Reflecting on Newman’s Life at the Time of His Death - Part 4. Our Loss, and Now Our Gain

John Henry Newman died on 11 August 1890, and in October of that year, the Dublin Review published an article celebrating the life and accomplishments of Newman. The article titled, “John Henry Cardinal Newman,” includes four major segments that are now individually republished in the Newman Review for the 135th anniversary of Newman’s death. 

The final segment, “Cardinal Newman: Our Loss, and Now Our Gain,” is an essay written by Henry Hayman from an Anglican perspective.

4. —CARDINAL NEWMAN: OUR LOSS, AND NOW OUR GAIN.  

A TRIBUTE FROM THE STANDPOINT OF ANGLICANISM. 

Why should we mourn for him? Rather, our period of mourning is over. It had lasted long, and the snapping of the last frail link of earthly life has now reunited us to him in a more intense and inseparable bond. Death has not built up, but removed the partition. He who is thus given back to those who loved and honoured him, sheds spiritual influence in a wider sphere than could be commanded from the retreat at Littlemore, or the Oratory at Birmingham. The Master in Israel renews his presence to his bereaved disciples. He seemed awhile a star of far-off ray, he now fills an orbit of nearer splendour.  

His work, as a whole, cannot be duly estimated, even by the standards of time, until a longer period has elapsed. As with all great men who were greatest in the region of thought, its probate is deferred. But his character and personality are an heritage of immediate value. That mitis sapientia which takes the sting from controversy; that innate nobleness which touches with something of its own lustre all who approach it, because it has first quenched every spark of self-seeking; the severe logic, ascetically dry, four-square and analytical; the rich imagination which deals contrariwise in largely integrated and highly rounded forms; the heart of love which ever gives its best and grudges not, which robs of austerity the hard mechanism of intellect, and oils every valve of human intercourse—all these were met in him, and live not in memory only, as a mere picture on the dead wall of the past, but as a living study of an eye undimmed—of that single-eyed faith which sees all things from an undisturbed focus, and finds its standards of judgment in the pure ideals of holiness.  

But we have around us that chorus of Babel, the sectaries of all denominations, striking for once the unwonted note of concord and harmony, as a tribute to something in the man which has penetrated there. What can that be, for his saintliness was not of the type familiar to them? It is probably the man’s unalloyed genuineness which compels their homage. The inward and outward wholeness of sincerity, which formed the grain of his character, pillars itself aloft over their heads like a monolith of crystal, and has a self-luminous power which draws all eyes. In their homage to that, their differences are for a moment hushed. 

A great spirit passing on its way, laying down the shell of mortality, and paying that tribute to the perishable, which all both small and great must pay, strikes a deep chord of human sympathy. But this is common to statesmen, warriors, and world-ruling magnates—to Wolsey and Richelieu. But then there comes in the spiritual power which fascinates even the least saintly, whose lines were the furthest removed from its ruling principle. Let men waste themselves as they will on a thousand trifles; there is that in a consistent sacrifice of all secondary ends to one primary, and that the highest known, which shows by contrast as a diamond amidst paste imitations. Each bubble-chaser holds his breath and bows the head with awe at the glimpse of a great truth lived through to the end and emphasized by death. Worldly discords are hushed in a throb of genuine feeling, which unifies for a moment the thoughtful part of humanity with the thoughtless, as the seal of completeness is set on a great example of self-devotion.  

The fascination of John Henry Newman lay in what he was; more in the open book of his own life than in the volumes which he wrote, and the deep things which he taught. From any stirring share in human affairs he had long ceased; but there remained, after all that he did was done, that which he was—indelible, as powerful in his quiet life-haven at the Oratory, as it had been when he was the foremost figure in theological strife—nay, sweeping a wider radius of influence now than it could do then; for then it was by circumstances limited to the few who knew and loved the man, but now it circles round the world wherever moral forces are acknowledged, as it were on a tide-wave of emotion. He became so popular because he had always lived above popularity. Not that he disdained it, for his moral mould was too large for the littleness of disdain, but took it as a homage, not to himself, but to the truth for which he lived. Lord Bacon’s adage, that the multitude pay homage readily to the commonplace virtues, while the highest of all obtain from them the rarest recognition, was in his case reversed. Few men of our or any day have lived their principles so thoroughly; but, beyond this, he had the threefold power which perceived those principles by intuition, impressed them by ratiocination, and stamped them upon others by his character. His own record of his struggles shows that his charming harmony of various tones was not reached at once, and the “Kindly Light,” whose leading he invoked, came gradually on his path.

