Newman Reader - The Press on Cardinal Newman

Catholic Times

His Eminence Cardinal NEWMAN has passed away after a life the close of which has been crowned with as much happiness as is given to titan to enjoy here below. Long the leader and chief actor in a great religious struggle, and subsequently assailed with all the bitter fury of bigotry, he lived to see his character thoroughly understood by his countrymen, the purity of his motives and his actions recognised, and his name upheld in affectionate reverence throughout every English-speaking land. The magnitude of the loss which the Catholic Church has suffered through his death may be estimated by the testimony now given in the Press to the power which he exercised over the minds of his countrymen. In the mighty chorus of eulogy there is scarcely a single discordant note. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN conquered prejudice and won universal affection by the noble simplicity of his character, his fearless and unswerving adhesion to truth, his high and lofty ideal of duty, and his incomparable intellectual gifts. Those who are old enough to remember the outbursts of anti-Catholic feeling which in years gone by were so frequent amongst the Protestants of Great Britain cease not to wonder at the change which has come over the land. The bogey of Papal aggression no longer excites general indignation, and Catholics are no more despised for the open profession of their Faith. How much of this change is due to the part played by Cardinal NEWMAN in the national life! The Oxford movement, which shook the Established Church to its foundations, {52} directed the attention of Protestants to every word spoken or written by the man whose genius had placed him at its head. And as he found light himself he diffused it. An unrivalled master of English—and such English as the most ordinary intelligence could comprehend—he exercised a fascination over the reading public which brought them to reason with themselves the truth of Catholic belief. The result was that even where complete assent to Catholic doctrine was not secured, asperities were softened, calmness of judgment was induced, and the Catholic body gradually obtained a fuller toleration. Though Cardinal NEWMAN'S winning personality be no longer with us, the grandeur of the example which he set as a leader of religious thought, the nobility of his character, and the fruits of his labours as a writer will remain to stimulate and enlighten English-speaking peoples for all time. Amongst his contemporaries he has by common consent held the foremost place as a master of his native language, and sound critics there are who maintain that he is the greatest master of English who has ever lived. H is two stories, "Loss and gain" and "Callista," his lectures on "Anglican Difficulties," his "Grammar of Assent," and his "Apologia Pro Vita Sua" are specimens of pellucid prose which have probably never been excelled. Cardinal NEWMAN has by action and teaching largely helped to ennoble the lives of his countrymen, and the Catholic Church in England will indeed be fortunate when it looks upon his like again.

Christian Age

In the death of Cardinal NEWMAN a great figure—not a few would say the greatest—in the ecclesiastical life of England has passed away. * * * * * * * The question is already being asked, "Will NEWMAN survive in the estimation of his country? {53} Will his books maintain it?" That is a question 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 fanaticism, will endure. The saint and the poet in him will, we believe, survive. "Lead, kindly Light," is already something more than a classic in the thoughts of pious people of various creeds in England; and however we may deplore his departure from what we profoundly believe to be a purer faith, the life at Littlemore and at Edgbaston will engrave itself deep in the hearts of all to whom religion and lofty human character are dear.

Christian Globe

By the death of Cardinal NEWMAN, the Christian world has lost one of its most earnest and erudite members, perhaps its most anxious inquirer after truth. He voluntarily embraced a life of obscurity in devotion to what he believed to be the truth, when he might have been for another generation the most powerful man in the Church of England. It is difficult for those of us who have little or no sympathy with the Roman Catholic Church to speak of Dr. NEWMAN in befitting terms. There are few men who have been so misunderstood, or so unjustly abused as the late Cardinal; few men who have striven so earnestly after truth. He puzzled his friends, it is true, by his continual changes, and so brought upon himself a good deal of adverse criticism; but what seemed inconsistency was merely a continual and unavailing search after truth. {54}

Christian Million

A great Englishman, a profound thinker, a prolific writer, a leading educationalist, and a prominent divine passed away in the person of JOHN HENRY (Cardinal) NEWMAN.

Christian World

If it is true—and it certainly is, though the words were not used in that sense by Shakespeare——that one touch of nature makes the whole world kin, how much more true is it that all the world feels itself drawn in affection towards those who have uttered words of genuine inspiration, and all the more if those words have been musically expressive! The din of political and polemical contention passes away—the forms of theological systems change—but tones that have been caught from what Carlyle used to call the eternal melodies live from generation to generation. Cardinal NEWMAN had outlived the tumults of his prime. In the deep stillness encircling his bed of death, the present generation finds no echo of the din, and whirl, and eddying conflict in which so many of his years were passed. But amid that silence, rising like a strain of far-away celestial music, we seem to hear that hymn in which, for Protestant and Catholic alike, he invoked the Kindly Light of Divine guidance to lead us across life's stormy ocean to our Father's home. Tens of thousands of devout souls throughout the vast multitude of English-speaking people in England, America, and the Colonies will think of him not as a subtle theologian, not as a keen and combative dialectician, but as a massively great and noble representative of the religious character, a man who walked with God, a man who gave imperishable expression to the faith, the feeling, the inspiration in which all who call themselves Christians agree. {55}

Church Bells

Cardinal NEWMAN has passed away, quietly, at the Oratory at Edgbaston. Although he was so advanced in years, although he was comparatively withdrawn from the world, yet the space which he filled in many men's hearts and interests was very large, and cannot easily by estimated. We have lost a famous link with past days, a great personality, an epoch-making man. * * * * * JOHN HENRY NEWMAN has always appealed, in three distinct ways, to three different classes of mind. To the scholar and the thinker his writings and his theological disquisitions have an inherent charm of their own, apart from their polemical issue; to the earnest Christian, of whatever school, it has generally been evident that NEWMAN was in earnest, and that he seceded to Rome because he felt that his conscience led him thither; while to the simple-minded and humble his beautiful hymn, "Lead, kindly Light," has become almost a classic in our language. To the English Church his loss was very great, while to the Roman Communion the gain of so powerful and good a man was equally valuable.

