends appealed to the unimaginative and commonplace generation to go for guidance to the old faith and piety of the Middle Ages. And on their generation they effected a work which will never be forgotten. True it is they did not bring back the faith of the Middle Ages, but they did teach to mankind that the past has still its sacred lessons, and that man does not live for gain alone. As Matthew Arnold long ago observed, the Manchester school, and the old-fashioned Evangelicalism which was the religious aspect of the old-fashioned Liberalism, have passed away before a purer ideal in religion and politics, killed by the great spiritual movement of which NEWMAN was the leader. What will be the fate of the Church which NEWMAN left, or of the Church which he joined, no man can say; but this fact at least is certain, that in all developments of English thought whether religious, political, or literary, his influence will be felt for many a generation to come. Of all the illustrious sons whom Oxford has given to the world during the present century, none will leave so great a memory behind.

———————

"Lead, Kindly Light"; and lo; the Light hath led
Whither his soul in harvest-time hath sped.
The Gleaner, glancing down upon the field,
Saw the dead fruit that living fruit did yield;
Then gathered to His arms the empty husk,
When shadows deepened, and the day was dusk.

"Lead, Kindly Light": The lamp is burning now
In full effulgence on thy saintly brow;
And o'er thy thought-worn visage gleams the ray {241}
That juvenates through all unending day.
Not onto us is given to praise or blame,
Our Maker knows, and He will mete thy fame.

"Lead, Kindly Light"; nor earth, nor cloud, nor sea
Can dim the lustre of the life of thee,
Nor in thy death can darkling envy thrust
One dart into the tomb which holds thy dust.
Father, and friend, and Cardinal, we bow
Our heads before the pall-draped coffin now.
                                                  Ogilvie Mitchell.

Stock Exchange

The death of Cardinal NEWMAN removes a great Englishman. He was not quite the saint, or the genius that his admirers describe, but he was a great theologian, a master of English, a man of pure life, who never aimed at self-aggrandisement. Whether his services to England were great may be doubted, and as to his writings, not one in a hundred of the people who are raving about his character and career has read a page of them. But that was not his fault. May peace be with him.

Sunday School Chronicle

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN is no longer amongst men. The morn has dawned for him of which he taught us to sing:

"And with the morn those angel faces smile,
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile."

The man who never willingly gave up a friend has already been greeted by troops of friends that had preceded him to the eternal shore.   *   *   *   *   *   Before the publication of the "Apologia," many supposed him to be an insidious teacher, leading his disciples on to conclusions to which he designed to bring them, while carefully concealing his purpose. But he was {242} in fact, the most transparent of men. Singularly free from ambition, except the ambition of usefulness, lowly hearted, simple in his tastes, a poet, a mystic, and an eminent example of unworldliness, he has become to thousands outside his own communion a modern Enoch who lived and walked with God.

NEWMAN'S secession to Rome becomes intelligible enough to those who follow the track of his mental history. Intellectually he shared the sceptical bias of his brother. Unshaken and unshakeable as his own convictions were they did not rest upon intellectual grounds. Indeed, he seems to have accepted Hume's famous argument against the credibility of miracles as logically sound, and in the imperfection of the outward evidence for the truth of Christianity, he discovered an argument for the Catholic theory of the Church as a Living Body through which Christ himself still speaks to us. Roman Catholicism supplied him with an intellectual justification for a faith which possessed him he knew not how.

Froude gives some striking illustrations of his preaching. On one occasion he had been describing some of the incidents of our Lord's Passion, when he suddenly paused. For a second or two there was a breathless silence. Then, in a low clear voice, of which the faintest tone was audible in the farthest corner of the great church of St. Mary's, he said, "Now, I bid you recollect that He to whom these things were done was Almighty God." It was as if an electric stroke had gone through the church, as if every person present understood for the first time the meaning of what he had all his life been saying. The real faith of not a few of his hearers dated from that moment.   *   *   *   *   *   He has longed ceased to exert any influence on English society. His work for good and for ill has long been done. He has outlived religious prejudices and animosities. By his hymn, "Lead, kindly Light," he is endeared to tens of thousands who share his faith without {243} participating in his superstitions. As to how far his writings will continue to influence religious thought, there will be differences of opinion, but probably their work is also done. The memory of his pure and beautiful life, will, however, remain, and the estimate of his noble character will be enhanced as the controversies in which his energies were spent are left farther and farther behind.

Sussex Daily News

The great Cardinal continues to fill the newspapers, and it is clear that, though dead, he is destined to live long in the memory of the world which his presence honoured. When one remembers the bitterness, the ferocity even, with which he was attacked years ago, it is good to read the words that have been written of him these last few days. The "Apologia" remains the most wonderful work of its kind in any language, and had Cardinal NEWMAN written nothing else it would still be difficult to appreciate the literary standard of the person in the Times who has pronounced him a failure as a writer. It is a very strange judgment for any critic to arrive at who must be supposed to have read not only the "Apologia pro Vitâ Suâ," but the "Parochial Sermons," the "Essay on Assent," the Miscellaneous Essays, and the "Discourses Addressed to the Catholics of Dublin." It may be questioned whether any English man of letters ever wrote a style more pure, more subtle, more direct, more simple, more exquisitely harmonious than NEWMAN'S; and scattered up and down throughout his voluminous works are passages which, for fineness and strength of imagination and perfection of expression, are scarcely to be matched, and are assuredly not surpassed in our language. {244}