Even those who had least sympathy with the deeper essence of his nature were struck by the mental and moral symmetry which marked its workings, the masterful yet graceful strength of his controversial attitude, the directness of point, yet needle-delicacy of touch, the force of matter and courtesy of manner—in short, the thoroughbred style which expressed the man, and made it impossible to him to execute a clumsy movement, or give an unfair blow. Refined natures only would appreciate that chivalry of strength, most forcible when sympathizing with weakness; and that shrinking from all that soils the surface where all within was sensitively pure, which mark the gentleman by nature. In some secondary points, especially in the fine interplay of æsthetic qualities, in the genuine timbre of all the lighter notes in every chord, he often reminds one of Charles Lamb.  

Where a life has reserved nothing in its self-sacrifice, there is less need and less consciousness of reserve in human intercourse. Hence the perfect affability of Newman, the readiness with which he replied to, and the graciousness with which he acknowledged, the respectful approaches of his juniors. The large heart seemed always open; and he who had outlived all his contemporaries found still troops of friends around him, and a crowd of disciples who knew him at second or third hand only, and yet felt as distinct a fascination of his reality as though some electric band united them with those who had sat at his feet at Oxford forty years ago. The following example of his accessibility is among many which can be personally guaranteed. One of these disciples of the aftergrowth, shortly after Newman’s elevation to the Cardinalate, wrote, enclosing a copy of a theological serial, containing an article against infidelity, founded in part on a passage in one of the “Plain Sermons” of half a century previous, with due acknowledgment of the source. But finding the publication was disfigured by an advertisement, illustrated in a rather broad style, and founded on the passage in one of the “Ingoldsby Legends,” where a

Nice cake of soap,    
Worthy of washing the hands of the Pope

is presented for “the Cardinal” to perform his ablutions, the writer tore it out for the waste-paper basket. Cardinal Newman replied with mingled suavity and gravity—appreciatively as regards the article, but adding the remark that he “failed to perceive the relevancy of the illustration accompanying it,” which he therewith re-enclosed. In which, to his horror, the correspondent recognized the offending abomination which he had devoted to the uses of the scullery-maid. What he had intended exactly to exclude he had in fact included, and placed, by inadvertent haste in closing for post, in the same envelope with his own letter! He of course wrote a modest apology explaining the oversight, which drew again a gracious reply.  

But although thus flowing with the milk of human kindness, there was a period when he could on occasion be savage. In the soreness of heart which beset his last days of Anglicanism, he seems to have greeted with a growl any of either side of old friends or new who offered to approach too near. But this very soreness was but the anguish of the then impending wrench from the comradeship of early years.

Had it not been for this deep vein of tender feeling, allied closely to a sensitive scrupulosity of conscience—had it not been for the shock which he foresaw among the ranks where he had been a loved and trusted leader, and for the ties of attached veneration which he personally felt for old friends, old attitudes of devotion, old habits of life and thought, interwoven in him with all the subtle delicacy of the nerves with the muscles in the human frame, the change which was consummated at Littlemore in 1845 would have come to pass some years sooner. The subject is a solemn and a tender one. He shall speak for himself here: —

My difficulty was this: I had been deceived greatly once; how could I be sure I was not deceived a second time? I thought myself right then; how was I to be certain that I was right now? How many years had I thought myself sure of what I now rejected? How could I ever again have confidence in myself? As in 1840, I listened to the rising doubt in favour of Rome; now I listened to the waning doubt in favour of the Anglican Church.1 

How closely this state of mind illustrates the often-quoted lines of Shakespeare :  

Between the acting of a dreadful thing      
And the first motion, all the interim is      
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.      
The genius and the mortal instruments      
Are then in council; and the state of man,      
Like to a Iittle kingdom, suffers then      
The nature of an insurrection.2  

