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CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
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Cornell Catholic 
 Union Library. 
 
 John Henry Newman 
 
 THE FOUNDER OF 
 
 MODERN ANGLICANISM 
 
 AND 
 
 A CARDINAL OF THE ROMAN CHURCH 
 
 BY 
 
 WILFRID MEYNELL 
 
 WITH PORTRAIT 
 
 LONDON 
 KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., Lt d 
 
 1890 
 
 HI 
 
A 
 
 2_2_5""2-£" 
 
 (Tie rights of translation and 0/ reproduction are reserved.') 
 
DEDICATION. 
 
 To the Very Rev. WILLIAM LOCKHART, 
 Of the Institute of Charity. 
 
 My dear Father Lockhart, 
 
 Your secession from the Church of England, while 
 
 YOU WERE UNDER Dr. NEWMAN'S CARE AT LlTTLEMORE, WAS 
 
 the immediate cause of his resignation of the vlcarage 
 of St. Mary's. You, then, had the glory of leading, 
 and he the glory of following where you led. when 
 one remembers what small causes bring large results, 
 it is worth while to record that you yourself owed 
 your conversion to a chance encounter with a book in 
 the keeping of an undergraduate of st. john's college 
 — now known as father ignatius grant, s.j. that 
 book was mllner's " end of controversy," and it was 
 the beginning of the end of controversy for you. 
 
 so, in linking your name with that of cardinal 
 Newman, I am only recalling a passage in the personal 
 
 HISTORY OF THE GREAT OXFORD MOVEMENT TOWARDS THE 
 
 Church of the Apostles. I hope you will think I can 
 with equal fitness associate your dear and honoured 
 name with any publication of mine ; since it was under 
 the cover of your friendship, fifteen years ago, that 
 my first scribbler's tasks were taken in hand. allow 
 me, then, to offer this public expression of gratitude 
 and of love to one who has done favours to so many 
 and is by many so greatly loved. 
 
 i am, my dear father lockhart, 
 
 Always affectionately yours, 
 
 WILFRID MEYNELL. 
 
AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 My first intention, in beginning this record, was 
 merely to get together some reminiscences of the 
 places most closely associated with Cardinal New- 
 man — some of them already places of pilgrimage. 
 But before I came to the end of it, the history of 
 his habitations had grown into a Monograph. In 
 speaking of the place I had told of the man who 
 made it memorable while the association lasted. 
 Anecdotes and reminiscences wove themselves into 
 the text, and I found that I had made a sort of 
 mtmoire pour servir. 
 
 For the moment, therefore, these pages may be 
 welcome to some as containing the completest 
 record yet made of the movements and surround- 
 ings of Cardinal Newman all his life long. I 
 hasten to add my grateful acknowledgments to 
 
vi AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 those to whom alone that completeness is due : 
 friends and companions of the Cardinal who have 
 given me their aid : the Rev. Frederic S. Bowles 
 first among them all. It remains to be said that, 
 in treating the same incidents over again, I have 
 not been at pains to vary the wording from that 
 already used in articles contributed to the 
 Athenaeum, to the Contemporary Review, and (under 
 a pen-name) to Merry England. 
 
 Palace Court, London, W., 
 September, 1890. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGK 
 
 I. Early Homes and Haunts ... ... ... i 
 
 II. At Trinity and Oriel ... ... ... 14 
 
 III. Littlemore ... ... ... ... ... 27 
 
 IV. Maryvale, Rome, Cotton Hall, and Alcester 
 
 Street, Birmingham ... ... ... 50 
 
 V. At the Oratory, Edgbaston ... ... 64 
 
 VI. The Outer World ... ... ... ... 88 
 
CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 EARLY HOMES AND HAUNTS. 
 
 The Cardinal's father — An unsuccessful career — The promise 
 of its fruits — "A Mother of Men" — Studious sisters — 
 The one dead of a long-lived family — Frank Newman 
 and a growing asunder — Charles Newman and a swift 
 division— Uneventful youth — Brief and various homes 
 — Travelling with preoccupations — Hither and thither 
 in the years to come. 
 
 BANKING, in modern England at any rate, is 
 associated with philanthropy and generally with 
 Evangelicalism. Strange to say, three of the most 
 illustrious converts to the Catholic Church in the 
 early middle of this century were sons of men con- 
 nected with those innermost shrines of Babylon, 
 London banks — Manning, Newman, Ward. Like 
 bankers, brewers also, by some freak of restitu- 
 tional justice, are men mostly given to good works 
 ■ — out of the brewery. Cardinal Newman's father 
 
 B 
 
2 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 first banked, then brewed, and failed at both. It 
 was not that he allowed his Freemasonry, or his 
 music, or his scheme for the reafforesting of Eng- 
 land, to distract him from business ; for after the 
 bank in Lombard Street broke during a financial 
 crisis, he became the slave of his brewery at Alton 
 — to no purpose. There is something melancholy 
 in the picture of the man who deserves, but does 
 not command, success ; nor does Cato's encourage- 
 ment avail him. What real comfort Mr. John 
 Newman had, he had from his son, John Henry, 
 who was able to give him the good news of his 
 election to a Fellowship at Oriel in 1823. The 
 father died soon afterwards, a man disappointed 
 in himself, and not realizing the greatness which 
 awaited the son who bore his name. He was a 
 Cambridge man by birth. The family had been 
 small proprietors of land ; but it was Newman's 
 want of " high connections " that placed the aris- 
 tocratic Pusey at the nominal head of the Oxford 
 Movement. 
 
 Jemima Fourdrinier, when she married John 
 Newman in 1799, brought her husband a small 
 fortune, which, after the bank and brewery went, 
 was all that remained for the family to live upon, 
 until John Henry's earnings swelled the slender 
 purse. Of Huguenot descent, and belonging to a 
 
EARLY HOMES AND HAUNTS. 3 
 
 family of famous paper-makers, whose plate still 
 appears on Ludgate Hill, she was a woman of 
 sense and of piety — Calvinistically tinged. Misfor- 
 tune she took kindly ; also her son's Catholicizing 
 mission. This had not gone very far when she 
 died, in the spring of 1836 ; the Oxford Movement 
 being then only three years old. In the church 
 at Littlemore which Newman built, with the funds 
 of Oriel, he placed a tablet to the memory of his 
 mother, who died just before its consecration ; and 
 a portrait of her remained upon his mantelpiece 
 until the end. 
 
 The six children were equally divided as to sex ; 
 and the names of the three girls were Harriet, 
 Jemima, and Mary. Harriet, the eldest, married in 
 September, 1836, the Rev. Thomas Mozley, then 
 already the brilliant Boswell of the future Cardinal. 
 Before she died, Mrs. Thomas Mozley made two 
 appearances as the author of children's stories, 
 " The Fairy Bower " and " The Lost Brooch." 
 Jemima married Mr. John Mozley, of Derby, in 
 the spring of 1836 ; outlived her husband ; and 
 died, in Derby, about ten years before the death of 
 the Cardinal. Yet another of the Mozley brothers, 
 the Rev. Dr. James Mozley, had in 1832 described 
 his future sisters-in-law in a letter home : " The 
 Miss Newmans are very learned persons, deeply 
 
4 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 read in ecclesiastical history, and in all the old 
 divines, both High Church and Puritanical. Not- 
 withstanding— [Oh, why "notwithstanding"?]— they 
 are very agreeable and unaffected." These two 
 sisters were hero-worshippers, with John Henry for 
 hero. They looked after his poor at Littlemore, 
 and they gave hitn what he had the grace to thank 
 God for — 
 
 A countless store 
 Of eager smiles at home. 
 
 The family circle had been lessened so early as in 
 1828 by the death of the third and youngest girl. 
 What Charlotte Bronte says in poignant words of 
 her sister Emily may be said again : " Never in all 
 her life had she lingered over any task that lay 
 before her, and she did not linger now. She sank 
 rapidly. She made haste to leave us." In ap- 
 parently perfect health one noon, Mary Newman 
 by the next noon was gone. Pusey's thoughts 
 turned affectionately to his friend in this hour of 
 grief, almost panic. " Every consolation," he wrote, 
 " which a brother can have he has most richly — 
 her whole life having been a preparation for that 
 hour." Other " Consolations in Bereavement " had 
 Newman, and he thus expressed them : 
 
 Death was full urgent with thee, sister dear, 
 And startling in his speed ; 
 
EARLY HOMES AND HAUNTS. 5 
 
 Brief pain, then languor till thy end came near — 
 Such was the path decreed. 
 The hurried road 
 To lead thy soul from earth to thine own God's abode. 
 
 Death wrought with thee, sweet maid, impatiently : 
 
 Yet merciful the haste 
 That baffles sickness ; — dearest, thou didst die, 
 
 Thou wast not made to taste 
 Death's bitterness, 
 Decline's slow-wasting charm, or fever's fierce distress. 
 
 Death wrought in mystery ; both complaint and cure 
 
 To human skill unknown : — 
 God put aside all means, to make us sure 
 
 It was His deed alone ; 
 
 Lest we should lay 
 Reproach on our poor selves that thou wast caught away. 
 
 Death came and went : — that so thy image might 
 
 Our yearning hearts possess, 
 Associate with all pleasant thoughts and bright, 
 
 With youth and loveliness ; 
 Sorrow can claim, 
 
 Mary, nor lot nor part in thy soft soothing name. 
 
 Joy of sad hearts and light of downcast eyes ! 
 
 Dearest, thou art enshrined 
 In all thy fragrance in our memories ; 
 
 For we must ever find 
 
 Bare thought of thee 
 Freshen this weary life, while weary life shall be. 
 
 To both of his brothers, John Henry was able 
 to be a benefactor, in part a father : a nobly 
 common role which ought to give eldest brothers a 
 larger place among the heroes of romance. Francis 
 
6 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 William, only four years younger, followed him to 
 school at Ealing, and then to Oxford, where he lived 
 for some time in lodgings, pursuing his studies with 
 as much docility as was in him under John Henry's 
 directions. Already the difference of temperament 
 was marked, though in religion Frank was then an 
 Evangelical, John Henry not much more. But, 
 even then; Frank thought him wanting in sympathy 
 with his Evangelical friends, so did not consult him 
 about his own difficulties. But Frank himself! 
 A master of style, he made his words fit his strange 
 fancies about the Catholic religion ; they were as 
 arrows poisoned by his prejudices. John Henry, 
 a little later, in what he thought a particularly 
 Apostolic mood, would not speak to Frank, whom 
 he had shortly before invoked in fraternal rhymes : 
 
 Dear Frank, we both are summoned now, 
 
 As champions of the Lord ; 
 Enrolled am I ; and shortly thou 
 
 Must buckle on the sword ; 
 A high employ, nor lightly given, 
 To serve as messengers of Heaven. 
 
 This season of syllogistic silence passed away. 
 The difference grew greater, but with a difference 
 —they agreed to differ. They met from time to 
 time, in after-years, Frank visiting his brother at 
 Maryvale (where spirits were high) ; at Rednal ; 
 and in Birmingham. Writing to Mr. Lilly in 1877 
 
EARLY HOMES AND HAUNTS. 7 
 
 Dr. Newman, as he then was, says : " The Dublin 
 lias a practice of always calling me F. Newman, 
 whereas my. brother is commonly distinguished 
 from me by this initial, his name being Francis. 
 I say this because, much as we love each other, 
 neither would like to be mistaken for the other." 
 Nor was there much fear. Francis William New- 
 man, theist, vegetarian, anti-vaccinationist, to whom 
 a monastery is even as a madhouse, and a nun a 
 woman beside herself, had an utterance too distinct 
 in its idiosyncrasy to be any but his own : and has 
 it still — sole left of all his name. 
 
 It remains to speak of the least spoken-of 
 member of the family, he of whom the Rev. Thomas 
 Mozley ventures only : " There was also another 
 brother, not without his share in the heritage of 
 natural gifts." Charles Robert Newman, before 
 he was out of his teens, decided that his brothers 
 and sisters were too religious for him ; and he 
 wrote to Cousins, begging that he should no longer 
 be thought of as a Newman : a vain desire, for only 
 as such has he remembrance now. His mother 
 was still alive, and she and his sisters tried to win 
 him, but without success, from the life of self- 
 elected loneliness. Never was a kindness denied 
 him, however one-sided the kindnesses might be. 
 Both his brothers, after they had been "cast off" 
 
8 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 by him, not he by them, as some have hinted, 
 managed to put together funds for sending him 
 to Bonn. But he came away without even offer- 
 ing himself for examination, a step he explained 
 by saying that the judges would not grant him 
 a degree because he had given offence by his 
 treatment of faith and morals in an essay which 
 they called teterrima. This was only one of a 
 series of aids given by John Henry and by Francis, 
 who, unlike in so much, resembled each other in 
 their generous desires and actions towards their 
 mother's youngest son. But in him they found, as 
 one of them expresses it in a private letter, only 
 " the closest representation of an ancient cynic 
 philosopher this nineteenth century can afford." 
 He had vicissitudes of fortune ; and fortune was 
 never much kinder than to cede him an ushership 
 in a country school ; a post it was not in his 
 character to keep. For the last forty years of his 
 life, which ended in 1884, he lived at Tenby ; and 
 there, two years before he died, he had a short visit 
 from the Cardinal — at the very time when " Lead, 
 kindly Light," was being sung at Christ Church 
 round Pusey's open grave. 
 
 Born in Birchin Lane in the City of London in 
 1801, and spending his early years within almost 
 a stone's throw of the Mansion House, John 
 
EARLY HOMES AND HAUNTS. g 
 
 Henry Newman did not go further afield than 
 to Ealing for his first venture in the great world. 
 From Dr. Nicholas's school he went straight to 
 Trinity College, Oxford. Almost immediately 
 afterwards the Newman family removed to Alton, 
 where they stayed for two or three years. During 
 that time John Henry spent his holidays there, 
 delighting in White's " Natural History of Sel- 
 borne,'' a few miles away. Other holidays in 
 those earlier years of his Oxford life he spent 
 with the Rev. Samuel Rickards, at Ulcombe in 
 Kent, or at Stowlangtoft near Bury St. Edmunds. 
 In 1827 he and his sisters paid a visit to Mr. 
 Wilberforce, at Highwood, where one out of the 
 four sons was already his pupil, and three were to 
 be among his followers to Rome. Holidays were 
 his season of verse-making. At Ulcombe he wrote 
 "Nature and Art" in 1826, and "Snap-dragon" 
 (a Trinity memory) in 1827. At Highwood he 
 wrote " The Trance of Time." 
 
 After settling for a short time at Strand-on-the- 
 Green, all who were left of the Newmans at home 
 — the mother and two girls — went, in 1829, to a 
 cottage at Horspath, to be near John Henry ; then 
 to a cottage at Nuneham Courtney, offered to 
 Newman by Dornford, a Fellow of Oriel and a 
 warm friend. " In the Midlands," says Thomas 
 
io CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 Mozley, " it would have been set down as the 
 habitation of a family of weavers or stockingers." 
 But it had its associations. Rousseau had stayed 
 in it; and Nuneham was supposed to be Gold- 
 smith's Deserted Village. From Nuneham to 
 Rosebank Cottage, Iffley, was no great move ; and 
 it was the last the family made. 
 
 In these wanderings during the earlier twenties 
 of the century the Newmans had lived a while at 
 Brighton. There John Henry wrote his " Para- 
 phrase of Isaiah, chap, lxiv.," the second piece of 
 his " Verses on Various Occasions," in 1821. Six 
 years later and eight years later he visited Brighton 
 again to see cousins, in one of whose albums he 
 wrote verses on each visit. At Brighton, too, after 
 his mother and sisters had left it for the neighbour- 
 hood of Oxford, Newman landed from the journey 
 with Hurrell Froude to the south of Europe. The 
 manuscript of " Lead, kindly Light," written on 
 the voyage, was in his pocket ; and he was hurry- 
 ing home, inspired by the conviction that he had 
 "a work to do in England." He arrived just in 
 time to hear Keble preach that sermon about 
 "National Apostasy "on the Sunday in July, 1833, 
 which began the Oxford Movement. 
 
 His life had been despaired of for a week in 
 Sicily. He was in a high fever, and no medical 
 
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12 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 help was at hand. A priest came and offered his 
 services, which were declined. In his half-delirious 
 caprice he got up and walked for some miles. 
 Then he sank down exhausted, and was carried 
 into a hovel, which a doctor chanced to pass, to 
 whose care Newman owed his recovery. At 
 Lyons he fell ill again ; his legs and ankles swelled 
 — he thought with erysipelas. All this time — six 
 weeks — his friends at home heard nothing of him, 
 and were horribly anxious. When he landed in 
 Brighton, having crossed from Dieppe, he still felt 
 a little weakness lingering from the fever ; but he 
 looked much better than when he set out, partly, 
 perhaps, because his face was tanned by exposure 
 to the sun. 
 
 To Brighton the Cardinal was destined to go 
 again after yet another notable journey. This was 
 on his return to England after visiting Rome in 
 1879 to receive his Cardinal's hat. On this journey, 
 too, it had seemed that he must die ; but the time 
 had not yet come, though he had done the work 
 he felt he had to do when he set foot there nearly 
 fifty years before. In the morning of the last 
 Sunday in June, 1879, accompanied by Father 
 Neville, he went to the Church of St. John the 
 Baptist, where he assisted at High Mass — for the 
 first time in this country as a Cardinal. In 
 
EARLY HOMES AND HAUNTS. 13 
 
 the afternoon he drove to the Qther Catholic 
 churches in the town, and visited the clergy- 
 attached to them. The bells of Anglican steeples 
 rang out early in the morning, as only High 
 Churchmen make them ring, and all the day ; but 
 not invitingly for him, albeit he was, as the 
 Guardian candidly put it when he died, "the 
 founder of the Anglican Church as it now is." 
 
14 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 AT TRINITY AND ORIEL. 
 
 Degree— Scholar of Trinity — "Trinity had never been un- 
 kind to me " — A Trinity Sunday in after-life — A Trinity 
 friend — Fellow of Oriel — The first of Pusey and of 
 Keble — Diffidences — Ordination — First publicities — " I 
 began to be known '' — The University pulpit — A group 
 of great listeners — Profound memories — Word-por- 
 traits — A prophet's chamber — Overheard prayers — A 
 neighbour at Oriel. 
 
 Newman took his degree at Trinity College in 
 1820 ; and there he remained for three years longer 
 in the coveted position of Scholar. For this home 
 of the first six years of his Oxford life he ever 
 retained a tender affection. There he had the 
 dreams of his lay life ; there he moulded what was 
 afterwards matured. When he left Oxford " for 
 good," as he himself phrased it, one of his friends 
 who came to Littlemore to say good-bye was Dr. 
 Ogle, who had been his private tutor at Trinity. 
 " In him," he says, " I took leave of my first 
 College, Trinity, which was so dear to me, and 
 which held in its foundation so many who had 
 
AT TRINITY AND ORIEL. 15 
 
 been kind to me both when I was a boy, and all 
 through my Oxford life. Trinity had never been 
 unkind to me. There used to be much snap-dragon 
 growing on the walls opposite my freshman's rooms 
 there, and I had for years taken it as the emblem of 
 my own perpetual residence even unto death in my 
 University." At distant intervals during the next 
 thirty-two years a traveller to and from Birming- 
 ham looked from the railway carriage, with feelings 
 his fellows could not have divined, at the spires 
 of Oxford ; but he did not revisit it until 1878' 
 Trinity attracted him there again, having elected 
 him in 1877 an Honorary Fellow. He was the 
 hero of cheering undergraduates ; and he attended 
 the College "gaudy" in the glare of limelight: 
 feted for the first time in his already long life. 
 