Sussex News

A great Englishman and another of the saints of God has passed to his peace. When JOHN HENRY NEWMAN laid down his long and immortal life's work he was surrounded by young men, any one—or all—of whom would joyfully have given up his own life if it had been possible by such sacrifice to prolong yet a little while the life of the greatest theologian and one of the greatest thinkers of this century. No one who knows anything of the Brothers at the Oratory of S. Philip Neri can doubt this for a moment. Their love for their illustrious and aged chief has scarcely a parallel in these days   *   *   *   *   *   Not in England only but throughout Christendom the death of Cardinal NEWMAN will inspire a feeling of reverent sorrow. He was in his ninetieth year, and it might be said that his work was done; but it is not in human nature to say "Farewell!" without a feeling of grief to such a pure and glorious spirit. In the Christian Church he was the foremost man of his age among the English speaking race, and it is generally agreed among all the most competent critical authorities that he stood before all living prose writers as the master of the English language. All may not agree with his opinions on theological subjects, but he has at any rate given those opinions to the world embalmed in the imperishable amber of his style. In the English language there is nothing more beautiful than the literary workmanship of the dead Cardinal's Apologia pro Vita Sua—a book which with its exquisitely felicitous and touching dedication at the end, in the old-fashioned way, to the Brothers of St. Philip Neri, can surely never die. This is neither the time nor the place to discuss Cardinal NEWMAN'S theological opinions. But, though he left the Anglican Church, no intelligent Anglican Churchman ever ceased to entertain for him feelings of respect and admiration. Nobody who knows the history of the convulsive years prior to the publication of Tract 90, when Cardinal NEWMAN was {245} severely censured by those in authority for writing what is being written and said daily now by thousands of Anglican Churchmen, can doubt that the Bishops absolutely drove him out of the English Church. Many of these Bishops seemed utterly incapable of sympathising with the great-souled poet-thinker, who just then gave the Christian Church the undying hymn:—

Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
                Lead thou me on;
The night is dark, and I am far from home:
                Lead Thou me on.

Sydenham Gazette

Everybody is reading just now about the great ecclesiastic, Cardinal NEWMAN. The idol of the literary-religious people for nearly two generations, JOHN HENRY NEWMAN has exercised a potent spell which is hardly explained, either by his charming style, or the depth and correctness of his thinking. Indeed, to the present generation the unique position he has held in the estimation of the refined and cultured, is somewhat of a puzzle, which is far from being solved by a perusal of his writings. And old admirers and worshippers at the NEWMAN shrine, on re-reading the great Cardinal's writings in the light of later days and newer movements, are obliged to fall back upon his superb personality to explain the wonderful impression he made on men of light and leading. But though it has, naturally, been the fashion for the last few days to overpraise the genius, and exaggerate the influence of NEWMAN, every candid lover of English literature and moral greatness will admit that his writings, both for their excellence of composition and of sentiment, are worthy of a foremost place in the estimation of Englishmen. {246}

Tablet

Causes were in operation, quite apart and distinct from the personality of NEWMAN, to bring about a second spring of the Church in England as throughout Europe. But the personality of NEWMAN was, in its variety of gifts and power of fascination, transcendent. He has been compared in the commanding outlook of his genius to Cæsar, and in the fiery keenness of his thought to Dante. Much, indeed, there was in him that resembled Cæsar, though in so different a sphere; his grace and clearness of speech, his loyalty to friends, immeasurable daring, and natural tone of supremacy. With Dante it is curious to remark that he never felt a conscious sympathy, and could not read the "Divina Commedia." Yet his own "Dream of Gerontius," which will outlast everything of his but the "Apologia," has many of the qualities that are characteristic of the Florentine. What gave his secession its unique value was the height to which he had risen as a complex and subtle genius, as poet, preacher, historian, controversialist, theologian, and saint. For he was all these at once, and every one of them in extraordinary measure. And without parade or self-consciousness he manifested them all in the medium of a lucid English that for transparency, depth, and colouring, for the brightness of its irony, its idiomatic strength, the tenderness of its pathos, the happy turn of its slightest phrase, and the bold yet classic rendering of every mood and feeling, remains at this day simply unrivalled as the most perfect prose of this, or perhaps, of any century.

The question that NEWMAN brought home to the hearts and business of Englishmen was this: If so richly endowed a mind can submit itself to Rome, what argument is left for the average intellect whereby to withstand those peremptory claims? If, again, not even his genius could save the "Via Media" from destruction, where is there standing-ground for the many who hate or despise the Papal Church, yet shrink from unbelief and {247} desire to remain Christians? His conversion implied that the problems of the age, instead of being dwarfed to petty strifes about the meaning or non-meaning of articles, had assumed their true dimensions. The force on one side was seen to be religious Liberalism ending in "each man his own church and his own creed;" while on the other there came forth an imperial, self-asserting authority, speaking in the name of a present Christ, and suffering neither rival nor rebellion because it held the keys of eternity. In his own person NEWMAN had stated and resolved the great dilemma: either Christianity is a human invention destined to have its day, or the primal indefectible Christianity is the Roman Church. It was fitting that he should have advanced to his conclusion by sure steps though slow, that logic, and history, and the voice of conscience should play their several parts, and the evidence be weighed, and objections tested, and passion laid to rest; for the process through which genius arrives at truth is in this way shortened for the many that come after. What was done in those ten years between 1833 and 1843 was done once for all; and the track in the wilderness has grown to be a clear pathway since.

To speak of the forty volumes, large and small, in which his message to the world is contained, would be impossible now, if we are to do them justice. They range through all the forms of literature and touch upon innumerable questions. Occasional in their origin, and often hurried in their composition, each of them has still upon it the highly-wrought finish that is proper to a classic, and, whether the movement of their periods be solemn or swift, their melodious rhythm, graceful poise, and consummate ease of expression are such that a reader may well believe he has something like the finest Greek prose before him. A wonderful light dwells upon the pages of the Oxford Sermons, the Essay on Justification, the Sermons to Mixed Congregations, and the Dream of Gerontius. In the Catholic period of his life there seems added a deep {248} warm colouring, and a power of terrible imagery, as though the stern drawings of an Albert Dürer had been suddenly quickened into Dantean life and caught the hues of Italian genius. NEWMAN'S Anglican writings are clear and cold; when he became a Catholic, it was like going into a Southern atmosphere, all glow and sunshine, his nature expanded, his eloquence took fire, and the passionate energy that had been seeking for an object found it in preaching the visible kingdom of Christ. He wrote of men and their ways with an intimate overwhelming knowledge; history was to him a present drama; and, whilst in the art of marshalling facts and grouping characteristic personages he owed something to Gibbon, the enthusiasm which enabled him to live through past ages over again was all his own. To the last he was a denizen rather of the ancient Church than the modern, though never a mere antiquarian; he was at home with the Basils and the Chrysostoms, and moved up and down the early centuries like one to whom they were a familiar inheritance.