For he continues:  

As far as I know myself, my one great distress is the perplexity unsettlement, alarm, scepticism, which I am causing to so many; and the loss of kind feeling and good opinion on the part of so many, known and unknown, who have wished well to me.3 

And yet again:  

How much am I giving up in so many ways! and to me the sacrifice is irreparable, not only from my age, when people hate changing, but from my especial love of old associations and the pleasures of memory. Nor am I conscious of any feeling, enthusiastic or heroic, of pleasure in the sacrifice; I have nothing to support me here.4  

So long as a mere machine is duly wound, the pendulum will oscillate for ever; but every oscillation of the ripe fruit upon the bough brings nearer the moment when it drops away; and Newman seems to have been matured intellectually for his change before he was so morally. Had he been more rigidly a man of logic, and less a man of feeling, Oxford and the Anglican position would have seen the last of him much earlier in the forties.

   Of the actual change—of the very moment when he had planted his foot on the turn-table at last—a deeply interesting anecdote has lately found its way to light; although the letter which is its voucher has unluckily perished. That letter, one of several written in a similar tenour to a few select friends,5 was addressed to Dr. Pusey, as follows : —

My dearest Pusey, —Before this reaches you all will be over. Father Dominic, who is on his way to a Chapter in Belgium, will be here this evening, and will, I hope, receive me into what I believe to be the Church of St. Athanasius.6

The last phrase is not absolutely certain. “The Church of St. Athanasius, or something of that sort,” was the expression used by the narrator, to whom Dr. Pusey passed on the letter, inscribed in pencil in his own hand with kýrie eléison, christé eléison, kýrie eléison]. The narrator added, “Poor Pusey was so badly hurt, that he had no wish to see the letter again, so he sent it to me, telling me that I might keep it.” This narrator was the late Rev. Thomas Henderson, for many years vicar of Messing in Essex, who was born shortly before the century began, and was thus senior to and intimate with Dr. Pusey. He told it to his sometime curate, the Rev. Martin Rule, from whose letter in John Bull of Sept. 20, 1890, I extract this account.  

The letter of Newman, which at the time, Mr. Henderson could not lay his hand upon, but was anxious to recover and show, with no doubt a view to its preservation, was, after his sudden death a few days later, actually found among his papers and burnt. This precipitate act deprives us of the means of actual verification, and prevents Mr. Rule from speaking with the authority of one who saw the letter. The rash destroyer, however, recognized enough of the character and contents to confirm Mr. Henderson’s statement, especially the fact of a memorandum added by a different hand.

The keystone of the Cardinal’s intellectual structure seems to me to have been a sense of the objectivity of the highest truth. I mean, ever since his mind broke at Oxford into freedom from the patroparádota. His early continental tour, and the turn which his personal intimacies took, in John Keble and Hurrell Froude, and conversely his dropping away from Whately and Hawkins, are so many indices of his mind settling down in this direction. It is true that he adopted first one and then another interpretative aspect of that objectivity; but to that idea itself he held fast with a fundamental tenacity from about 1831 onwards. All sacrifices made for truth, and the correlative idea of moral duty in holding fast by truth, imply this.7 For how can a man feel that “I ought” comes in, when hardship, loss and pain are to be suffered for a mere subjective tenet, or how distinguish it from the various idola specûs which form its surroundings? Thus, with Newman, the objectivity of truth, however it might take a colour from the receiving mind, yet moulded that mind by the pressure of its form; and in this will, I think, be found the kernel principle of his “Grammar of Assent,” the most winnowed thought-product of his mind. 

  At his earlier period this objectivity, I think, extended itself to the region of politics—i.e., he seems to have held that there were certain relations existing as of right, because objectively true, between the citizen and the body politic. His comments on the expulsion of Charles X. in France, his dislike of O’Connell, and his detestation of the French tricolour, are examples. Writing in 1853, he seems rather to view constitutional relations as the expression outwardly of certain deeply implanted racial germs, which expand through maxims and public sentiments into institutions, which may or may not harmonize with objective truth. He shall speak for himself.  