 The feelings he all along entertained for his 
 old haunt had been expressed ten years earlier in 
 a letter, dated from Birmingham, Trinity Monday, 
 1868, and addressed to the Rev. Thomas Short, of 
 Trinity : — 
 
 My dear Short, 
 
 It is fifty years to-day since I was elected scholar 
 of Trinity. And, as you had so much to do with the election, 
 I consider you my first benefactor at Oxford. In memory of 
 it I have been saying Mass for you this morning. I should 
 not have ventured to write to tell you this ; but, happening 
 to mention it to William Neville, he said, " Do write and tell 
 him so, for I said Mass for him yesterday, being Trinity 
 
16 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 Sunday." This letter will at least show the love we bear to 
 you and old Trinity amid all changes. Take it as such, and 
 believe me to be, affectionately yours, 
 
 John H. Newman. 
 
 The Cardinal, during his visits to Oxford in 
 1878 and 1880, saw many old friends. He called 
 on Mr. Short, who had then become blind, and 
 spent an hour with him. He called also on Dr. 
 Pusey ; and on Mark Pattison, a guest at Little- 
 more, in 1843, altered out of all recognition. 
 
 After Trinity, Oriel seemed strange to Newman, 
 when, in 1823, it elected him to a Fellowship. 
 " Dtiring the first years of my residence at Oriel," 
 he himself says, " though proud of my College, I 
 was not quite at home there. I was very much 
 alone, and I used often to take my daily walk by 
 myself." On one such occasion he met Dr. 
 Copleston, then Provost, who turned round, made 
 him a bow, and said : " Never less alone than when 
 alone." At first he had no friend but Pusey ; and 
 even to Pusey, though Newman " could not fail to 
 revere a soul so devoted to the cause of religion, so 
 full of good works, so faithful in his affections," he 
 could not open his heart — then or afterwards. 
 Keble, too, was a Fellow of Oriel, and when New- 
 man went to receive the congratulations of the 
 Fellows, he bore it all until Keble took his hand ; 
 
AT TRINITY AND ORIEL. 17 
 
 and then, he says, " I felt so abashed and un- 
 worthy of the honour done me, that I seemed 
 desirous of quite sinking into the ground." But 
 Keble was not in residence ; and was shy of him, 
 so Newman thought, in consequence of the marks 
 he still bore of the Evangelical and Liberal schools. 
 Hurrell Froude, quoting the murderer who had 
 done one good thing in his life, boasted of himself 
 that he had brought Newman and Keble finally 
 " to understand each other" in 1828. 
 
 As time went on, things wonderfully changed. 
 By 1824 Newman took orders and was appointed 
 curate at St. Clement's ; he preached his first 
 University sermon ; became a tutor of his College, 
 and "a. public examiner ; and wrote one or two 
 essays which were well received. " I began to be 
 known." He had for his intimate friends Hurrell 
 Froude and Robert Isaac Wilberforce, afterwards 
 the fellow-Archdeacon of Manning in secession to 
 Rome. His hold on young men began. It was a 
 grip of goodness ; an attraction which was not of 
 earth — at a time when an attraction of the kind 
 was new and wonderful. 
 
 This influence was widely extended in 1828, 
 when he became Vicar of St. Mary the Virgin — a 
 post involving no change of residence. Though 
 primarily a parochial church, " gown " soon vied 
 
 C 
 
1 8 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 with " town " in attendance. He had for his 
 listeners the future clergy of the Church of 
 England, of all schools, and not these only. In 
 no other case quite so much expert and other 
 testimony has been given to the influence of spoken 
 words — as regards both the words themselves and 
 the way they were spoken. That other great figure 
 in the history of the revival of the Catholic Church 
 in England forms a fitting fiist witness; for 
 Cardinal Manning recalls even now, after a lapse 
 of sixty years, being led captive by the " form and 
 voice and penetrating words at Evensong in the 
 University Church," where, having once seen and 
 heard Newman, he " never willingly failed to be." 
 Dean Stanley — no name follows Manning's as so 
 great a contrast — agreed in this : 
 
 There are hardly any passages in English literature [he 
 says] which have exceeded in beauty the description of 
 music, in his University sermons; the description of the 
 sorrows of human life in his sermon on the pool of Bethesda ; 
 the description of Elijah on Mount Horeb ; or, again, in the 
 discourses addressed to mixed congregations : " The Arrival 
 of St. Peter as a Missionary in Rome ; " the description of 
 Dives as the example of a self-indulgent voluptuary ; the 
 account of the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, and of 
 the growth in the belief in the Assumption of the Virgin 
 Mary. 
 
 Among his listeners was one who was already 
 studying the mechanism of oratory : 
 
AT TRINITY AND ORIEL. 19 
 
 Now, Dr. Newman's manner in the pulpit [says Mr. 
 Gladstone] was one about which, if you considered it in its 
 separate parts, you would arrive at very unsatisfactory con- 
 clusions. There was not very much change in the inflexion 
 of the voice ; action there was none. His sermons were 
 read, and his eyes were always bent on his book, and all 
 that, you will say, is against efficiency in preaching. Yes, 
 but you take the man as a whole, and there was a stamp 
 and a seal upon him ; there was a solemn sweetness and 
 music in the tone ; there was a completeness in the figure, 
 taken together with the tone and with the manner, which 
 made even his delivery, such as I have described it, singularly 
 attractive. 
 
 Principal Shairp put into words the thoughts of 
 many hearts when he said : " On those calm Sun- 
 day afternoons , he was heard preaching from the 
 pulpit of St. Mary's, 'As if the angels and the 
 dead were his audience.' That voice it was which 
 thrilled young hearts — that living presence that 
 drew to itself whatever there was in Oxford that 
 was noble in purpose, or high and chivalrous in 
 devotion." " No one," says Mr. James Anthony 
 Froude, " who heard his sermons in those days can 
 forget them : " 
 
 They were seldom directly theological. Newman, taking 
 some Scripture character for a text, spoke to us about our- 
 selves, our temptations, our experiences. His illustrations 
 were inexhaustible. He seemed to be addressing the most 
 secret consciousness of each of us — as the eyes of a portrait 
 appear to look at every person in the room. They appeared 
 to me to be the outcome of continued meditation upon his 
 fellow-creatures and their position in the world, their awful 
 
20 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 responsibilities, the mystery of their nature, strangely mixed 
 of good and evil, of strength and weakness. A tone, not of 
 fear, but of infinite pity, ran through them all. 
 
 It was in St. Mary's that men learned how to 
 bear great names greatly ; like Lord Coleridge, 
 who then founded the opinion he expressed in 
 later years : " Raffaelle is said to have thanked 
 God that he had lived in the days of Michael 
 Angelo ; there are scores of men I know, there are 
 hundreds and thousands I believe, who thank God 
 that they have lived in the days of John Henry 
 Newman." The voice is silent for ever now ; but 
 the printed words remain ; and these in bare type 
 retain their hold. Mr. R. H. Hutton* confesses 
 that the University sermons, and other works, have 
 " fascinated " him ever since he was eighteen or 
 nineteen ; and he adds : " I have often said that if 
 it were ever my hard lot to suffer solitary confine- 
 ment, and I were given my choice of books, and 
 were limited to one or two, I should prefer some of 
 Dr. Newman's to Shakspere himself." 
 
 A little incident, or a large one — who shall 
 reckon ? — brought Newman down from that pulpit 
 in 1843 — two years before his secession : the be- 
 ginning of the great Renunciation. " It was," says 
 
 * " I have now for twenty years held him, as a journalist, to be 
 a good friend of mine," the Cardinal wrote to me in 1884. 
 
AT TRINITY AND ORIEL. 2i 
 
 Principal Shairp, "as when to one kneeling by- 
 night, in the silence of some vast Cathedral, the 
 great bell tolling solemnly overhead has suddenly 
 gone still." 
 
 The young generation does not associate the 
 name of Cardinal Newman with horses or vintages ; 
 but it is Mr. Froude, I think, who somewhere refers 
 to him as the trusted wine-taster of his College ; 
 and to his love for horse exercise there are many 
 allusions in Mr. Mozley's " Reminiscences." In 
 his earlier Oriel days he rode a good deal. Besides 
 taking his chance of the Oxford hacks, Newman 
 had for some time a pretty, but dangerous animal, 
 Klepper, brought over from Ireland by Lord Aber- 
 corn, then at Christchurch. 
 
 One little matter of self-imposed duty, arising out of a 
 painful occasion, will [says Mr. Mozley] be remembered by 
 all who ever accompanied Newman in a country walk. One 
 morning Dornford asked him whether he was going to 
 Littlemore that day, and whether on foot or horseback. He 
 had to reply that he was riding there, when Dornford pro- 
 posed to accompany him. This gentleman, having served 
 two years in the Rifle Brigade in the Peninsular War, and 
 being proud of his military character, was in the habit of 
 cantering on the hard road, and had generally to do it alone. 
 But Newman was in for it. In those days the first milestone 
 between Oxford and Iffley was in a narrow, winding part of 
 the road, between high banks, where nothing could be seen 
 fifty yards ahead. Dornford and Newman heard the sound 
 of a cart, and the latter detected its accelerated pace, but the 
 impetuous " captain," as he loved to be styled, heeded it not. 
 
22 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 It was the business of a cart to keep its own side. They 
 arrived within sight of the cart just in time to see the carter 
 jump down and be caught instantly between the wheel and the 
 milestone, falling dead on the spot. The shock on Dornford 
 was such that he was seriously ill for two months, and 
 hypochondriac for a much longer time. The result in New- 
 man's case was a solemn vow that whenever he met a carter 
 driving without reins, or sitting on the shaft, he would make 
 him get down ; and this he never failed to do. Several years 
 after this sad affair, I was walking with him on the same 
 road. There came rattling on two newly-painted waggons, 
 drawn by splendid teams, that had evidently been taking 
 corn to market, and were now returning home without loads. 
 There were several men in the waggons, but no one on foot. 
 It occurred to me that as the waggoners were probably not 
 quite sober, it was only a choice of evils whether they were 
 on foot or in the waggons. But Newman had no choice ; 
 he was bound by his vow, and he compelled the men to come 
 down. We went on to Littlemore, were there for some time, 
 and then turned our faces homewards. Coming in sight of 
 the public-house at Littlemore, we saw the two show teams, 
 and something of a throng about them ; so we could not but 
 divine evil. It was too true. The waggoners had watched 
 us out of sight, and got into their waggons again. The 
 horses had run away on some alarm, one of the men had 
 jumped out, and had received fatal injuries. 
 
 Other examples of the Cardinal's habits of self- 
 discipline at this time are on record. He never 
 passed a day without writing a Latin sentence — 
 either a translation or an original composition — 
 before he had done his morning's work. Fre- 
 quently, when on the point of leaving his room for 
 an afternoon walk, he has asked a friend to stay 
 a minute or two while he was writing his daily 
 
AT TRINITY AND ORIEL. 23 
 
 sentence. Then, too, he wrote and laid by a com- 
 plete history of every serious question in which he 
 was concerned, such as that of the College tuition. 
 He did the same with every book he read and 
 every subject he inquired into. He drew up a 
 summary or an analysis of the matter, or of his 
 own views upon it. Mr. Mozley's further outlining 
 of his brother-in-law at this period tallies with the 
 " Sketch from St. Mary's " — from the pencil of an 
 undergraduate : — 
 
 Newman did not carry his head aloft or make the best use 
 of his height. He did not stoop, but he had a slight bend 
 forwards, owing perhaps to the rapidity of his movements, 
 and to his always talking while he was walking. His gait 
 was that of a man upon serious business bent, and not on a 
 promenade. There was no pride in his port or defiance in 
 his eye. Though it was impossible to see him without interest 
 and something more, he disappointed those who had known 
 him only by name. They who saw for the first time the 
 man whom some warm admirer had described in terms above 
 common eulogy, found him so little like the great Oxford 
 don or future pillar of the Church, that they said he might 
 pass for a Wesleyan minister. John Wesley must have been 
 a much more imposing figure. Robust and ruddy sons of 
 the Church looked on him with condescending pity as a poor 
 fellow whose excessive sympathy, restless energy, and general 
 unfitness for this practical world would soon wreck him. 
 Thin, pale, and with large lustrous eyes ever piercing through 
 this vale of men and things, he hardly seemed made for this 
 world. Canon Bull meeting him one day in the Parks, after 
 hearing he had been unwell, entreated him to spare what 
 fibre he had for a useful career. " No ordinary frame can 
 stand long such work as yours." His dress — it became 
 
24 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 almost the badge of his followers — was the long-tailed coat, 
 not always very new. There is a strange tendency in religious 
 schools to express themselves in outward forms, often from 
 the merest accident. Newman, however, never studied his 
 " get up," or even thought of it. He had other uses for his 
 income which in these days would have been thought poverty. 
 It became the fashion of the party to despise solemnity of 
 manner and stateliness of gait. Newman walked quick, and,' 
 with a congenial companion, talked incessantly. George 
 Ryder said of him that when his mouth was shut it looked 
 as if it never could open ; and when it was open it looked as 
 if it never could shut. Yet he was never so busy or so pre- 
 occupied but that he had always upon him a burden of con- 
 scientious duties to be attended to, calls of civility or kindness, 
 promises to be fulfilled, bits of thoughtfulness to be carried 
 out, rules of his own to be attended to. 
 
 Mr. J. A. Froude's description is, perhaps, mis- 
 leadingly picturesque : — 
 
 He was above middle height, slight and spare. His head 
 was large, his face remarkably like that of Julius Caesar. 
 The forehead, the shape of the ears and nose, were almost 
 the same. The lines of the mouth were very peculiar, and I 
 should say exactly the same. In both men there was an 
 original force of character, which refused to be moulded by 
 circumstances, which was to make its own way, and become 
 a power in the world ; a clearness of intellectual perception, 
 a disdain for conventionalities, a temper imperious and wilful, 
 but along with it a most attaching gentleness, sweetness, 
 singleness of heart and purpose. Both were formed by 
 Nature to command others ; both had the faculty of attracting 
 to themselves the passionate devotion of their friends and 
 followers. 
 
 Newman's rooms at Oriel, on the first floor near 
 
AT TRINITY AND ORIEL. 25 
 
 the chapel, communicated with what was no better 
 than a large closet, overlighted with an immense 
 bay-window over the chapel door. It had been a 
 lumber-room ; but, says Mozley, " Newman fitted 
 it up as a prophet's chamber, and there, night after 
 night, in the Long Vacation of 1835, offered up 
 prayers for himself and the Church. Returning to 
 College late one night I found that, even in the 
 gateway, I could not only hear the voice of prayer, 
 but could even distinguish words. The result was, 
 Newman contented himself with a less poetical 
 oratory." Strangers • coming daily to Oxford, and 
 seeking out the abode of the man who was "moving 
 the Church of England to its foundations," were 
 surprised to find him in simple undergraduate's 
 lodgings. In the rooms above lived William 
 Froude, HurrelFs younger brother, who was to be 
 Brunei's helper in laying out the Bristol and 
 Exeter Railway, and who was to make for himself 
 a more difficult spiritual way to Rome. While 
 Newman was praying, William Froude was making 
 laughing gas and staining his window-sills with 
 sulphuric acid. From 1837 to 1840, Mozley records: 
 " Newman had no College office or work, and was 
 seldom seen in Hall ; but he gave receptions every 
 Tuesday evening in the Common Room, largely 
 attended by both College and out-College men." 
 
z6 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 Though he was to take the second step in the 
 great Renunciation, and to leave the University 
 and the city, he did not resign his Fellowship until 
 the fateful October of 1845. 
 
( 27 ) 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 LITTLEMORE. 
 
 Search after seclusion — Cloister, cells, and crucifix — Reso- 
 lution as to his position — Disciples — Hard fasting — A 
 significant visit — The first to go — Curiosity, and New- 
 man's resentment of it — Father Dominic receives New- 
 man — A first and last Mass — A Jesuit's strange offer — 
 Primitive confession — Father Newsham's laughter — 
 Final farewells. 
 
 Newman had too many visitors in Oriel to be 
 able to give time and thought to serious religious 
 studies and exercises ; so he withdrew to Little- 
 more, which lies two or three miles to the south of 
 Oxford, towards London. He had always loved 
 the place, and it had the tradition of being the 
 healthiest spot thereabout. The parish was a 
 hamlet of St. Mary the Virgin ; and for many 
 years Newman walked from Oxford to Littlemore 
 two or three times a week. Since he had built a 
 little church there, the sound of the stonemason's 
 hammer had not been heard, and he could find 
 
28 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 nothing better for his new residence than a dis- 
 used range of stabling at the corner of two roads. 
 
 Nothing could be more unpromising ; but New- 
 man said it was enough ; and his handy man was 
 there to help in the work of reconstruction — 
 Thomas Mozley, a master-builder, too, of words, 
 whose " Reminiscences " have again and again 
 helped me in the patchwork of these temporary 
 memoirs. Newman made known his needs. There 
 must be a library, some " cells," and a cloister — the 
 chapel was to be for future consideration. The 
 library was to be the common workroom ; and 
 each cell was to contain a sitting-room, say twelve 
 feet by nine feet, a bedroom six feet by six feet ; 
 the height of both to be nine or ten feet. Newman 
 bought nine acres which he proposed to plant with 
 firs, and on which he could build, bit by bit, as 
 money came and men. He expressed only one 
 sentimental wish to the reconstructor — that he 
 might be able to see from his own cell window the 
 ruins of the Mynchery — a convent dating from 
 Saxon times, inhabited of old by generations of 
 Benedictine Nuns, and dedicated to " Our Lady of 
 Littlemore." Newman's decision as he paced the 
 cloister, or knelt before the crucifix (for he had 
 ceased to be superstitiously afraid of crucifixes), or 
 studied the Fathers, now was : that he could go on 
 
LITTLEMORE. 29 
 
 in the University pulpit only on condition that he 
 was allowed to hold by the Catholic interpretation 
 of the Anglican Articles set forth in " Tract XC." ; 
 but that he would relapse into lay life in the 
 Church of England rather than join the Church of 
 Rome "while she suffered honours to be paid to 
 the Blessed Virgin and the Saints, which I thought 
 in my conscience to be incompatible with the 
 Supreme, Incommunicable Glory of the One In- 
 finite and Eternal;"* that he desired a union 
 between the Churches, on conditions ; that Little- 
 more was, as he called it, his Torres Vedras, and 
 that he and his followers might advance again 
 within the Anglican Church, as they had been 
 forced to retire ; and, finally, that he must keep 
 back with all his might intending seceders to 
 Rome. Everything indicated that he came to the 
 village to stay — not to make it, as it turned out 
 to be, his home of only five or six years' duration. 
 When all was done, the place still looked outside 
 
 * Looking back to those days, after years of experience as a 
 Catholic, he says : " Only this I know full well now, and did not 
 know then, that the- Catholic Church allows no image of any sort, 
 material or immaterial, no dogmatic symbol, no rite, no sacrament, 
 no Saint, not even the Blessed Virgin herself, to come between the 
 soul and its Creator. It is face to face, solus cum solo, in all matters 
 between man and his God . He alone creates ; He alone has 
 redeemed ; before His awful eyes we go in death, and in the vision 
 of Him is our eternal beatitude. '" 
 
30 CARDWAL NEWMAN. 
 
 what it had always been — a range of stabling. 
 But these were not the times for "externals ; " and 
 the cells were soon filled with men all in deadly- 
 earnest about "the interior life." "They were 
 most of them," says Newman, " keenly religious 
 men, with a true concern for their souls as the 
 first matter of all, with a great zeal for me, but 
 giving little certainty at the time as to which way 
 they would ultimately turn. Some, in the event, 
 have remained firm to Anglicanism, some have 
 become Catholics, and some have found a refuge 
 in Liberalism." Of the latter, one name comes to 
 mind on the moment — that of Mark Pattison. 
 Pattison had his habitation in a sort of Com- 
 munity-house established on Apostolic principles 
 by Pusey in Oxford itself; and he was a guest, 
 not a resident, when he stayed at Littlemore. 
 What attracted the future Rector of Lincoln 
 College to Tractarianism was " the interest it ex- 
 cited in the young in all religious practices and 
 exercises, and in many religious questions which 
 had been matters of indifference." * Mark Pattison 
 
 * Newman somewhere says that his old friends were distressed to 
 see him surrounded in the early 'forties by " younger men of a cast 
 of mind in no small degree uncongenial to my own. " Some of this 
 was raw material, certainly ; and so remained. In after-life Mark 
 Pattison wrote : " I am astonished to see what hours I wasted (!) 
 over religious books at a time when I ought to have been devoting 
 every moment to preparation for the Oriel Examination." On a 
 
LITTLEMORE. 31 
 
 kept a diary during a fortnight's visit to Newman 
 at the close of September, 1843, and these are 
 some of the entries, showing what manner of life 
 the men of Littlemore led : — 
 
 Newman kinder, but not perfectly so.* Vespers at eight. 
 Compline at nine. How low, mean, selfish, my mind has 
 been to-day ; all my good deeds vanished ; grovelling, sensual, 
 animalist ; I am not, indeed, worthy to come under this roof ! 
 