A great man has gone out from among us full of years, and with the deserved esteem of the Roman Church following him. His secession from the Church is the epoch in his career which most vividly strikes Churchmen. The incident itself caused the most profound sensation. All men who thought were moved by it—some of them so profoundly that they greatly over-estimated its importance to the Church. It was undoubtedly a great blow to her to lose so talented a son, and her influence, if he had remained faithful, might have been today even more wide-spread than it is; but Mr. Gladstone, when he placed on record his opinion that the ecclesiastical historian would probably judge the secession as a much greater event than John Wesley's "partial secession," can hardly now be said {56} to have correctly estimated the weight of the incident. So, too, the Earl of Beaconsfield's saying that "the Anglican Church reeled under the shock" is now seen to have a good deal of hyperbole in it. Earl Russell thought that the "inexplicable event" had set the English tide rolling in the direction of Romanism, which again shows the folly of predicting "unless you know," for the English tide has been for many years rolling away from Romanism, rather than towards it, if statistics are to be believed. The truth is, that the times were exciting, men lost their heads, wavered in faith, and said many wild things, some of which have been preserved for us to wonder at, as succeeding generations will probably wonder at the foolish sayings which will transmit to them. Although the hidden springs of Cardinal NEWMAN'S consciousness robbed the Church of his great services, and for all that we may think differently from him, few will question that by his death the world is poorer by the loss of a great and good man.

The death of Cardinal NEWMAN, which was announced on Tuesday morning last, has been the one event of the week around which the greatest interest has centred. For many years he was, to many men, the leading personality in England. The ardent leader of Oxford thought; the fervent preacher at St. Mary's; later on, the eagerly welcomed disciple of the Roman Communion, JOHN HENRY NEWMAN has exercised a charm and a power in English theological thought which it has been the lot of few persons to possess.

The Church Review

I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou
Shouldst lead me on
I loved to choose and see my path; but now
Lead Thou me on.

These lines fitly describe the mind of the man who wrote {57} them, and whose death we regret to chronicle this week. The bent of the NEWMAN mind was such that there was no via media: it was inevitably either John Henry the Romanist or Francis William the Deist. The surroundings of the one led him through Calvinism and Evangelicalism to the feet of the Roman Pontiff, Anglo-Catholicism providing him only with a temporary halting-place, in which his soul never found rest; while the brother's environments led him through similar phases of Protestantism to a disbelief in Divine revelation.

The great ecclesiastical event of the week has of course been the death of Cardinal NEWMAN. We have dealt with his life, his influence, and his character elsewhere; in this place it is only becoming to pray that he who so eloquently pleaded for the kindly Light on earth may enjoy perpetual light in Paradise. The public will be treated to various estimates of the man, according to the point of view of the critic, but the general impression among the public at large will be that he was the leader in the Tractarian movement, that he went to Rome, and that therefore Tractarianism leads to Rome. Now, this, of course, is merely a surface view. As he himself said, when speaking of the early struggles after Catholic truth, he and his companions were disorganised and it inchoate until Pusey joined them, and in doing so, he "at once gave us a position and a name. Pusey, therefore, has more right to be considered the leader in the great movement which has revivified the English Church, and Pusey never went over to Rome. However much, then, we may deplore the defection of the white-souled man, the consummate master of English, the true poet, the persuasive orator, from our ranks, we retained to the last our real leader, a man in every way worthy to be the friend and companion of him whom thousands are mourning today. As fellow-Catholics with John Henry NEWMAN, we can but conclude by breathing the Catholic prayer, "May he rest in peace!"

All England is bewailing the death of one of whom it may be said without exaggeration that his personality was stronger {58} and the influence he exerted greater than those of any man in our country during the present century, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Frederick Denison Maurice only excepted. The death of Cardinal NEWMAN revives the memory of controversies which have long since died and have passed into history; it snaps the last cord which bound the present generation to that which saw the rise of the Tractarian party; it reminds us of those sad and sorrowful secessions which shook the Church of England to its foundations, and, we may add, proved to her loyal sons that her origin was Divine, for she passed through the fire unscathed, and is today stronger than ever she was. Without going so far as Lord Beaconsfield went when he said that the loss of JOHN HENRY NEWMAN was the severest blow which the Church of England had received since the Reformation, we may at once and with perfect honesty own that his secession stunned the Church for a time, and caused the Catholic revival to reel for many a year from the blow. Nevertheless, NEWMAN'S mind was so constituted that his gravitation to Rome was as sure as it was slow. Churchmen could not see this at the time, but events have since made the drift of his mind as clear as the orbit of a planet in the heavens. Of some who in the early days of the Privy Council's wild career, and in the terrors which the Gorham Judgment conjured up, deserted the ship for the seeming security of the Roman bark, it may soberly be inferred that had they lived in our days they would still be loyal members of that exarchy of the Catholic Church which God's providence has placed in this land. But this cannot be affirmed of JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. His course, all unconsciously to himself, was ever directed towards Rome, and his mind was overpowered by that peculiar attraction which the Roman system possesses for some intellects. For years he hesitated, for years he restrained himself by writing articles and pamphlets in favour of Anglicanism, but the end was all the while drawing nearer, and when it did come, the {59} wonder which far-seeing men felt was that it had not been reached before.