As individuals have characters of their own, so have races. Most men have their strong and their weak points, and points neither good nor bad, but idiosyncratic. And so of races. . . . . Moreover growing out of these varieties or idiosyncrasies, and corresponding to them, will be found in these several races, and proper to each, a certain assemblage of beliefs, convictions, rules, usages, traditions,  proverbs and principles; some political, some social, some moral;  and these tending to some definite form of government and modus vivendi, or polity, as their natural scope. . . . . This then is the Constitution of a State, securing, as it does, the national unity by at once strengthening and controlling the governing power. It is something more than law; it is the embodiment of special ideas, ideas perhaps which have been held by a race for ages, which are of immemorial usage, which have fixed themselves in its innermost heart, which are in its eyes sacred to it, and have practically the force of eternal truths, whether they be such or not. . . . . They are the expression of some or other sentiment of loyalty, of order, of duty, of honour, of faith, of justice, of glory. They are the creative and conservative influences of Society; they erect nations into States and invest States with Constitutions.8

The few words which I have italicized, show that the writer by no means considered a constitution (however true, as a development, to some innate germ), as necessarily an expression of objective truth; and I suppose he would have considered this as tending to limit its authority.

It was but fair to take a glance at his political utterances, however secondary in their interest to the absorbing principles which shaped his career. Besides which, Newman was an intense Englishman. He knew his countrymen in their forte and in their foibles as few professed divines have cared to know them, and could hit them off with that fine point and that mordent acid, which formed his etching style. Here is a John Bull sketch, founded on a reminiscence of Sir Walter Scott’s “Two Drovers.”

He is indeed rough, surly, a bully and a bigot; these are his weak points: but if ever there was a generous, good, tender heart, it beats within his breast. Most placable, he forgives and forgets; forgets not only the wrongs he has received, but the insults he has inflicted. Such he is commonly, for doubtless there are times and circumstances in his dealings with foreigners in which, whether when in despair or from pride, he becomes truculent and simply hateful; but at home his bark is worse than his bite. He has qualities, excellent for the purposes of neighbourhood and intercourse; and he has besides a shrewd sense and a sobriety of judgment, and a practical logic which passion does not cloud, and which makes him understand that good fellowship is not only commendable, but expedient too. And he has within him a spring of energy, pertinacity and perseverance, which makes him as busy and effective in a colony as he is companionable at home. Some races do not move at all; others are ever jostling against each other; the Englishman is ever stirring, yet never treads too hard upon his fellow countryman’s toes. He does his work neatly, silently, in his own place; he looks o [sic] himself and can take care of himself; and he has that instinctive veneration for the law, that he can worship it even in the abstract, and thus is fitted to go shares with others all around him in that political sovereignty which other races are obliged to concentrate in one ruler. . . . . Some races are like children, and require a despot to nurse and feed and dress them, to give them pocket-money, and take them out for airings. Others, more manly, prefer to be rid of the trouble of their affairs, and use their ruler as their mere manager and man of business. Now an Englishman likes to take his own matters into his own hands. He stands on his own ground, and does as much work as half a-dozen men of certain other races. He can join too with others, and has a turn for organizing, but he insists on its being voluntary. He is jealous of no one, except kings and governments, and offensive to no one except their partisans and creatures.  

Then, with a glance at our Anglo-Indian Empire, he continues: —

Pass a few years and a town has arisen on the desert beach, and houses of business are extending their connections and influence up the country. At length a company of merchants make the place their homestead, and they protect themselves from their enemies with a fort. They need a better defence than they have provided, for a numerous host is advancing upon them, and they are likely to be driven into the sea. Suddenly a youth, the castaway of his family, half clerk, half soldier, puts himself at the head of a few troops, defends posts, gains battles, and ends in founding a mighty empire over the graves of Mahmood and Aurungzebe.  

