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no space to enter. The Tract was received with a storm of indignation. Newman says he was unprepared for the outbreak and was startled by its violence, but he does not own to feeling any fear, and is not sure but that he experienced the sensations of relief. He saw that his place in the movement was lost. "In all parts of the country and among all classes, in newspapers, in periodicals, at meetings, in pulpits, at dinner tables, in coffee rooms, in railway carriages, I was denounced as a traitor who had laid his train and was detected in the very act of firing it against the time-honoured establishment. Confidence in me was lost, but I had already lost full confidence in myself." He refused to withdraw the Tract which, assailed on all sides, found a defender in Mr. Monckton Milnes, the present Lord Houghton.

As early as 1839, Newman had doubts of the tenableness of Anglicanism. He had begun to study the history of the Monophysites. He found the Christendom of the 16th and 19th centuries reflected in the middle of the 5th. He was a Monophysite; the Church of the Via Media was the oriental communion; Rome was in the same position as now; and the Protestants were the Eutychians. The coincidence impresses him most powerfully. "There was," he writes, "an awful similitude." The theory of the Via Media became "absolutely pulverised." These impressions became less vivid after a while, but ultimately returned with increased force. When Tract 90 was published, he was contemplating the resignation of his living of St. Mary's, and he was not confident of his permanent adhesion to the Anglican creed. The expostulations of his Bishop led to the Tracts being discontinued, not suppressed. The Vice Chancellor and the Heads of Houses met in March, 1842, to censure Tract 90, and resolved "that modes of interpretation such as are suggested in the said Tract, evading, rather than explaining, the sense of the Thirty-nine Articles, and reconciling subscriptions to them with the adoption of errors which they designed to counteract, defeat the object, and are inconsistent with the due observance of the Statutes of the University." Next day Newman wrote to his censors, thanking them "for an act which even though founded on misapprehension, may be made as profitable to myself as it is religiously and charitably intended." The projected

establishment of a Protestant Bishopric at Jerusalem tended to widen the breach between Newman and Anglicanism. He drew up a warm protest against such a step, of which, and of some other acts on the part of Anglican ecclesiastical authorities, he writes: "Many a man might have held an abstract theory about the Catholic Church, to which it was difficult to adjust the Anglican; yet never have been impelled onwards, had our rulers preserved the quiescence of former years. But it is the corroboration of a present, living, and energetic heterodoxy, which realises and makes them practical." He continues, "As to the project of a Jerusalem Bishopric, I never heard of any good or harm it has ever done, except what it has done for me; which many think a great misfortune, but I, one of the greatest of mercies. It brought me to the beginning of the end."

From the end of 1841, he was on his death bed as regards his membership with the Anglican Church. He writes of it as a tedious decline, with seasons of rallying, and seasons of falling back. The Jerusalem Bishopric was the ultimate condemnation of the old theory of Via Media; if England could be in Palestine-Rome might be in England. His friends were in trouble about him. He had retired to Littlemore, an integral part of St Mary's parish, and between two and three miles from Oxford, where he had some years before built a church. It was stated that he was attempting a revival of the monastic orders; but this, in a letter to his Bishop, he denied. Some people even went so far to say that at Littlemore he was rearing a nest of Papists, who were to take the Anglican oaths, covered by a dispensation from Rome. He explains this calumny, by stating that as he made Littlemore a place of retirement for himself, so did he offer it to others. To young men, whose testimonials for orders were refused by their Colleges, to young clergymen who could not conscientiously go on with their duties, and who were going straight to Rome, he offered Littlemore as a refuge, and kept some of them back for years from being received into the Catholic Church. He resigned St. Mary's, indeed, because of the unexpected conversion of one of them, who had promised to remain in the Anglican Church for three years before being received at Littlemore. His conduct at this time afterwards brought down upon him the condemnation of Cardinal Wiseman, while the Anglican authorities thought it insidious. Newman credits Dr. Russell, afterwards President of Maynooth, with having had more to do with his own immediate conversion than anyone else. In February, 1843, he made a formal retractation of all the hard things he had said against the Church of Rome, and in September of the same year he resigned the living of St. Mary's, Littlemore included. This position made him extremely unhappy. He was oppressed with the feeling that his retirement from Oxford meant the triumph of Liberalism and the anti-dogmatic principle. He saw but two alternatives-the way to Rome, and the way to Atheism; Anglicanism being the half-way house on the one side, and Liberalism on the other. He felt that many would not follow his advance from Anglicanism to Rome, but would quit Anglicanism and him for the Liberal camp. He had taught that the dogmatic and Anglican principle were one, but he was breaking the Via Media in pieces, and with it, he feared, dogmatic faith in the minds of many. In a letter to Archdeacon Manning he explains that his resignation of St. Mary's was "caused by the general repudiation of the view contained in No. 90, on the part of the Church." A few days later he wrote, "It is not from disappointment, irritation, or impatience that I have, whether rightly or wrongly, resigned St. Mary's, but because I think the Church of Rome the Catholic Church, and ours not part of the Catholic Church, because not in communion with Rome; and because I feel that I could not honestly be a teacher in it any longer."

