afar off or tricked out in the showy colors with which celebrity, reminiscing, bedecks its early years; but into the very soul, as this master of psychological penetration saw the being he knew best in all the world-himself. We see that soul set apart as it surely was from the beginning-yearning always to know the will of God, and highly resolved always to fulfill it, conscious of His presence, loving all His ways, fearful of His displeasure, eager for His approbation, and beholding in the ordinary circumstances of everyday manifestations of His wishes, His anger, His approval.

Early in his teens he felt himself called apart from the multitude and he dedicated himself to celibacy without ever again experiencing a change of inclination save once and that but for a day. Whenever THE VOICE called him he answered, whether it spoke through the pages of some forgotten volume of theology, or out of the silence of a sickroom in a foreign land, or in some pregnant phrase of a religious foe unexpected as a swordthrust from the dark. Wherever THE VOICE summoned him he went, to the ministry, to St. Mary's, to the forefront of a great cause, to Littlemore and its loneliness, to the Great Renunciation. Always his motives were unselfish, his thoughts noble, his eagerness to please God abiding, and as we read, the world and its pettiness seem far away and we thrill to the heroism of this strange man who sought opportunities of self-surrender and, though reticent in every fiber, is here baring the secrets of his soul which before he shared only with God,

[VII]

Between Newman and St. Augustine are many striking parallels. Both were churchmen; both reached that goal only after years of doubt and anguish. Both devoted their supreme gifts of heart and intellect to the cause of

religion; both were in the forefront of the defensive struggles waged by the Church against the hostile forces of their day. For while Augustine attacked Manicheans and Donatists in whom he beheld the most potent foes of Christianity, Newman had ever in his thoughts the menace of what he termed "liberalism"-the tendency of modern thought to destroy the basis of revealed religion and against it devoted much of his literary labor.

Both Augustine and Newman were prolific writers in the field of controversy; both were masters of pulpit eloquence; both were outstanding figures among the ecclesiastical leaders of their day; both, in consequence, drew the fire of enemies who were eager to destroy their influence.

As men, both were marked by an unfailing human sympathy which made them the confidants of more than one perplexed soul, and the letters of both are full of persuasive calls to saintliness and of answers to spiritual difficulties. Both were extremely sensitive and suffered at the hands of those who, from jealousy or inability to understand them, misjudged their motives and denounced their acts. Both, though dwelling on intellectual heights, kept close to the hearts and aspirations of the people. Both were capable of almost feminine tenderness, and Augustine's love of Nebridius has its counterpart in Newman's love of St. John. Both had a magnetism which could convert enemies into friends and friends into disciples. To both even in young manhood the noise and din of the market place was a weariness of flesh and spirit; Augustine dreamed of a distant Utopia, and Newman of the peaceful seclusion of Oxford, but both took up their burdens as they found them and bore them through the heat and weariness of the day without complaint.

The peace of Cassisiacum was dear to St. Augustine as that of Littlemore was dear to Newman, and the presence of loving friends was as the balm of Gilead to their

craving for affection. But Cassisiacum like Littlemore beheld a yearning of spirit for a more perfect comprehension of truth and a higher life that was to come. They were but milestones on the journey to the heights. Augustine's Tagaste was Newman's Edgbaston with sacred joys abiding there once those two great souls had found a peace unknown before. The "pitfalls of intellectualism" never menaced Newman except for a single hour at Oxford; while Augustine, having forgotten them at his conversion, recaptured, for all his keen intellect, the confident simplicity of a child. To neither one nor the other was life an easy matter; rather, it was filled with innumerable complexities which were a maze unto the feet of all men save theirs alone to whom the supreme quest was the will of God and the supreme task its fulfillment. Each stands out as the embodiment of a lofty and unconquered faith, never doubting, abiding always.

To few men as to Augustine and Newman have the unseen realities ever been so tremendously real. Though all the world might be but the shadow of a dream, there remained to each himself and his Creator; and the very stir of the air about them was to both, as Newman so beautifully said, "the waving of their robes whose faces see God in Heaven."

Augustine could not know Newman but Newman could and did know Augustine, not merely through his studies of the Fathers but best of all through the divination of a perfect sympathy. In his early thirties Newman had pictured Augustine as he was in those hectic years that preceded his conversion and he read aright his "fierce fevers of the mind" and his pitiful cry for light. And when the vision of peace dawned at last for Augustine, Newman took leave of him in words that have a strange sound as of prophecy, as if a glance into his own heart had given him thus early a premonition of the desolating uncertainty that was to come and of the com

pleteness of the final renunciation. "He had 'counted the cost,' and he acted like a man whose slowness to begin a course was a pledge of zeal when he had once begun it."

And of the three great autobiographies, what? St. Augustine's is a lyric; Newman's, an elegy; Rousseau's, a tragi-comedy.

IX

NEWMAN AS A MAN OF LETTERS

[1]

As a man of letters Newman's chief endowment was threefold, a mastery of rhetoric, a perfect style, and psychological insight. This insight has been touched upon in every chapter of the present study, especially in those which were devoted to Newman as preacher and as controversialist.

And now is the time to say once for all that Newman's preeminent gift both as man and as writer was psychological insight. Had he never written a line, that extraordinary power must inevitably have made him great. Insight is a rare thing, rarer perhaps than that supremest of all things, common sense. The man who possesses it has a great work to do in the world, and Newman would have found a hundred ways aside from literature and the church in which he might have left an indelible impress upon his generation. Having psychological insight of a high order he had the essential gift of the great writers of all times, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe. Men of Newman's own day were endowed with it in varying degrees, some slightly like Macaulay, others to the point of genius like Thackeray and Browning. Ruskin had it in those moments when he did not stand in his own light and Carlyle when his sympathies were afire. But Newman's was as steady as Thackeray's and as subtle as Browning's. This does not mean that Newman had the creative imagination any more than Sainte