which have greeted their achievements there, himself taking unquestioningly that lowest place which his ecclesiastical superiors assigned him, going forth, as of old, to his work and to his labour in his appointed sphere; and at last, in the "calm sunset of his various day," as unquestioningly obeying the voice of authority bidding him go up higher, and setting him among the princes of his people. His life, since he joined the communion of Rome, has been to a great extent "a hidden life"; a life of religious retirement and abstraction, not indeed from the world's thought and great interests, but from its selfish striving and low desires; that life, as some one has described it, à la fois en nous et hors de nous, which is perhaps the most favourable to the development of high spiritual and intellectual gifts. So far as its external surroundings are concerned, it has been spent among a strange people; a population given up to grimy industrialism, to "the dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion," and possessing little in common with the visitant who had exchanged the learned leisure and antique beauty of Oxford for the "fumum et opes strepitumque" of their modern and unlovely town. There has he passed from mature manhood to green old age, and there he trusts it will be permitted him to die. Thence has gone out his sound into all lands. A simple priest, holding no position of authority, living tranquilly with his brethren, his utterances have sunk into

CHAP. II.] CARDINAL NEWMAN AS A CATHOLIC. 85

the thinking minds of his communion, throughout the world, as those of no other member of his Church. Not one of his words has fallen to the ground. This must be duly pondered in judging of his life as a Catholic.

Not on the vulgar mass

Called "work" must sentence pass,

Things done that took the eye and had the price;

O'er which, from level stand,

The low world laid its hand,
Found straightway to its mind,
Could value in a trice;

But all the world's coarse thumb
And finger failed to plumb,

So passed in making up the main account:

all that must be duly reckoned when the time comes to speak fully of his action in the Catholic Church. For the time is not come yet. That history must be left to a future day, when his is done and he is at rest. The world knows enough, however, to trace its main lines, to discern its dominant ideas, to appreciate its general significance. His later writings tell us much; like his earlier, they are true revelations of himself; from some points of view, indeed, truer, for in them we have the ultimate resolution of his philosophical and theological opinions, and the mature development of his literary gifts. Thus the Grammar of Assent is the full expansion and orderly arrangement of the philosophic system first set forth in his Sermons before the University of Oxford. His Discourses to

Mixed Congregations, and Upon Various Occasions, certainly surpass in intensity of power any of his former productions, whether in pages of appalling description which recall the via terribile of Michael Angelo, or in passages of more than earthly beauty and sweetness, which seem like a translation into words of a picture of Fra Angelico. I am here concerned with them, however, merely as documents of history, as notes and memorials of his work, as serving to shadow forth, however faintly, the more public side of his activity as a Catholic.

That activity has been to a large extent of a controversial kind. Cardinal Newman would gladly have had it otherwise. His ideal of existence would rather have been "to behold the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies." But for him, as for Milton, it was not so ordered. His course has lain "in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes," and in that rough element his endeavour has ever been to do, with all his might, the duty which lay nearest to him. And, when he had himself embraced Catholicism, he felt that his first duty was towards those whom he had left behind. His heart yearned towards his brethren. They had gone one mile with him: he would compel them to go twain. That upon their own prin ciples they ought to follow him, is the scope of most of his earlier Catholic sermons, and of those Lectures on Anglican Difficulties, originally delivered in

CHAP. II.] CARDINAL NEWMAN IN CONTROVERSY. 87

London in 1850, which created so great an impression at the time, and which, as years have gone on, have exercised an ever increasing influence. It does not fall within my present scope to examine in detail the arguments which he there employs. But I may remark, generally, that the effect of his writings upon what is called the Anglican controversy has been to place it upon quite another footing from that on which it formerly stood, and to lift it into a higher sphere. He puts aside, as in the question of Anglican orders, dreary gropings into minute intricate passages and obscure corners of past occurrences, as unsatisfactory except to antiquaries, who delight in researches into the past for their own sake,1 and brings you face to face with "broad visible facts," with great manifest historical phenomena. Thus, if he is treating "De Ecclesia," he inquires what the true logical idea of a Church is, and what is that idea as it has actually lived and worked, as it has from the first been apprehended by saints and doctors, and received by the orbis terrarum. And he draws it out in its particulars, as a divine creation, a supernatural order in the world, appealing to the human conscience, as the natural order appeals to the human senses, the City of God tabernacling among men, the Living Oracle of God in the earth, the inerrant Judge of Faith and Morals until the consummation

1 See "Letter to Father Coleridge" in Essays Critical and Historical, vol. ii. p. 109.

of all things, gathering, in each successive generation, the elect into a polity in belief of the truth, at once a philosophy, and a religious rite, and a political power, as its Divine Author is Prophet, Priest, and King. And then, he asks, can any man believe the Church of England to be this, or in any true sense, to represent it? Not that he is insensible to so much that is excellent and winning in Anglicanism.

Its portions of Catholic teachings, its " decency and order," the pure and beautiful English of its prayers, its literature, the piety found among its members, the influence of superiors and friends, its historical associations, its domestic character, the charm of a country life, the remembrance of past years, there is all this and much more to attach the mind to the national worship. But attachment is not trust, nor is to obey the same as to look up to, and to rely upon; nor do I think that any thoughtful or educated man can simply believe in the word of the Established Church. I never met any such person who did, or said he did, and I do not think that such a person is possible.1

The whole matter, as he judges of it, turns upon the question whether there is in the world such a thing as a Church, in the true sense of the word. Throughout his long career the deep underlying convictions which have guided him have been unchanged. Not only is it true of him that "his wandering step" was ever "obedient to high thoughts," but it is also true that the thoughts have always been, in substance, the same. As an Anglican, his battle was on behalf of the dogmatic

1 Discourses to Mixed Congregations, p. 232