Differ from him as widely as we may, we cannot refuse that respect which every man's honest convictions exact. Thankful as we should have been had his unrivalled talents been continued to the Church of England, we cannot blame him for following the guidance of his conscience, even though we are assured that he was led into schism thereby. We are proud of him as one of the most distinguished Englishmen which the nineteenth century has produced; we gladly remember the services he rendered to the truth at one of the most vital epochs of our ecclesiastical history; we lament his death, though we could not have wished him to live in the feebleness of old age; and we pray that, all his honest errors being forgiven, he may now attain the rest and peace he longed for on earth, a merciful judgment at the hands of Him who is absolute truth, and at last a joyful resurrection and the eternal felicity of the Beatific Vision.

Church Times

The death of Cardinal NEWMAN removes from us the last survivor of the great Tractarians, one of the few remaining links with a former generation, one of the most striking personalities of this great century. Although of late years he has spoken but seldom to the public ear, yet about his life of retirement and devotion at Edgbaston there gathered a unique interest and an almost affectionate regard. Catholics and Protestants, Christians and Agnostics, alike looked with genuine reverence upon the venerable age of the great spiritual guide and teacher. Even those who stood more or less outside the sphere of NEWMAN'S religious influence, felt the glamour of his romantic career, or come under the spell of his {60} intellectual subtlety and strength. It is given only to very few men, even among the foremost minds of their age, thus to reach all sorts and conditions of persons, and to be an abiding power in their thoughts and lives.

In an age when noisy materialists are fond of proclaiming the divorce of intellect from faith, we have looked with a sense of consolation and hope to the fact that this great mind gave unreserved allegiance to the Person and Creed of Jesus Christ; an allegiance not less passionate in its devotion because justified by calmest reason, and sustained by the resources of wide and lofty culture. There can be little question that the influence of Cardinal NEWMAN has been a very powerful factor among the forces of our time which make for faith.

It is, therefore, all the more noteworthy that the same influence has been so much less effective as a force on the side of Romanism.

Nor can it be said that the arguments which led him to submit to Rome, and which he has since restated in various forms, have had an effect even approximately proportionate to the weight of his genius and character. It is astonishing that the arguments of so great a man and so formidable a controversialist have accomplished so little. The men who "went over" after him were attracted far more by the magic of his personality than by the force of his reasoning.

As an intellectual guide, as an ecclesiastical controversialist, NEWMAN'S influence has already waned, and will not, we think, much outlive this generation. To those indeed of the present time, who were at Oxford when the afterglow of the Tractarian movement lingered around the venerable figure of Dr. Pusey, the name of NEWMAN must always recall memories the most pathetic, the most solemn, the most inspiring. Among outsiders, and those who come after us, NEWMAN will as a master of the English tongue, as one of the very first prose writers of the Victorian age of letters. Nor will the extraordinary fascination {61} of his character and life-history be soon forgotten.

But that which will live the longest is the spiritual warmth and vigour which radiates like beams from such a life and character as his. A man must be "more than a prophet" when he can but merely attract the multitude into the wilderness in his lifetime, but when his influence remains, and even increases, in extent and force when he is dead, that is only possible when the prophet is also a saint.

Whether NEWMAN is considered as a theologian or as a religious teacher and leader, or as a poet, or a preacher, or as a master of style, or as a literary critic, or as a great reasoner about philosophy (if not a philosopher), his genius is beyond doubt. And this accounts for his fame. He has some spell for everyone, and thus he numbers admirers of every cast of thought and shade of religious belief. Walter Bagshot was enthusiastic about his subtlety of argument, his keen insight and delicate style: Mr. John Morley reveres him as a great master of the mother tongue; some have seen in him a humanist born out of due time; to others he is a bulwark of the Christian faith against infidelity; Roman Catholics revere him as the greatest man whom their Church has subdued since the Reformation; Anglicans as the motive power of a great revival. Even Englishmen who do not read got to admire him of late years as in many ways a type of his nation and a true patriot. A single hymn has made his name a household word in all the Churches and all the sects. But in truth the subject of NEWMAN is inexhaustible, and his works are a literature in themselves.

The death of Cardinal NEWMAN severs this generation from the one link which connected the present with the past, when the great revival of Catholicity in the Church of England received its first impetus. He won for himself the affection and regard of the intellectual world, and for the communion which he ultimately joined such respect as it had not before enjoyed. Of the fear which Cardinal NEWMAN'S secession {62} begot in the minds of many who were his fellow labourers in the Catholic life and belief in the English Church, there has been no subsequent warrant. The Oxford movement went on uninterruptedly, as it developed from the Tractarian phase into that in which teaching became illustrated by the restored ritual of the English Church, and the academics of the University became the practical forces which have brought the Church into touch with the whole nation.

Many within the Roman fold have been stayed from utter loss of faith by the Cardinal's influence, and to outsiders his presence within the Roman schism has won for it a certain amount of respect because of his moderation and pronounced mistrust of the insolent faction. On one or two occasions we have had to express our regret that the Cardinal lent his name to publications, such as Mr. Hutton' book on "Anglican orders," which were so disreputable and disengenuous as to lead men to wonder how the venerable essayist ever came into such company: but the nemesis followed, and no doubt was felt.