Times

A great man has passed away; a great link with the with past has been broken. Thus enviably closes a most noteworthy life; a life that in itself sums up in the best and most attractive way one side of the religious life of the century. At ninety years of age, full of years, full of honour, but not of honours, in the obscurity of his almost private home, the great man receives the last summons and quietly obeys. A most interesting chapter of our history closes his death, and a life which bears strange testimony to the permanence of certain types in human nature becomes a part of the past. Once more the world is reminded of the degree in which respect and love still attach to the saintly life, when it is coupled with one or another kind of intellectual {249} leadership. Cardinal NEWMAN is literally the last of his generation. Many of his old friends and colleagues he has long survived; others have but lately passed away; but he, to all appearance the most fragile of all, has remained till now. The men who followed NEWMAN in his passage across the Roman Rubicon have almost all predeceased him. He has remained, looking out from those mysterious eyes of his upon a world that has changed enormously since the days of the Tractarians, and changed, it must be feared, in ways that he often liked but little. He liked them less, perhaps he understood them less, than the eminent foreign contemporary with whom one naturally compares him, Dr. Döllinger. Far more learned than NEWMAN, far more active, endowed with more physical vigour and a greater force of will, Döllinger never stood aside, like the great English dialectician from the course of affairs. The one, therefore, is the more interesting as an example of intellectual energy and critical alertness; the other, as a poet, a mystic, and as a thrice-refined example of the unworldly life.

He may be said to have lived no other life than the religious life, the life in constant and conscious communication with the Unseen. His history is the history of religious opinions, and of actions based on them. We trace the workings of his mind as he passes out of the evangelicalism of his boyhood—an effective school for the religious emotions—into the historical and logical stage from which grew the "Tracts for the Times." The story of this central moment of the modern religious history of England is always fascinating, and to those who have any personal link with the Oxford of that day it still has a curious and a powerful interest. It has to be told over again from the point of view of each actor in it—of Keble first, then of Pusey, lately, in a much-read book, of William George Ward, and now of NEWMAN, the chief of the band, the head and front of the offending. And yet, from the standpoint of today, how incredibly remote it all {250} seems!   *   *   *   *   *   From the moment of that great step NEWMAN became, to the bulk of English people, a mere memory. Oxford long retained the tradition of his wonderful personality; of the charm of his character, of the pure beauty of his style. But he passed out of the life of the place and of the many who had read and admired him. Fifteen years or more passed by till the world heard of him again, when the "Apologia" was published. The cause seemed a mere accident; a chance phrase of a man who was not given to measuring his words. One does not need to be a Roman Catholic to appreciate the thoroughness of the punishment which Kingsley received from his veteran antagonist. The amateur had challenged the old swordsman; and he became as a child in his hands.

Will NEWMAN'S memory survive in the estimation of his country? Will his books maintain it? That is a question which may be asked today, but which the future only can answer. Of one thing we may be sure, that the memory of his pure and noble life, untouched by worldliness, unsoured by any trace of fanaticism, will endure, and that whether Rome canonizes him or not he will be canonized in the thoughts of pious people of many creeds in England. The saint and the poet in him will survive. "Lead, kindly Light," is already something better than a classic; the life at Littlemore and at Edgbaston will engrave itself deep into the memory of all to whom religion and lofty human character are dear.

Truth

"The amiable, the intellectual, the refined JOHN HENRY NEWMAN." Such was the phrase in which the celebrated Blanco White described NEWMAN some sixty years ago, and it was as true of him during the closing years of his life as it was in the old Oriel days. {251}

Those beautiful sermons which NEWMAN preached at Oxford, and which, on the whole, are probably the finest discourses that have ever been heard from an Anglican pulpit, were long ago collected and published, very much against his own wish, and they have passed through many large editions. It would be a real blessing if clergymen would only condescend to read these sermons to their congregations, instead of nauseating them with their own twaddling vapidities.

NEWMAN was one of the men who during the present age have made England illustrious, and he was unapproached in the force and splendour of his character, the power and brilliancy of his mind, and the vastness of his acquirements, to which may be added his unaffected humility and simplicity. His writings have always commanded universal admiration, for the dignity, elegance, and limpid clearness of his style. The effect of his extraordinary talents was prodigiously heightened by the purity of the mind which directed them. He had no personal ambitions, for immortal happiness was the sole ultimate aim of his existence. Everybody who knew him loved and honoured him, and all his countrymen were proud of him.

Universe

Cardinal NEWMAN'S loss to the Catholic community in this realm is incalculable but not irreparable, for his memory and his works are always with us.

His was a towering intellect—one that like a pharos on the sea of controversy pointed heavenwards, and spread afar the beams of a bright intelligence. He was learned, modest, earnest, and thorough.

To rise to a due literary appreciation of the deceased, one {252} should have almost devoured the contents of the Bodleian; but this is remarkable in his style, as in that of other truly great men, that there is an utter absence of pedantry. The nostril is never offended with the stale smell of the midnight lamp. In the ranks of the graver intellect and the real riper scholarship, he stands beside the Ruskins, the Tennysons, the Gladstones. In fact, he was a genius, one of those who are rarely vouchsafed to earth—and, in his person, a light of the century has been quenched.

And yet not quenched, for his better, his genuinely vital part, is still with us. His voice will continue to speak, to guide, to cheer, to counsel, to remonstrate. He has indented his autograph in the tablet of history. Generations hence, when the glaring notabilities of today shall have been forgotten, when some of the dynasties which are now high shall be flat as the sand and broken as the shard, NEWMAN will be known and held in honour as a buttress and ornament of the Church—a nineteenth century Aquinas.

His figure will loom large to posterity. Throughout his lengthened existence, from those early student days in the cloisters of Oxford to the decline in the serene hermitage of Edgbaston, where he consoled himself with his Breviary and his violin, the leading trait in his character was its intensity. To borrow Carlyle's phrase, he was an unswerving disciple of "the eternal veracities," these in NEWMAN'S case bearing no suspicion of the taint of cant, but being in probability something loftier and more awful than the pseudo-philosopher of Chelsea ever conceived.

Blameless in his private, as he was dignified in his public deportment, he proved that one can mix with the world, take a profound interest in the thorniest questions which agitate it, even dash a keen weapon in discussion, and yet be as saint-like and simple as the most austere of recluses. Severely and calmly logical, when he applied his powers to the elucidation of a subject, it was as if the unrelenting search-light were turned {253} upon it, and when he chose to hold up to scorn the followers of imposture or littleness how fiercely scathing he could be! And yet he was as far removed as possible from the vulgar or abusive pragmatic polemist, for this man, while devoid of the vanity of the self-conscious, always preserved his proud self-respect. He was a master-dialectician; beside him the muscular parson of Devonshire, as the more insolent and ignorant devil's advocates, were but pigmies.