The following (continuing the same line of thought) might almost have been written by Thackeray: —

The Englishman is on the top of the Andes, or in a diving bell in the Pacific, or taking notes at Timbuctoo, or grubbing at the Pyramids, or scouring over the Pampas, or acting as Prime Minister to the King of Dahomey, or smoking the pipe of friendship with the Red Indians, or hutting at the Pole. A people so alive, so curious, so busy as the English, will be a power in themselves, independently of political arrangements; and will be, on that very ground, jealous of a rival, impatient of a master, and strong enough to cope with the one and repel the other. A government is their natural foe, they cannot do without it altogether, but they will have of it as little as they can. They will forbid the concentration of power; they will multiply its seats, complicate its acts, and make it safe by making it inefficient. They will take care that it is the worst worked of all the many organizations which are found in their country. As despotisms keep their subjects in ignorance, lest they should rebel, so will a free people maim and cripple their government, lest it should tyrannize. . . . . England surely is the paradise of little men and the purgatory of great ones. May I never be a Minister of State or Field-Marshal! I’d be an individual, self-respecting Briton, in my own private castle, with the Times to see the world by, and pen and paper to scribble off withal to, some public print and set the world right. Public men are only my employés; I use them as I think fit, and turn them off without warning. Aberdeen, Gladstone, Sidney Herbert, Newcastle, what are they muttering about services and ingratitude? Were they not paid? Hadn’t they their regular quarter-day? Raglan, Burgoyne, Dundas—I cannot recollect all the fellows’ names—can they merit ought? Can they be profitable to me, their lord and master?”  

Admire the delicacy, again, of the following stroke: —

At the public meeting held to thank that earnest and energetic man, Mr. Maurice, for the particular complexion of one portion of his theology, a speaker congratulated him on having, in questioning or denying eternal punishment, given (not a more correct, but) a “more genial” interpretation to the declarations of Holy Scripture.  

As a theologian, the force which he puts forth was probably nothing as compared with his reserves. He never shows that dead hand which marks the treatise-maker, but whatever truth he recognizes quickens under his touch. Probably no man ever passed through so momentous a shock, especially in the years of the judgment’s maturity, unhinging the allegiance of half a lifetime, with so little of change in his own personality. We of that earlier allegiance naturally prefer the mental products of that earlier period. They seem to us to contrast with the later growth, as the fruitage of the open air and sunshine contrast with those of a hothouse, and have more of the unforced aroma and native bouquet. The “Plain Sermons” are still a great storehouse of holy wisdom, and probably nine-tenths of their contents are irrespective of the line of cleavage which separated him from us later and remain unaffected by it. Here is a sample from “Christ Manifested in Remembrance,” vol. iv. p. 263, ed. 1869.  

Kings of the earth, and the great men and rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men,” who, in their day, so magnified themselves, so ravaged and deformed the Church, that it could not be seen except by faith, these are found in nowise to have infringed the continuity of its outlines, which shine out clear and glorious, and even more delicate and tender for the very attempt to obliterate them. It needs very little study of history to prove how really this is the case; how little schisms, and divisions, and disorders, and troubles, and fears, and persecutions, and scatterings, and threatenings, interfere with the glory of Christ Mystical, as looked upon afterwards, though at the time they almost hid it. Great Saints, great events, great privileges, like the everlasting mountains, grow as we recede from them.

Or take, from the same volume, p. 218, on “The Greatness and Littleness of Human Life,” the following : —

Over and above our positive belief in this great truth [a future life], we are actually driven to a belief; we attain a sensible conviction of that life to come, a certainty striking home to our hearts and piercing them, by this imperfection of what is present. The very greatness of our powers make this life look pitiful; the very pitifulness of this life forces our thoughts to another; and the prospect of another gives a dignity and value to this life which promises it; and thus this life is at once great and little, and we rightly contemn it while we exalt its importance.