Colonies and India

English literature has lost one of its most brilliant lights by the death of Cardinal NEWMAN. We question whether there is a living writer who had a command of the English tongue at once so eloquent and incisive, though often ironical. His masterly prose has been recognised by all the leading critics during several decades. A very accurate critic speaks thus: "Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Froude, and many others have described the NEWMAN of the old Oxford days; the peculiar eloquence which was not eloquence at all in the rhetoricians sense, and yet which could pierce the hearts of men whom the heart of the orator might {63} have wholly failed to move. For the work which he had to do he was endowed with genius. His personal influence, his sincerity, his devotedness, his simplicity, came to the help of his language, and even of his logic. Keen and powerful as his style of argument was, yet even those who thought most thoroughly with him since his great change would probably admit that the very same arguments arrayed in the very same words would not have had such influence if they had come from any other than NEWMAN. There was a poetic side to his nature, which was shown in his prose work and in his conversation, as well as in his poems. He loved music and all the arts, and flowers, and all the beautiful objects of nature, and the talk of gifted or even of intelligent men, 'and even irony,' as Charles Lamb puts it. Indeed, NEWMAN was a very master of a certain kind of cold and poignant irony, which runs through his controversial writings like a shooting pain."

Commonwealth

A great Englishman has passed away, and one whose name, as a divine, a thinker, a writer, and an educationalist will have a high place in the history of the nineteenth century. Unquestionably the greatest loss to this country to Protestantism was suffered by the perversion to Romanism of JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. The power of Rome to bewitch men of genius was illustrated in a way which astonished the English people, when a band of Pusey's disciples took their spiritual leap in the dark. The most popular of that Oxonian band of perverts at this day is Cardinal Manning whose splendid abilities and almost ultramontane fanaticism constitute him a deadly danger to modern Protestantism. A perversion to Rome like that of the Marquis of Ripon does not make even a ripple in the nation's history; but when {64} JOHN HENRY NEWMAN was brought under the mystic infatuation of the Papacy, Rome gained a genius of really commanding influence. The chief effect of NEWMAN'S accession to Rome as all through his priestly life been this, that he more than any other man of the time has succeeded in blunting the edge of Puritan dread of Popery. His pure saintliness, gracious refinement, and exalted abnegation would have made him one of the foremost influences of the Anglican Church could that communion have retained him. When he joined the Roman hierarchy he took with him all the graces of a fascinating personality together with his immense erudition.

The career of NEWMAN is something for High Churchmen to sigh over. He and Manning and several others less famous have for ever shown how fatally mistaken was Pusey in supposing he could detain his friends at the time just on the verge of Popery where he himself stopped short. When the career of the man is reviewed, it is evident that he was as sincere as he was mistaken. Such a conjunction of true zeal with untrue conceptions is the humiliating position into which High Anglicanism continually lures its victims. Among these the life of NEWMAN will ever be monumental.

Cork Examiner

The English journals, without distinction of politics or creed, express regret for the death of Cardinal NEWMAN, admiration of his saintly character, and devotion to his glorious memory. There are, after all, many great and noble things in this world beyond the strife of politics, apart from the quarrels of sects or of races. It is well to find his virtues and the intellectual powers of the dead Cardinal recognized by friend and foe alike. Those who bemoaned "The Lost Leader" joined with those who hailed {65} NEWMAN'S accession to the Church as an epoch-making event in paying tribute to his memory, and in extolling his great, his marvellous career, his matchless life-work. It is not venturing on extravagant eulogy to say that Cardinal NEWMAN'S death removes from this sphere a star of the first magnitude. To Ireland he was especially dear from the great services he rendered to her greatest educational institution at a time when such assistance as he was capable of rendering was most needed. To England his will always be a great, a sanctified name, representing the virtues of a More combined with the intellect of a Bacon. No other man could command the respect, the reverence that has followed him in life and in death. Cardinal NEWMAN goes to his grave with the singular honour of being by all creeds and classes acknowledged as the just man made perfect. A century, at least, must elapse before men shall be in a position to consider with adequate appreciation the nobility, the blessedness of JOHN HENRY NEWMAN'S character.

The clearness of his intellect was not clouded by the increasing weakness of advancing years, nor was there anything in him of the fretfulness of old age to impair the sweetness of his temper and his singular personal fascination. The affection and veneration of those who were living with him were not tried by the common failures which too often impair the glory of genius and sanctity when physical strength is decaying.

The County Gentleman

In referring, however reverently, to the extinction of so great a light as Cardinal NEWMAN, I feel almost as if I were treading on forbidden ground. But your "Man About Town's" duty is to some extent urbi et orbi, and in some senses NEWMAN was the greatest Roman of them all. His lovers, who were also his {66} co-religionists, followed him at all times with an adoring and submissive affection scarcely less touching than the great Ecclesiastic's own submission to the Mother Church. There has scarcely been a mind the indications of which have been so closely watched, and there never have been purely human lips upon which myriads have more breathlessly hung. Others besides the members of the community at Littlemore, and the oratories at Brompton and at Birmingham, might well have apostrophised him the words of his own incomparable hymn, "Lead, kindly Light." The light has gone out now, to the sorrow of all the churches, and to the scarcely less keen regret of the world outside. Just now, when cholera morbus is once more within measurable distance of our shores, it is due to the late Cardinal to remember the heroic way in which he threw himself into "the imminent and deadly breach" during the terrible visitation of 1849.

Court Journal

Though long forecast as a very near event, still the news of the death of Cardinal NEWMAN has been received as a shock amidst the even tenor of our lives. He was a great man, prudent, learned, and good also, while by his death he has even achieved that which he could not during his life, for it has heartily united men of widely, some of fiercely, differing creeds in a perfect unison of real Christian thought, inasmuch as that is the outcome of brotherly love. All men, at this moment, are speaking well of the Cardinal, and in the same spirit recall things that honour and fling lustre on his career, or show his gentle nature. "Lead, kindly light," he sang in truly poetic thought and worshipful prayer; a kindly light sheds its ray's on the way of the living man, and follows his departing shade. {67}

Gerontius has fulfilled his dream. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN has passed that mysterous boundry, the crossing of which he has described with such marvellous insight. Few men have excercised a more potent influence over their fellows than the recluse of Edgbaston. If Disraeli's definition of a great man, as one who affects the mind of his generation, be a true one, NEWMAN was among our greatest. Though for well-nigh a generation he has withdrawn from the ken of active life, and has buried in seclusion those powers of argument and oratory which had so often routed the ablest antagonists, NEWMAN'S name never failed to awaken interest and to excite respect.