And with his enormous wealth of classic lore, it was curious to note how fondly he clung to that pithy, strong vocabulary of Saxon English. But in his hand the swaying of the sturdy sledge-hammer dazzled like rapier-play.

He is silent, and the world is poorer by a golden voice. What a hoard of scholarship, of wisdom, of judgment, of prescience and poetry is sepulchred as we write, under that cold marble brow in a room of the mourning Oratory by the busy capital of the Midlands. There indeed is an empty dome of thought, a tenantless palace of the soul. Others may regret that the great modern exemplar of the high desire and holy living has departed; ours is the privilege of praying for his eternal welfare, and recommending ourselves to his protection.

United Ireland

The earth is poorer by a great life gone. The earth is poorer, and Heaven itself is richer for that glorious soul A great man has passed away—amongst the greatest, if not the very greatest, of his generation. Amid the quick, fierce turmoil of politics it is good to pause, if it be but for a moment, to contemplate that wonderful life, now over. What he has done for the generation in which he lived—what his example and works will do for the generations that are to fallow, far on into the dim future, cannot be spoken in {254} words; can be but vaguely realised even in imagination. A life like his makes rich the blood of the world. It drives out the creeping paralysis of infidelity before it, as light drives out darkness. He was a great living, preaching protest against the callous, careless apathy of things spiritual—too careless for definite unbelief—which is slowly darkening the earth, like a thick cloud, and shutting out Heaven from view or thought. To NEWMAN religion was real, and to him vitally essential. His soul craved for it urgently, as the animal nature craves for food and drink. In feeling and intellect he was wonderfully equipped to find truth in religion. He moved, or was moved, to truth by a power as urgent and as infallible as water moves down hill to the sea. The good, easy indifference (for indifference lies at the bottom of it) which makes the majority of men content with the routine requirements and beliefs of the Faith in which they are born was not for him. Restless indefatigable inquiry preceded calm, profound belief. Men will ring a doubtful coin to test if it be true metal. They will accept a religion from the vague remembrances of their nurseries, from snatches of odd hymns and prayers and stories that the infant brain has retained, and cling to it all their life. Is it that their coin is to such men of more value than their creed? NEWMAN was urged in pursuit of religion by a pressing need of his nature. He was guided aright by the calm, unquivering brightness of his intellect. Many there were that followed his guidance through the darkness, and came, like him, to light and peace. We will not touch here on his writings. Surely heat and light, warm feeling and bright reason never met in more harmonious fusion. His style was like a shower in the summer sunshine—brilliant as the diamond, tender as the dew. Amongst the keenest and most powerful writers of the age there was none that could stand before him so perfect his mastery of his weapons. He conquered in all controversies without effort. Charles Kingsley {255} came out against him wielding the rough bludgeon of foul personal abuse. With perfect dignity, with perfect ease, with perfect grace he disarmed his savage assailant, and made the ridicule his humiliation provoked the only punishment of his attack. Even that surpassing master of dialectic fence, Mr. Gladstone himself, was foiled perhaps for the first time when Cardinal NEWMAN encountered him with weapons keener than his own and wielded with more consummate skill. His highest praise is that his matchless literary force and skill were ever put forth in defence, not merely of truth, but of spiritual truth. His words and life combined, preached religion incessantly. There is no question that scepticism, begot of that solid, practical utilitarianism, for which Macaulay was largely responsible, has fallen like a blight on the spiritual life of the nineteenth century. The struggle for subsistence amongst the poor, and, far more, the craving for luxuries amongst the rich, has shoved religion from her place. If she is not quite cast out of the heart, she is, at least, put away in an empty corner, to receive but a formal perfunctory visit on settled routine occasions. She is not allowed to take part in the soul's daily life—to mingle with its sorrows and its joys. In the old days, infidelity was a hideous spectre, darkening a man's life: something to be fought against and prayed against and received, if it must be, with shuddering, on compulsion. Now it is invited as a gay guest invited to help to pass life pleasantly and laugh at the terrors of the future. To almost every man—the most worldly and the most religious—there comes, at times, from the inner recesses of his nature, the terrible question—what is beyond the opaque terror of death which every hour brings nearer? There are times when gay scepticism shrinks aghast at that terrible question, and faith itself—even the strongest—falters in trembling doubt. To that question NEWMAN'S life and works give consolatory answer. He, too, felt these terrible doubts in his early days, and fought his way out to truth and peace. He had made the way clearer and brighter for those {256} who follow. So a man of troubled soul, whose reason refuses to walk in the path of faith, how precious the comfort to know that the great mind of NEWMAN has travelled the ground before him with minutest care, and found it safe. To the man whom spiritual doubts and difficulties assail on all sides, what infinite consolation to troubled souls there is in words like those of the great Cardinal, after he entered the Catholic Church—

"I have been in perfect peace and contentment. I never have had one doubt. I am far, of course, from denying that every article of the Christian Creed, whether as held by Catholics or by Protestants is beset with intellectual difficulties; and it is simple fact that for myself I cannot answer these difficulties. I am as sensitive as anyone, but I have never been able to see a connection between apprehending these difficulties, however keenly, and multiplying them to any extent, and doubting the doctrines to which they are attached ... Of all points of faith the being of a God is to my own apprehension, encompassed with most difficulty, and borne in upon our minds with most power."