 Sunday, October 1st. — St. John called me at 5.30, and at 
 six went to Matins, which, with half Lauds and Prime, takes 
 about an hour and a half; afterwards returned to my room 
 and prayed, with some effect, I think. Tierce at nine, and 
 at eleven to church — communion. More attentive and devout 
 than I have been for some time ; thirty-seven communicants. 
 
 par with this are the reasons he gives for not joining the Catholic 
 Church : " I must have been enveloped in the catastrophe of 1845, 
 as were so many of those with whom I lived, but for two saving 
 circumstances. One of these was my devotion to study. In 1843 
 Radford offered me a tutorship of the College. My classics had got 
 sadly rusty. I immediately set resolutely to work and made good 
 my lost ground. I think it was chiefly owing to this that when the 
 crash came in 1845 I did not follow Newman." Later on, in his 
 " Memoirs," Mark Pattison, feeling perhaps that everything still 
 remained to be said on this subject, gives another version. He 
 says : " In dealing with the students I soon became aware that I 
 was the possessor of a magnetic influence, which soon gave me a 
 moral ascendancy in the College. In this fact, which was very 
 slowly making itself felt, lies the true secret of my not having 
 followed Newman." When some one compiles — O strangest collec- 
 tion of inadequacies ! — a volume of men's " Reasons why I did not 
 join the Church of Rome," Mark Pattison's will still remain, with 
 Keble's, among the most perplexing. 
 
 * Poor Mark Pattison, in his self-torturing sensitiveness, had 
 supposed, "up to 1838 the only sentiment Newman can have enter- 
 tained towards me was one of antipathy." 
 
32 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 Returned and had breakfast. Had some discomfort at wait- 
 ing for food so long. Walked up and down with St. John in 
 the garden ; Newman afterwards joined us ; and at three to 
 church ; then Nones ; walked in the garden till dinners- 
 interesting talk. Some unknown benefactor sent a goose. 
 Talk of some Rosminian Nuns coming to England ; * though 
 an Order, and under the three vows, they do not renounce 
 possessions in the world. They aim to embrace the whole 
 Church. The Jesuits always and everywhere opposed and 
 despised ; St. Ignatius prayed for this ; Wiseman opposed 
 the Jesuits at Rome, and does so here ; proof of his sincerity. 
 Vespers at eight, Compline at nine. Very sleepy, and went 
 to bed at ten. 
 
 October 3rd. — Lockhart's mother much distressed. Pro- 
 bably at the separation, more than at the conversion, which 
 she must have expected some time. 
 
 October 4th. — N mentioned to me having just received 
 
 the account of a lady who, having in conversation declared 
 she thought the Church of Rome the true Church, had been 
 refused the Communion by her minister, he telling her in so 
 many words to go to Rome. 
 
 October 5th. — Coffin came to-day to stay. How uncom- 
 fortable have I made myself all this evening by a childish 
 
 fancy that once got into my head — a weak jealousy of N 's 
 
 good opinion ! Oh ! my God, take from me this petty pride ! 
 Coffin more subdued and less thoughtless than usual. 
 
 This particular way of introducing the name of 
 Coffin will perhaps surprise those afterwards ac- 
 quainted with the ascetic Provincial of the English 
 Redemptorists, who took on himself, when at the 
 end of his life, the burden of the Bishopric of 
 
 * The future Rosminian, Father Lockhart, was not at the dinner- 
 table. He had gone on pilgrimage to the shrines of St. Gilbert of 
 Sempringham ; and on the journey he joined the Catholic Church. 
 
LITTLEMORE. 33 
 
 Southwark. Other men of Littlemore, belonging 
 to the group who became Catholics, were Frederick 
 S. Bowles, now Chaplain to the Dominican Nuns 
 at Harrow ; John B. Dalgairns, afterwards a London 
 Oratorian, a man of whom Mozley says, " I feel 
 sure he might have taken his place among the 
 most popular and instructive writers of the age, 
 and become a household word in England ; " " dear 
 Ambrose St. John," the " link between the old life 
 and the new,'' who lived with Newman as a fellow- 
 priest at the Birmingham Oratory, and now lies 
 with him in one grave at Rednal ; Albany Christie, 
 now a Jesuit, who was studying medicine in London 
 with as many interludes at Littlemore as he could 
 get ; Bridges, of Merton, whose brother George, 
 and his cousin Matthew, became Catholics too ; 
 Richard Stanton, now an Oratorian in London ; 
 and Lockhart, the first to go. 
 
 If Lockhart's mother ' was distressed,* his 
 master was so too. Speaking of his young men, 
 and of this young man, Newman said : " Their 
 friends besought me to quiet them if I could. 
 Some of them came to live with me at Littlemore. 
 They were laymen or in the place of laymen. I 
 kept some of them back for several years from 
 being received into the Catholic Church. The 
 
 * She herself became a Catholic shortly afterwards. 
 
 D 
 
34 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 immediate cause of my resigning St. Mary's was 
 the unexpected conversion of one of them." This 
 was Lockhart ; who, after confessing to Newman 
 one day, asked : " But are you sure you have 
 the power of absolution ? " " Why will you ask 
 me that question?" replied Newman— "ask Pusey." 
 To Pusey the Littlemorians always supposed that 
 Newman himself went ; so that Pusey could now 
 at least aver that he gave that amount of proof of 
 his belief in the absolving power of the Anglican 
 clergy. But Lockhart did not trouble Pusey with 
 his question. He went to Father Gentili, whom 
 he had lately met with the De Lisles at Ward's 
 rooms in Oxford ; and at the end of a three days' 
 retreat was a Catholic and a Postulant with the 
 Rosminians. Rosmini's " Maxims of Perfection " 
 had been given to him four years earlier by a 
 friend — now Sir William White, our Ambassador 
 at Constantinople ; and one of the counsels on 
 which he opened in a moment of hesitation decided 
 him that his duty was to submit there and then to 
 the Catholic Church, despite the promise Newman 
 had extorted from him to linger for three years 
 longer. Father Lockhart, looking back at those 
 days, said in a lecture delivered in St. Etheldreda's, 
 Ely Place, just after Newman's death : 
 
 In speaking of Cardinal Newman and his work, he should 
 
LITTLEMORE. 35 
 
 necessarily speak of himself, though he spoke of himself only 
 as a type of the ordinary young Oxford man who came fifty 
 years ago under the great Cardinal's influence. To put into 
 one sentence what struck him as the character of his whole 
 teaching and influence, it was to make them use their 
 reasoning powers, to seek after the last satisfactory reason 
 one could reach of everything, and this led them to the last 
 reason of all, and they formed a religious personal belief in 
 God the Creator, our Lord and Master. This was the first 
 thing that Newman did for those young men under his care. 
 He rooted in their hearts and minds a personal conviction 
 of the living God. And he for one could say he never had 
 had that feeling of God before he was brought into contact 
 with Cardinal Newman. Who that had experience of it 
 could forget Newman's majestic countenance? — the meekness, 
 the humility, the purity of a virgin heart " in work and will," 
 as the poet says, a purity that was expressed in his eyes, his 
 kindness, the sweetness of his voice, his winning smile, his 
 caressing way, which had in it nothing of softness, but which 
 you felt was a communication to you of strength from a 
 strong soul — a thing to be felt in order to be realised. It 
 was when Newman read the Scriptures from the lectern in 
 St. Mary's Church at Oxford that one felt more than ever 
 that his words were those of a seer who saw God and the 
 things of God. Many men were impressive readers, but 
 they did not reach the soul. They played on the senses and 
 imagination, they were good actors, they did not forget them- 
 selves, and one did not forget them. But Newman had the 
 power of so impressing the soul as to efface himself; you 
 thought only of the majestic soul that saw God. It was God 
 speaking to you as He speaks to you through creation ; but 
 in a deeper way, by the articulate voice of man made to the 
 image of God and raised to His likeness by grace, com- 
 municating to your intelligence and sense and imagination, 
 by words which were the signs of ideas, a transcript of the 
 work and private thoughts that were in God. . . . Hearing 
 of Newman's intention to open a place at Littlemore he 
 
36 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 volunteered to join him, and was accepted. He was one of 
 the first inmates of that home. Newman rooted theism 
 most deeply in their souls, and from that they were led on 
 to the practice of submission and of that religion which they 
 doubted not had come from God, for they had no doubt 
 whatever that the Church of England was a part of that 
 world-wide religious society which Christ had established in 
 the beginning, and which He sent down His Apostles to 
 establish in every land. It was only after beginning to put 
 in practice what Newman had taught them — to go into the 
 last reason of things, which they did step by step, in many 
 cases quite independently of their teacher, because he became 
 a Catholic two years before Newman — that they arrived at 
 that conclusion which he himself reached a little later. 
 Newman was much hurt for his leaving him. But the first 
 step that Newman took after he had become a Catholic was 
 to pay him a visit at the College at which he was then 
 studying. He need not say how happy that day was when 
 he found himself and his old friend once more in the same 
 communion. 
 
 After preaching his last sermon as an Anglican 
 in September, 1843, Newman remained two years 
 longer at Littlemore — making sure that he was not 
 doing anything in a hurry. " It is," he says, 
 " because the Bishops still go on charging against 
 me, though I have quite given up : it is that secret 
 misgiving of heart which tells me that they do 
 well, for I have neither lot nor part with them ; 
 this it is which weighs me down." And he adds a 
 smaller grief, but to him a real grievance : " I 
 cannot walk into or out of my house, but curious 
 eyes are upon me. Why will you not let me die 
 
LITTLEMORE. 37 
 
 in peace ? Wounded brutes creep into some hole 
 to die in, and no one grudges it them. Let me 
 alone, I shall not trouble you long." One day, 
 when he entered the house, he found a flight of 
 undergraduates inside. Heads of houses, as 
 mounted patrols, walked their horses round the 
 poor cottages ; Doctors of Divinity dived into the 
 recesses of that private tenement uninvited. When 
 the Warden of Wadham, a flourishing Evangelical, 
 knocked one day at the door, Newman opened it 
 himself: — nothing so human as a housemaid entered 
 the " monastery," where the inmates took the duty 
 of door-opening for a week by turns. " May I see 
 the monastery ? " insinuated the visitor. " We 
 have no monasteries here," replied Newman, and 
 closed the door in his face — less than civil ! Then 
 the newspapers had their paragraphs, inviting 
 episcopal attention. So the Bishop of Oxford 
 writes, a little timidly, to ask what it all means : — 
 Is there really an intention to found — he can 
 hardly bring himself to write the naughty word 
 Archdeacon Farrar and all of them have now so 
 glibly at the tongue's end — an Anglican monas- 
 tery ? Newman replies : 
 
 For many years, at least thirteen, I have wished to give 
 myself to a life of greater religious regularity than I have 
 hitherto led ; but it is very unpleasant to confess such a wish 
 
38 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 even to my Bishop. I feel it very cruel, though the parties 
 in fault do not know what they are doing, that very sacred 
 matters between me and my conscience are made a matter 
 of public talk. As to the quotation from the newspaper, 
 your Lordship will perceive that " no monastery is in process 
 of erection ; " there is no " chapel," no " refectory," hardly a 
 dining-room or parlour. The " cloisters " are my shed con- 
 necting the cottages. I do not understand what " cells of 
 dormitories " means. Of course, I can repeat your Lord- 
 ship's words that " I am not attempting a revival of the 
 Monastic Orders, in anything approaching the Romanist 
 sense of the term." 
 
 Rumours flew about ; and it was whispered that 
 he "was already in the service of the enemy" — 
 had already been received into the Catholic Church. 
 On the other hand, among Catholics there were 
 murmurs— could he know so much, and yet remain 
 in good faith? What a rebuke it seemed when 
 the Bishop of Clifton recalled rash judgments in 
 the presence of the coffin containing all that was 
 mortal of this immortal man ! That the resignation 
 of St. Mary's gave him a new sense of freedom is 
 implied by Newman in the letter he wrote in 
 April, 1845, to Cardinal Wiseman, then Vicar- 
 Apostolic, who had accused him of past coldness 
 in his conduct towards him : 
 
 I was at that time in charge of a ministerial office in the 
 English Church, with persons entrusted to me, and a Bishop 
 to obey ; how could I write otherwise than I did without 
 violating sacred obligations ? ... If you knew me, you 
 would acquit me, I think, of having ever felt towards your 
 
LITTLEMORE. 39 
 
 Lordship in an unfriendly spirit, or ever having had a shadow 
 on my mind of what might be called controversial rivalry, or 
 desire of getting the better, or fear lest the world should 
 think I had got the worst, or irritation of any kind. And 
 now in like manner, pray believe, though I cannot explain it 
 to you, that I am encompassed with responsibilities so great 
 and so various as utterly to overcome me unless I have 
 mercy from Him Who, all through my life, has sustained 
 and guided me, and to Whom I can now submit myself, 
 though men of all parties are thinking evil of me. 
 
 The story of the life at Littlemore has never yet 
 been entirely told ; and it would be impossible to 
 glean from Newman's scanty allusions in the 
 " Apologia," or even from his letter to the Bishop, 
 any idea of its primitive austerities and observances. 
 I tell these as they are told to me by Littlemore 
 men. Lent was a season of real penance for the 
 inmates of the monastery. They had nothing to 
 eat each day till five, and then the solitary meal 
 was of salt fish. No wonder Dr. Wootten, the 
 Tractarian doctor, told them they must all die in 
 a few years if things went on so ; and no wonder 
 Dalgairns had a serious illness ; after which re- 
 laxations were made. A breakfast of bread and 
 butter and tea was taken at noon, the monks 
 standing up at a board — a real board, erected in 
 the improvised refectory, and called in undertones 
 by some naturally fastidious ones a "trough." 
 The ''chapel" was hardly more pretentious than 
 
40 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 the dining-room. At one end stood a large cruci- 
 fix, bought at Lima by Mr. Crawley, a Spanish 
 merchant living in Littlemore. It was what was 
 called "very pronounced" — with the all but 
 barbaric realism of Spanish religious art. A table 
 supported the base ; and on the table were two 
 candles lighted at prayer-time by Newman himself 
 — and necessary — for Newman had veiled the 
 window and walls with his favourite red hangings. 
 Of an altar there was no pretence ; the village 
 church at Littlemore being Newman's own during 
 the first years of his residence there. A board ran 
 up the centre of the chapel, and in a row on either 
 side stood the disciples for the recitation of Divine 
 Office ; " the Vicar," as his disciples called him, 
 standing by himself a little apart. The days and 
 hours of the Catholic Church were duly kept ; and 
 the only alteration made in the Office was that 
 Saints were invoked with a modification of New- 
 man's making— the " Ora pro nobis " being changed 
 in recitation to " Oret." At Christmas and Easter 
 some white silk was placed behind the crucifix, 
 upon the background of red hangings [those red 
 hangings — almost mauve — reappear at Maryvale 
 and at Edgbaston — horrors !], a symbol and pro- 
 clamation of Divine grace. 
 
 Among the visitors to Littlemore, a year before 
 
LITTLEMORE. 41 
 
 the visit, was Father Dominic himself. He came, 
 passing through Oxford, and presented himself at 
 Newman's door as one watching with keen interest 
 Anglican development in Christian doctrine. " A 
 little more grace,'' he said, and then the consum- 
 mation : — an Italian, new to the English language, 
 must be ceded the pleasure of the pun. Newman 
 took him to Littlemore Church ; and there the 
 Father fell on his knees — doubtless to pray for the 
 happy issue of these strange workings of Divine 
 grace in the heart of Oxford — in the hearts of the 
 very flower of the University which Protestantism 
 had appropriated, and fenced in, and planted 
 about. * 
 
 If, on the night of October 8th, 1845, any dons 
 or proctors were prying round the "monastery" 
 (even Newman could not persist in calling it the 
 " parsonage-house " after he had ceased to be the 
 parson), they must have seen a strange sight- — a 
 monk indeed ! Father Dominic, the Passionist, 
 
 * A dear friend of mine, an Irish priest, told me he felt a little 
 strange when, years afterwards, he found himself impelled to kneel 
 in the same place. Father Dawson, O.M.I., did not know he was 
 but doing what Father Dominic had done. Nor did Mr. F. W. 
 Grey, the grandson given by the great Lord Grey to the Faith, who 
 writes : " Silently we knelt in the deserted temple and prayed that 
 its Lord and Master, banished for three hundred years, might 
 quickly return to it again, and then rose and continued our 
 pilgrimage." 
 
4« CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 was that night to find the consummation of those 
 hopes he had held almost from the days when he 
 watched his sheep on the Apennines : those hopes 
 that he might get to Northern Europe and to 
 Protestantism, and preach the full Gospel of Christ. 
 The years passed ; and the shepherd lad found 
 himself a priest, and was sent' to England — and to 
 Aston in Staffordshire. And now Dalgairns, who 
 had already been received by Father Dominic at 
 Aston, and who had returned to find " the Vicar " 
 at the last gasp of Anglicanism, and Ambrose St. 
 John also reconciled to the Church by Monsignor 
 Brindle at Prior Park, suggested that the Passionist 
 should again visit Littlemore. He came, dripping 
 wet from his journey through torrents of rain. 
 Newman knelt before him. The Father bade the 
 neophyte rise, " conscious," says one of his friends, 
 " of a great miracle of grace." Mr. Oakeley, one 
 of Newman's young disciples, who subsequently 
 exchanged the Anglican ministry for the Catholic 
 priesthood, says : 
 
 It was a memorable day, that 9th of October, 1845. The 
 rain came down in torrents, bringing with it the first heavy 
 instalment of autumn's sere and yellow leaves. The wind, 
 like a spent giant, howled forth the expiring notes of its 
 equinoctial fury. The superstitious might have said that the 
 very elements were on the side of Anglicanism — so copiously 
 did they weep, so piteously bemoan, the approaching de- 
 
L1TTLEM0RE. 43 
 
 parture of its great representative. The bell which swung 
 visibly in the turret of the little Gothic church at Littlemore 
 gave that day the usual notice of morning and afternoon 
 prayers ; but it came to the ear in that buoyant, bouncing 
 tone which is usual in a high wind, and sounded like a knell 
 rather than a summons. The monastery was more than 
 usually sombre and still. Egress and ingress there were 
 none that day ; for it had been given out, among friends 
 accustomed to visit there, that Mr. Newman "wished to 
 remain quiet." One of these friends, who resided in the 
 neighbourhood, had been used to attend the evening " office " 
 in the oratory of the house, but he was forbidden to come 
 " for two or three days, for reasons which would be explained 
 later." The ninth of the month passed off without producing 
 any satisfaction to the general curiosity. All that transpired 
 was that a remarkable-looking man, evidently a foreigner, 
 and shabbily dressed in black, had asked his way to Mr. 
 Newman's on the day but one before ; and the rumour was 
 that he was a Catholic priest. In the course of a day or two 
 the friend before mentioned was re-admitted to the evening 
 office, and found that a change had come over it. The Latin 
 was pronounced for the first time in the Roman way, and the 
 antiphons of Our Lady, which up to that day had always 
 been omitted, came out in their proper place. The friend in 
 question would have asked the reason of these changes, but 
 it was forbidden to speak to any of the Community after 
 night-prayers. Very soon the mystery was cleared up by 
 Mr. Newman and his companions appearing at Mass in the 
 public chapel at Oxford. 
 