For chastened fervour, for unaffected solemnity, clearness of didactic outline, and pathetic earnestness of exhortation, one must go a long way back in the annals of the Anglican pulpit to find him surpassed. To the congregation of St. Mary’s, Oxford, he was specially adapted by its higher degree of culture, and by the academic sympathy between the University and the higher grade of professional and other minus having secular relations with its members. Besides these, not a few members of the University itself, especially among the rising juniors, the youth of devotional mettle and promise, filled places there, and raised the standard of capacity in the audience. From the time of Simeon and Bishop Wilson (Calcutta) to the middle of the century was such an era of sermons as had hardly been known since the Restoration in that Church which was then restored. The average length of parochial discourses was probably greater then than before or since. I need not dwell on causes, but merely state facts. The religious fashion of the day thus gave him exceptional advantages; and being at once a man of mark, and as the breeze of. controversy blew to a gale, a marked man, he used them with an impressiveness only strengthened by all that was known of a personality transparently sincere and devoted. Thus, although lacking the electric fascination which holds an audience by a spell woven of matter and manner, of voice, gesture, eye, and nervous sympathies, and tinging the pulpit with something of the lecture-room, Newman grew into the hearts and minds of his habitual hearers with a power which was more felt after his sermon than during the course of it, and depended rather on the unsluiced stream of afterthought than the momentary inundation of eloquence.

After recording our preference for the freshness and naturalness of the earlier Newman as against the later, it is only fair to set beside it the following verdict of a writer in the Tablet, on the other side: —

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 which had been seeking for an object found it in preaching the visible kingdom of Christ.  

So let the question rest—laudabunt alii, &c. Each will probably prefer the earlier or later vintage, according as his own standard of taste has been previously formed. But taking the estimate of the Tablet as expressing a fact and implying a value, what astonishes Anglicans most in the later career of the Newman of their early memories is that so little use was made of such a master mind by those at whose disposal be had placed its fully matured powers. He had not yet reached his “grand climacteric” when he left us. His position on the whole since then has been one of perplexing obscurity to all who felt what a power they had lost in him. Of the Anglican Church it is unhappily true that it hardly owns its greatest men, does not know what to do with them, feels them rather an excrescence on its system, and an incumbrance to the working of its machinery, as if a diamond had got into a grist-mill—in this respect how truly national! —teste Newman in the above words, “the paradise of little men, the purgatory of great ones.” We honestly thought that Rome knew better, and eminent authorities are not wanting who extol her wisdom in that respect. The practical appreciation evidenced in the utilization of a convert so richly endowed with various gifts does not tend to confirm that opinion. Tandem aliquando! was on the lips of most of us, when we heard that the Cardinal’s hat had dropped on him. He reminds us of some noble swan, which, after a long sojourn on terra firma, find its way to its proper element at last, and is straightway frozen in. 

As regards his style, Newman was so purely classical because he was so unpedantic. His mind never runs in the ruts of familiar phrase. There is now and then a direct allusion to, seldom a quotation of, the great masters of Greece and Rome. But his writings exhale the aroma of their influence at every pore. It is impossible to draw this out without going through, as it were, the process of distillation over again. I will only refer to one instance of the often unconscious influence exercised by the grandest models of mental form on a sympathetic genius, because I am not aware that it has yet been noticed. The entire attitude of his mind in the preface to his “Apologia” is that of Socrates in the famous “Apology” of Plato. To exhibit this in detail would be tedious trifling. I will just detach a specimen flower: 

It is this which is the strength of my accuser against me: not the articles of impeachment which he has framed from my writings, and which I shalI easily crumble into dust, but the bias of the court. It is the state of the atmosphere; it is the vibration all round which will echo his bold assertion of my dishonesty; it is that prepossession against me which takes it for granted that, when my reasoning is convincing it is only ingenious, and that when my statements are unanswerable, there is always something put out of sight or hidden up my sleeve, &c. &c.

To those who remember the parallel complaint of Socrates against the established prejudices which filled and poisoned the popular mind of Athens against him, Platonic quotations would be superfluous here, and to others unmeaning.

Questions of style often lead to such startling comparisons as have the effect for the moment of caricatures. I venture to compare him, then, with Dean Swift in some of the main intellectual elements which constitute style; more especially in the balance of logical against imaginative endowments, and in the absence of mere rhetorical declaration. In Swift the two more interpenetrate one another: as it were two charges in one gun-barrel; in Newman they are like parallel tubes, each detonating separately, but guided by a single sight. Had Swift possessed the moral elevation and spiritual fervour of Newman, then, allowing for the disparity of their centuries; he would have written as Newman wrote. For “proper words in proper places,” they are, I think, the two greatest masters of English prose which the two centuries have seen, and that mainly by virtue of the balance of qualities above referred to. But, “Cousin Swift you will never be a poet,” said Dryden to his aspiring kinsman. Our Newman, however, was a poet. I will cull from his own “Gerontius” a single blossom to throw upon his grave—

O man, strange composite of heaven and earth,      
Majesty dwarfed to baseness! fragrant flower      
Running to poisonous seed! and seeming worth    
Cloaking corruption! weakness mastering power!     
Who never art so near to crime and shame,      
As when thou hast achieved some deed of name.  