It is an assurance that from the weakness of the intellect, not its strength, our doubts spring. It is folly for duller and feebler minds to question a faith which NEWMAN'S great intellect calmly examined and reverently approved. He has not carried this comfort away from us to the Heaven for which he lived. He has left it to help others weaker than he along the same road. Yet is his death a sore loss to the spiritual life of the world, insomuch as the example of a living man is greater than the words of a dead. His death too breaks the great Oxford triumvirate of genius which has endured so long. Only these two now remain in England who merit to be named in the same breath with NEWMAN, who, too, have wrought great work in their own spheres—Manning and Gladstone. May God preserve them long upon the earth, where there is a sore dearth of great men! {257}

Vanity Fair

All the columns of print that have been published on Cardinal NEWMAN hardly do him justice as a master of English. As a Theologian, NEWMAN may possibly be forgotten; and the Church of England may have already recovered from the blow under which it was "still reeling" when Lord Beaconsfield published his "Lothair;" but the vigorous simplicity and splendour of his language will endure so long as the English language shall last. And it may be, when ours is a dead language, and when England's greatness is but a shadow in the past, that NEWMAN will be to the schoolboy of the far future what Cicero is to the schoolboy of the present. From the time when in Tract Ninety, NEWMAN blew a blast that shook the Church to its foundations, he had been recognised as by far the greatest intellectual theologian of his time; and his marvellous eloquence, his blameless life, his subtle, delicately-shaded genius, stamped him as the man pre-eminent in the century. These things have improved men more; but when they are all forgotten—when his skill in dialectics is unremembered—his English will survive as a model of what English should be.   *   *   *   *   *

Vegetarian

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN is dead, and by his death England loses one of its epoch-marking men, the Roman Church loses one of its two great English Cardinals, and the world loses one of [its] modern-day saints. In his ninetieth year, having outlived the men who clustered round him when "Newmania" arose, having seen the ebb of that tide upon which he sat foremost, he has passed away from his quiet retreat in Birmingham, and as we hear of his "parting" from our midst, we are reminded of {258} that deeply poetic description which Professor Shairp wrote of that other parting from the communion of his early faith, "It was as when to one kneeling by night in the silence of some vast cathedral, the great bell tolling solemnly overhead has suddenly gone still." Long indeed, more and more faintly has that bell been tolling, until now as it ceases, it is rather the dying of the rhythmic roll of the echo-sound in the dim distance of the cloister shadows, than the booming of the bell itself.

Weekly Despatch

Cardinal NEWMAN was one of the notable Englishmen of the century. He had interested the western world in his distinctive career, and he had conciliated the affectionate admiration of successive circles of friends, and of a considerable section of his countrymen. It is therefore most painful to be unable to claim him for embalmment in grateful remembrance as not a champion of human progress. NEWMAN'S activity was strained in the opposite direction—to trample human intellect under the foot of authority. The Calvinism that he imbibed at fifteen and carried to Oxford he abandoned at twenty-three; and his mind was totally unfitted to deal efficiently with the historical and logical questions that led up to the Oxford movement in the early forties, in which he played the leading part. With his usual perversity, however, he liked controversy, and many trophies fell to his pen, through his clever dialectic, his interesting style, his steely sarcasm and irony, and the incapacity and blundering of his opponents.   *   *   *   *   *   The Church of Rome was obviously now a more fitting place for NEWMAN than even the Church of England. Within its bosom he prostrated his intellect at the feet of authority. Let him speak for himself as to his capacity of belief: — {259}

I think it impossible to withstand the evidence which is brought for the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius at Naples, or for the motion of the eyes of the pictures of the Madonna in the Roman States. I see no reason to doubt the material of the Lombard Cross at Monza, and I do not see why the Holy Coat at Trèves may not have been what it professes to be. I firmly believe that portions of the True Cross are at Rome and elsewhere; that the Crib of Bethlehem is at Rome, and the bodies of St. Peter and St. Paul; also I firmly believe that the relics of the Saints are doing innumerable miracles and graces daily. I firmly believe that before now Saints have raised the dead to life, crossed the seas without vessels, multiplied grain and bread, cured innumerable diseases, and stopped the operations of the laws of the universe in a multitude of ways.

   *   *   *   *   *  We acknowledge the interest of NEWMAN'S style; we can accept Mr. Gladstone's reminiscences of the distinction and impressiveness of his preaching; we will not question the charm of his manner, or the simplicity of his character, or the so-called saintliness of his life. Neither will we affirm that he was conscious of any aim that was not single-minded and elevated: he was undoubtedly sincere. But his mind was imaginative and devotional; he did not in any effective sense inquire and reason.   *   *   *   *   *   Beyond the tradition of a gentle and unblemished life of spiritual renunciation and religious contemplation, sheltered from the storm and stress of the struggling world, this prince of the Church leaves no fruit of his labours to refresh and strengthen the weary toilers in the battle of life.

Weekly Register

At last the Catholic journalist has to record an event long dreaded, and often mercifully postponed. On more than one occasion it has seemed as if Cardinal NEWMAN must die. Even at Rome, when he had reached the highest honour an English ecclesiastic may hope for in the ranks of the Church, the shadow of the valley of death threw itself across his path of purple. After his return to the Oratory he had built in Birmingham, the waning years went, leaving {260} him weaker and weaker, so that it seemed as if his life was a flickering flame which might at any moment expire. His splendid constitution was aided by the devoted care of his brothers in religion, especially the care of Father William Neville, in prolonging a life which was the centre of so wide an interest and so large a love.   *   *   *   *   *   George Eliot once thought of making a journey to Birmingham to see Cardinal NEWMAN, whose "Apologia," she said, breathed new life into her, and especially that last passage of it, in which the writer apostrophised the friends who shared his life at the Birmingham Oratory. This display of masculine devotion, which she honoured, was never wanting in the life of the Birmingham Oratory, though the older friends went, and new faces replaced, but never obliterated, the faces of the dead. Cardinal NEWMAN'S nature was one that demanded, and was prepared to return, a large homage. That it was yielded to him was no wonder. In private life he had friends more devoted than are given to any but a very few: and the public homage to him was as great as it was sudden. From obloquy and obscurity he emerged to be one of the most profoundly praised and admired men of the century whose contemporary he was.

Though Cardinal NEWMAN had ceased to be a factor in public affairs, his mere presence in the camp of the Lord was a strength and a consolation. A special Providence prolonged his life. Had he died earlier, there would have been cavil and contention over his grave. Not for many years could Anglicans make up their minds that he had really left them. They thought all the inconsistent and absurd things they are given to thinking on such occasions—that Cardinal NEWMAN was blinded for the moment, and that with the morning his sight would return. When he knew more of the Roman system he would come back to his true mother? Prophecy, always "the most gratuitous form of human error," was never more signally unfulfilled and, in all the notices that have appeared this week, we have not seen one attempt to call {261} in question the fixed fidelity of Cardinal NEWMAN to Catholic principles. He had to say that the thought of the Anglican services made him shudder and shiver before they would believe him; but they believed him at last. They came to see also that his work for the last half of his life—half almost to a month—was as worthy as his work during the first half. At the same time we are not anxious to join issue with the Guardian when it rates the importance of his Anglican life to Anglicans as greater even than that of his Catholic life to Catholics.

