issue every household of the land; can it speak, will it speak, those truths which touch the consciences of men, which call them away from the low blinding prejudices of partisanship to an eager, earnest contention for that which shall make the nation to be purer and grander not only in material strength, but in moral character; a blessing to itself and to all the nations of the earth? From none of these quarters, representing so much of the power and influence of our times, do we catch those tones which with such moral emphasis and highest patriotic appeal and solemn reference to the Eternal's judgment once rebuked alike the tyranny of kings and the frenzy of the people.

The gospel, Christ told us, was to remedy every wrong. How to-day is it dealing with the awful problems of life? To what extent is it fronting the huge greed of the times, which builds its fortunes and riots in its pleasures on the misery and ruin of the many? Surely there are ulcers which our boasted Christian civilization itself creates ; there are vices, degradations, supreme woes, which spring up with peculiar fecundity out of what we so complacently call "Christian soil." It is social crime; it is civic corruption; it is nationalized wickedness, it is these in their awful concreteness as they propagate themselves in the great centres of population which stand in battle array before the Church of God. Plainly it is God's call to his preachers to speak his message of denunciation and warning against such public iniquities. With even that same intense pungency of indignation with which the Master denounced the hard hypocrisy of his age must his commissioned followers denounce the shames and crimes which give a character to our time and people.

The martial metaphor of the greatest soldier of the Cross seems fittest to set forth the terrific conflict of this age: "The adversaries with whom we wrestle," says Paul, "are not flesh and blood, but they are Principalities, the Powers, and the Sovereigns of the darkness of this present generation, the spiritual forces of wickedness in high places."

SYRACUSE, NEW YORK.

George B. Spalding.

EDITORIAL.

CARDINAL NEWMAN.

THE recent death of Cardinal Newman has removed a striking figure from English life. Scarcely a man in it not in politics had impressed his personality more deeply upon the mind of his countrymen. The place Tennyson holds among English poets of the century, and Gladstone among English statesmen, that, at any rate as respects fame, Newman held among English theologians.

Had

This was partly due, no doubt, to his conversion to Rome. he remained in the English Church, even though he had reached its highest place, he would have had a smaller share of public attention than that which fell to him. But his remarkable powers and influence made his conversion the striking fact it was. In the case of a smaller man the unpopularity of the act would have soon caused its author to be forgotten. Men do not usually remember a person whom they wish to forget. But Newman had too much power before his conversion, and showed too much ability after it, to pass out of mind. His fame, though it waned for years after he went to Rome, grew bright again, and steadily gained lustre to the end.

It is not our purpose to describe the career so luminously sketched in the "Apologia," and lately recounted by the journals. Assuming that our readers are not ignorant of facts so generally known, we wish to point out some of Newman's characteristics as a writer, and to give some thoughts suggested by his conversion to Rome.

Let it however be said, in passing, that the Cardinal's early life should be studied in the light thrown on it by his brother-in-law, T. B. Mozley's "Reminiscences of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement,” and J. A. Froude's sketch entitled "J. H. Newman " in the fourth series of his "Short Studies on Great Subjects," in order to appreciate the man. He evidently had an extremely strong and engaging personality. Froude says: "A man of genius. . . is a spring in which there is always more behind than flows from it. The painting or the poem is but a part of him inadequately realized, and his nature expresses itself with equal or fuller completeness in his life, his conversation, and personal presence. This was eminently true of Newman. Greatly as his poetry had struck me, he was himself all that the poetry was, and something far beyond. I had then never seen so impressive a person." Again he says: "I still looked on him- I do at this moment as one of the two most remarkable men I have ever met with." And again: "Thus it was that we, who had never seen such another man, and to whom he appeared, perhaps, at special advantage in contrast with the normal college don, same to regard Newman with the affection of pupils (though pupils, strictly speaking, he had none) for an idolized master. The simplest word

which dropped from him was treasured as if it had been an intellectual diamond. For hundreds of young men Credo in Newmannum was the genuine symbol of faith."

Evidently such a man as this cannot be fully found out by the mere study of his books, self-revealing as these are, one of them self-descriptive so far as the growth of religious views goes. Assuming this, we will speak of some of the leading features of his mind as shown in his writings. To begin with, it is essentially religious, as deeply so as that of any man of our time. It has been said, and with truth, that Newman was not in the main bent and the deepest inclinations of his mind a theologian. What he chiefly cared about was not abstract truth; it was the religious life; men's spiritual fellowship with God. How this was to be maintained and what it implied were the themes to which he most naturally turned. He says in the "Apologia" that he learned early in life to "rest in the thonght of two and two only absolute and luminously selfevident beings, myself and my Creator." We believe these words to be in a deep and wide sense self-revealing; we find in them the main bent of Newman's mind as well as the determining principle of his character. The intense desire to realize, to describe, to justify the life in God we hold to have been the master passion of his life. His interest in theology was swallowed up in his interest in religion. Of this another passage in the "Apologia" gives curious evidence: "From the age of fifteen dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion; I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion as a mere sentiment is to me a mere dream and a mockery." And what does he mean by dogma? The words immediately following inform us: "As well can there be filial love without the fact of a father, as devotion without the fact of a Supreme God." Dogma, then, is the truth about God; that in which the soul recognizes the object of supreme love and devotion. This Newman would of course identify with the Catholic theology taken as a whole; but evidently its main interest to him is its subjective side, the personal apprehension of the Supreme Being which it yields. We may then agree with these words of an able critic of his writings: "For abstract truth it is clear to us that he has no engrossing affection; his strength lay in his own apprehension of it, in his power of defending it when once it had been so apprehended and had become engrafted into him; and it is to this as made one with himself, and to his own inward life as fed and nourished by it that he continually reverts."