Those who remember the noble sonnet of Wordsworth, beginning—on a theme borrowed from old Bede—

Man’s life is like a swallow, mighty king,  

or that splendid stanza of Byron which comes upon us in “Don Juan” like a meteor flashing out of swampy slime—

Between two worlds life hovers, like a star      
‘Twixt night and morn, upon th’ horizon’s verge.      
How little do we know that which we are!      
How less what we may be! &c.  

may hang this of Newman’s beside them as worthy to form a triptych.

His tale of years all but spans nine decades of this nineteenth century, as did that of John Wesley before him of the eighteenth; with whom again, especially in his earlier career, he has not a few points in common. Each sought to trim to larger and more lustrous life the waning lamp of spiritual religion. Each began his work in Oxford, and led a band of the more finely tempered spirits there. Oxford, felix prole virum, claims each as an alumnus. Each grew in his respective century to be its most typical specimen among our native theologians, each became a centre of partisan strife, and each unwillingly. Wesley’s strong reverence for and study of the early Church, his longing to strengthen by some of its most saintly and serviceable usages the Anglican system as he knew it, and his recalling the Thirty-nine Articles from their popular Calvinistic interpretation, mark him as a labourer in the same quarry as Newman, albeit he left the deeper strata unsearched. But Wesley’s mind was essentially prosaic and practical, with no visionary glimpses. He “asked no angel’s wing, no seraph’s fire,” whereas Newman bodied forth the unseen. His lyre indeed has few notes, but they are sweet and pure and lofty. Faith, hope and charity, piety and reverence, are the lines of the stave on which they hang. He knew his own compass and never overstrained it. Few since Dante and Milton have aspired to kindred themes, and fewer still have not singed their wings in soaring up to them.

Is he realizing the dream of his own “Gerontius,” into which he has now passed—finding it all “true which was done by the Angel,” and no longer deeming “that he saw a vision,”9 ouk ónar. . . . . all’ ýpar ídi,10 and filling up those outlines of symbolic mystery which he draws in the words:

Thou livest in a world of signs and types,      
The presentations of most holy truths,      
Living and strong, which now encompass thee.      
A disembodied soul, thou bast by right.    
No converse with aught else beside thyself;      
But lest so stem a solitude should load      
And break thy being, in mercy are vouchsafed      
Some lower measures of perception,      
Which seem to thee as though through channels brought,    
Through ear, or nerves, or palate, which are gone.  

I only say, if so it be, so be it. For, as St. Augustine says of a Purgatorial fire, “I will not argue against it, because perchance it is true.”11

HENRY HAYMAN, D.D.  

1 Newman, Apo (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1890), 228.

2 Shakespeare, William. “Julius Ceaser.”

3 Newman, Apo, 228.

4 Newman, Apo, 229.

5 Newman, Apo, 234–35.

6 John Henry Newman to Edward Pusey (8 October 1845). LD xi, 9. This excerpt is quoted inaccurately in this article. The original text can be read in the NINS Digital Collections.

7 “No one, I say, will die for his own calculations; he dies for realities.” “Essay on Secular Knowledge as a Principle of Action,” written 1841. (original footnote)

8 “Who’s to Blame? States and Constitutions.” Reprinted from the Catholic Standard. By "Catholicus.” (original footnote)

9 Et nesciebat quia verum est quod fiebat per angelum, existimabat autem se visum videre.— “Actus Ap.” xii. 9. (original footnote)

10 Hom. “Odys.” xx. 90. (original footnote)

11 Non redarguo, quia forsitan verum est.— “De Civit. Dei,” xxi. 26. (original footnote)