A nobler tribute we could not have wished Anglican opinion to pay to him whose message to the Anglican Church it has yet only half heard. There is no doubt that Cardinal NEWMAN has, quite apart from the conversions he has been the means of bringing about under God, given an immense impulse to the Christianity of England. He has changed the face of the Anglican Communion, and set it towards Rome. When we think of the few conversions made in the last century, we shall realise how enormously Anglicanism, as revived by Cardinal NEWMAN, has prepared the way for the return of its children to the full light and blessedness of the Christian unity.

But Cardinal NEWMAN'S direct work for Catholicism was so great as to be not easily measured. "It was in England a dying creed, when a shy Oxford student came out on its behalf into the fields of controversy, and kindled hopes that England herself, the England of Elizabeth and Cromwell, will kneel for absolution again before the Father of Christendom." That is Mr. Froude's rhetoric: but there is something of truth behind it. Anyway Cardinal NEWMAN made conversions easy to Englishmen when before they were difficult; he stated our doctrines in plain English—a dress which they greatly needed; and there was not a Catholic who did not feel in some way benefited by the conversion of this most admired man in the Anglican Communion. His very fastidiousness and a certain impracticability added to the triumph of the Church which won {262} him to her poverty, and—he had thought a little time before—to the vulgarity of her methods. He had never dealt with the masses, and his horror of Rome, because she "imitated the low ways of the popular religions," Father Ignatius had reason to remember. But even on the masses Cardinal NEWMAN made his mark. For those who did not come under his own influence, came under the influence of those who did; and no man, save perhaps one, has had so wonderful and so true a magnetism for drawing souls to perfection. The calamity of last Monday, though so great a loss to us, to him has been an infinitely greater gain. In life, like his own Gerontius,

                       He fain would know
A maze of things, were it but meek to ask,
And not a curiousness.

Now he knows them; and we, to whom that revelation comes not yet, can only pray to be found prepared for it as he was. After the Cardinal had read, in his Oxford days, the Despatches of the Duke of Wellington, a friend asked him what he thought of it. "Think!" he said, "it makes one burn to have been a soldier." There will be readers of Cardinal NEWMAN'S works, for many years to come, who will burn as they read them, to be Catholics and to be priests.

Weekly Times and Echo

The death of Cardinal NEWMAN has removed one, who, though he dealt the Church of his baptism a blow from which she has hardly yet recovered, and identified himself with a faith of which three-fourths of his fellow Englishmen are traditionally suspicious, yet so ordered his life, that of no man of his time were his countrymen prouder or fonder. {263}

Western Morning News

The greatest ecclesiastic of the Victorian era has passed away. In Cardinal NEWMAN England loses the first Roman Catholic priest whom it has loved since the Reformation. Poet, musician, divine, saintly controversialist, leader of men, unrivalled preacher, and great teacher, Cardinal NEWMAN dies full of years and honours, and passes from a world of fret and trouble into a land of silence and peace, amid the affectionate admiration of the entire nation. Misconceived he frequently was, and even cruelly misjudged: there was a time when the majority of religious people almost hated him through fear and terror of his leadership; but the misconception and dislike have been buried long ago, and its object will be laid to rest with tears. Every school of thought now unites in Christian tolerance of his errors, if errors there have been, and recognises the self-sacrificing spirit, love of truth, and personal holiness of one who, when the time comes, will probably be enrolled in the Roman Calendar of Saints.   *   *   *   *   *   Agnostic though he be, Mr. John Morley not long ago bore testimony to the charms of Cardinal NEWMAN'S incomparable prose style. There is not a Churchman who is truly interested in theological and ecclesiastical matters who has not learnt much from Dr. NEWMAN. His personality is cherished by all educated men, and revered by those who were brought into contact with it. The Dissenters long ago recovered from their somewhat infantile dread of an advance of Rome, and have long ago learnt to speak as kindly of the good old man of the Edgbaston Oratory as even the High Church Party. The power of goodness in his case has made itself felt, and whatever judgment is to be passed upon his career—and it will be difficult not to attach to it in some of its aspects the label of failure—everybody agrees in lauding the man. There will even be competition as to who is to claim him. The Rationalists look upon him as {264} one of themselves; who spoilt his intellect by permitting ecclesiastical prepossession to over-ride his reason; and the Church of England is proud of having nurtured him in her bosom and produced all his finest qualities, though he ran away from the conflict and found rest at length by avoidance of battle. The recent history of the Church of Rome in England has little else to boast of except that she at length drew to her one of the best spirits of the day.   *   *   *   *   *

Cardinal NEWMAN'S is a name known over the whole civilized world. It is a name cherished among men of culture; but his work was almost purely English. He was the leader of a movement which has revived the Church of England. The Georgian period was one for Anglicanism of deadness, sloth, and of gradual loss of power. Whatever may be said for Dr. NEWMAN and the Oxford movement, they have given us a Church full of life and energy, developing, and expanding. The Oxford movement made men, speaking rationally, pay some regard to the historical continuity of the Church. Religion had become prose, and somewhat depressing prose. NEWMAN, who wrote "The Dream of Gerontius," and so many beautiful hymns in the "Lyra Anglicana" (his "Lead kindly Light" is one of the most beautiful hymns in the English language, and will not perish until Christian worship ceases in this country), with the assistance of Keble and other poetic minds made religion poetic again. It is said of him that he is not popular; the working man does not read NEWMAN'S sermons. But the impulse he gave started a great popular movement. Lesser men, some of them stupid where he was acute, some of them foolish where he was wise, took up his teaching and made it a thing for the masses by translating it into Ritualism.   *   *   *   *   *   Probably we shall never again have such prose as he used in his sermons, and the times are unpropitious for such poetry he and his brethren wrote under circumstances of great excitement. We shall never have a more subtle intellect engaged on behalf of religion, or a sweeter character to {265} draw men to the religious life. But we shall always have with us the consequences of his influence, and there is probably hardly a Dissenting chapel in the country which has not been touched by the ripples which have been caused by his plunge into the great Roman sea.