 Father Dominic, after spending some hours in 
 Newman's " cell," visited Bowles and Stanton. 
 His bow to the Pieta — a German coloured print — 
 as he entered Bowles's room, was a part of his 
 pious simplicity : — Newman said of him he had 
 
44 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 met no one in whom so much simplicity combined 
 with so much shrewdness ; a common Italian type 
 which he must have encountered often enough 
 afterwards. " My dear brother," Father Dominic 
 began to Bowles, " I am surprised that you should 
 dwell in a Church which has no ideas." What 
 followed is hardly remembered now ; but need for 
 controversy there was none. The watering and 
 the planting and the grafting (a great deal of that) 
 had been done : now came the harvest. Stanton 
 was a young clergyman, formerly of Brasenose 
 College, and a Hulme Exhibitioner, who had 
 resigned his benefice and come to Littlemore. 
 These three, " the Vicar " and the two disciples, 
 entered the curious chapel on Thursday afternoon, 
 October 9th, 1845, ana " stood in a line together. 
 Function there was none ; and Ritualism hid her 
 face. The bowl of Baptism was of domestic, not 
 of ecclesiastical pattern ; and all else was of a 
 tale. 
 
 Then Father Dominic gave a little address, 
 saying his Nunc Dimittis. Dalgairns and St. John 
 went into Oxford, to the primitive Catholic chapel 
 — St. Clement's — and borrowed from the old priest, 
 Father Newsham, an altar-stone and vestments, so 
 that Father Dominic might say Mass the next 
 morning — the first and only time at Littlemore. 
 
L1TTLEM0RE. 45 
 
 At that Mass the neophytes received their first 
 Communion. The fervour of Father Dominic, 
 when he made his thanksgiving, greatly impressed 
 the converts, who had not been accustomed in 
 Anglicanism to see so much emotion in prayer. 
 One little incident may be recorded as almost 
 comic. On the evening before their reception into 
 the Church, Father Dominic went into the chapel 
 with the catechumens, and recited Office with 
 them. But when they came to the record of how 
 St. Denis, after his martyrdom, put his head under 
 his arm and walked about, Father Dominic cried 
 "stop," and skipped it over. He thought such 
 legends might be a difficulty to beginners ; but he 
 did not know his men ; for who was more familiar 
 with miracles and the authority assigned to them 
 than the author of those Essays which had made 
 Macaulay exclaim, "The times require a Middle- 
 ton " ? In truth, the neophytes were a little 
 scandalized at him, and not at all at it.* 
 
 Father Dominic left at the end of a three days' 
 
 * Four years later, when the Oratorian Series of Saints' Lives 
 began to be published, the Convert Editors found themselves dis- 
 countenanced in their love of legend by old Catholics ; and the 
 series was temporarily stopped by Newman after it had been 
 accused, in Dolman's Magazine, of reducing Hagiology to a string 
 of "unmeaning puerilities." Newman himself hinted afterwards 
 that he had been led into extravagances by "younger men." 
 
46 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 visit. As he went back to Oxford he must have 
 recalled a passage in the life of the Founder of the 
 Passionists — St. Paul of the Cross. It tells how- 
 he fell into a trance, at the end of which he was 
 asked what vision he had seen, and answered : " O 
 the wonderful works of my children in England ! " 
 Confessor and penitent met once again at Maryvale. 
 But the Passionist had done his work. In 1849, 
 he was travelling by rail with one companion, 
 when his mortal illness seized him, and he died 
 upon the platform of Reading Station, blessing 
 England with his latest breath. By some deplorable 
 chance the people who were near, and who might 
 have helped him, feared some infection, and held 
 aloof from him and refused him shelter. Thus 
 died this lover of our country, the humble apostle 
 who reconciled to the Catholic Church him 
 whom her Head afterwards called "the light of 
 England." 
 
 For four months after his conversion Newman 
 remained at Littlemore. It was a strange period. 
 The converts went down daily to Oxford to Mass 
 • — great curiosities ! They took the path through 
 the fields to escape the public gaze. There is a 
 fine church in Oxford now, and there are Jesuits 
 to man it. But the old St. Clement's was almost 
 comic in its insufficiencies. One announcement 
 
LITTLEMORE. 47 
 
 made on Sunday was : " Confessions will be heard 
 on Saturday afternoon in the arbour.'' The arbour 
 in some way communicated with the schoolroom ; 
 and a penitent of the party repairing thither, feeling 
 all the first shyness of a never anything but shy 
 proceeding, found an unexpected embarrassment. 
 Just as the critical moment came, he heard the 
 young barbarians stop their play to listen. " Hush,'' 
 said the leader, " he's going to begin.'' There was 
 at least the precedent of the early Church, when 
 Confession was publicly made. Father Newsham 
 walked over to Littlemore ; and during his call was 
 perpetually breaking out into ripples of laughter. 
 Newman was a little sore about it. " What did he 
 find so funny about us ? " he asked, when the visitor 
 went. The reassuring truth leaked out : the good 
 priest was so overjoyed — he could not contain 
 himself. At last grace had done its work — and he 
 had as his parishioner at St. Clement's the great 
 Mr. Newman of St. Mary's. Other visitors came 
 — among them the Provincial of the Jesuits, with 
 a proposition — astonishing ! The Society had a 
 work in hand, and would the converts help in it ? — 
 an apostolate in Timbuctoo. Then came partings, 
 the saddest that ever voluntarily were ; with Mr. 
 Pattison and Mr. Lewis, one of whom followed 
 Newman to Rome at leisure, and Mr. Church, 
 
48 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 afterwards Dean of St. Paul's. " You may think 
 how lonely I am. We are leaving Littlemore, and 
 it is like going on the open sea." * 
 
 Father Dawson, during a visit from Ireland to 
 England in 1890, made a pilgrimage to the death- 
 bed of Newman's Anglicanism. Writing of it as 
 it now is, he says in a letter to me : " Yes ! that 
 was it — just a little row of one-storey cottages on 
 the side of the village street, and a similar row, 
 joined to it at right angles, running into a lane. 
 The cottages are now in reality separate cottages ; 
 but one grave old lady most politely showed me 
 what (as she understood) had been the chapel, the 
 refectory, and the dormitory. It looked, indeed, a 
 place of plain living. ' Remember him myself ? 
 Oh yes ! I can remember Mr. Newman very well 
 indeed — hearing him preach in the church, and 
 seeing him in the school when I was a little girl. 
 He was kind to us, sir, when he used to come into 
 the school ; we were all so fond of him. Ah ! 
 what a pity, sir, he ever left us ! ' On that point 
 
 * In the "Apologia," written nearly twenty years later, the 
 Cardinal speaks of spending the last two days at Littlemore " simply 
 by myself " — a slip of memory. Father Bowles was there till the 
 end ; and into his room Newman came each evening, and fell 
 asleep in his chair, worn out with the day's packing. On their 
 last night in Oxford, Newman slept "at my dear friend's, Mr. 
 Tohnson's, at the Observatory," as also did Father Bowles. 
 
L1TTLEM0RE. 49 
 
 I did not feel willing to dwell, or even to find out 
 for certain whether my venerable hostess meant 
 by ' leaving us ' anything besides leaving the village 
 of Littlemore." 
 
CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 MARYVALE, ROME, COTTON HALL, AND ALCESTER 
 STREET, BIRMINGHAM. 
 
 Gives up the idea of a lay life — Confirmed at Oscott — Goes 
 to Maryvale — Two places in a coach and five vans of 
 books — Studies and Ordination in Rome — " We are to 
 be Oratorians " — Return to Maryvale — Is joined by 
 Faber — Goes to Cotton Hall — A call to London — The 
 choice of Birmingham — The Achilli trial — The libel 
 itself — A prisoner of a minute — A house in a slum — 
 Cholera duty at Bilston — "Mostly poor and Irish" — 
 Literary and other labour not in vain in the Lord. 
 
 At first Newman had talked of " secular employ- 
 ment ; " but Bishop Wiseman knew better. The 
 neophyte came to Oscott, near Birmingham, to be 
 confirmed by the Bishop on November ist, 1845 \ 
 together with Oakeley, who had been received into 
 the Church by Father Newsham at Oxford ; and 
 Mr. Walker, a great friend of Stanton, and, like him, 
 a young ex-clergyman, late of Brasenose, and after- 
 wards a Catholic priest. While at Oscott, Newman 
 was taken by Wiseman to see a building, then 
 
MARY VALE. 51 
 
 used as a boys' school, near to the College and 
 belonging to it. "Bring your friends here," said 
 Wiseman, "and carry on your studies for the 
 priesthood, with the help of our professors at 
 Oscott.'' Newman accepted the house, and called 
 it " Maryvale." Thither he went, accompanied by 
 Bowles, inside the coach from Oxford, on Monday, 
 February 23rd, 1846. Stanton and St. John had 
 gone before to prepare the house, they having 
 cleverness in such arrangements ; and Newman's 
 own furniture and books — especially books — were 
 on the road in five enormous vans. 
 
 After a few months at Maryvale, Newman went 
 to Rome, pausing here and there upon the way, 
 The Univers of September 20th, 1846, published 
 the following letter from Langres : — 
 
 The presence of the Rev. J. H. Newman in our city has 
 excited no less interest than it did at Paris. His simplicity 
 and modesty charmed every one who had the advantage of 
 an admission to his presence. Our venerable Bishop re- 
 ceived him with the affection and cordiality of a brother. 
 Forty or fifty members of our clerical body had the honour 
 of being presented to him whose eloquent words affected 
 so lately the studious youth of the principal University of 
 England. The marks of sympathy of which this learned 
 writer was the object have spoken to him of the happiness 
 which Catholics experience in counting him among their 
 brethren. What admirable men are these Oxford converts ! 
 God has not without purpose chosen instruments so fitted to 
 accomplish His great designs. Mr. Newman was acoom- 
 
52 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 panied by the Rev. Ambrose St. John, who, also, has been 
 admitted to Minor Orders, and repairs to Rome to receive 
 the priesthood. The second companion of Mr. Newman is 
 the Rev. Robert Aston Coffin. Mr. Coffin does not proceed 
 to Rome with his two friends, but returns to England. Mr. 
 Newman and Mr. St. John go from Langres to Besangon. 
 They will travel through Switzerland to Milan, where they 
 remain till they have learnt Italian * before proceeding to 
 Rome. Mr. Dalgairns, who is completing his theological 
 studies at Langres, hopes to return to England next year, 
 where he will await the return from Rome of his friend and 
 instructor. 
 
 Of the Archbishop of Besancon, Newman wrote : 
 " He has the reputation and the carriage of a very- 
 saintly man." " What you want in England is a 
 strong Bishop," said the Prelate ; and Newman, 
 who thought things went a little too easily, agreed. 
 The arrival in Rome is recorded by the Roman 
 correspondent of the Daily News, which had 
 started, under Dickens's editorship, on the very 
 day following Newman's departure from Oxford — 
 an event it did not think worth a mention. The 
 Roman correspondent — no other than " Father 
 Prout " — says : 
 
 On the evening of October 28th Mr. Newman, accom- 
 panied by Mr. Ambrose St. John, entered the Eternal City. 
 
 * Newman had learnt some Italian before his tour with Hurrell 
 Froude in 1833, but it was obliterated from his memory during his 
 fever in Sicily ; and he afterwards corresponded with his landlord 
 there in Latin. 
 
ROME. S3 
 
 Next morning the ex-Anglican proselyte's first impulse was 
 to pay his homage at the Tomb of the Apostles, when, as 
 chance would have it, Pius IX. was in the act of realizing 
 Scott's ballad — 
 
 The Pope he was saying his High, High Mass 
 All at St. Peter's shrine. 
 
 Their interview occurred in the crypt or subterranean 
 sanctuary, the oldest portion of the basilica. It would appear 
 that the inundations of Upper Italy opposed serious obstacles 
 to the progress of the Oxford pilgrims, and that at one 
 passage the cart which bore them, drawn by oxen, was well- 
 nigh swallowed up by the rush of many waters. Safe from 
 these semi-apostolic " perils of the flood," they are now 
 engaged, under the guidance of the most intelligent of their 
 countrymen and co-religionists, in a brief survey of whatever 
 is most remarkable here ; and in a few days Mr. Newman, 
 late of Oxford, and his companions will take possession of 
 chambers in the College of Propaganda, and enter on a 
 preparatory course previous to re-ordination in the Church 
 of Rome. 
 
 Newman received Holy Orders at the hands of 
 
 Cardinal Franzoni, and, in 1847, he announced, 
 
 in a letter from Rome to Mr. Hope-Scott, the 
 
 important plans already made — ■ 
 
 We are to be Oratorians : Monsignor Brunelli went to the 
 Pope about it the day before yesterday — my birthday. The 
 Pope took up the plan most warmly. He wishes us to come 
 here, as many as can, form a house under an experienced 
 Oratorian Father, go through a novitiate, and return. I 
 suppose we shall set up in Birmingham. 
 
 By the end of 1847* he was back in London, 
 
 * Cardinal Manning, in his beautiful elegy on his brother 
 Cardinal, speaks of having met him in Rome in 1848 — a mistake 
 of a year in the date. 
 
54 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 which he reached on Christmas Eve. He went to 
 Bishop Wiseman, who had now settled in Golden 
 Square as Administrator of the London District ; 
 and all at once a great development of his plans 
 was opened out. It happened in this wise. 
 Frederick Faber, the Rector of Elton, who had 
 called himself Newman's " acolyte " at Oxford, and 
 who had been detained in Anglicanism by New- 
 man's influential persuasions to patience, did not 
 wait many days, once he heard of Newman's sub- 
 mission to the Church, to follow it by his own. 
 Then he drifted to Birmingham, where Father 
 Moore at St. Chad's had received many of the 
 Oxford converts ; and he had already formed him- 
 self and the friends who came with him from Elton 
 into a sort of community in a Birmingham slum, 
 when Newman first came to Maryvale. Faber's 
 offer there and then to place himself and his com- 
 panions under Newman, was declined ; and before 
 long Faber found himself and his fellows established 
 at Cotton Hall, near Alton, by the Earl of Shrews- 
 bury, who bought for him a piece of land to build 
 upon beside the Catholic church at Cheadle. Here 
 the " Brothers of the Will of God," or " Wilfridians," 
 grew and prospered for eighteen months, until the 
 time came, in Advent, 1847, when Faber should 
 proceed to London to take the community vows 
 
COTTON HALL. 55 
 
 before Bishop Wiseman. Arriving in Golden 
 Square, he found, with Wiseman, Father Stanton, 
 just arrived from Rome — the first wearer of the 
 Oratorian habit in England. " Why not com- 
 bine ? " said Wiseman — a thought which had 
 already taken possession of Father Faber. Why 
 not ? The question was repeated to Father New- 
 man, who arrived shortly afterwards, and to whom 
 Faber paid a visit at Mary vale, in January, 1848, 
 when all details were settled. 
 
 Next month Father Newman, with Stanton and 
 St. John, visited Faber at Cotton Hall, and formally 
 received Faber and his Wilfridians into the rule of 
 St. Philip Neri. Writing a few days afterwards, 
 Faber said : " Father Superior has now left us, all 
 in our Philippine habits, with turn-down collars, 
 like so many good boys brought in after dinner. 
 In the solemn admission, he gave us a most 
 wonderful address, full of those marvellous pauses. 
 He showed how, in his case and ours, St. Philip 
 seemed to have laid hands upon us, whether we 
 would or not. I hardly know what to do with 
 myself for very happiness." To Maryvale Faber 
 went, with Newman for his novice-master ; but he 
 returned to Cotton Hall ,almost immediately ; and 
 his novitiate ending, by dispensation, in July, 1848, 
 he became novice-master there to the new Com- 
 
56 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 munity. In the month of October in that year, all 
 the Fathers from Maryvale joined their brethren 
 at Cotton Hall, at the instance of Bishop Wiseman. 
 The Community were now forty in number, flourish- 
 ing exceedingly. The ceremonies of the Church 
 were carefully carried out, and Father Faber had 
 already made some two hundred converts in the 
 neighbourhood. Several lay friends came to live 
 around ; and Lord Arundel, Mr. David Lewis, 
 Mrs. and Miss Bowden, may be called the nursing 
 fathers and mothers of the infant congregation. 
 Before this time a site in Bayswater had been 
 offered to the Oratorians, by whom, however, it 
 was declined, and it was afterwards to be the site 
 of the Oblate Fathers' Church of St. Charles 
 Borromeo and the home of Henry Edward Manning. 
 But no one had forgotten that for the town, and 
 not for the country, was St. Philip's rule designed ; 
 and now Bishop Wiseman wrote to Father Newman 
 asking him to come to London to found an Oratory 
 there. Newman had already thought of Birming- 
 ham, and to the Pope had mentioned Birmingham 
 as the place for his foundation. This, in New- 
 man's opinion, was sufficient to allege as a reason 
 for declining Bishop Wiseman's invitation. Great 
 events have certainly been controlled everywhere 
 by little incidents seemingly beneath the notice of 
 
COTTON HALL. 57 
 
 pompous records : the " Go it, Ned ! " scrawled in 
 the corner of that despach of the Duke of Clarence's 
 which decided the Battle of Navarino, but is not 
 found in the Blue Books ; the chance wound which 
 led Ignatius of Loyola to take up the " Lives of 
 the Saints " as better than nothing in his boredom ; 
 the passing of Gibbon when Vespers were being 
 sung by monks by the Temple of Jupiter at 
 Rome ; the drowsiness of Ministers at a Richmond 
 dinner while the Duke of Newcastle read the letter 
 to Lord Raglan determining the invasion of the 
 Crimea ; the badly cooked chop which lost Napoleon 
 Leipsic : all the innumerable littlenesses which 
 make up the domestic side of history. Newman's 
 ultimate settling at Birmingham has been assigned 
 to solemn causes : by some to his desire to hide 
 himself ; by others to the desire of his new 
 authorities that he should be hidden. Oh, what 
 a clatter of chatter if he had gone, as the Jesuit 
 proposed, to Timbuctoo ! We have heard enough 
 about the seclusion in Birmingham of this apostle 
 for whom, in truth, fine society had no fascinations, 
 of this man of letters who preserved in his seclusion 
 an almost uninterrupted literary mood. And, after 
 all, perhaps the determining reason was a sub- 
 stantial one — the weight of his books. These had 
 been carted to Maryvale at an incredible expense 
 
58 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 — a sum equal to what had been half a year's 
 income in his most flourishing Oxford days, when 
 that yearly income, all told, never exceeded ^500 
 a year. He had been moved already to Cotton 
 Kail from Maryvale and from his books ; not 
 greatly liking the separation. They were a sort 
 of magnet to him, and, as he could get to them 
 more easily and less expensively than they to him 
 — to them he went. 
 
