falsehood, but morality and immorality, depended on his setting. his seal to a bit of parchment. From the time that indulgences were hawked about in his name, which would insure pardon for any man, esti matrem Dei violavisset,' the world in general began to be of that opinion. But the mischief was older and deeper than those indulgences. It lay in the very notion of the dispensing power. A deed might be a crime, or no crime at all-like Henry the Eighth's marriage of his brother's widow-according to the will of the Pope. If it suited the interest or caprice of the old man of Rome not to say the word, the doer of a certain deed would be burned alive in hell for ever. If it suited him, on the other hand, to say it, the doer of the same deed would go, sacramentis munitus, to endless bliss. What rule of morality, what eternal law of right and wrong, could remain in the hearts of men born and bred under the shadow of so hideous a deception?

"And the shadow did not pass at once, when the Pope's authority was thrown off. Henry VIII. evidently thought that if the Pope could make right and wrong, perhaps he could do so likewise. Elizabeth seems to have fancied, at one weak moment, that the Pope had the power of making her marriage with Leicester right, instead of wrong.

Moreover, when the moral canon of the Pope's will was gone, there was for a while no canon of morality left. The average morality of Elizabeth's reign was not so much low, as capricious, self-willed, fortuitous; magnificent one day in virtue, terrible the next in vice. It was not till more than one generation had grown up and died with the Bible in their hands, that Englishmen and Germans began to understand (what Frenchmen and Italians did not understand) that they were to be judged by the everlasting laws of a God who was no respecter of persons.

"So, again, of the virtue of truth. Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not to be; that cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage. Whether his notion be doctrinally correct or not, it is at least historically so.

"Ever since Pope Stephen forged an epistle from St. Peter to Pepin, King of the Franks, and sent it with some filings of the saint's holy chains, that he might bribe him to invade Italy, destroy

the Lombards, and confirm to him the 'Patrimony of St. Peter;' ever since the first monk forged the first charter of his monastery, of dug the first heathen Anglo-Saxon out of his barrow, to make him a martyr and a worker of miracles, because his own minister did not 'draw' as well as the rival minister ten miles off;—ever since this had the heap of lies been accumulating, spawning, breeding fresh lies, till men began to ask themselves whether truth was a thing worth troubling a practical man's head about, and to suspect that tongues were given to men, as claws to cats and horns to bulls, simply for purposes of offence and defence."

II.

DR. NEWMAN to MESSRS. MACMILLAN and Co.

GENTLEMEN

The Oratory, December 30, 1863.

I do not write to you with any controversial purpose, which would be preposterous; but I address you simply because of your special interest in a Magazine which bears your name.

That highly respected name you have associated with a Magazine, of which the January number has been sent to me by this morning's post, with a pencil mark calling my attention to page 217.

There, apropos of Queen Elizabeth, I read as follows:

"Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not to be; that cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage. Whether his notion be doctrinally correct or not, it is at least historically so."

There is no reference at the foot of the page to any words of mine, much less any quotation from my writings, in justification of this statement.

I should not dream of expostulating with the writer of such a passage, nor with the editor who could insert it without appending evidence in proof of its allegations. Nor do I want any reparation from either of them. I neither complain of them for their act, nor should I thank them if they reversed it. Nor do I even write to you with any desire of troubling you to send me an answer. I do

but wish to draw the attention of yourselves, as gentlemen, to a grave and gratuitous slander, with which I feel confident you will be sorry to find associated a name so eminent as yours.

I am, Gentlemen,

Your obedient Servant,

(Signed)

III.

JOHN H. NEWMAN.

The REV. CHARLES KINGSLEY to DR. NEWMAN.

REVEREND SIR:

Eversley Rectory, January 6, 1864.

I have seen a letter of yours to Mr. Macmillan, in which you complain of some expressions of mine in an article in the January number of Macmillan's Magazine.

That my words were just, I believed from many passages of your writings; but the document to which I expressly referred was one of your sermons on "Subjects of the Day," No. XX., in the volume published in 1844, and entitled "Wisdom and Innocence."

