sermon. I have omitted no passage in which Dr. Newman guards himself against the conclusions which I drew from it; and none, I verily believe, which is required for the full understanding of its general drift. I have abstained from all comment as I went on, in order not to prejudice the minds of my readers. But I must now turn round and ask, whether the mistake into which Dr. Newman asserts me to have fallen was not a very reasonable one; and whether the average of educated Englishmen, in reading that sermon, would not be too likely to fall into the same? I put on it, as I thought, the plain and straightforward signification. I find I am wrong; and nothing is left for me but to ask, with some astonishment, What, then, did the sermon mean? Why was it preached? To insinuate that a Church which had sacramental confession and a celibate clergy was the only true Church? Or to insinuate that the admiring young gentlemen who listened to him stood to their fellow-countrymen in the relation of the early Christians to the heathen Romans? Or that Queen Victoria's Government was to the Church of England what Nero's or Diocletian's was to the Church of Rome? It may have been so. I know that men used to suspect Dr. Newman-I have been inclined to do so myself-of writing a whole sermon, not for the sake of the text or of the matter, but for the sake of one single passing hint-one phrase, one epithet, one little barbed arrow which, as he swept magnificently past on the stream of his calm eloquence, seemingly unconscious of all presences, save those unseen, he delivered unheeded, as with his finger-tip, to the very heart of an initiated hearer, never to be withdrawn again. I do not blame him for that. It is one of the highest triumphs of oratoric power, and may be employed honestly and fairly, by any person who has the skill to do it honestly and fairly. But then-Why did he entitle his sermon "Wisdom and Innocence"?

7

What, then, could I think that Dr. Newman meant? I found a preacher bidding Christians imitate, to some undefined point, the "arts" of the basest of animals and of men, and even of the Devil himself. I found him, by a strange perversion of Scripture, insinuating that St. Paul's conduct and manner were such as naturally to bring down on him the reputation of being a crafty deceiver. I found him -horrible to have to say it even hinting the same of One greater than St. Paul. I found him denying or explaining away the existence of that priestcraft which is a notorious. fact to every honest student of history; and justifying (as far as I can understand him) that double-dealing by which prelates, in the middle age, too often played off alternately the sovereign against the people and the people against the sovereign, careless which was in the right, as long as their own power gained by the move. I found him actually using of such (and, as I thought, of himself and his party likewise) the words, "They yield outwardly; to assent inwardly were "to betray the faith. Yet they are called deceitful and double-dealing, because they do as much as they can, and "not more than they may." I found him telling Christians that they will always seem "artificial," and "wanting in openness and manliness;" that they will always be "a mystery" to the world, and that the world will always think them rogues; and bidding them glory in what the world (.e. the rest of their fellow-countrymen) disown, and say with Mawworm, "I like to be despised."

Now how was I to know that the preacher, who had the reputation of being the most acute man of his generation, and of having a specially intimate acquaintance with the weaknesses of the human heart, was utterly blind to the broad meaning and the plain practical result of a sermon like this, delivered before fanatic and hot-headed young men, who hung upon his every word? That he did not foresee that

they would think that they obeyed him, by becoming affected, artificial, sly, shifty, ready for concealments and equivocations? That he did not foresee that they, hearing his words concerning priestcraft and double-dealing, and being engaged in the study of the Medieval Church, would consider the same chicanery allowed to them which they found practised but too often by the Medieval Church? or even go to the Romish casuists, to discover what amount of cunning did or did not come under Dr. Newman's one passing warning against craft and deceit? In a word, that he did not foresee that the natural result of the sermon on the minds of his disciples would be, to make them suspect that truth was not a virtue for its own sake, but only for the sake of the spread of "catholic opinions," and the "salvation of their own souls;" and that cunning was the weapon which Heaven had allowed to them to defend themselves against the persecuting Protestant public?

All England stood round in those days, and saw that this would be the outcome of Dr. Newman's teaching.

I to know that he did not see it himself?

How was

And as a fact, his teaching had this outcome. Whatever else it did, it did this. In proportion as young men absorbed it into themselves, it injured their straightforwardness and truthfulness. The fact is notorious to all England. It spread misery and shame into many an English home. The net practical result of Dr. Newman's teachings on truthfulness cannot be better summed up than by one of his own disciples, Mr. Ward, who, in his "Ideal of a Christian Church," page 382, says thus:

"Candour is rather an intellectual than a moral virtue, and "by no means either universally or distinctively characteristic "of the saintly mind."

Dr. Newman ought to have told his disciple, when he wrote those words, that he was on the highroad to the father of

lies; and he ought to have told the world, too, that such was his opinion; unless he wished it to fall into the mistake into which I fell-namely, that he had wisdom enough to know the practical result of his words, and therefore meant what they seemed to say.

Dr. Newman has nothing to blame for that mistake, save his own method. If he would (while a member of the Church of England) persist (as in this sermon) in dealing with matters dark, offensive, doubtful, sometimes actually forbidden, at least according to the notions of the great majority of English Churchmen; if he would always do so in a tentative, paltering way, seldom or never letting the world know how much he believed, how far he intended to go; if, in a word, his method of teaching was a suspicious one, what wonder if the minds of men were filled with suspicions of him? What wonder if they said of him (as he so naïvely, in one of his letters, expresses his fear that they will say again), "Dr. "Newman has the skill of a great master of verbal fence, who

knows, as well as any man living, how to insinuate a doctrine "without committing himself to it?" If he told the world, as he virtually does in this sermon, "I know that my conduct "looks like cunning; but it is only the arts' of the defence"less:" what wonder if the world answered, "No. It is "what it seems. That is just what we call cunning; a habit " of mind which, once indulged, is certain to go on from bad to worse, till the man becomes-like too many of the mediaval clergy who indulged in it-utterly untrustworthy." Dr. Newman, I say, has no one to blame but himself. The world is not so blind but that it will soon find out an honest man if he will take the trouble of talking and acting like one. No one would have suspected him to be a dishonest man, if he had not perversely chosen to assume a style which (as he himself confesses) the world always associates with dishonesty.

B

When, therefore, Dr. Newman says (p. 16 of his pamphlet) that "he supposes, in truth, there is nothing at all, however "base, up to the high mark of Titus Oates, which a Catholic

may not expect to be believed of him by Protestants, how"ever honourable and hard-headed," he is stating a mere phantom of his own brain. It is not so. I do not believe it ever was so. In the days when Jesuits were inciting fanatics to assassinate Queen Elizabeth, and again in the days of the Gunpowder Plot, there was deservedly a very strong feeling against Romish priests, and against a few laymen who were their dupes; and it was the recollection of that which caused the "Titus Oates" tragedy, which Dr. Newman so glibly flings in our teeth, omitting (or forgetting) that Oates' villany would have been impossible without the preceding villanies of Popish fanatics, and that he was unmasked, condemned, and punished by the strong and great arm of British law. But there was never, I believe, even in the worst times, any general belief that Catholics, simply as such, must be villains.

There is none now. The Catholic laity of these realms are just as much respected and trusted as the Protestants, when their conduct justifies that respect and trust, as it does in the case of all save a few wild Irish; and so are the Romish priests, as long as they show themselves good and honest men, who confine themselves to the care of their flock. If there is (as there is) a strong distrust of certain Catholics, it is restricted to the proselytizing priests among them; and especially to those who, like Dr. Newman, have turned round upon their mother-Church (I had almost said their mothercountry) with contumely and slander. And I confess, also, that this public dislike is very rapidly increasing, for reasons which I shall leave Dr. Newman and his advisers to find out for themselves.