 A house in Alcester Street, Birmingham, was 
 taken, therefore, into which he entered in January, 
 1849. His first work was to draw up, with the 
 help of those about him, lists of names of the 
 Fathers who should stay at Birmingham, and of 
 the Fathers who should be ceded to London. At 
 last the approved list was sent to Cotton Hall to 
 Faber, with a draft of the scheme for the founda- 
 tion of the London Oratory, of which Faber was 
 named the head. How it was formed, how it has 
 flourished exceedingly, going from King William 
 Street to South Kensington, needs not to be told 
 here. Stanton and Dalgairns, late of Littlemore, 
 were among those put on the London foundation ; 
 Bowles and St. John were among those who re- 
 mained at Birmingham. Father Newman preached, 
 on the opening day of the London Oratory, his 
 sermon on the " Prospects of the Catholic Mis- 
 
ALCESTER STREET. 59 
 
 sioner." In 1850 he released the London Com- 
 munity from their obedience, and gave them 
 " Home Rule," a system under which they have 
 grown to be the centre of London's spiritual 
 activity — far surpassing the parent Oratory in the 
 glory of stone and marble, and in the size and 
 splendour of appointments. Father Newman stayed 
 at the Oratory in King William Street in 1852, for 
 the Achilli trial ; a time of excitement, during 
 which he remained day and night, almost without 
 interruption, before the Tabernacle. 
 
 The trial began in June, before Lord Campbell 
 and a jury; and it lasted for several days. Gio- 
 vanni Giacinto Achilli, an undoubted apostate 
 priest, had lectured in Birmingham against Popery, 
 representing himself as one who had escaped the 
 persecutions of the Inquisition. What manner of 
 man he really was, Newman set forth in one of the 
 lectures on " The Position of Catholics." This was 
 the crucial passage, the place of which is taken by 
 stars only in subsequent editions of the " Lectures: " 
 
 The Protestant world flocks to hear him, because he has 
 something to tell of the Catholic Church. He has something 
 to tell, it is true ; he has a scandal to reveal, an argument to 
 exhibit. That one argument is himself, it is his presence 
 which is the triumph of Protestants ; it is the sight of him 
 which is a Catholic's confusion. It is indeed a confusion 
 that our Holy Mother could have had a priest like him. He 
 
60 CARDINAL NEWMAK. 
 
 feels the force of the argument, and he shows himself to the 
 multitude that is gazing upon him. " Mothers of families,'' 
 he seems to say, " gentle maidens, innocent children, look at 
 me, for I am worth looking at. You do not see such a sight 
 every day. Can any Church live over the imputation of such 
 a production as I am? I have been a Roman priest and 
 a hypocrite. I have been a profligate under a cowl. I am 
 that Father Achilli who, as early as 1826, was deprived of 
 my faculty to lecture for an offence which my superiors did 
 their best to conceal ; and who, in 1827, had already earned 
 the reputation of a scandalous friar. I am that Achilli who, 
 in the diocese of Viterbo, in February, 1831, robbed of her 
 honour a young woman of eighteen ; who, in September, 
 1833, was found guilty of a second such crime in the case 
 of a person of twenty-eight ; and who perpetrated a third in 
 July, 1834, in the case of another, aged twenty-four. I am 
 he who was afterwards found guilty of sins, similar or worse, 
 in other towns of the neighbourhood. I am that son of 
 St. Dominic who is known to have repeated the offence at 
 Capua, in 1834 and 1835, and at Naples again in 1840, in 
 the case of a child of fifteen. I am he who chose the 
 sacristy of the church for one of these crimes, and Good 
 Friday for another. I am that Cavaliere Achilli, who then 
 went to Corfu, made the wife of a tailor faithless to her 
 husband, and lived publicly with the wife of a chorus singer. 
 I am that Professor in the Protestant College at Malta who, 
 with two others, was dismissed from my post for offences 
 which the authorities could not get themselves to describe. 
 And now attend to me, such as I am, and you shall see 
 what you shall see about the barbarity and profligacy of the 
 inquisitors of Eome ! " 
 
 One of the apostate's reverend supporters insisted 
 that he should bring an action, which was laid, in 
 the first instance, against Messrs. Burns and Lam- 
 bert, the publishers of the " Lectures ; " but the 
 
ALCESTER STREET. 61 
 
 name of Dr. Newman, by leave of the Court, was 
 substituted as that of the defendant. The defence 
 (in the preparation of which Newman had the 
 friendly help of Mr. Hope-Scott, Q.C.) consisted 
 of twenty-three paragraphs of justification ; and 
 woman after woman confronted the curious black- 
 wigged man, who " smiled and smiled " as they 
 denounced him as the perpetrator of their ruin. 
 Against their evidence was pitted the denial of 
 Achilli, and this prevailed. Newman was sentenced 
 to pay a fine of £100, and to be imprisoned until it 
 was paid. While the cheque was being written, 
 a cordon of chairs was drawn around him, so that 
 he might feel himself in custody ; a detention 
 which adds his name to the list of imprisoned 
 law-breakers, with Shakspere and with Bunyan. 
 The Times, speaking of the result of the trial, said : 
 " To Protestants and Romanists, the case, truly 
 viewed, is unimportant ; its real significance is in 
 the discredit it has tended to throw on our ad- 
 ministration of justice, and the impression which it 
 has tended to disseminate — that where religious 
 differences come into play, a jury is the echo of 
 popular feeling, instead of being the expositor of 
 
 * A quarter of a century later a point in the case was quoted in 
 one of the Courts as a precedent, when the following dialogue took 
 
62 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 The house in Alcester Street was poor enough 
 for a man who had lost in law expenses ^"io.ooo, 
 and the church adjoining was an old gin warehouse. 
 " British spirits, pass this way," was the legend 
 painted on an old iron door at the back of the 
 altar. To a recent writer in a Birmingham news- 
 paper, who went to Alcester Street in those days, 
 and " saw John Henry Newman addressing a mere 
 handful — sometimes, perhaps, a couple of hundred 
 — of poor people, many of them Irish labourers," it 
 appeared that " Rome had lost the skill with which 
 she is credited of using with the greatest effective- 
 ness every instrument at her command. We hap- 
 pened to hear a discourse of his in those days in 
 which there was a brilliant sketch of Napoleon and 
 his influence on the national and religious life of 
 Europe. It was delivered on a week-night, and 
 the congregation, if we can trust to memory, did 
 not consist of more than forty people, most of 
 whom must have been very ill-educated." Newman 
 himself, not " Rome," judged differently, however ; 
 nor did he hesitate, when cholera broke out at 
 Walsall — doubtless also among " poor people " and 
 
 place : — Lord Chief Justice Cockburn : The case referred to 
 created a painful impression on my mind, which can never be 
 effaced. — The Solicitor-General : Your Lordship was counsel in 
 ^t.— The Lord Chief Justice : I was beaten, Mr. Solicitor ; and 
 I ought to have been the victor. 
 
ALCESTER STREET. 63 
 
 " mostly Irish " — to put his life at their disposal ; 
 taking, with Father St. John, the place of the priest 
 already prostrated by his labours. 
 
 Meanwhile, the man of letters was not idle. The 
 " Discourses to Mixed Congregations " were issued 
 from this house. . The lectures on " Difficulties felt 
 by Anglicans " were here composed, in which, as 
 also in the lectures on " The Present Position of 
 Catholics in England," his style attained its high- 
 water mark. These last-named lectures were 
 delivered in the Birmingham Corn Exchange, the 
 lecturer, who wore his habit, remaining seated, and 
 reading from his MS. Admission was by ticket, 
 and one ticket was held at the first lecture by 
 " Mr. Manning, late Archdeacon." At the end of 
 the course of nine lectures, Bishop Ullathorne 
 thanked the lecturer, who made, in reply, a singular 
 confession : " It is a curious thing for me to say 
 that, though I am of mature age, and have been 
 very busy in many ways, yet this is the first time 
 in my life that I have ever received any praise." 
 Beyond this hall the lectures were heard — and 
 praised, too. George Eliot read them " with great 
 amusement (!) " — the mark of exclamation her own 
 — " they are full of clever satire and description." 
 
64 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 AT THE ORATORY, EDGBASTON. 
 
 The building of the Oratory — Mr. Spooner takes fright — 
 The daily life — An interval at Dublin — The Oratory 
 school — Newman as a talker — The literary work of the 
 period — The Cardinalate — " Home" after Rome — Rednal 
 — The last resting-place. 
 
 In 1852 the Oratorians left Alcester Street for 
 Edgbaston, where they have since remained. 
 The plans for the house were drawn up by an 
 engineer, Mr. Terence Flannagan, a cousin of one 
 of the Fathers. During the building, some of the 
 Littlemore stories were again in the air ; and Father 
 Newman had to explain his kitchen arrangements 
 to the world in a letter to the Times : — 
 
 UNDERGROUND CELLS. 
 
 May 15th, 1851. 
 
 Sir, 
 
 The Times newspaper has just been brought me, 
 and I see in it a report of Mr. Spooner's speech on the 
 Religious Houses Bill. A passage in it runs as follows : " It 
 was not usual for the coroner to hold an inquest, unless 
 when a rumour had got abroad that there was a necessity 
 for one ; and how was a rumour to come from the under- 
 
AT THE ORATORY, EDGBASTON. 65 
 
 ground cells of convents ? Yes, he repeated, underground 
 cells ; and he would tell honourable members something 
 about such places. At this moment, in the parish of 
 Edgbaston, within the Borough of Birmingham, there was a 
 large convent of some kind or other being erected, and the 
 whole of the underground was fitted up with cells ! " The 
 house alluded to in this extract is the one I am building for 
 the Congregation of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, of which 
 I am Superior. The underground cells to which Mr. Spooner 
 refers have been devised in order to economize space for 
 offices commonly attached to a large house. I think they 
 are five in number, but I cannot be certain. They run under 
 the kitchen and its neighbourhood. One is to be a larder, 
 another is to be a coal-hole ; beer, perhaps wine, may occupy 
 a third. As to the rest, Mr. Spooner ought to know that we 
 have had ideas of baking and brewing ; but I cannot pledge 
 myself to him that such will be their ultimate destination. 
 Larger subterraneans commonly run under gentlemen's 
 houses in London, but I have never in thought or word 
 connected them with practices of cruelty and with inquests, 
 and never asked their owners what use they made of them. 
 When is this inquisition into the private matters of Catholics 
 to end ? 
 
 Your obedient servant, 
 
 John Henry Newman. 
 
 The church was merely four brick walls, requir- 
 ing no design beyond that of the local builder. So 
 it has since remained, with the addition of the 
 sanctuary, planned by Mr. J. H. Pollen. The place 
 has been described by a man who has at least the 
 qualifications of being familiar with every corner of 
 it. Writing about the year 1886, he says — 
 
 About a mile and a half from either of the Birmingham 
 
66 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 railway stations a visitor who passes along the whole length 
 of Broad Street to the " Five Ways," and then turns up the 
 Hagley Road, in the pleasant suburb of Edgbaston, reaches 
 a plain, substantial red-brick building on the right, which 
 covers a very considerable piece of ground. It has no 
 pretension to ecclesiastical style. The building adjoining, 
 which has somewhat the appearance of a riding-school, and 
 comes right up to the pavement with an almost unbroken 
 red-brick frontage of some eighty feet, is the big room of the 
 Oratory School in which the well-known Latin plays are 
 annually performed ; and an ostentatiously plain door at the 
 nearer end of it, open in the morning and evening, leads to 
 the Oratory Church, through a pleasing little round-arched 
 cloister, which bears marks rather of ingenious contrivance 
 than of any boldly conceived design. The church itself will 
 probably disappoint the visitor, as it is small and dingy and 
 without any architectural feature of interest, being, in fact, 
 only a temporary building that has undergone alteration 
 from time to time. The careful observer may, however, find 
 in odd corners a bit of mosaic or of marble work that will 
 please him ; but where imitative decorations mainly prevail, 
 the lover of the genuine is apt to distrust everything. The 
 plain oaken pulpit is that occupied at irregular intervals by 
 Dr. Newman until two or three years ago ; and up a passage 
 behind a statue of St. Joseph will be found the small and 
 dark chapel of " Bona Mors," where he daily said Mass at 
 seven in the morning, until his elevation to the Sacred 
 College gave him the privilege of doing so in his own private 
 room. On the spectator's left of the high altar is the 
 Cardinal's throne, where, unless indisposed, he presides at 
 the chief ceremony on the great festivals of the Church, and 
 notably at the High Mass on the Feast of St. Philip Neri 
 
 (May 26th) and on that of the Immaculate Conception 
 
 December 8th). 
 
 The cost of the Achilli case may, perhaps, partly 
 account for the poverty and inadequacy of the 
 
AT THE ORATORY, EDGBASTON. 67 
 
 Oratory Church at Birmingham. It had been in 
 the Cardinal's thoughts to build a worthier, one 
 which would in miniature recall St. Mark's at 
 Venice, the church he most of all admired ; and 
 M. Viollet le Due came to Birmingham and 
 prepared plans. But the "libel" trial timed with 
 the entrance of the Fathers into the new house 
 at Edgbaston ; and Newman used to say that he 
 had not the heart to ask for aid to build a big 
 church after the inflowing of subscriptions to defray 
 his legal expenses. Heavy as these were, there 
 was a surplus of money subscribed ; to be re-spent 
 partly in Ireland, which had given, as usual, 
 abundantly out of its own poverty. 
 
 There, at Edgbaston, for thirty-eight years, he 
 lived, laboured, and loved. The little break made, 
 early in the time, by his residence in Dublin as 
 Rector of the Irish Catholic University, hardly 
 destroys the continuity of that long spell of peace- 
 ful years. He was still " the Father " in his experi- 
 mental absence ; an experiment which did not 
 succeed. Nor did he in Ireland cut himself off 
 from old friends. The men of the Oxford Move- 
 ment were gathered about him, his own converts, 
 some of them : Mr. Allies, who has told the story of 
 his momentous " Life's Decision ; " Mr. Aubrey de 
 Vere, the link between the vitalizing of poetry by 
 
68 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 Wordsworth and Tennyson — his friends — and the 
 vitalizing of religion by Newman and Manning — 
 himself a sharer alike in the literary and in the 
 religious glory ; Henry Bedford, who once well 
 compared plain Father Newman to Napoleon, 
 wearing no star among his generals who wore — 
 constellations ; J. H. Pollen, formerly a clergyman, 
 and afterwards to fill more than one responsible 
 post in the world of art and of politics ; Le Page 
 Renouf, the first of scholars in phases of Biblical 
 history — -now of the British Museum ; Thomas 
 Arnold, the son of Dr. Arnold and the brother of 
 Matthew ; Robert Ornsby, the biographer of 
 Hope-Scott ; Penny, who had been a visitor at 
 Littlemore after his resignation of his living and 
 his reception, before Newman's, into the Church ; 
 and W. H. Anderdon, who afterwards as a Jesuit 
 Father fulfilled his apostolate, or continues it from 
 Heaven. The lectures on " University Education " 
 were delivered in Dublin ; and the fame and name 
 of Newman still inhabit the city from which he 
 retired, at the end of 1859, with the conviction that 
 he had served " a country which had tokens in her 
 of an important future, and the promise of still 
 greater works than she has yet achieved in the 
 cause of the Catholic faith." 
 
 Dublin or Oxford dwelt, for a time, in Newman's 
 
AT THE ORATORY, EDGBASTON. 69 
 
 thoughts, as alternative places for an attempt to 
 
 establish a College of high aims for Catholics. 
 
 Dublin fell through, and the Oxford attempt was 
 
 never made ; for it failed, for good or for ill, to win 
 
 the final approval of Pius IX., though Cardinals 
 
 and others, including many fathers of sons, awaited 
 
 its accomplishment with hopes and blessings. The 
 
 Oratory School, established at Birmingham in 1859, 
 
 supplied a smaller need, but supplied it well. One 
 
 " Old Boy," Mr. Arthur Pollen, recalls :— 
 
 At the Oratory we saw a good deal of the Cardinal ; and, 
 although he took no active share in the administration of the 
 school, his interest in it was always great. Nothing pleased 
 him more than making friends with the boys, and the many 
 opportunities we had of personal contact with him made the 
 friendship a real one. Of course, to us he was the greatest 
 of heroes. Slight and bent with age, with head thrust for- 
 ward, and a quick firm gait, the great Oratorian might often 
 be seen going from corridor to corridor, or across the school 
 grounds. His head was large, the pink biretta made it seem 
 still more so, and he carried it as if the neck were not strong 
 enough for the weight. His face changed but little ; yet he 
 would be a bold man who attempted to describe its sweet- 
 ness, its firmness, and its strength. A pontifical ring and 
 red sash and biretta were the only symbols of his rank ; and 
 no one living in the Oratory would imagine that it was the 
 home of a Prince of the Holy Roman Church. It had been 
 his special desire from the beginning that no ceremony or 
 state should be maintained. He was always known by those 
 in the house as " the Father ; " and except in the part he 
 took in the ceremonies of the Church, his dignity made 
 small difference to his life. In the Latin plays which he 
 had prepared for the boys to act he always took the keenest 
 
70 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 interest, insisting on the careful rendering of favourite 
 passages, and himself giving hints in cases of histrionic 
 difficulty. In the school chapel he from time to time 
 appeared, giving a short address, and assisting at the after- 
 noon service. It is curious that it should have been in con- 
 nection with these two widely different occupations that we 
 should have seen most of him. It is, perhaps, characteristic 
 of his disposition, in which playfulness and piety were so 
 sweetly combined. 
 
 Another "Old Boy," Dr. Sparrow, also remembers 
 some of the methods and moods of his master : — 
 
 The first boy to arrive was the eldest son of Serjeant 
 Bellasis — R. G. Bellasis, who afterwards joined the Con- 
 gregation of the Oratory, and is now Father Richard 
 Bellasis, of the Birmingham Oratory. I went myself to the 
 Oratory in 1863, and for eleven years enjoyed the privilege 
 and blessing of the Cardinal's training. In those early days 
 of the school we saw more of the Father (as we called him) 
 than was possible for the students to have done in later 
 years, owing to his age and physical weakness. Every 
 month, in my time, each form went up to the Father's room 
 and was examined by him vivd voce in the work done during 
 the preceding month, a trying ordeal for those who were 
 nervous or idle, notwithstanding the kindness and gentleness 
 of the Father, who was one of the most considerate and 
 sympathetic of examiners. The Father always attached 
 great importance to the " lesson by heart," and insisted on 
 perfect accuracy and readiness in its repetition. He was 
 always most particular to urge upon the boys a higher 
 standard of honour, and never would tolerate anything mean 
 or shabby. At the end of each term every boy went to the 
 Father for what we called his " character," that is, the 
 Father spoke to him privately as to his progress and be- 
 haviour during the past term. There was a story that in 
 the early days of the school the Father received about the 
 
AT THE ORATORY, EDGBASTON. 71 
 
 same time a letter from A., who had a boy at the school, 
 complaining that the vacation was too long, and a letter 
 from B., who also had a son at the school, complaining that 
 the vacation was too short ; Dr. Newman quietly (after 
 cutting off the signatures) sent A.'s letter to B., and B.'s 
 ItUer to A., after which no more was heard from either on 
 the subject. When I was reading for the London University 
 Intermediate Examinations in Arts along with another, the 
 Father took us himself in classics and English literature, 
 and I shall never forget those lectures, especially those in 
 literature. He told us how greatly he admired Sir Walter 
 Scott's novels ; he also expressed a great liking for the 
 " Rejected Addresses," as some of the cleverest parodies he 
 had read ; and he encouraged us to read good novels. 
 