It was in consequence of that sermon that I finally shook off the strong influence which your writings exerted on me; and for much of which I still owe you a deep debt of gratitude.

I am most happy to hear from you that I mistook (as I understand from your letter) your meaning; and I shall be most happy, on your showing me that I have wronged you, to retract my accusation as publicly as I have made it.

I am, Reverend Sir,

(Signed)

Your faithful servant,

CHARLES KINGSLEY.

IV.

DR. NEWMAN to the REV. CHARLES KINGSLEY.

REVEREND SIR:

The Oratory, Birmingham, January 7, 1864

I have to acknowledge your letter of the 6th, informing ne that you are the writer of an article in Macmillan's Magazine,

in which I am mentioned, and referring generally to a Protestant sermon of mine, of seventeen pages, published by me, as Vicar of St. Mary's, in 1844, and treating of the bearing of the Christian towards the world, and of the character of the reaction of that bearing upon him; and also, referring to my works passim; in justification of your statement, categorical and definite, that "Father Newman informs us that truth for its own sake need not, and on the whole ought not to be, a virtue with the Roman clergy."

I have only to remark in addition to what I have already said with great sincerity to Messrs. Macmillan & Co., in the letter of which you speak, and to which I refer you, that, when I wrote to them, no person whatever, whom I had ever seen or heard of, had occurred to me as the author of the statement in question. When I received your letter, taking upon yourself the authorship, I was amazed.

I thank you for the friendly tone of your letter of the 5th just received, and I wish to reply to it with the frankness which it invites. I have heard from Mr. Kingsley, avowing himself, to my extreme astonishment, the author of the passage about which I wrote to Messrs. Macmillan. No one, whose name I had ever heard, crossed my mind as the writer in their Magazine; and, had any one said that it was Mr. Kingsley, I should have laughed in his face. Certainly, I saw the initials at the end; but, you must recollect, I live out of the world; and I must own, if Messrs. Macmillan will not think the confession rude, that, as far as I remember, I never before saw even the outside of their Magazine. And so of the editor: when I saw his name on the cover, it conveyed to me

* A gentleman who interposed between Mr. Kingsley and Dr. Newman.

absolutely no idea whatever. I am not defending myself, but merely stating what was the fact; and as to the article, I said to myself, "Here is a young scribe, who is making himself a cheap reputation by smart hits at safe objects."

All this will make you see, not only how I live out of the world, but also how wanton I feel it to have been in the parties concerned thus to let fly at me. Were I in active controversy with the Anglican body, or any portion of it, as I have been before now, I should consider untrue assertions about me to be in a certain sense a rule of the game, as times go, though God forbid that I should indulge in them myself in the case of another. I have never been very sensitive of such attacks; rarely taken notice of them. Now, when I have long ceased from controversy, they continue: they have lasted incessantly from the year 1833 to this day. They do not ordinarily come in my way; when they do, I let them pass through indolence. Sometimes friends send me specimens of them; and sometimes they are such as I am bound to answer, if I would not compromise interests which are dearer to me than life. The January number of the Magazine was sent to me, I know not by whom, friend or foe, with the passage on which I have animadverted, emphatically, not to say indignantly, scored against. Nor can there be a better proof that there was a call upon me to notice it, than the astounding fact that you can so calmly (excuse me) "confess plainly" of yourself, as you do, "that you had read the passage, and did not even think that I or any of my communion would think it unjust."

Most wonderful phenomenon! An educated man, breathing English air, and walking in the light of the nineteenth century, thinks that neither I nor any members of my communion feel any difficulty in allowing that "Truth for its own sake need not, and on the whole ought not to be, a virtue with the Roman clergy; nay, that they are not at all surprised to be told that "Father Newman had informed" the world, that such is the standard of morality acknowledged, acquiesced in, by his co-religionists! But, I suppose, 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, however honourable and hardheaded. However, dismissing this natural train of thought, I observe on your avowal as follows; and I think what I shall say will commend itself to your judgment as soon as I say it.