This is the mind of a preacher, and a preacher Newman was more than anything else. The higher qualities of his mind and his literary power are most fully disclosed in his sermons. This is very significant in view of the fact that they are bona fide sermons, preached in the course of stated pulpit service, made primarily for hearing, not for reading. To find his peculiar gifts most fully used here is to establish our VOL. XIV. - NO. 81.

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conviction that it was the religious life which most deeply interested his mind.

That the gifts shown in these sermons are great ones need hardly be said. Every educated man knows the power which Newman wielded as a preacher in the pulpit of St. Mary's, Oxford. No English preacher of the century has, we believe, influenced educated audiences so deeply and so long. Says Froude: "No one who heard his sermons in those days can ever forget them. They were seldom directly theological. We had theology enough and to spare from the select preachers before the university. Newman, taking some Scripture character for a text, spoke to us about ourselves, 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. He was never exaggerated; he was never unreal. A sermon from him was a poem, formed on a distinct idea, fascinating by its subtlety, welcome - how welcome! from its sincerity, interesting from its originality, even to those who were careless of religion; and to others who wished to be religious, but had found religion dry and wearisome, it was like the springing of a fountain out of the rock."

The sermons which made such impression when delivered live now upon the printed page among the very few effective sermons which take permanent place in literature. This is in great measure because of that gift of expresssion which put Cardinal Newman at the very head of English prose writers. Any one who will give good thoughts in a manner supremely graceful, easy, lucid, subtly finished, and delicately strong is sure of a hearing. This Newman has done in his sermons. But he has done more. His thoughts are not only good, they are high and deep. They present the loftiest truths of Christianity as apprehended by a mind of peculiar refinement, and imaginative force, a mind to which spiritual things were most real, and at the same time mysterious in their reality, whose vision of truth and of the mysteriousness of truth is given in the hymn, "Lead kindly light amid the encircling gloom."

We are aware that the encomiums which these sermons have won from good critics, such, for example, as Mr. Hutton of the London "Spectator" and the late Principal Shairp, seem to some undeserved. They are so simple in their structure and style, so devoid of philosophical reasoning and of illustrative ornament as to seem common-place to some discriminating readers. Doubtless they do not correspond to the ordinary conception of what a sermon should be. Probably they would not have had, if preached to a town congregation, the effect which we know attended them preached in Oxford. Be that as it may, if they are read and reread simply as literature, disregarding all opinion as to what should belong to a sermon, they will appear greater and greater, as mountains whose mass is half-concealed by the very clearness of the air about them grow greater as one gazes on them.

We pass on to Newman's abandonment of the Anglican for the Roman Catholic Church. His peculiar gifts, taken in connection with his doctrinal views, justify, it must be admitted, the discussion to which this most important act of his life gave rise. The ablest and most churchly man of the Anglican Church becomes convinced that it is in schism from the true church and leaves it. The leader of a party devoted to awakening in the Church of England the consciousness of being through its sacraments a channel of divine grace becomes convinced that the religious principles upon which he is acting demand his submision to the Pope. The fervid, yet logical Christian whose soul burns with the conviction “that dogma is the fundamental principle of religion," that "there is a visible Church, with sacraments and rites which are the channels of invisible grace, that the Anglican Bishop is in his diocese the successor of the Apostles, the Vicar of Christ," finds that he cannot continue to be a Christian unless he enter the Roman communion.

Here is something challenging the attention of all who would know the relation of Christianity to Churchism. Admitting the genuineness of Newman's change of belief respecting the standing of the Anglican Church, how are we to account for it? Are we to regard it, with him, as the product of his earlier convictions, and to see in the Roman Catholic the ripened Anglo-Catholic, or are we to attribute the change to other causes, temperament or circumstance, or both?

We see no ground for hesitation in answering the question. The only external influences likely to impel Newman towards Rome were the charges which the bishops issued against "Tract Number Ninety," and the outcry raised against him by the Liberals. These attacks he felt deeply, no doubt, but he could not have been goaded by them into a change of belief. As Froude says: "A man of so much ability would never have rushed to conclusions so precipitately merely on account of a few bishops' charges." As for his temperament, that was not one to make him take so serious a step hastily. His powerful imagination was the servant of his reason and his moral convictions. He was, if the descriptions of him given by his friends and the impressions made by his writings can be trusted, anything but an impulsive man; calm, resolute, self-contained. Indeed, the fact that he waited for light two years after resigning his pulpit and giving up all clerical service shows that in this instance he acted from deliberate conviction.

And the sketch of his mental history during the years preceding his change of communion shows, we think, a mind calmly maturing its convictions. Doubt seized him as to whether Christianity as he understood it did not mean Roman Catholicism. He did not cherish it. "He would not make his judgment blind." It passed away. It came again an unwelcome guest. It led to questioning, to slow testing of old opinions, to selfdenying action by which liberty for further questioning was gained, to long and painful search for light, finally to new conviction — the convic