Western Daily Mercury

The great Cardinal, it is clear, though dead, is destined to live long in the memory of the world which his presence honoured. When one remembers the bitterness, the ferocity even, with which he was attacked years ago, it is good to read the words that have been written of him these last few days. But, indeed, the persecution of NEWMAN, forty or fifty years ago, was the very best thing that could have happened to him. It drew from him the "Apologia," that most extraordinary confession of a soul; and within a week of the publication of the "Apologia," NEWMAN was righted with the world. "It is now more than twenty years," he wrote, in a pathetic passage in the introduction, "that a vague impression to my disadvantage has rested on the popular mind." When the book was read that vague impression to his disadvantage was changed into all but universal feelings of sympathy, and admiration. The "Apologia" remains the most wonderful work its kind in any language, and had Cardinal NEWMAN written nothing else it would still be difficult to appreciate the literary standard of the person in the Times who has pronounced him a failure as a writer. It is a very strange judgment for any critic to arrive at who must be supposed to have read not only the "Apologia pro Vita Sua," but the "Parochial Sermons," the "Essay on Assent," the miscellaneous Essays, and the "Discourses Addressed to the Catholics of Dublin." It may be questioned whether any Englishman of letters ever wrote a style more pure, more subtle, {266} more direct, more simple, more exquisitely harmonious than NEWMAN'S; and scattered up and down throughout his voluminous works are passages which, for fineness and strength of imagination and perfection of expression, are scarcely to be matched, and are assuredly not surpassed in our language.

Western Daily Press

There has passed away one of the makers of the English history of the present century. For many years the venerable Cardinal had enjoyed the esteem and respect of a generation containing few who remembered the time when NEWMAN was one of the leaders of the Oxford movement.   *   *   *   *   It is rarely that a man of great ability and influence, who changes his church at a time of crisis, escapes anger and personal censure so much as NEWMAN did. But this was because those who understood the man at all realised that he had acted as he believed to be right, after a long and painful effort to feel sure that he was right, and men who could not pretend to sympathise with his ideas were yet obliged to respect them. To the student of ecclesiastical history NEWMAN is a most interesting type of an interesting age—of a period of Conservatism, so to speak, when amidst the confusion and the difficulties of new ideas there is an impulse towards the old. Such a period is but an episode, and it does not happen to every generation to see it. To the ordinary reader, NEWMAN is a "classic;" what he says may be thought astounding rather than true, but the way he says it is almost perfect. And to the mass of people who study neither theology not literature, NEWMAN is best known as the author of a hymn that has long been recognised as a superb expression of faith and resignation. He who upon the day of NEWMAN'S death can recall the beauty of that composition alone will not be inclined to criticise its author harshly. {267}

Western Daily Press

The death of Cardinal NEWMAN has produced a profound sensation throughout the whole civilized world. His name and fame form the subject of criticism in all the newspapers and periodicals, and will occupy the thoughts of the leading intellects of the day for some time to come.   *   *   *   *   *   His personal charm and absolute unselfishness won every thoughtful student to him. "I can never forget," says a student of the period, "the first time I heard him at St. Mary's, and the electric thrill which ran through the audience as sweetly soft and tender sentences were uttered with his divinely melodious voice." Matthew Arnold says of him: —"Who could resist the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St. Mary's rising into the pulpit, and then, in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music—subtle, sweet, mournful?"   *   *   *   *   *   That such a man, who at that time was spoken of as a renegade and a traitor, should live to see himself regarded as one of the finest specimens of Christian worth is almost incredible. It is evidence of the wonderful growth of religious charity. His death will give a new impulse to the faith in which he believed; and his pure, simple, and disinterested life will serve as an example for others to follow and emulate. It is gratifying to witness so noble a testimony to conscience and such a subjugation of self in an age of skepticism, unreality and sham. This is the reason that the expression of sympathy is so genuine and universal. And it is a proof, also, of how a great nation recognises worth, notwithstanding wide differences of opinion. {268}

Westminster Times

Cardinal NEWMAN is dead. What memories that death awakens! To that one man to whom the whole revival of Romanism in this country was due, and who was so largely responsible for the Oxford Movement which struck from the Anglican Church the fetters of bigotry, all Christians owe much. One of two leading divines of his own country, who passed from the extreme of Calvinism to the extreme of Romanism, he has left his mark not only upon his generation but upon the history of the world.

"Lead, Kindly Light" was the composition of the late Cardinal, and a more beautiful hymn has never been written. Sincerity is stamped in every word of it, and if one was asked (without knowing its author) whose career it would best fit, he could say, "NEWMAN'S." The Kindly Light led NEWMAN where many others were soon to follow, through his influence and teaching.

Whitehall Review

Hundreds of people, unable to follow him to Rome, have read and enjoyed his books, with their flowing diction and masterly English, unable, when once taken up, to lay them down; and hundreds will read them when the great Tractarian movement has been forgotten, and when all those who took part in it, or in the later movement which succeeded it, have passed away. As regards the Roman Church in this country, "a prince and a great man has fallen in Israel." having outlived nearly all his old, familiar friends. His name will live long, and his hymn, "Lead, kindly Light," now so popular, will remind generations yet unborn of him whom England mourns—JOHN HENRY, CARDINAL NEWMAN. {269}

Woman

One of the greatest of our "great old men," of whom, alas! so few remain, has just passed away in the person of Cardinal NEWMAN, who leaves us full of years and honours, and surely with no enemy in the whole world. To us of the present day the life story of this venerable old man is almost ancient history. All our lives he has been among us, but for the last thirty years he has been practically a recluse. His great work was achieved; his books were written; his controversies were ended; his influence had made itself felt, and once felt had become permanent before the present generation came to exist. So it is that in writing of him one feels a sort of awe as one might feel at the thought of a Saint of bygone ages. And a Saint he was, if ever living man deserved that crowning title. This is no place for sermonizing, and we have no mind for it; but that woman must be callous and worldly and unsympathetic indeed who can read the record of this blameless life, and rise from the reading without feeling the better and the purer for it. The "Tractarian movement!" How strange the very words sound nowadays! We have lived so fast since the day's when Mr. NEWMAN, the brilliant young Oxford teacher and preacher, startled the religious world with theories that small minds could not grasp, and therefore condemned. But the man's whole life was a standing reproof to the narrow-minded, and even his bitterest opponents were at last bound to admit that the "pervert" after all was a good man—one among ten thousand. He robbed the Church of England of his bright genius, and made the Church of Rome inestimably richer by it; but he did more than this. He showed the world that there is something more important than mere profession in things religious. A hater of the cheap cynicism called Freethought, he nevertheless was, indirectly perhaps, the most potent factor of modern times in {270} spreading abroad that gracious spirit of broad-mindedness and tolerance, which, after all, unless it is carried to excess, is the great redeeming characteristic of the age in which we live. It mattered little to which particular Church NEWMAN belonged. His influence was for all; and must be so still. The spirit of him who wrote "Lead, Kindly Light," the most beautiful hymn in existence, can never die. This is surely the great lesson that every one of us has to learn from him, who, so few days ago, after a long, blameless, noble life, full of genius and beauty of every sort—

