influences then in operation over England, both of which alike aroused the alarm and the hostility of certain gifted and enthusiastic young Oxford men. One was the ten

dency to Rationalism drawn from the German theologians; the other was the manner in which the connection of the Church with the State in England was beginning to operate to the disadvantage of the Church as a sacred institution and teacher. The Reform party everywhere were assailing the rights and property of the Church. In Ireland, especially, experiments were made which every practical man will now regard with approval, whether he be Churchman or not, but which seemed to the devoted ecclesiast of Oxford to be fraught with danger to the freedom and influence of the Church. Out of the contemplation of these dangers sprang the desire to revive the authority of the Church; to quicken her with a new vitality; to give her once again that place as guide and inspirer of the national life which her ardent votaries believed to be hers by right, and to have been forfeited only by the carelessness of her authorities, and their failure to fulfil the duties of her Heaven-assigned mission.

No movement could well have had a purer source. None could have had more disinterested and high-minded promoters. It was borne in upon some earnest, unresting souls, like that of the sweet and saintly Keble-souls "without haste and without rest," like Goethe's star-that the Church of England had higher duties and nobler claims than the business of preaching harmless sermons and the power of enriching bishops. Keble could not bear to think of the Church taking pleasure since all is well. He urged on some of the more vigorous and thoughtful minds around him, or rather he suggested it by his influence and his example, that they should reclaim for the Church the place which ought to be hers, as the true successor of the Apostles. He claimed for her that she, and

she alone, was the real Catholic Church, and that Rome had wandered away from the right path, and foregone the glorious mission which she might have maintained. Among those who shared the spirit and purpose of Keble were Richard Hurrell Froude, the historian's elder brother, who gave rich promise of a splendid career, but who died while still in comparative youth; Dr. Pusey, afterward leader of the school of ecclesiasticism which bears his name; and, most eminent of all, Dr. Newman. Keble had taken part in the publication of a series of treatises called "Tracts for the Times," the object of which was to vindicate the real mission, as the writers believed, of the Church of England. This was the Tractarian movement, which had such various and memorable results. Newman first started the project of the Tracts, and wrote the most remarkable of them. He had, up to this time, been distinguished as one of the most unsparing enemies of Rome. At the same time he was, as he has himself said, “fierce against the "instruments" and the "manifestations" of "the Liberal cause." While he was at Algiers once, a French vessel put in there, flying the tricolor; Newman would not even look at her. "On my return, though forced to stop twenty-four hours at Paris, I kept in-doors the whole time, and all that I saw of that beautiful city was what I saw from the diligence." He had never had any manner of association with Roman Catholics; had, in fact, known singularly little of them. As Newman studied and wrote concerning the best way to restore the Church of England to her proper place in the national life, he kept the thought before him "that there was something greater than the Established Church, and that that was the Church Catholic and Apostolic, set up from the beginning, of which she was but the local presence and the organ. She was nothing unless she was this. She must be dealt with strongly, or she would be lost.

There was need of a second Reformation." At this time the idea of leaving the Church never, Dr. Newman himself assures us, had crossed his imagination. He felt alarmed for the Church between German Rationalism and man-of-the-world liberalism. His fear was that the Church would sink to be the servile instrument of a State, and a Liberal State.

The abilities of Dr. Newman were hardly surpassed by any contemporary in any department of thought. His position and influence in Oxford were almost unique. There was in his intellectual temperament a curious combination of the mystic and the logical. He was at once a poetic dreamer and a sophist—in the true and not the corrupt and ungenerous sense of the latter word. It had often been said of him and of another great Englishman, that a change in their early conditions and training would easily have made of Newman a Stuart Mill, and of Mill a Newman. England, in our time, has hardly had a greater master of argument and of English prose than Newman. He is one of the keenest of dialecticians; and, like Mill, has the rare art that dissolves all the difficulties of the most abstruse or perplexed subject, and shows it bare and clear even to the least subtle of readers. His words dispel mists; and whether they who listen agree or not, they cannot fail to understand. A penetrating, poignant, satirical humor is found in most of his writings, an irony sometimes piercing suddenly through it like a darting pain. On the other hand, a generous vein of poetry and of pathos informs his style; and there are many passages of his works in which he rises to the height of a genuine and noble eloquence.

In all the arts that make a great preacher or orator Newman was strikingly deficient. His manner was constrained, ungraceful, and even awkward; his voice was thin and weak. His bearing was not at first impressive

in any way. A gaunt, emaciated figure, a sharp and eagle face, a cold, meditative eye, rather repelled than attracted those who saw him for the first time. Singularly devoid of affectation, Newman did not always conceal his intellectual scorn of men who made loud pretence with inferior gifts, and the men must have been few indeed whose gifts were not inferior to his. Newman had no scorn for intellectual inferiority in itself; he despised it only when it gave itself airs. His influence while he was the vicar at St. Mary's at Oxford was profound. As Mr. Gladstone said of him in a recent speech, "without ostentation or effort, but by simple excellence, he was continually drawing undergraduates more and more around him." Mr. Gladstone in the same speech gave a description of Dr. Newman's pulpit style which is interesting: "Dr. Newman's manner in the pulpit was one which, if you considered it in its separate parts, would lead you to arrive at very unsatisfactory conclusions. There was not very much change in the inflection of the voice; action there was none; his sermons were read, and his eyes were always on his book; and all that, you will say, is against efficiency in preaching. Yes; but you take the man as a whole, and there was a stamp and a seal upon him, there was a solemn music and sweetness in his tone, there was a completeness in the figure, taken together with the tone and with the manner, which made even his delivery, such as I have described it, and though exclusively with written sermons, singularly attractive." The stamp and seal were, indeed, those which are impressed by genius, piety, and earnestness. No opponent ever spoke of Newman but with admiration for his intellect and respect for his character. Dr. Newman had a younger brother, Francis W. Newman, who also possessed remarkable ability and earnestness. He, too, was distinguished at Oxford, and seemed to have a great career there before him. But he

was drawn one way by the wave of thought before his more famous brother had been drawn the other way. In 1830 the younger Newman found himself prevented by religious scruples from subscribing the Thirty-nine Articles for his master's degree. He left the unversity, and wandered for years in the East, endeavoring, not very successfully, perhaps, to teach Christianity on its broadest base to Mohammedans; and then he came back to England to take his place among the leaders of a certain school of free thought. Fate had dealt with those brothers as with the two friends in Richter's story: "it seized their bleeding hearts, and flung them different ways."

When Dr. Newman wrote the famous Tract "No. 90," for which he was censured, he bowed to the authority of his bishop, if not to that of the heads of houses; and he discontinued the publication of such treatises. But he did not admit any change of opinion; and, indeed, soon after he edited a publication called The British Critic, in which many of the principles held to be exclusively those of the Church of Rome were enthusiastically claimed for the English Church. Yet a little and the gradual working of Newman's mind became evident to all the world. The brightest and most penetrating intellect in the Church of England was withdrawn from her service, and Newman went over to the Church of Rome. His secession was described by Mr. Disraeli, a quarter of a century afterward, as having "dealt a blow to the Church of England under which she still reels." To this result had the inquiry conducted him which had led his friend Dr. Pusey merely to endeavor to incorporate some of the mysticism and the symbols of Rome with the ritual of the English Protestant Church; which had brought Keble only to seek a more liberal and truly Christian temper for the faith of the Protestant; and which had sent Francis Newman into Radicalism and Rationalism,