The death of Cardinal NEWMAN has evoked on all hands the warmest tributes to his sincerity, devotion, rare intellectual gifts and fascinating power. It was the rare combination of fervent conviction and acute thinking, with a literary style as forcible as graceful, that secured for him the deference he has so long enjoyed. Those who remember the bitter controversies which raged around his name, and the movement to which he gave so strong an impulse, may almost question whether the devout Cardinal, who has just passed away, and whose saintly career receives universal homage, were the same NEWMAN of forty years ago.

Daily Chronicle

By the death yesterday evening, in his ninetieth year, of JOHN HENRY Cardinal NEWMAN, the principal figure in the ecclesiastical life of England during the present century has passed away. Born the son of a London merchant prince, when Bloomsbury-square dictated fashions in everything save millinery to the West-end; nurtured in Erastian Calvinism, {68} and passing from thence by subtle gradations through metaphysical scepticism into the region of severest orthodoxy; the leader, almost for a generation of the greatest religious revolution in Europe since the Reformation; he has died a Prince of the Roman Catholic Church, but bereft neither of the love nor the esteem of his companions on the way, however brief their journey. From his earliest years, when he romped in Bloomsbury Gardens with BENJAMIN DISRAELI, to those later days when age had damped the ardour of enthusiasm, without diminishing the intensity of belief, the figure of JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, spiritually and intellectually, was a notable one. * * * * * When Mr. Gladstone left Oxford Newman a NEWMAN had already become a power. The tall, slim, silent tutor was exercising an influence over his younger, and even his older, contemporaries, great in its potentiality for good or evil, immeasurably greater in its actual achievements, than the wisest of his time could have predicted. Early in the thirties the storm burst. Oriel Common Room was supposed to have become a nest of Romanising conspirators. These were KEBLE, HURRELL FROUDE, "Ideal" WARD, CHARLES MARRIOTT, BLANCO WHITE, DENISON, MOSLEY—PUSEY was already at Christ Church—and a host of other names less familiar to this generation. NEWMAN himself always declared that he dated the beginning of the Oxford Movement from KEBLE'S celebrated sermon on Baptism, at St. Mary's, in 1833. In point of fact, however, the Oxford Movement began when NEWMAN conceded to RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE'S banter that a good deal might be said in favour of the worship of the Virgin. It is singular, indeed, to reflect that this was the first point of departure from the conventional Protestantism of the Established Church, which characterized his career, when we remember that, with all its extravagances, the subsequent history of the Tractarian Movement has had no farther extreme than the Real Presence, a doctrine which NEWMAN only adopted some years later. {69} What the struggles of those twenty years in Oxford really meant for NEWMAN and his devoted band of disciples we, of the present generation, only realize more clearly than we do the history of the Reformation because the principal actor in the drama until yesterday was still with us in a plenitude of aged vigour only surpassed by one other Oxford man of his generation. By English Churchmen NEWMAN'S fifteen years at St. Mary's will probably be regarded as the halcyon period of his existence. That period covered the publication of "Tracts for the Times," the "Parochial and Plain Sermons," and the largest part of his tutorial work in the university.

* * * * * * *

There are some who assert that his works subsequent to 1843, when he resigned St. Mary's and sought admission to the Roman Church, betray a tinge of disappointment such as might properly belong to hopeless ambition or to the domain of conquered vanity. But the occasional dry humour of "Callista," the poetry of the "Dreams of Gerontius," and the exquisite pathos of the "Apologia," may fairly be set against the bitterness of the "Essay on Assent" and the occasional rancour of the lectures. Some point, of course, may be made of the falling away in style which his later works undoubtedly exhibited; but his former friends might well feel grateful for being spared the barbed arrows of his purest form of literary expression rather than jubilant at an apparent loss of power. Opinions will, no doubt, differ in marked degrees as to the precise place which the late Cardinal will occupy in the estimation of the English people. High Churchmen will never cease to reverence him, whether as Tractarian or as a preacher. Low Churchmen profess to honour him for his honesty in quitting a Church which they hold gives no harbour to either his earlier or his later views. Broad Churchmen and Nonconformists witnessed in him a psychological phenomenon which largely enabled them to account {70} for certain curious developments of early Christian history. To the mass of Englishmen, however, he was a conspicuous example of that welding together of genius, talent, and self-effacement which are the prime elements of a popular hero. Whether they do not also realize that much of the purest philanthropy which marks our age, in politics as well as in religion, is due to efforts, to talents, to zeal, and even to doctrines such as his, may be open to briefest question. Without doubt, the spirit of rebellion against stereotyped Acts of Uniformity and antiquated modes of thought which the "Tractarians" exhibited, has largely pervaded English life, and has almost metamorphosed the Established Church, in the space of the last fifty years. Honours from Rome, which are rarely valued in England, were bestowed upon him with the hearty acquiescence of our national vanity, and perhaps these notwithstanding, a poll of Englishmen would be as ready to accord assent to his interment in Westminster Abbey as it would be to demand such an honour for Cardinal MANNING. But nothing, not even his character as a recluse, could rob JOHN HENRY NEWMAN of the esteem due to a great Englishman.