"Gave his pure soul unto his Captain, Christ,
Under Whose banner he had fought so well."

Yorkshire Herald

Cardinal NEWMAN, whose death the whole world is lamenting, represented a type of mind of which he was the most distinguished example within living memory. It is probable indeed that for any other such example we should have to seek in an age before the great discoveries of science, and utterly remote from the spirit of inquiry which science has induced. In NEWMAN the faculty of belief had an almost boundless development. The desire for authority on which to rest the truths of religion did not in him partake of the quality of doubt. The questionings and scepticisms from which most men of mark have found it impossible to escape do not appear to have troubled him at all. His heart and imagination were large enough to take in all the wondrous things represented by religious faith, and his intellect gave its ready assent to their acceptance. Yet his intellect was a great one. It was so great that if the dominating power of sentiment had been less complete results very different from those which marked Cardinal NEWMAN'S career would have been the outcome of his life. But strong as was his intellectual {271} fibre, the emotional element in his nature was stronger. It overbore in him the logician, the dialectician, and even the theologian, for the mere theologian does not reach the mystic heights in which Cardinal NEWMAN dwelt. There was a period when it seemed likely that he would devote his great powers to aggressive and controversial work in the Church of England. But his connection with the Tractarian movement was a short one. To a great extent that movement originated with him, and continued from the impulse he gave to it, but NEWMAN himself could not stop short of the bolder certainties which the Church of Rome appeared to offer in matters of belief. To his emotional and highly mystic nature its creeds comprehended more than those of his own Church; they filled his imagination as the less elaborate creeds of the English Church had not done; and their authority was vouched for in a manner which to his impressionable mind was absolute. Thenceforth his life—except as it was disturbed for a short time by a controversy in which he held his own with remarkable skill—acquired almost a rapt character. He separated himself from the world, but he was not an ascetic. The human affections were too strong in him to admit of his emulating some of the more vigorous lights of his Church in that respect. But in purity and saintliness, in all that constitutes nobleness of spirit and beauty of character, he emulated the best of them. No one who ever looked into his face or heard him speak, in these later years could be in any doubt as to there being a type of saintly humanity still possible in the world. The most protestant of Protestants could have nothing to urge against his Romanism, for it was forgotten in the fine spiritual personality of the man himself. He was indeed infinitely larger than his creed, or than any possible creed. But we repeat that he was a solitary example of the high qualities he possessed. {272}

Yorkshire Post

Cardinal NEWMAN'S death deprives England of one of the most remarkable men of the century, with which he was all but coeval. Intellectual force and culture lose in him one of their most brilliant representatives. He was a veritable prince in the realm which is theirs as well as in that Church which eleven years ago gave him, more formally, the same high title. It is difficult to fix precisely the place which Cardinal NEWMAN will occupy in the estimation of posterity. Founder of a school he can hardly be admitted to be. That could only have been said of him while he was yet within the communion of the Church of England, and during the interval between his establishment of the ascetic community at Littlemore and his final admission into the Church of Rome. At this period, extending from 1842 till 1845, he had no doubt a following which was neither of one nor of the other of these Churches. But neither he nor they were on stable ground. Repelled by the negative pole of one magnet they were bound sooner or later to be caught by the positive pole of the other. Having gone out from the Church of England they were compelled to go into that of Rome, much though they might dally by the way. And once absorbed there was an end of master and disciples as a separate school. Although NEWMAN was himself unaware of it at the time, there were outside observers without number who clearly saw whither he and those who thought with him were tending. The Church of Rome only claimed her own, and got it. NEWMAN simply went where he was destined to go, where he was bound by his very nature and cast of thought to go. To the dispassionate student of his writings, one of their greatest charms is their utter absence of self-consciousness upon this vital point. NEWMAN never saw—not even when he wrote his "Apologia" apparently—that he was a born Roman Catholic, just as his brother Francis, who {273} left the Church by another door, was a born unbeliever, and that his sojourn within the Establishment was more an accident of his position than anything else. By nature he was no more an Anglican than another great man and delightful writer, M. Renan, between whom and himself may be discerned almost as many points of resemblance as of contrast, was a Roman Catholic. M. Renan was sceptic by nature, ecclesiastic only by accident, and his "Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse," independently of their fascinating style, have this in common with the "Apologia"—they show the writer to have had no business whatever in the school to which he had been sent, since by every affinity of thought and inclination he belonged to another and an entirely different school. And the odd and the piquant thing about each—the ars in arte of the confession, as it were—is the impression left upon us that neither knew himself to be out of his element, to be occupying a world he was never designed to occupy, and to be as much out of place as a fish in the air or a bird in the depths of the sea. When Mr. Gladstone compared the departure from the Church of the leader of the Oxford movement, and the author of the famous Tract 90 to the departure of John Wesley long previously, he was accurate only as regards the personal loss which the Establishment sustained. Unlike Wesley, NEWMAN has left no following of his own, and the relative position of the Establishment remains unaltered by the exodus, which, if it has had the effect of bracing up the faithful who remain, and of bringing them nearer to those great ideals of religion with which the traditions of the Establishment are inseparably connected, will reconcile them to the loss of the great thinker, the incomparable master of English, the man of blameless life and angelic simplicity, whose loss all sections of his countrymen are mourning with a grief like those of old when they cried, "Know ye not that there is a prince and a great man fallen this day in Israel?"

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Newman Reader — Works of John Henry Newman
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