 The life of the Fathers of the Oratory differs 
 little from that of any group of secular priests living 
 in community. A visitor to Edgbaston in the early 
 'eighties, Mr. C. Kegan Paul, gives the following 
 account of the domestic routine : — 
 
 Each Father has his own comfortable room,* library and 
 bedroom in one, the bed within a screen, the crucifix above, 
 and the prized personal little fittings on the walls. The 
 library is full of valuable books, many of them once the 
 private property of Dr. Newman, now forming the nucleus 
 of a stately collection for the use of the Community. The 
 quiet men who share this home come and go about their 
 several businesses — the care of the school, whose buildings 
 join, but are separate from the Oratory proper, the work in 
 the church, in hearing confessions, saying Masses, and 
 preaching. In the house the long soutane and biretta are 
 worn ; to go abroad they wear the usual dress of the clergy 
 
 * " The Father," however, had two rooms allotted to him. 
 
72 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 in England. Perhaps it is the dinner-hour, and the silent 
 figures pass along the galleries to the refectory, a lofty room 
 with many small tables, and a pulpit at one end opposite the 
 tables. At one of these sits the Superior alone, clad like 
 the rest save the red lines of his biretta, which mark his 
 Cardinal's rank. But among his children, and in his home, 
 he is still more the Superior and the Father than a Prince 
 of the Church. At a table near him may, perhaps, be a 
 guest, and at others the members of the Community, two 
 and two. The meal is served by two of the Fathers, who 
 take this office in turn ; and it is only of late that Dr. 
 Newman has himself ceased to take his part in this brotherly 
 service, owing to his advanced years. During the meal a 
 novice reads from the pulpit a chapter of the Bible, then 
 a short passage from the life of St. Philip Neri, and then 
 from some book, religious or secular, of general interest. 
 The silence is otherwise unbroken save for the words needful 
 in serving the meal. Towards the end, one of the Fathers 
 proposes two questions for discussion, or rather for utterance 
 of opinion. On one day there was a point of Biblical criticism 
 proposed, and one of ecclesiastical etiquette (if the word 
 may be allowed) ; whether, if a priest, called in haste to 
 administer Extreme Unction, did so inadvertently with the 
 sacred oil set apart for another purpose, instead of that for 
 Unction, the act was gravely irregular. Each gave his 
 opinion on one or other of these questions, the Cardinal on 
 the first, gravely, and in well-chosen words. Yet it seemed 
 to the observer that, while he, no doubt, recognized that such 
 a point must be decided and might have its importance, 
 there was a certain impatience in the manner in which he 
 passed by the ritual question and fastened on that proposed 
 from Scripture. After this short religious exercise, the com- 
 pany passed into another room for a frugal dessert and glass 
 of wine, since the day chanced to be a feast ; and there was 
 much to remind an Oxford man of an Oxford Common- 
 room, the excellent talk sometimes to be heard there, and 
 the dignified unbending for a while from serious thought. 
 
AT THE ORATORY, EDGBASTON. 
 
 53 
 
 As a talker in the old days Newman has been 
 described by Mr. J. A. Froude : — 
 
 Newman's mind was world-wide. He was interested in 
 everything which was going on in science, in politics, in 
 literature. Nothing was too large for him, nothing too 
 trivial, if it threw light upon the central question, what man 
 really was, and what was his destiny. His natural tempera- 
 ment was bright and light ; his senses, even the commonest, 
 were exceptionally delicate. He could admire enthusiasti- 
 cally 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 said ; "it makes one burn to 
 have been a soldier ! " He seemed always to be better 
 informed on common topics of conversation than any one 
 else who was present. He was never condescending with 
 us (undergraduates), never didactic or authoritative ; but 
 what he said carried conviction along with it. Perhaps his 
 supreme merit as a talker was that he never tried to be witty 
 or to say striking things. Ironical he could be, but not ill- 
 natured. Not a malicious anecdote was ever heard from 
 him. Prosy he could not be. He was lightness itself — the 
 lightness of elastic strength — and he was interesting because 
 he never talked for talking's sake, but because he had some- 
 thing real to say. 
 
 At Littlemore he had told his young men to 
 drop the Mister. " Call me Newman," he said. But 
 on this point they were not bold enough to obey. 
 " The Vicar " was a good way out of the difficulty 
 then, as "The Father" was at the Oratory, where 
 he called the others by their Christian names — 
 "William" and "John;" proving that a title is 
 
 Cornell Catholic 
 Union Library. 
 
74 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 not always the useless " tin-kettle " which Lord 
 Strangford found his own. Archdeacon George 
 Anthony Denison speaks of the Oriel Common- 
 room in 1828, attended by " Whately, Arnold, 
 Blanco White, Keble, Newman, Hampden," and 
 others, as being " as dull a place socially as I can 
 remember anywhere " — " there was no freedom of 
 intercourse." But Mozley, also a Fellow, supposes 
 the Archdeacon must have forgotten all about 
 Oriel, since he jumbles together names of men he 
 can never have seen together there. Probably, 
 Newman and his intimates did not unbosom them- 
 selves to Denison ; possibly, Newman received 
 some of his statements with even that withering 
 " Really ! " after hearing which you were supposed 
 to go and hide yourself. Certain it is that Newman 
 told him in later years that "he was sorry for 
 instances of harshness" towards him during their 
 time at Oriel. Denison answered that he had no 
 recollection of any such instances, but, if such 
 there were, it must have been that Newman was 
 far more in earnest than he. 
 
 Newman, then and afterwards, was never wanting 
 in tact as a talker. Father Bertrand Wilberforce, 
 O.P., writes to me: "A characteristic story used to 
 be told by my dearest father.* When Newman 
 
 * Henry Wilberforce, who resigned the living of East Farleigh 
 
AT THE ORATORY, EDGBASTOM. 75 
 
 was Fellow of Oriel, during the Hampden con- 
 troversy, an American professor visited Oxford and 
 dined at the high table. As the Fellows took 
 different views in the controversy, it was never 
 mentioned at dinner. The American, not under- 
 standing this, suddenly cried out : ' Well, Mr. 
 Newman, what about this Hampden controversy ? ' 
 Newman at once seized a spoon, and taking a 
 potato from the dish, said : ' A hot potato ? ' " 
 Another time, when a naval chaplain was em- 
 barrassed by being asked whether his service on 
 board ship was " High " or " Low," Newman inter- 
 posed : "Surely that depends upon the tide." His 
 own peculiar method of turning off questions which 
 were not timely is well known. " Serious compli- 
 cations in Rome, Father,'' said Lord Edward 
 Howard,* a member of Parliament anxious to get 
 at Newman's mind during a crisis of the Roman 
 question. " Yes," said the Father, quickly adding : 
 " And in China." And there was something in 
 
 to become a Catholic, and to whom Newman dedicated " Callista " • 
 ' ' To you alone, who have known me so long, and who love me so 
 well, could I venture to offer -i trifle such as this. But you will 
 recognize the author in his work and take pleasure in the recogni- 
 tion." It is Henry Wilberforce who forms the most charming and 
 human figure in all the group of Newman's contemporaries sketched 
 by Mr. Mozley. 
 
 * Afterwards first Lord Howard of Glossop, whom Newman 
 came to London purposely to see upon his death-bed. 
 
76 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 his manner, we suppose, which prevented his ques- 
 tioners on such occasions from feeling that they 
 were being trifled with. When he knew words 
 would be wasted, he would not spend them. One 
 of those about him having resolved to leave him, 
 under circumstances likely to raise exclamations 
 and to invite remonstrance, told him his deter- 
 mination. " By what train ? " was all he said in 
 acceptance of the inevitable. His offer to the 
 Protestant champion who challenged him to a 
 discussion, that he would play him on the violin, 
 was another instance of his economy of words. 
 
 Many were the visitors from afar who sought out 
 the Father at the Oratory : strangers and wayfarers, 
 generally in anxiety about their souls ; old friends, 
 too, some of whom, like Lord Emly and Aubrey 
 de Vere, made a point of paying him a yearly visit. 
 There, when both were bowed with age, met the 
 two great Cardinals — the friends, counterparts and 
 contrasts during sixty years. In the 'eighties they 
 had half an hour together in Birmingham : saying 
 not much, but looking each at each, with what self- 
 revelations, what leave-takings ! When the news of 
 death came from Birmingham, the Prince of the 
 Church at Westminster' — -though eight years 
 younger — bowed his head and said he felt he had 
 his own notice to quit. Some went to the Oratory, 
 
AT THE ORATORY, EDGBASTON. 77 
 
 as it were by night. Other business brought them 
 to the Midlands : politics, for example. The last 
 time Mr. Gladstone visited the house the invalid 
 could not see him ; but the politician, hearing that 
 the Cardinal's arrangements for reading when 
 reclining were defective, supplied a remedy. And 
 there were some who were not even as Nicodemus ; 
 who were drawn to the Oratory, but never went. 
 " I envy you your opportunity of seeing and 
 hearing Newman," wrote George Eliot to Miss 
 Hennell ; " and I should like to make an expedi- 
 tion to Birmingham with that sole end." If only 
 she had gone ! 
 
 It was the " Apologia," written at Edgbaston in 
 1864, that did much more than confute Kingsley — 
 it " breathed new life into me/' said George Eliot, 
 who, so speaking, spoke too for others. " Pray 
 mark," she writes, " that beautiful passage in which 
 he thanks his friend, Ambrose St. John. I know 
 hardly anything that delights me more than such 
 evidence of sweet brotherly love being a reality in 
 the world." In 1866 Newman wrote at Birming- 
 ham his answer to Pusey's " Eirenicon : " " There 
 was one of old time who wreathed his sword in 
 myrtle; excuse me, you discharge your olive-branch 
 as if from a catapult." In 1870 the "Grammar 
 of Assent " was published ; and five years later he 
 
78 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 issued his " Letter to the Duke of Norfolk on Mr. 
 Gladstone's Expostulations : " taking this very- 
 welcome opportunity for linking his name with that 
 of one of the Old Boys of the Oratory School who 
 was dear to him. Perhaps the life of the man of 
 letters at Edgbaston was a more even one than it 
 had ever been elsewhere : bringing with it no great 
 discoveries, or fears, or surprises. He did not again 
 "see a ghost:" — such as he had encountered in 1839, 
 when the history of the fifth century revealed to 
 him that the old Monophysite heresy was a type 
 of Anglicanism ; and such as reappeared to him in 
 1842 while translating Athanasius. He did not 
 laugh to himself any longer as he had laughed at 
 Maryvale over his composition of " Loss and Gain '' 
 — with its peculiar convert-clerical irony. He did 
 not feel again the thrill of pleasure which ran 
 through him as he took down the volumes of the 
 Fathers from the shelves at Littlemore, after he 
 had been received into the Church, and said, " You 
 are mine now, you are mine now : " this nearest 
 approach to almost bridal joy and sense of posses- 
 sion and triumph at last after long wooing, ex- 
 perienced by the lonely student, who had felt 
 himself called to lead a single life from his youth, 
 and for whom pleasure held out no temptations. 
 In truth, the most disturbing event of the 
 
AT THE ORATORY, EDCBASTON. 79 
 
 Edgbaston period was the publication in the 
 Standard of the private letter he had written — 
 with a pen primed with panic, the pen of a recluse 
 — during the sittings of the Vatican Council, to 
 Bishop Ullathorne — between whom and himself 
 the relations were always affectionate. And it 
 "took away his breath" to find, one morning in 
 1885, among his letters one from Frank Power's 
 sister, to say that she possessed a relic from 
 Khartoum — a copy of " The Dream of Gerontius," 
 given to her brother by Gordon, and scored by 
 Gordon with incisive pencil-marks at such passages 
 as, " Now that the hour is come, my fear is fled," 
 and " Pray for me, O my friends." This poem, 
 in which penetrating sincerity of feeling on a 
 great subject finds the most poetical expression 
 attained by Newman, was sent by him, in the 
 first instance, to a periodical, the editor of which 
 asked him for something : " I have routed this 
 out of a drawer." 
 
 From Birmingham he had now and again to 
 make a profession of Faith : — 
 
 I have not had one moment's wavering of trust in the 
 Catholic Church ever since I was received into her fold. I 
 hold, and ever have held, a supreme satisfaction in her 
 worship, discipline, and teaching ; and an eager longing, 
 and a hope against hope, that the many dear friends whom 
 I have left in Protestantism may be partakers in my hap- 
 
80 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 piness. And I do hereby profess that Protestantism is 
 the dreariest of possible religions ; that the thought of the 
 Anglican service makes me shiver, and the thought of the 
 Thirty-nine Articles makes me shudder. Return to the 
 Church of England ! No ! " The net is broken, and we 
 are delivered." I should be a consummate fool (to use a 
 mild term) if, in my old age, I left " he land flowing with 
 milk and honey " for the city of confusion and the house of 
 bondage, 
 
 He was only sixty-one, and had still a third of 
 his life to run when he was writing thus of his 
 " old age." The first letter I ever had from him, 
 written early in 1874, ends: "Don't forget in 
 your prayers that I am very old now, and need 
 every help I can get from friends." For twenty 
 years there were such closing passages and post- 
 scripts to letters addressed alike to friend and 
 casual correspondent, postscripts always pene- 
 trating. By 1887 it had got to "Excuse a short 
 letter — but I do not write without pain ; " and 
 the signature became as much as he could easily 
 attempt at the end of the text indited in a hand 
 rather freer than his own, but closely formed upon 
 it, by his faithful friend and devoted other-self, 
 Father William Neville.* 
 
 The news of his impending elevation to the 
 
 * One of the six Anglican clergymen connected with St. Saviour's, 
 Leeds, received into the Church together by Father Newman in 
 1851. 
 
AT THE ORATORY, EDGB ASTON. 81 
 
 Cardinalate reached Newman at the Oratory early 
 in 1879 by rumour; and in March a letter from 
 Cardinal Manning, giving an all but official message 
 to that effect from the Pope, put an end to the 
 '' suspense " he said he felt while the news seemed 
 to be known to everybody, but to him had never 
 been formally announced. His was not the attitude 
 of St. Bonaventura, who looked up from washing 
 dishes in the kitchen to tell the Pope's messengers 
 to hang up the hat in the passage. It was no 
 bauble to Newman, whose respect for authority was 
 the mainspring of his Anglican as of his Catholic 
 life, and gave a value, in his eyes, to a recognition 
 from the Father of Christendom. It was a seal 
 set upon his fidelity by Leo XIII., who was wont 
 to refer to him affectionately as "my Cardinal." 
 It closed controversies which, while they lasted, 
 had been sometimes hot, and always disturbing ; 
 vexed questions about an Oratorian establishment 
 at Oxford ; about the opportuneness of the Vatican 
 Council's definition ; about the dogmatism of Dr. 
 Ward and the Dublin Review ; about his general, 
 but strictly conditioned, sympathy with the writers 
 in the suppressed Rambler. It was a pledge of 
 good will from a quarter which, by rewarding him 
 so highly, practically imposed silence on the old 
 opponents. "They are all on my side now," said 
 
 G 
 
82 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 the aged Cardinal with a smile : a smile which had 
 no poor human triumphing in it, but an added 
 indulgent sweetness. Pusey did not quite under- 
 stand how much it meant, when he wrote to 
 Newman to congratulate him on his having the 
 offer of the Cardinalate, and on his alleged refusal 
 of it. Writing later, Pusey said : " His still life 
 in the Oratory at Birmingham had been an ideal 
 to me. However, dear Newman thought that it 
 would have been ungrateful in him towards those 
 who had been at the pains to obtain this honour 
 for him, and he accepted it, though he himself 
 preferred obscurity. . . . Nothing has or can come 
 between my deep love for John Henry Newman." 
 In truth the old "still life in the Oratory" was 
 not broken, when once the new Cardinal had 
 been in Rome and received his hat — choosing 
 Cor ad cor loquitur as his motto, and St. George 
 in Velabro as his titular church. It was the same 
 still life, and the old retiring John Henry New- 
 man ; but it was the life crowned with the only 
 glory he sought, the approbation of the ' living 
 Church : a glory which, like the " harrowing praise " 
 in Coventry Patmore's " Odes," humbles even 
 while it exalts.* 
 
 * Dr. DSUinger, who, during his last years, gave up to gossip 
 a mind meant for history, said Newman's elevation showed that 
 
AT THE ORATORY, EDGBASTON. 83 
 
 Back to Birmingham he came, after weariness 
 in Rome, in July, 1879. "To come home again!" 
 he said to the flock who gathered to meet him — 
 " in that word ' home ' how much is included ! I 
 know well that there is a more heroic life than a 
 home-life. We know St. Paul's touching words 
 in which he says he is an outcast. We know, too, 
 that our Blessed Lord had not where to lay His 
 head. But the idea of home is consecrated to us 
 by St. Philip, who made it the very essence of his 
 religious institute. Therefore I do indeed /eel 
 pleasure in coming home again.'' A few visits of 
 a few days' duration through the ten remaining 
 and declining years were the only absences from 
 Edgbaston, except the stays at Rednal — the 
 country-house of the Oratorians. 
 
 The end came at last quickly. There had been 
 little illnesses ; and the failure of strength was so 
 apparent that it seemed as if a breath or a move- 
 ment would extinguish the faint spark. On one of 
 
 ' ' his real views are not known at Rome," cheaply adding that 
 "several of his works, had he written in French, Italian, or Latin, 
 would have found a place on the 'Index.'" This opinion was 
 printed and shown to Newman, who wrote: "It has pained me 
 very much as manifesting a soreness and want of kindness for me 
 which I did not at all suppose he felt. It makes one smile to 
 suppose that Romans, of all men in the world, are wanting in acute- 
 ness, or that there are not quite enough men in the world who 
 would be ready to convict me of heterodoxy if they could." 
 
84 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 these days he asked some of the Fathers to come 
 in and play or sing to him Father Faber's hymn 
 of "The Eternal Years." When they had done 
 so once, he made them repeat it, and this several 
 times. "Many people," he said, "speak well of 
 my ' Lead, kindly Light,' but this is far more 
 beautiful. Mine is of a soul in darkness — this 
 of the eternal light." Into that light he wakened 
 up on Monday evening, the nth of August, 1890, 
 in the ninetieth year of his age. 
 
 It was impossible on the day of the funeral — a 
 day also of fruition — not to think of that other day 
 at Little more, when he entered the fold on earth 
 which is one with the fold in heaven. Above and 
 between the solemn chants, I was haunted by the 
 words which " A Young Convert " has said, and 
 which older converts say in measure, on the day 
 of reception into the Church — 
 
 " Who knows what days I answer for to-day ? 
 Giving the bud, I give the flower. I bow 
 This yet unfaded and a faded brow. 
 Bending these knees, and feeble knees, I pray. 
 Thoughts yet unripe in me I turn one way ; 
 Give one repose to pain I know not now ; 
 One leaven to joy that comes I guess not how. 
 I dedicate my fields when spring is grey. 
 