Daily Free Press

There is something strange, and yet not difficult to explain, in the unbroken chorus of admiration that has followed the death of Cardinal NEWMAN. A man that never once in his long life sought popularity, whose work lay so distant from that of our present democracy, and whose later years have been passed in ascetic seclusion, is now the object of loving recollection. Above all, one who renounced the religion of the great majority in this country, and who took what must be regarded by that majority as a great retrograde step has passed away without a note of bitterness {71} from those whom his memorable action disappointed most.

But it is not as a learned theologian who had the courage to art up to his convictions that Cardinal NEWMAN is so much admired. Undoubtedly the act of his becoming a Roman Catholic made his name more widely known than it would otherwise have been, and directed towards him an amount of public interest which he would have been the last to seek. It is NEWMAN'S beautiful personal character that the nation values highest of all his great qualities. He was singularly free from the narrowness and sharp temper that are the usual concomitants of the faculty for polemical controversy. There are many great divines who, by their austerity, repel sympathy; NEWMAN, the greatest of them all, never did that. In his undergraduate and tutorial days at Oxford; in his little ascetic community at Littlemore; and in his comparative retirement at Edgbaston, he loved and was loved to his heart's content. In religious controversy he was keener and stronger than any of his contemporaries, and yet he never said an unkind word of an opponent. Nothing is more characteristic of the man [than] the cheerful equanimity with which he resigned ease and social pleasures for the stern discipline and simple fare of a Catholic order. It is a commonplace to say that the style is the man; but in the case of no writer would it be more difficult to dissociate the character of the author from the style of his works than in that of Cardinal NEWMAN. The same generous, spontaneous current pervades them both. Felicity of expression came as naturally to him as leaves to a tree, and was, indeed, simply a part of his system of invariably following out a line of thought to its logical conclusion. His works are left to us a monument of his keen intellect and cheerful humility. He never sought praise in his life, and now he would be the last to wish that "flattery soothe the dull, cold ear of death." {72}

Daily Graphic

The genuine expression of sorrow called forth throughout the land by Cardinal NEWMAN'S death witnesses to the deep and enduring impression his individuality made on the popular mind, as well as to the extent of his influence on the religious and intellectual life of his country. A many-sided man, he was great on every side or aspect of his character. He was a preacher of singular eloquence and persuasion, and a writer of the very highest distinction, with unrivalled powers of logic, irony, and tenderness; nevertheless, the comparatively narrow limits of his sphere of action and period of activity compel us to look for the reason of his universal popularity and influence elsewhere. A great Churchman, a golden-mouthed preacher, a masterly dialectician, a sweet poet, he was this and more; but, above all, he was a great Englishman. The strength and dignity, the simplicity and sweetness of his character were conspicuously reflected in his writings; but these qualities and virtues appealed less powerfully to his countrymen than the grandeur of soul which made him content to find in a life of self-sacrifice and obscurity the truest opportunities for dutiful service to God and man.

Daily News

The greatest English ecclesiastic of our later times has passed away. Cardinal NEWMAN is dead. He died quietly in the Birmingham where he had lived for many years a life of calm monotony after so much change, of secluded peace after so much controversy. His work as a leader had been done many years ago, although his interest in men and the movement of their thoughts had never faded. {73}

Keen and powerful as his style of argument was, yet even those who thought most thoroughly with him since his great change would probably admit that the very same arguments arrayed in the very same words would not have had such influence if they had come from any other than NEWMAN. There was a poetic side to his nature which was shown in his prose work and in his conversation, as well as in his poems. He loved music and all the arts, and flowers, and all the beautiful objects of nature, and the talk gifted or even intelligent men, "and even irony," as Charles Lamb puts it. Indeed, NEWMAN was a very master of a certain kind of cold and poignant irony, which runs through his controversial writings like a shooting pain.

The great controversy in which he became engaged may be said to have moulded the rest of his life. It is remarkable that although he had left the faith of the great majority of Englishmen, and carried his many and marvellous gifts over to a Church which Englishmen in general do not love, he never was regarded in this country with anything but respect and admiration. One might have expected anger, bitterness, misappreciation, misrepresentation. Anger there was no doubt for awhile; but Englishmen in general were positively generous in their recognition of NEWMAN'S gifts, and of his sincerity. There was even a tendency among many Protestants to exaggerate rather than to depreciate his ability and his influence. The JOHN HENRY NEWMAN of those days, and even of much later days, loved controversy and its cut-and-thrust encounters as much as did Pascal himself. In his command of cold sarcasm and cutting irony he was not unlike Pascal. In the latter editions of the celebrated "Apologia" NEWMAN purposely left out some of the bitterest and, in the controversialist's sense, the best things he had said about Charles Kingsley. If he did not actually regret having them, he yet would not allow the bitterness of the controversy to spice and flavour its arguments for new and curious readers. {74} Sometimes the barb of his irony seemed to have a little poison on it. Sometimes he seemed to be carried away by polemical zeal into language which appeared ungenerous to his adversary. Yet all who knew him, whether among those whom he had left or those whom he had joined, knew well that there was nothing ungenerous in his unselfish and candid nature.

We cannot pretend to judge just yet the extent and the permanence of NEWMAN'S influence either on the Church of England or the Church of Rome. Nor, indeed, is that the question which will arouse most interest now that he has gone. Men will dwell rather on the career of the man himself; on the influence which he exerted over those who came within his reach. We can hardly recollect any other instance in which so great and keen a controversialist made so few enemies, in which so eminent a seceder retained such a hold on the regard and admiration on those from whose ranks he withdrew at so critical an hour. We are constantly told that this is an age of cynicism—an age which has ceased to believe in the sincerity and disinterestedness of men. No stronger evidence can be cited to prove that we are not swallowed up in cynicism and lost to belief in the possibility of moral sincerity than the mere fact that men of all creeds and parties, in whatever heat and passion of controversy, recognised and respected the sincerity of Cardinal NEWMAN.