Between the autumns of 1843 and 1845, Newman remained in lay Communion with the Church of England, attending its services as usual

and abstaining altogether from intercourse with Catholics. His face was turned Romewards, but as yet he experienced no certitude, he was in a state of mental self-distrust. He had vague misgivings that he might change again after he had become a Catholic. In November, 1844, he wrote to a friend telling of his deep unvarying conviction that his Church was in schism, and that his salvation depended on his joining the Church of Rome; that what kept him, and had kept him so long, was a fear that he was under a delusion. He waited, "hoping for light, and using the words of the Psalmist, 'Throw some token upon me.' On October the 8th, 1845, he wrote to a number of friends, "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, then of England. After thirty years' (almost) of waiting, he was without his own act sent here: * * * he does not know of my intention; but I mean to ask of him admission into the One Fold of Christ." Soon afterwards Dr. Wiseman called him to Oscott, where he went with Mr. Oakely, Mr. St. John, and Mr. Walker, and received the sacrament of confirmation in the Chapel of Oscott College at the hands of Dr. Wiseman. He was afterwards sent to Rome and finally placed in Birmingham. He left Oxford for good on the 23rd of February, 1846. "Various friends came to see the last of me," he writes, "Mr. Copeland, Mr. Church, Mr. Buckle, Mr. Pattison, and Mr. Lewis. Pusey, too, came up to take leave of me; and I called on Dr. Ogle, one of my very oldest friends, for he was my private tutor when I was an undergraduate. In him I took leave of my first College, Trinity, which was so dear to me. * * Trinity had never been unkind to me. There used to be much snapdragon 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. On the morning of the 23rd I left the Observatory. I have never seen Oxford since, excepting its spires as they are seen from the railway."

Dr.

Writing nearly twenty years afterwards, Newman says, that since his reception he had been in perfect peace and contentment; he had never had one doubt. His conversion was "like coming into port just after a rough sea," and his happiness on that score had remained without interruption. After being ordained a priest, he was appointed head of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, at Birmingham. In 1854, he was appointed head of the new Catholic University in Dublin, but resigned in 1858, and established a school for the sons of Roman Catholic gentry at Edgbaston, near the Oratory, where he has remained ever since.

The account contained in the preceding pages is derived almost wholly from Newman's great work, his "Apologia pro Vita Suâ." We have let him tell himself the history of his life, merely condensing what has been admirably described as "not only a masterpiece of polemical literature, but the most touching and picturesque narrative of a spiritual and intellectual existence that has been written in the English language." We must now touch for a moment on the most notable of Newman's acts between his going over to Rome, and the

Kingsley controversy, which evoked the Apologia. In March, 1850, Dr. Achilli, said to have escaped from the dangers of the Inquisition, commenced a series of lectures, attacking, with coarse invective, the communion he had quitted. Newman defended his new Church with all the zeal of a proselyte against this recusant, recantant Romanist." He published a pamphlet, in which the following passage occurs: "Mothers of families' (this Achilli seems to say) 'gentle maidens, innocent children, look at me, for I am worth looking at.

I

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 Catholic and an infidel. 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, 1832, 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 that Cavaliere Achilli who went to Corfu, made the wife of a tailor faithless to her husband, and lived publicly and travelled about 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 cannot get themselves to describe.' In the midst of outrages such as these, my brothers of the Oratory, the Reformed Church, wiping its mouth, clasping its hands, and turning up its eyes, trudges to Exeter Hall to hear Dr. Achilli expose the Inquisition!"

Dr. Achilli brought an action for libel against Father Newman, and the latter was condemned to pay a fine of £100. Mr. Justice Coleridge, who tried the case, acquitted Dr. Newman of personal malice, and expressed his belief that he had written as he had done because Dr. Achilli had assailed a religion Dr. Newman held dear, and had done so in Birmingham where it was extremely important his authority should not be lessened; but, he added, speaking of the great controversy between the Churches, "I think the pages before me should give you this warning, that if you engage in this controversy, you should engage in it neither personally nor bitterly. The best road to unity is by increase of holiness of life. If you for the future sustain, as you may think you are bound to do, by your publications, the cause of the Church of Rome, I entreat you to do it in a spirit of charity, in a spirit of humility, in a spirit worthy of your great abilities, of your ardent piety, of your holy life, and of our common Christianity."

The rebuke was not wholly lost. On the subsequent occasions when Dr. Newman entered the arena of controversy, he conducted his case with good temper and good taste, as well as with consummate ability. We greatly regret that we are unable in this article even to touch upon the great Kingsley controversy, but maybe we shall have something to say about it in a subsequent paper. Charles Kingsley, indeed, proved

himself no adequate match for the greatest dialectician of the day, but he distinctly earned the gratitude of the world for provoking the controversy, inasmuch as we are mainly indebted to it for the Apologia.

In the earlier portion of this paper we alluded to Newman's early feelings of isolation and separation from the visible world. This absorbing peculiarity was afterwards beautifully expressed in the following lines which occur in his Dream of Gerontius:

"Take me away, and in the lowest deep
There let me be :

And there in hope the lone night watches keep,
Told out for me.

There motionless and happy in my pain,
Lone, not forlorn ;

There will I sing my sad perpetual strain
Until the morn.

There will I sing and soothe my stricken breast,
Which ne'er can cease

To throb, and pine, and languish, till possest
Of its sole peace.

There will I sing my absent Lord and Love :
Take me away,

That sooner I may rise and go above,

And see Him in the truth of everlasting day."

With these expressive lines we bring our paper to a close. There is no need for us to describe the recent journey to Rome, and the last and crowning event in the life of the great Oratorian. The incidents are still fresh in our memories, and no words of ours could add to the feelings of satisfaction and pleasure experienced by all classes at the welldeserved recognition of the glorious intellect, the nobleness of purpose, and pure simplicity of life of Father Newman.

ERICA.

SONG.

Rain and wind in the morning;
Mist and cloud in the sky;

Flowers hiding under the hedges,

Letting the blasts go by.

Sighs of a lovelorn maiden;

Face set hard in pain.

Lashes laden with pearl-drops,

Tears in a rushing rain.

Summer sun in the evening,

Music and light in the skies.
Violets glow in the meadows,

Violets laugh in her eyes.

Sorrow and storm have vanished

Millions of miles away:

Peace has come back before nightfall,

Love with the dying day.

A. W. W. D.

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