 " O rash (I smile) to pledge my hidden wheat ! 
 I fold to-day, at altars far apart, 
 Hands trembling with what toils ! In their retreat 
 
AT THE ORATORY, EDGBASTON. 85 
 
 I sign my love to come, my folded art. 
 I light the tapers at my head and feet, 
 And lay the crucifix on this silent heart." 
 
 Well had John Henry Newman's forty-five years 
 of Catholic life answered to the great act of the 
 ninth of October, 1845. To the Catholic Church 
 indeed he came, not in the bud, but in full flower of 
 his maturity. At its altars how faithfully knelt the 
 knees, at first firm, but afterwards feeble with the 
 weight of ninety years ! Nor was he once dis- 
 appointed, during all these forty-five years, of the 
 " repose " he had invoked at Littlemore for coming 
 pain. At " altars far apart " — in London, in Rome, 
 in Dublin, above all, at Birmingham — he had folded 
 " hands trembling with what toils ; " and in that 
 safe shelter he had been surrounded by his dearest 
 friends, and had practised the art of the penman 
 in full perfection. And now, at last, were lighted 
 those tapers at his head and feet ; and now was 
 that crucifix laid upan his silent heart. The forty- 
 five years since he first faced that final scene 
 seemed now but a moment in the wonderful dream. 
 The seal had been set on that October day for 
 ever and ever, and no man could break it. By 
 that day, all eternity was tinged. 
 
 At Rednal he was laid to rest by loving hands. 
 His grave he shares with Ambrose St. John, who 
 
S6 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 died in 1875, and in whose memory Newman 
 planted the now spreading bed of St. John's wort 
 down one side of the small enclosure. They loved 
 each other in life ; in death they are not divided. 
 On either side is a grave — that of Father Edward 
 Caswall, and that of Father J. Gordon. Two other 
 graves are there : that of Robert Boland, who died 
 while a novice ; and that of a son of Father Pope 
 — an Oratorian after the death of his wife. Thus 
 do tender human relationships cling — as is fitting 
 in presence of the ashes of that human heart — 
 to the graveyard where Cardinal Newman lies. 
 
 Even the dust of a woman is in that last resting- 
 place of celibacy : Frances Wootten, widow of the 
 Oxford doctor who attended the inmates of the 
 monastery at Littlemore ; she who had followed 
 Newman, first into the Church, and then to 
 Birmingham to be the Matron, the Vice-Mother, 
 at the Oratory School. And my last words shall 
 leave him in association with women. He, who 
 gave himself to none, belonged to all ; becoming 
 the tender father and helper to many of that sex 
 which intimately enters into the life of a St. Paul 
 by Damaris, of a St. Francis de Sales by Madame 
 de Chantal. Among the flowers sent to Rednal, 
 were two wreaths, one of which bore the name of 
 a woman who offered it " to the most dear memory 
 
AT THE ORATORY, EDGBASTON. 87 
 
 of Cardinal Newman, who has been benefactor, 
 guide, arid counsellor through life." Another gar- 
 land came from the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, as 
 " a tribute of respect to a great Englishman, whose 
 beauty of life shed its light of purity over his own 
 century, but belongs to all ages : " a legacy that 
 shall endure, by time untarnished and undimmed 
 by death. 
 
88 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE OUTER WORLD. 
 
 A MAN is entered in a Biographical Dictionary 
 by the date of his birth ; but it is really the date 
 of death that ranges him in the memories of man- 
 kind. Macaulay and Newman belong to a different 
 epoch, but were born within a month or two of 
 each other. Newman was a baby when Keats, 
 a child of four or five, had not yet even heard of 
 Lempriere. Shelley, just over eight, was already 
 exciting the admiration of his sisters by his de- 
 clamation of Latin verse. Byron was beginning 
 his tumultuous teens, scribbling his first verses, and 
 being well hated at Harrow. Newman hardly 
 ranks as the contemporary of these, though he 
 was twenty when Keats died, was of age when 
 Shelley died, and when Byron died was twenty- 
 three. With Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, 
 though these were all born between thirty and 
 thirty-five years before him, he lived for thirty- 
 three, forty-two, and forty-nine years. In 1836, 
 
THE OUTER WORLD. 89 
 
 Faber, returning to Oxford from the Long, which 
 he had spent at the Lakes, reported that " Words- 
 worth spoke of Newman's sermons, some of which 
 he had read and liked exceedingly." Walter Scott 
 was thirty when Newman was born, and when 
 Scott died Newman was beginning the Tractarian 
 movement which was to give Abbotsford to 
 Rome. 
 
 Newman's literary admirations were in great 
 part those of the period. For Scott he had all 
 Mr. Gladstone's enthusiasm. The tinsel of that 
 medievalism did not disconcert him ; and he grate- 
 fully mentions Scott as having in some sort, by 
 his scenes of chivalry, prepared the path for the 
 Catholic revival ; surely a route to the Oratory 
 by way of Wardour Street ! Scott's novels he put 
 into the hands of the boys at the Oratory school 
 at Edgbaston as prizes, and even examined in 
 them. Perhaps he had his happiest holiday when 
 he spent five weeks at Abbotsford at the end of 
 1852, the guest of Mr. Hope-Scott, who, like his 
 wife, Lockhart's daughter, had become a Catholic. 
 When Newman got the invitation he wrote in 
 reply : " It would be a great pleasure to spend 
 some time with you, and then I have ever had 
 the extremest sympathy for Walter Scott, and it 
 would delight me to see his place. When he was 
 
SO CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 dying, I was saying prayers (whatever they were 
 worth) for him continually, thinking of Keble's 
 words, ' Think on the minstrel as ye kneel.' " 
 Lockhart was still alive, and the visits his daughter 
 and son-in-law paid him in London, he repaid 
 at Abbotsford, whither, finally, he had his books 
 taken. There, in the breakfast-room, because he 
 could not leave the ground-floor, and because he 
 shunned the dining-room where Sir Walter gave 
 up the ghost, the old editor, a stoic amid suffering, 
 a Protestant among Catholics, passed away, with 
 Father Lockhart, a distant cousin, at his unre- 
 sponsive side, and the sound of his daughter's 
 voice, reading prayers from her "Garden of the 
 Soul," in his ears. 
 
 One can well imagine the mystification of the old 
 editor of the Quarterly in presence of the Popery 
 which sat at his hearth, although he had been 
 willing to give Tractarianism a distant hearing in 
 his Review. In 1837, one of the party at Oxford 
 complacently records that " Lockhart finds he 
 must have an infusion of Oxford principles ; it 
 takes with people now — that is, such people as 
 read the Quarterly ; " and Philip Pusey, the member 
 of Parliament, told his brother Edward that one 
 of Newman's greatest triumphs was his " getting 
 hold of the Qicarterly." A little later this com- 
 
THE OUTER WORLD. 91 
 
 placency must have been shaken by the report 
 that Murray had said he would have given a 
 thousand pounds to be able to suppress the article 
 which Sewell had written. 
 
 Though the Quarterly might turn half an ear 
 timidly towards the arresting preacher of St. Mary 
 the Virgin, such leniency could not be expected 
 from the rival Review. Of course Macaulay was 
 cock-sure, even before reading one of Newman's 
 Anglican books, that he could reply to it. Writing 
 to the editor of the Edinburgh, Napier, in February, 
 1843, he says : " I hear much of a defence of the 
 miracles of the third and fourth centuries by 
 Newman. I have not yet read it. I think that I 
 could treat that subject without giving any scandal 
 to any rational person ; and I should like it much. 
 The times require a Middleton." There was no 
 weak openness to conviction lurking behind those 
 words ; nor yet behind these, written eight months 
 later, also to Napier, and also before he had read the 
 book he was eager to smash : " Newman announces 
 an English hagiology ,in numbers which is to 
 contain the lives of such blessed saints as Thomas 
 a Becket and Dunstan. I should not dislike to be 
 the devil's advocate on such an occasion." In his 
 essay on the " Comic Dramatists of the Restorar 
 tion," Macaulay just alludes to the Tractarians, 
 
92 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 saying that Jeremy Collier's notions touching " the 
 importance of vestments, ceremonies, and solemn 
 days, differed little from those which are now held 
 by Dr. Pusey and Mr. Newman" — a sentence 
 which suggests to the initiated that the writer 
 wrote once more without having read Newman — 
 who was never a Ritualist, and treasured no husk 
 except it held a kernel. 
 
 After all, it was left to Sir James Stephen and 
 to Henry Rogers to pillory Popery in the pages 
 of the Edinburgh. The first of these, after con- 
 fessing in a letter to Napier, in 1841, that what- 
 ever comes he "cannot but cherish the good old 
 Protestant feelings of our ancestors," thus con- 
 veniently explains away Mr. Newman : "As for 
 Newman himself, I am sorry that his integrity 
 should be impugned. I am convinced that a more 
 upright man does not exist. But his understanding 
 is essentially illogical and inveterately imaginative ; 
 and I have reason to fear that he labours under 
 a degree of cerebral excitement, which unfits him 
 for the mastery of his own thoughts and the 
 guidance of his own pen." It is worth noting, that 
 while Newman was being thus described on hearsay 
 as a literary lunatic, Pusey, his constant companion, 
 was writing of him to a friend : " You will be glad 
 to hear that the immediate excitement about 
 
THE OUTER WORLD. 93 
 
 Tract 90 is subsiding. It has been a harassing 
 time for N., but he was wonderfully calm." 
 
 Macaulay, instead of reading the books he had 
 already prejudged, probably contented himself 
 with reading the Edinburgh attack on them (April, 
 1843), and not all of that. "I have read three or 
 four pages of the article on the Puseyites, which 
 I like very much. I should be glad to know who 
 wrote it.'' The writer was Henry Rogers, who 
 congratulated himself with the true Whig con- 
 fidence, when he sent his MS. to the editor, that 
 he had " not spared ridicule " in treating " pub- 
 lications which are having a large sale, and are 
 doing immense mischief amongst the young, the 
 ardent, and the sentimental." But "the young, 
 the ardent, and the sentimental " had grown into 
 men and reviewers by the time the " Apologia " 
 appeared ; and Newman, for the first time, found 
 himself seriously considered, whether favourably 
 or not, by secular publications. 
 
 Indeed, " the young, the ardent, and the senti- 
 mental " of the early 'forties had made themselves 
 felt in the other walks of life, as well as in 
 literature, before many years were over. They 
 manned the Anglican Church. Rival Cabinet 
 Ministers might be seen sitting under the same 
 Tractarian shepherd in Mayfair. A Lord Chief 
 
94 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 Justice ranked it as his highest honour to be the 
 host of Cardinal Newman, even after his secession ; 
 and there was no house in London where he was 
 more welcome than at the Deanery of St. Paul's. 
 Dean Church was one of that immense body of 
 actual contemporaries or immediate juniors who 
 came under Newman's personal influence, and who, 
 in their turn, spread the principles which have 
 transformed the Anglican Communion. In one 
 sense the Guardian expresses the bare truth when 
 it speaks of Newman as "the founder of the 
 Anglican Church as it now is," and says : " Great 
 as his services have been to the Communion in 
 which he died, they are as nothing by the side 
 of those he rendered to the Communion in which 
 the most eventful years of his life were spent. 
 He will be mourned by many in the Roman 
 Church ; but their sorrow will be less than ours, 
 because they have not the same paramount reason 
 to be grateful to him." Not in admiration for his 
 mind, nor in reverence for his character, nor in 
 personal devotion yielded him even by strangers, 
 can those to whom he came be outstripped by 
 those whom he left. His life was divided with a 
 strange equality of time between the two Com- 
 munions ; for he lived in each for half of it almost 
 to a month. But he actually changed the face 
 
THE OUTER WORLD. 9? 
 
 of the Anglican Church, while he could not alter 
 one feature of the immutable other. 
 
 Of all his contemporaries, therefore, the Anglican 
 clergy bear most the marks of him. What their 
 predecessors were seventy years ago, when Newman 
 began " to come out of his shell," has ceased to be 
 a memory, but it remains as a tradition. " Decent, 
 easy men, who supremely enjoyed the gifts of the 
 founder, from the toil of reading, thinking, or 
 writing they had absolved their conscience. Their 
 conversation stagnated in a round of college busi- 
 ness, Tory politics, personal anecdotes, and private 
 scandal. Their dull and deep potations excused 
 the intemperance of youth." Such were the Oxford 
 dons of an earlier generation, as described by 
 Gibbon, Newman's greatest master in style, and 
 his finger-post to the Fathers. " Whenever you 
 meet a clergyman of my time," said Sydney Smith 
 to Mr. Gladstone about the year 1835, "you may 
 be sure he is a bad clergyman ; " and Sydney 
 Smith had as little love as Gibbon himself would 
 have had for " Puseyism." 
 
 Vainly was Evangelicalism pitched against " two- 
 bottle orthodoxy." In Wesley, Newman as a 
 Catholic recognized "the shadow of a Catholic 
 saint ; " but the name of Wesley worked no 
 wonders in the Oxford of Newman's early days. 
 
96 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 The Evangelicals entrenched themselves in an 
 obscure college, and their influence never spread 
 beyond St. Edmund's Hall. Mozley says it may 
 have been a common peculiarity of their com- 
 plexions, but the St. Edmund's men never looked 
 clean. He adds that their mental and moral 
 claims to influence were inconspicuous ; and Arch- 
 bishop Tait of Canterbury admits that there is too 
 much truth in this ugly delineation. Newman and 
 his friends, on the other hand, joined learning with 
 sanctity, and united good-breeding with unworldli- 
 ness. " We loved the Evangelicals because they 
 loved our Lord," said Pusey — a formula which 
 sums up the Catholic attitude towards the Salva- 
 tion Army to-day ; but that is the beginning and 
 the end of the bond ; and Newman saw, even if 
 Keble did not, that liberalism in religion, repre- 
 sented by Whately and the rest, was a force Evan- 
 gelicalism could not touch : that Evangelicalism 
 was itself only another form of liberalism, though 
 the feelings and prejudices of its adherents were 
 on the side of personal religiousness. The men 
 who had a general idea of the importance of 
 dogma, but who had not the enthusiasm of religion, 
 and the men who had the enthusiasm but no 
 science or coherence, met together under Newman, 
 and supplied to each other the deficiency of each. 
 
THE OUTER WORLD. 97 
 
 The leaders themselves — Newman, Pusey, and 
 Keble — united tender personal piety with a zeal 
 for dogmatic exactitude — for truth in thought as 
 well as in conduct. 
 
 The reasons why the early leadership seemed 
 to lie with Pusey, and not with Newman, are well 
 known. Equally well known is it that Newman 
 was the mainspring of the movement. " Out of 
 my own head," he says he started the Tracts, and 
 the Tracts became the text-books of the new 
 Anglicanism. The doctrines they expounded, 
 though fresh to the hearers, were old as the 
 Apostles, and were gathered by Newman from the 
 Bible he loved and studied ; they had been taught 
 without intermission by the Catholic Church from 
 the first Peter to the last Leo ; and the Anglican 
 Church itself, under Archbishop Laud, fitfully 
 received them. The result of Newman's labour as 
 a revivalist is seen to-day in half the rectories of 
 England. The typical Anglican minister trains, 
 conducts, even dresses himself on the model of the 
 Catholic priest ; and if externals could make him 
 the real thing, the real thing he would perfectly be. 
 Beautiful were the tributes which Newman's death 
 elicited from the conspicuous pulpits of Anglicanism, 
 and most affecting to Catholics ; but surely some of 
 the preachers strangely misunderstood their master 
 
 H 
 
98 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 when they hinted that he might never have left 
 Anglicanism in 1845 had he foreseen how many- 
 Roman collars would be worn, how many beards 
 be shaved off, how many " celebrations " be an- 
 nounced, and confessions heard, in the Establish- 
 ment in 1890. Why, the Arians in their day had 
 Bishops, and Masses, and organization as perfect 
 as that of the orthodox ; but it was with Athanasius 
 that Newman ranged himself while still an Angli- 
 can ; and it was precisely the parallel he found 
 between Anglicans and Arians or Donatists that 
 brought him at last from Oxford to Birmingham. 
 It was he, in truth, who said to Anglicans such as 
 these — 
 
 Look into the matter more steadily ; it is very pleasant to 
 decorate your chapels, oratories, and studies now, but you 
 cannot be doing this for ever. It is pleasant to adopt a 
 habit or a vestment ; to use your Office-book or your beads ; 
 but it is like feeding on flowers unless you have that objective 
 vision in your faith, and that satisfaction in your reason, of 
 which devotional exercises and ecclesiastical appointments 
 are the suitable expression. They will not last in the long 
 run, unless commanded and rewarded on Divine authority ; 
 they cannot be made to rest on the influence of individuals. 
 It is well to have rich architecture, curious works of art, and 
 splendid vestments, when you have a present God ; but oh, 
 what a mockery if you have not ! If your externals surpass 
 what is within, you are so far as hollow as your Evangelical 
 opponents, who baptize, yet expect no grace. Thus your 
 Church becomes not a home, but a sepulchre ; like those 
 high cathedrals once Catholic, which you do not know what 
 
THE OUTER WORLD. 99 
 
 to do with, which you shut up, and make monuments of, 
 sacred to the memory of what has passed away. 
 
 " You are under a destiny," very solemnly said 
 Newman also to the Anglican clergy, after he had 
 become a Catholic ; and he was attributing to 
 them what he had always believed in a very special 
 manner of himself. Not the third Napoleon him- 
 self had franker conviction of the distinctness of 
 his fate. During the tour in the South of Europe, 
 in 1833 — the tour which produced "Lead, kindly 
 Light " — " I began," he tells us, " to think that I 
 had a mission." When he paused in Rome and 
 was asked by Monsignor Wiseman to pay a second 
 visit, he replied with great gravity, " I have a work 
 to do in England." In Sicily, after an illness, he 
 sat down on his bed and began to sob violently. 
 " My servant asked what ailed me. I could only 
 answer him, ' I have a work to do in England.' " 
 The record, with the obvious hint, is made by 
 himself; and he evidently believed it to be no mere 
 coincidence that his return home, with its strange 
 adventures of both delay and speed, timed with 
 Keble's sermon on " National Apostasy." It was 
 the first Sunday after his arrival ; and he says, " I 
 have ever considered this day as the start of the 
 religious movement of 1833." When he retired to 
 Littlemore, as a sort of half-way house between 
 
ioo CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 England and Rome, he turned up an old copy- 
 book, and it took his breath away to find on it a 
 cross drawn between the words " verse " and 
 " book." Moreover, a further device, in which one 
 less smitten with his destiny might have recognized 
 a sister's chain and pendant, he could not make 
 out to be anything but " a set of beads w.ith a little 
 cross." Then there came his reception into the 
 Catholic Church, and thus the man of destiny 
 records it : "I am this night expecting Father 
 Dominic the Passionist, who from his youth has 
 been led to have distinct and direct thoughts, first, 
 of the countries of the north, and then of England. 
 After thirty years' (almost) waiting, he was, without 
 his own act, sent here." This is in the " Apologia ; " 
 and in " Loss and Gain," under fictitious names, 
 the story is told in greater detail : — 
 
 On the Apennines, near Viterbo, there dwelt a shepherd 
 boy, in the first years of this century, whose mind had early 
 been drawn heavenward ; and one day, as he prayed before 
 aji image of the Madonna, he felt a vivid intimation that he 
 was to preach the Gospel under the northern sky. There 
 appeared no means by which a Roman peasant should be 
 turned into a missionary ; nor did the prospect open, when 
 this youth found himself, first, a lay brother, then a Father, 
 in the Congregation of the Passion. Yet, though no external 
 means appeared, the inward impression did not fade — on the 
 contrary, it became more definite ; and, in process of time, 
 instead of the dim north, England was engraven on his 
 heart. And, strange to say, as years went on, without his 
 
THE OUTER WORLD. 101 
 
 seeking, for he was simply under obedience, our peasant 
 found himself at length upon the very shore of the stormy 
 Northern Sea, whence Cassar of old looked out for a new 
 world to conquer ; yet that he should cross the Strait was 
 still as little likely as before. But the day came, not, how- 
 ever, by any determination of his own, but by the same 
 Providence which, thirty years before, had given him the 
 intimation of it. 
 