It is difficult especially on the morrow of his death, to criticise Cardinal NEWMAN. The beauty of the Cardinal's writings, the noble simplicity of his character, the loftiness of his aims, and the saintliness of his life are in the mouth and in the heart of every educated man today. It is impossible to forget that JOHN HENRY NEWMAN was an Englishman. "I had rather," he wrote in his Apology, "be an Englishman, as in fact I am, than belong to any other nation under Heaven." This passage was written when its author was smarting from a sense of keen injustice at the hands of his countrymen, especially of a popular {75} writer who happened at that time to be much in vogue. But indeed it will always be reckoned among Cardinal NEWMAN'S services to his country and his age that he should have dissipated completely, and we may hope for ever, the old view that Roman Catholicism implied mental dishonesty, or practical hypocrisy. Even he never really prevailed upon the solid, robust, incorrigible Protestantism of his countrymen. What the great man we have lost really did was to show that opinions which Protestants regard as repugnant to all healthy minds may be sincerely held by men of exemplary conduct in all the relations of life. But Cardinal NEWMAN, with all his virtues and graces, his piety and his eloquence, his religious fervour and his unselfish enthusiasm, was an enemy of free inquiry. He was no half-hearted Catholic. He did not pick his doctrines here and there. The one connecting link between the Vicar of St. Mary's and the Cardinal of the Oratory is hostility to Liberalism in all its forms. He would never parley with the "modern spirit."

It is a peculiarity of NEWMAN'S genius that he could adopt the forms of philosophy and appear to be arguing when he was only asserting. He could put a pious opinion into a syllogism, and appear to prove a miracle by mood and figure. But this semblance of precision, though plausible, is deceptive. The magnificence of the rhetoric, the splendour of the diction in the Apology and the Grammar of Assent cannot blind a really intelligent reader to the poverty of the reasoning employed. The Grammar of Assent has been wittily nicknamed the art of taking things for granted. Carlyle once said in his haste that NEWMAN had no more intellect than a rabbit. The saying, even when every allowance has been made for humorous and intentional exaggeration, is a foolish one. But if Carlyle had confined himself to saying that in NEWMAN the reasoning faculty was absorbed in the imaginative, he would not have been far wrong. Dr. NEWMAN himself very frankly {76} said that he had no great faith in argument. Argument, he said, only made the truth less plain, and considerably less impressive. "We laugh at men of one idea. But we are most of us in that condition, and we should be happier if we knew it." There may be some point in the sarcasm. There is more instruction in the sentiment. Cardinal NEWMAN has been called naturally sceptical, and it has been said that he felt the necessity of being either an Atheist or an Ultramontane. This seems to us an unjust and mistaken view. His nature and habit of mind were not only poetical, but intensely devotional. His opinions did not rest upon reason or knowledge. He was anything rather than a rationalist. The thorough-going Liberalism which pervades all forms of thought and action was his abhorrence. It irked him. He could not away with it.

Daily Telegraph

That fervent piety, and a capacity for absolute belief in disputable dogmas, may be combined with intellect of the highest order and exquisitively sensitive conscientiousness in one and the same person was conspicuously instanced in the illustrious Englishman and august ecclesiastic who has just passed away from among us, at a ripe old age, "full of years and honours." Although gifted by nature with extraordinary brain-power, fully equal to that of the most brilliant intelligences of the nineteenth century, Cardinal NEWMAN sincerely believed in traditions and revelations that have been disproved and discarded by modern science. The deceased Prince of the Roman Church was on an intellectual level with the profoundest thinkers of the Victorian age; with DARWIN, and LYELL, HUXLEY, and TYNDALL, and other great men, astronomers, geologists, and physiologists, {77} who during the past half-century have opened the eyes of mankind to the wonders of the real world in which we live. And yet he accepted as eternal truths certain narrations and even assumptions which they have rejected as fictions and absurdities. His mind was an eminently receptive and assimilative mind; but it seems to have been governed by an inborn instinct, pointing to the necessity of faith as the one thing needful, rather than by the reasoning faculty which was one of its most salient characteristics. Perhaps the tendency to mysticism which displayed itself in his early youth may have disposed him in maturity to adopt as finally indisputable a belief based upon alleged inspiration, instead of one founded upon physical demonstration and philosophical analysis. By his own admission we know that, when a stripling, he cherished the theory that "life might be a dream, and this world a mere deception of the senses"; that, moreover, he was extremely superstitious, and "used to cross himself upon going into the dark." At the age of fifteen, to quote his own words, he "fell under the influences of a definite creed, and received into his intellect impressions of dogma." To a person of this mental temper and of these psychical predilections, cut-and-dry physical facts of scientific showing, however coherent and complete, would not go for much. Curiously enough, during his University career, which lasted for nearly ten years, he was possessed by a passion for inquiry and investigation. In particular allusion to that period, FROUDE has described him as a man of world-wide mind, interested in everything which was going on in science, politics and literature. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, according to his brilliant biographer, had no ambition to make a career or to rise to rank and power; still less had pleasure any seductions for him. His natural temperament was bright and light; his senses, even the commonest, were exceptionally delicate; though he rarely drank wine, he was trusted to choose the wines for the college cellar. "He could {78} admire enthusiastically any greatness of action and character, however remote the sphere of it from his own. GURWOOD'S 'Despatches of the Duke of Wellington' came out just then. Newman had been reading the book, and a friend asked him what he thought of it. 'Think?' he replied. 'It makes one burn to have been a soldier.' The simplest word that dropped from him was treasured as though it had been an intellectual diamond. For hundreds of young men 'Credo in Newmannum' was the genuine symbol of faith."

