he wrote to a friend in after years, "would have put down the far-spread impression (that I taught lying on system). I took a course which would destroy it, and, as I think, which alone would be able to destroy it. It is little or nothing to me that people should think me angry, rude, insulting, etc. No common language would have done the work; I had to use language that was unmistakably my own and could not have been dictated to me." Newman read his public aright; he reached it and caught its ear; it stopped to listen and, like the wedding guest held fast by the gaze of the Ancient Mariner, it was unable to tear itself away until the whole tale was told.

That tale was the Apologia, itself a great autobiography. It is great-perhaps equally great-as a monument to Newman's controversial genius.

It is a truism that controversial writing is ephemeral. The problems or the causes in which it is enlisted have their day and are forgotten. Many an issue, which was attacked with virulence and stoutly defended while a nation looked on applauding the combatants, is now as dim a shadow as the ghosts of those who engaged in the battle. But some controversial writings will never die; partly because they are concerned with moral problems as old as the race in whose eyes honor and truth and fair play are sacred; partly because they possess those abiding qualities of what (for want of a better term) we call "form," which lift them into literature.

Men may differ as to the value of Newman's controversial writing who find it leaves them untouched in mind and heart; but if they seek skill and high artistry in this fascinating but dangerous kind of literature they will seek in vain for any examples in our language to surpass his. Here are resourcefulness, power, and uncanny appreciation of one's own weaknesses and one's opponent's strength; knowledge of every phase of the

question involved; perfect appraisal of the prejudices and mental attitude of the opposition; a persuasiveness which reaches the heart; a readiness to concede where concession is justifiable; a wealth of illustration to clarify an abstruse point and a telling analogy to drive it home; touches of humor; flashes of wit; an irony amusing, stimulating, deadly as the need may be; a patience and an infinite skill in exposition of which Newman was a past master; an invincible command of self, so that, should he for a moment fling aside the more rigorous restraints of temper or statement, he soon catches himself, toning down his utterances, introducing qualifying clauses, seeking a greater precision of word as if he feared that the tide of his feeling might sweep him away from the anchorage of exactitude and truth. And withal an abiding and pervasive grace, the grace of urbanity, of unfailing tact, of personal charm, of literary style.

To study his methods and apply them adequately would require high talent. To equal them would demand genius.

VII

NEWMAN'S IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY

ALL things considered, this would probably be the volume of Newman's which the majority of readers would be most loath to give up. Unlike the Apologia it does not have to do with a personal spiritual problem, nor does it, like The Present Position of Catholics, concern itself largely with a religious situation. It deals in the main with phases of higher education which were always close to Newman's heart, and the lectures which make it up were written when he was in the atmosphere of a University and charged with the task of organizing its various schools and establishing adequate curricula. The volume consists of two parts: the first embracing nine "discourses" on University teaching; the second made up of various lectures and essays on "University Subjects," the aim of the entire work being to define and illustrate Newman's conception of what the new institution at Dublin should be.

Newman was always a careful workman, and although his was the genius of art which conceals art, there is no mistaking the extraordinary care with which he prepared these University discourses, all of which seek not alone to disclose his own ideas but at the same time secure for them a favorable hearing before an audience not entirely disposed to let them pass unchallenged.

[I]

Newman's specific purpose in the nine discourses was fourfold: to indicate the part which theology should

occupy in a University curriculum; to justify knowledge as worth pursuing for its own sake; to prove that the aim of a University course should be the equipping of its students to be broad-gauged, well-poised, and cultured men; and to define what he conceived to be the duties of the Church toward science and literature.

The necessity of theology as a University subject would not, of course, be questioned by the Churchmen whose influence and authority were largely responsible for the establishment of the new Catholic University. In addressing them on the matter, accordingly, Newman was really addressing the non-Catholic world to whom theology was inexact and hence unscientific, and he was seeking to turn their arguments against themselves by showing that it was their own point of view which was itself unscientific. Newman's second proposition troubled him; he could not feel at all certain that it would receive a favorable hearing. The first four discourses are concerned with Theology and at no time in the course of them does he forget his second thesis; and he leads the way to it with the unfailing skill of one who had been in the past and was to be in the future the champion of challenged causes.

Never in the range of Newman's work are his wide sympathies more strikingly illustrated. He had an unfailing appreciation of types of mind quite foreign to his own and modes of thought from which he could not but dissent. The scientist, though he might disagree with Newman and refuse to concede that theology was more than a matter of sentiment and conjecture and hence no part of science, could not but admit that Newman yielded due importance to chemistry, physics, biology, and the rest; and that he appraised the scientific type of mind to a nicety.

To Newman science was not composed of unrelated parts; rather it was an organic whole, its parts com

plementing one another, and rounding out, with theology, the perfect circle of universal knowledge. But if theology were excluded there could be only mutilated knowledge; for however far physics might go, and mathematics, and biology, and chemistry, they trespass sooner or later upon a province which is not rightfully theirs and in which, having no guidance, they lose their way and wander about in a thicket of contradictions, compromises, conjectures, and half-truths. This province, Newman maintains, is not devoid of map and guide. The difficulty is that the man of science, in the narrow sense, will not recognize the authoritativeness of either. As a matter of fact this province belongs to theology, and no man who has ever believed in it as a an authentic science has explained its significance more eloquently and more brilliantly than Newman. His challenge is a bold one and yet it is adroitly made; for he concedes the importance of every form of science and pleads at the same time against that violation of truth of which they are guilty who allow it to encroach upon forbidden territory and fail to recognize its limitations. Ultimately, Newman was combating the notion which rejects religion, declares it to be merely a matter of feeling, and regards God and the future life as matters of conjecture regarding which one guess is as good as another. Here, as in the Apologia, he is battling against "liberalism," by which he meant "the tendencies of modern thought to destroy the basis of revealed religion and ultimately of everything that can be called religion at all."

By theology, Newman means something definite. He rejects the vague and many-sided meanings often attached to the word and says plainly: "I mean none of these things by theology. I simply mean the Science of God or the truths we know about God put into system; just as we have a science of the stars, and call it astronomy, or of the crust of the earth, and call it geology."