 The importance which each ' Christian must of 
 necessity attach to himself — he for whom the 
 Heavens descended to the earth, who has angels 
 for his ministers, who is an heir of Paradise, and 
 who traces the special designs of Providence in the 
 details of his daily life — might seem to be alien 
 to the humility and to the self-abnegation which 
 Christianity enjoins. Yet he, whose Christian 
 egoism is most sublime, he it is who, paradoxically, 
 abases and annihilates himself most completely. 
 " From a boy I had been led to consider that my 
 Maker and I, His creature, were the two beings, 
 luminously such." And the attitude remained to 
 the end, and determined the disposition of Newman 
 towards all people and things. " It is face to face 
 in all matters between man and his God. He 
 alone creates ; He alone has redeemed ; before His 
 awful eyes we go in death ; and in the vision of 
 Him is our eternal beatitude." 
 
 But those who came near to the Sacred Person 
 
102 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 had reflections of His glory, and as such were held 
 in worship by Newman — the angels and the saints. 
 And the men about himself he frankly regarded in 
 the light of their relations, not with the outer world, 
 but with him and his spiritual being. The record 
 of his Oxford contemporaries is the record of what 
 they were to him, " John Henry Newman." He 
 learnt, for instance, habits of thought and the idea 
 of the Church as a corporate body from Whately ; 
 Hurrell Froude " fixed deep in me the idea of devo- 
 tion to the Blessed Virgin, and led me gradually to 
 believe in the Real Presence ; " Keble familiarized 
 him with the sacramental system ; and from Dr. 
 Hawkins he learnt the value of tradition. The 
 bond was a close one in all cases ; but it had its 
 basis on religion. In the streets of Dublin, long 
 after, Whately as Archbishop, and Xewman as 
 Rector of the Catholic University, met without 
 recognition ; but the story of his having absented 
 himself, years before, from chapel on purpose to 
 avoid receiving the Sacrament with Dr. Whately, 
 was pure invention. " He made himself dead to 
 me," says Newman of Whately with great sim- 
 plicity ; adding, " My reason told me it was impos- 
 sible we could have got on together longer had he 
 stayed in Oxford ; yet I loved him too much to 
 bid him farewell without pain." When Kingsley 
 
THE OUTER WORLD. 103 
 
 said, "Truth for its own sake had never been a 
 virtue with the Roman clergy," and this in a mere 
 magazine with the poor life of a month in it, no 
 one would have bothered his head over it — the 
 charge was too hackneyed to need a new rebuff 
 from Catholics. But " Father Newman " was 
 linked with the passage, fortunately, as he himself 
 afterwards thought. He accuses " me, John Henry 
 Newman," exclaimed the hermit at Birmingham, 
 whose destiny the Heavens had made known to 
 him. 
 
 So the " Apologia " was written. Later on, the 
 passages which seemed to have personal resent- 
 ment were suppressed by the author ; who, more- 
 over, gave the Rev. Sir William Cope a most 
 interesting explanation of his adoption of the 
 world's otvn weapons — hard words — in the unequal 
 duel : the world would not believe him if he spoke 
 calmly. His after-thoughts were that Kingsley 
 should escape resentment because he had become 
 accidentally " the instrument in the good Providence 
 of God, by whom I had an opportunity given me, 
 which otherwise I should not have had, of vindi- 
 cating my character and conduct in my ' Apologia.' " 
 Not, as he might well have said, "vindicating the 
 Catholic doctrine as to truth, and the sin of lying ; " 
 but vindicating, what with Newman was a synonym, 
 
104 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 " my character and conduct." And Newman adds, 
 in the same letter, that a friend had chanced to 
 hear Kingsley " preaching about me kindly ; " and 
 about Athanasius, too, he had been writing less 
 unkindly ; so " I said Mass for his soul as soon as 
 I heard of his death." 
 
 The old friends he lost and the new friends he 
 made when he became a Catholic were they whom 
 " God gave me when He took every one else away." 
 " And in you, Ambrose St. John," that chief new 
 friend, he says, " I gather up and bear in memory 
 those familiar and affectionate companions and 
 counsellors who in Oxford were given to me to be 
 my daily solace and relief; and all those others, 
 of great name and high example, who were my 
 thorough friends ; and also those many younger 
 men, -whether I knew them or not, who have never 
 been disloyal to me by word or deed." To 
 Pius IX. he paid his homage in a sermon at 
 Birmingham, in which he recalls "his great act 
 towards us here, towards me." " One of his first 
 acts after he was Pope was, in his great con- 
 descension, to call me to Rome ; then, when I got 
 there, he bade me send for my friends to be with 
 me ; and he formed us into an Oratory. . . . Such 
 is the Pope now happily reigning in the Chair of 
 St. Peter ; such are our personal obligations to 
 
THE OUTER WORLD. 105 
 
 him ; such has he been towards us, towards you, 
 my brethren." 
 
 It was precisely this pervading personality in 
 Newman that distinguished him from his con- 
 temporaries. The pretentious " we " was dropped 
 in favour of the simpler " I." The abstract was 
 exchanged for the concrete under a pen primed 
 with individuality. The unit spoke to the unit — 
 to the units who made up mankind. " Heart 
 speaketh unto heart,'' was his own chosen motto as 
 a Cardinal, who bared his heart for the inspection 
 of friend and foe ; who told men how, when he 
 was ordained an Anglican minister, " he wept most 
 abundant and most sweet tears at the thought of 
 what he had then become," and so on, through all 
 the phases of his life. Only those entirely ignorant 
 of Newman's selflessness in conduct would put down 
 this self-analysis and self-centred measurement of 
 men to petty vanity, from which he was wholly 
 free, or to vulgar love of applause, of which he 
 had none. For the most part the poet alone has 
 shown himself so spontaneously, so autobiogra- 
 phically in his manuscripts ; and all the world has 
 listened. But here, at last, humanity could be 
 studied in a priest. The personal and the human 
 had re-inhabited poetry with Shelley, Keats, and 
 Wordsworth ; and with Newman the personal and 
 
io6 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 the human entered into theology, and into his 
 account of it. He allowed himself to be put under 
 the microscope, and how he bore the ordeal all his 
 contemporaries will tell. 
 
 Yet Newman's friendships, though formed and 
 governed under exacting and unusual conditions, 
 were extraordinarily tender. Such friendships 
 among men were less common when the Oxford 
 movement began than they have since become ; 
 and the present generation, if it owed nothing else 
 to the Newmania (as Bishop Hampden called it), 
 would have reason to be grateful for this infusion 
 of tenderness into the relations of man with 
 man. The sentiment expressed, to George Eliot's 
 great admiration, in the closing passage of the 
 " Apologia," appears and reappears elsewhere — in 
 Newman's method of addressing Dr. Church, Dean 
 of St. Paul's — " Carissime ; " in his sudden outbreak 
 where, on hearing of the death of Hurrell Froude, 
 he throws aside in one epithet the conventional 
 stiffness of the eighteenth century which ruled 
 nearly all his poems, and exclaims — 
 
 "Dearest/ he longs to speak, as I to know, 
 And yet we both refrain ; 
 It were not good : a little doubt below, 
 And all will soon be plain." 
 
 Newman's young men improved on their model. 
 
THE OUTER WORLD. 107 
 
 Faber, who had a greater exuberance of both 
 feeling and expression, wrote to the present Duke 
 of Rutland, then Lord John Manners — 
 
 " Thou walkest with a glory round thy brow, 
 Like saints in pictures, radiant in the blaze 
 And splendour of thy boyhood, mingling now 
 With the bold bearing of a man, that plays 
 In eyes, which do with such sweet skill express 
 Thy soul's hereditary gentleness." 
 
 That male eyes had "sweet skill," or that men 
 had eyes at all worth observing by men, came as 
 a surprise, if not as a shock, to many ; and Faber 
 himself, writing to some one who expostulated 
 with him, says : " Strong expressions towards male 
 friends are matters of taste. I feel what they 
 express to me. B. thinks a revival of chivalry 
 in male, friendships a characteristic of the rising 
 generation, and a hopeful one." " B.," whoever he 
 was, was right. The shyness which made an 
 Englishman ashamed to embrace even his father, 
 arose from times when wine-parties and a common 
 interest in the heredity of dogs and horses were 
 the most sacred links between men. The Oxford 
 movement established different relations — of mutual 
 confidence, mutual affection, mutual respect. Of 
 the influence for good which these generous friend- 
 ships exercised, Mark Pattison was sensible — and 
 even Mr. James Anthony Froude. At first, when 
 
io3 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 undergraduates went home raving about Newman, 
 anxious parents shook their heads. The corre- 
 spondence passing about the same date between 
 Lord Strangford and the old Duke of Rutland, 
 reveals the perturbations of aristocratic fathers 
 over the friendships between their sons and the 
 plain commoner who was afterwards to make 
 his Queen an Empress, his solicitor a baronet, 
 and his secretary a peer. So of Newman, the 
 fountain of so much piety for thirsty souls in 
 future, anxious mothers were asking, "But is he 
 a good man ? " And, " But is he a good man ? " 
 diffident fathers and confiding sisters chimed in. 
 When the sermons and tracts penetrated into 
 the provinces, the question answered itself; and 
 happy were the mothers whose sons were under 
 the influence which made religion seem to the 
 young, and even to the ambitious, something manly 
 and ennobling. 
 
 It was near Windermere that Charlotte Bronte, 
 as the guest of the Shuttleworths in 1850, met her 
 future biographer, and told her during their first 
 talk "about Father Newman's lectures at the 
 Oratory in a very concise, graphic way.'' Then 
 follow some dots, eloquent dots. What do they 
 conceal ? Probably some phrase not much more 
 reasonable than Carlyle's description of Newman 
 
THE OUTER WORLO, tot) 
 
 as possessing " the brain of a medium-sized rabbit." 
 For Charlotte Bronte combined, as no mind, thanks 
 largely to Newman, ever will again in England, 
 exquisite sensibility, deep religiousness, and an 
 open intelligence, with as strained a notion of 
 Popery as that of any Exeter Hall rhetorician. 
 " Good people — very good people — I doubt not, 
 there are among the Romanists," she says in a 
 weakly generous mood ; " but," she makes haste to 
 add, writing to Mrs. Gaskell, who discovered lean- 
 ings to primitive Christianity, " but the system is 
 not one which should have such sympathy as 
 yours. Look at Popery taking off the mask at 
 Naples." The last sentence reads like the text 
 of one of Newman's lectures, a text to be torn 
 mercilessly to tatters. 
 
 By the way, Miss Bronte and Mrs. Gaskell went 
 to tea at this time at Fox How, the house of the 
 widow of Dr. Arnold ; and Mrs. Arnold had 
 yielded her son Thomas to follow Newman to 
 Rome. They were all in a tale, especially in 
 homes of hereditary goodness. When, at the very 
 beginning of things, Newman visited old Mr. 
 Wilberforce, and saw his pious family, little did 
 this pattern of Evangelicalism suppose that out 
 of four sons three would become Catholics, leaving 
 only Samuel to adorn the Anglican bench, while 
 
no CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 his unworldly brothers went their simple ways — 
 one, Archdeacon Robert Isaac Wilberforce, to die 
 while preparing for the priesthood in Rome ; 
 another, William, " the squire," to spend an obscure 
 life as a Catholic layman ; and the third, Henry — 
 most delightful of them all — to found the Weekly 
 Register, in this as in all else, says Newman, 
 " actuated by an earnest desire to promote the 
 interests of religion, though at the sacrifice of his 
 own." What is recorded of the Scotts, the 
 Arnolds, and the Wilberforces, is recorded of nearly 
 every family in England. Lord Coleridge, who 
 never showed a nobler figure than when he knelt 
 by the coffin of the Cardinal in the dreary church 
 at Birmingham, must have thought of his own 
 brother — a Jesuit priest ; and Lord Selborne, 
 lamenting Newman as the father of modern 
 Anglicanism, counted a brother among the band 
 of Newman's closer followers to Rome. 
 
 Nor was this influence confined to those who 
 came within the magic of Newman's personality, 
 or to those who were students rather than hard- 
 headed men of the world ; or yet to men of his 
 own generation. When a typical Yorkshireman, 
 like Lord Ripon, with all the best qualities and 
 sympathies which distinguish John Bull, appeared 
 at the London Oratory to claim admission to the 
 
THE OUTER WORLD. in 
 
 Catholic Church, it was to the writings of Newman 
 that he attributed the transition which so greatly 
 perturbed the mind of Mr. Gladstone. Yet even 
 Mr. Gladstone, when he wrote bitterly of all others, 
 said of Newman that, honoured as he was, he 
 illustrated the line that "the world knows nothing 
 of its greatest men." Newman returned the com- 
 pliment by speaking of Mr. Gladstone's as "so 
 religious a mind." But Newman also accused 
 Anglicans, in one of his lectures to them, of 
 " praising this or that Catholic saint, to make up 
 for abuse, and to show your impartiality." Whether 
 Mr. Gladstone will plead guilty to this indictment 
 I cannot say ; but if he will look at his various and 
 most welcome praises of Newman, and see how, by 
 juxtaposition, they are made to imply dispraise of 
 the brother and colleague bearing the burden of 
 government and the responsibility of the bishopric, 
 he will not wonder at the words of Newman coming 
 to his reader's mind. 
 
 Indeed, the throwing together of the names of 
 the two Cardinals has been a common feat of 
 jugglery vainly performed to annihilate the one or 
 the other. It is delightful, despite all differences 
 of temperament, and of the objectivity and the 
 subjectivity with which each variously regarded 
 the outer world, to see these two names linked 
 
112 CARDINAL NEWMAN, 
 
 together, if not in daily speech, in the unity of 
 eternal love. When Newman was twenty-eight, 
 the younger man of twenty was led captive by the 
 " form and voice and penetrating words at Even- 
 song in the University Church at Oxford ; " where, 
 having once seen and heard Newman, he "never 
 willingly failed to be." When the fury of official- 
 dom in the Anglican Church was fulminating 
 against Littlemore, Manning, the born adminis- 
 trator, the bright hope of officialdom, wherever he 
 was found, paid a conspicuous visit of sympathy to 
 its occupant — though his thoughts just then were 
 not the thoughts of Newman, especially as to 
 Rome. This was what the Cardinal Archbishop 
 was thinking of when he said at the Requiem at 
 the London Oratory : " And when trials came I 
 was not absent from him. Littlemore is before me 
 now as fresh as yesterday." The next time they 
 met was in Rome, when Newman was first dressed 
 as an Oratorian, and then, five years later, the 
 , future Archbishop, having himself become a 
 Catholic, listened once more to the "well-known 
 voice, sweet as of old, but strong in the absolute 
 truth, prophesying a second spring, in the first 
 Provincial Council of Westminster." In 1857, 
 Newman dedicated to Cardinal Manning his 
 volume of " Sermons on Various Occasions," " as 
 
THE OUTER WORLD. 113 
 
 some memorial of the friendship there has been 
 between us for nearly thirty years ;" and in 1861 
 the compliment was returned, Cardinal Manning 
 testifying : " To you I owe a debt of gratitude, for 
 intellectual light and help, greater than to any one 
 man of our time." There the matter may be left, 
 under the hands that have never signed insincerities. 
 What if, between two men of character so marked, 
 there were light difficulties in the way of a con- 
 tinual and close interchange of thoughts and 
 emotions? Only the vulgar can demand of men 
 a contact contrary to temperament, or will profess 
 to be astonished, if Cardinal Newman's most 
 intimate and frequent letters are not found to be 
 indited to his brother Cardinal ; nor even to Father 
 Faber, that "bright, particular star," revolving 
 round Newman by a force greater than he could 
 control. 
 
 Lord Beaconsfield, when he said, a generation 
 later than 1845, that the Anglican Church still 
 reeled under the secession of Dr. Newman, was 
 looking at it politically ; and he pronounced it, 
 with all the assurance of Downing Street, to be " a 
 blunder." Lord John Russell probably combined 
 private with public feeling when he alluded in 
 Parliament, in 185 1, to " a person of great eminence, 
 of great learning, of great talents, whom we all 
 
 1 
 
ii 4 CARDINAL NE WMAN. 
 
 have to deplore as having left the Protestant 
 Church, and joined the Church of Rome — I mean, 
 Mr. Newman." The busy world went on. It 
 wondered a moment at the great renunciation ; and 
 then it lost sight of the neophyte. But it heard 
 of him again ; and the day came when he had 
 leavened the whole Establishment, and when his 
 voice held men of many minds and all communions 
 as by a spell. From Lord Coleridge and Mr. John 
 Morley, from Dean Church and Mr. Kegan Paul, 
 from Mr. R. H. Hutton and Mr. Froude, from Mr. 
 Frederic Harrison and Mr. Matthew Arnold (who 
 says that beside Newman's style Ruskin's is pro- 
 vincial), from Mr. Augustine Birrell and Mr. W. 
 E. Henley, from Mr. Aubrey de Vere and Mr. 
 Burnand, from Miss Christina Rossetti and Dean 
 Stanley, from Sir Francis Doyle and Lord Blach- 
 ford, from Professor St. George Mivart and Principal 
 Shairp, from all the critics of all the schools 
 and all the creeds, came one concordant voice in 
 praise of John Henry Newman as author and as 
 man. 
 
 " Sweetly the light 
 Shines from the solitary peak at Edgbaston," 
 
 sang Coventry Patmore, who understood that even 
 the polemical pamphleteer of 1874 had "peace in 
 heart " though "wrath in hand," and that his most 
 
THE OUTER WORLD. 115 
 
 trenchant paragraphs were the "gold blazonries 
 of Love irate," and never " the black flag of 
 Hate." 
 
 These names represent " light and leading," men 
 with minds and pens " beautiful and swift." But, 
 O phenomenon ! the mass walked and even ran 
 with its masters. The young lions of the Daily 
 Telegraph roared out praise. James Macdonell, 
 the type in sayings and doings of everything New- 
 man was not, avows that his "admiration for the 
 saint-like beauty of Newman's character, for the 
 exquisite character of his genius, for his wonderful 
 insight into human nature, for his marvellous com- 
 mand over the resources of the literary art, is such 
 that I never think of him without mentally lifting 
 my hat in token of my reverence." He was 
 " specially fond of reading Newman's writings 
 aloud on Sunday afternoons," and "his favourite 
 hymn was ' Lead, kindly Light ! ' '' Yet, " it is the 
 testimony of her who knew him best that the 
 question of his own salvation never troubled him." 
 So it happens that many admired Newman for his 
 accidents and his accessories, without even hearing 
 the essential message of his life. That can be best 
 summed up in the words he once addressed to the 
 Anglican clergy : " I want to make you anxious 
 about your souls." And vain as in death would 
 
n6 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 all praise have sounded on his ears that was 
 not based on the recognition of this as his only 
 hope and ambition ; of this as the end for 
 which he wrote as fervently, as individually, as 
 he prayed. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 Cornell Catholic 
 Union Libtaiy- 
 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, 
 LONDON AND BECCLES. 
 
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 V