This word-sketch drawn by a dexterous and veracious pencil—of the deceased Cardinal as he was between his eighteenth and twenty-eighth years, during his residence at Oxford, scarcely prepares one for the turn subsequently taken by an intellect at that time so active, versatile, and introspective. The youths who then gathered round him in more than discipular admiration, greedily receptive of the words of wit and wisdom that fell freely from his eloquent lips, little dreamed that a few years later he would forsake the faith in which he had been brought up, and which he had served with exemplary assiduity as an ordained and stipendiary minister of the Gospel. It is well known that he under-went soul-struggles and sufferings of the utmost poignancy before he could resolve to sever himself from the cherished friendships and associations of his career as a Protestant clergyman, by pursuing, which, moreover, he would undoubtedly have attained the highest rank in the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Established Church of England. There is no exaggeration in saying that a grave scission was brought about among the most distinguished supporters and votaries of that Church by Dr. NEWMAN'S formal and public adoption of the Roman Catholic dogmas and doctrines, which proved contagious to many hundreds of Ritualistic clergy and High-Church laymen. The appearance of the quondam incumbent of St. Mary's in the autumn of 1845, {79} at High Mass in the Roman Catholic Chapel at Oxford was an event that produced an extraordinary sensation in the religious world. Many years afterwards, in reference to the acts of renunciation and conversion which had preceded that memorable incident, Mr. GLADSTONE remarked: "Dr. NEWMAN'S secession from the Church of England has never yet been estimated among us at anything like the full amount of its calamitous importance An ecclesiastical historian will perhaps hereafter judge that this was a much greater event even than the partial secession of JOHN WESLEY, the only case of personal loss suffered by the Church of England, since the Reformation, which can be at all compared with it in magnitude." As a matter of fact, the number of Episcopalian priests and deacons who followed the great Tractarian's example was so large that according to the late Lord BEACONSFIELD, the Anglican Church reeled under the shock of Dr. NEWMAN'S withdrawal. Lord JOHN RUSSELL described it as "an inexplicable event." It certainly set the Anglican tide rolling in the direction of Romanism, which, as Mr. FROUDE has justly observed, was in England, fifty years ago, a dying creed, lingering in retirement in the halls and chapels of a few half-forgotten families. NEWMAN won illustrious converts, and kindled hopes that "England herself—the England of ELIZABETH and CROMWELL—would kneel again for absolution before the Father of Christendom. By the solitary force of his own mind NEWMAN produced this extraordinary change." The illustrious convert had joined an organisation which lost no time in utilising his splendid talents and indomitable energies for the advancement of its aims.

The great theologian, prelate, and man of letters has now gone to his rest, at least half of his long life having been brightened by the cordial esteem of his fellow-countrymen, no matter of what creed or persuasion, and by the profound veneration of the Catholic world at large. In connection with {80} Roman hierarchy, we believe that no name is so universally known and respected as that of Cardinal NEWMAN, the Oratorian. Throughout a period of modern history characterised by laxity of faith and unscrupulous competition for the good things of this life, his purity of conduct and singular disinterestedness enabled him to withstand the storm and stress of cruel misapprehension, and to emerge from a dense cloud of calumny with unstained honour and unblemished reputation. Some forty-five years ago he was the most virulently abused man in this country. "Renegade" and "traitor" were among the epithets freely applied to him at public meetings and in the columns of the press. His character was eloquently vilified by some of the most eminent Englishmen of that day, who, for the most part, lived to repent the intemperance of their language and the injustice of their accusations. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN has lived through that tempest of wrath and scorn. Still more, he reaped the full harvest of his fearless and single-minded uprightness throughout a long span of honoured years, and Englishmen, of all parties and creeds, are now united in a common sorrow over his grave.

Darwen Post

With NEWMAN dies the greatest theologian of the century and one of the sweetest of men. Though he embraced a creed which the mass of the people of this land reject, his countrymen retained for him a reverence almost amounting to affection. At such a time as this it is more pleasing to dwell on the nobility, the gentleness, the saintliness of the man, than to deal with controversies with which his name is inseparably associated. But the mark left by NEWMAN on the record of the intellectual thought of the age is one which will never be effaced; and now, when the eyes of the venerable Prince of the Romish Church are closed {81} in unwaking sleep, memory reverts to the movement which ended nearly half a century ago in his admission to what he had brought himself to consider "the One Fold of Christ." * * * * * He drew crowded congregations of the undergraduates then in residence at the University, who dwelt upon his utterances with singular earnestness. It is given to some men to have over their fellows a personal influence which almost seems to amount to mesmerism. That influence the young Vicar of St. Mary's possessed in no mean degree; his power was indefinable, but none the less appreciable; and when he joined the "Oxford movement" his influence coupled with his ability, were no slight factors in its success. "The triumvirs," says the historian Froude, "who became a national force, and gave its real character to the Oxford movement, were Keble, Pusey, and JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. NEWMAN himself was the moving power; the two others were powers also, but of inferior mental strength. Without the third they would have been known as men of genius and learning; but their personal influence would have been limited to, and ended with, themselves." * * * * * The Catholic fold received one of the intellectual giants of the age—a man who by the very fact of his acceptance of the faith blunted the arrows of less able men who scoff at its "vain superstitions." The controversies which raged round his Tracts and his secession have cooled with intervening years; all that is now remembered is the saintly piety, the gentle life. Cardinal NEWMAN will long be held in loving remembrance among men; the Catholic Church mourns a man who was a prince among his fellows; and the human race is the poorer for his loss.

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