and in spite of the darkness, our hands, or our head, or our brow, or our lips become, as it were, sensible of the contact of something more than earthly. We know not where we are, but we have been bathing in water, and a voice tells us that it is blood. Or we have a mark signed upon our foreheads, and it spake of Calvary. Or we recollect a hand laid upon our heads, and surely it had the print of nails in it, and resembled His who with a touch gave sight to the blind and raised the dead. Or we have been eating and drinking; and it was not a dream surely, that One fed us from His wounded side, and renewed our nature by the heavenly meat He gave."

Notice how at first, for the vivid moment when the veil is drawn aside, it seems to be a reality which we behold; but it swiftly pales again, melting away as the veil falls and leaving us only a faint memory as of a dream.

Surely the hand of the enchanter is here, moulding words with an exquisite touch till they seem to bear the impress of things beyond our ken. Only one other man in the nineteenth century could have written (I shall not say that passage, because Newman alone could do it, but) anything as delicately tenuous, as elusive, as remotely in that shadow-land where our senses falter and fail, as that. Who but Hawthorne, in the ardor of transcendent faith, could have invested words with such delicate implications, wooed them into yielding connotations beyond their seeming power, and enriched them with an emotional magic akin to that of music itself?

[VII]

Whether in pulpit or forum the spoken word depends for its immediate effect, as we all know, on the personality or magnetism (call it what you will) of the speaker. He must be a part of it, if he is to deserve the name of

orator at all, and his living voice with its cadences, now lowered in pathos, now lifted up in passion, has an immeasurable power all its own. But when the voice is silent, perhaps for a day, perhaps for long years, what then? Do the speeches or the sermons still have power to stir us, do they touch our emotions, and by some enchantment awaken them as they awakened those of men long gone? Do we feel shame or indignation or fear or penitence; are our hearts stirred or do the tears well up in our eyes? Who reads today a speech of Chatham or Fox or Henry Clay or Gladstone? Their personal magnetism held their audiences spellbound, but now that nothing remains but the printed page, the words that once glowed with fire are cold and the rounded periods repellently artificial.

Burke, with his poor voice and long-windedness, could not arouse and hold an audience, but Sheridan could. As good a judge as Byron called Sheridan's speech against Warren Hastings the finest in the language; but who reads it now? The speeches of Burke, which would have bored us to listen to, are among the classics of English. Perhaps there is about them too much of the heightened rhetoric and stately rhythm of spoken eloquence, but the passion of the man has survived in the printed page, in language that still glows with his fervor, stirs the imagination, and is beautiful with the beauty of a great style. Only when it possesses such power as this has the spoken word, no matter what the time or place or tongue, been granted a reprieve from oblivion.

We have ample testimony of Bossuet's powers in the pulpit and his sermons have survived among the classics of French literature for reasons similar to those which, in the field of political thought, have kept Burke from the dust of bookshelves. The most enthusiastic devotee of Newman cannot claim for his sermons as he gave them

the vigor and magnificence of Bossuet. It was never intended that the dove should challenge the eagle. But Newman's voice, like that of Bossuet, is hushed forever while his many volumes of sermons remain. Will they survive as Bossuet has survived or have they the qualities against which the tooth of time shall be unavailing? One might, of course, ask this question of all his works, of all the works, indeed, of all writers. But of the spoken word the question seems peculiarly pertinent, since so little remains from any age with power still to stir those who now may only read what once stirred those who heard it.

As one bearing witness to things unseen Newman's task was a difficult one. He must bring truths within his hearers' ken which only the eyes of faith can behold; he must talk in terms of the matter-of-fact world we live in about the spiritual realities of a world we cannot see, and bring home to our comprehension those actualities which are invisible, but eternal. The rhetoricians would say that he had to illustrate the abstract by the concrete. Which is another way of saying that he had to possess the resources of the poet. He was equal to the task; he made analogy his ally and he gave it a range of beauty and delicacy of suggestion which haunt the memory as do the "inevitable" figures of speech of the great poets.

In his sermon called "The Invisible World" Newman summons analogy constantly to his aid and suggests, as his custom is, relations with ordinary-I had almost said commonplace-things and typical experiences. All about us, he says, the vastness and mystery of the world; how little we know of it; how meager is our knowledge even of the animals on every side of us who are a part of it!

"Can any thing be more marvellous or startling, unless we were used to it, than that we should have a race of

beings about us whom we do but see, and as little know their state, or can describe their interests, or their destiny, as we can tell of the inhabitants of the sun and moon? It is indeed a very overpowering thought, when we get to fix our minds on it, that we familiarly use, I may say hold intercourse with, creatures who are as much strangers to us, as mysterious, as if they were the fabulous, unearthly beings, more powerful than man, and yet his slaves, which Eastern superstitions have invented. They have apparently passions, habits, and a certain accountableness, but all is mystery about them. We do not know whether they can sin or not, whether they are under punishment, whether they are to live after this life. Is it not plain to our senses that there is a world inferior to us in the scale of beings, with which we are connected without understanding what it is? And is it difficult to faith to admit the word of Scripture concerning our connection with a world superior to us?"

How homely this figure is, but how telling: Simon, the Pharisee, is giving a feast and in pomp and pride beholds the dishonored Magdalen enter to his guests. Clad in his complacent righteousness he "suffered her to come, so that she touched not him; let her come as we might suffer inferior animals to enter our apartments, without caring for them."

He is not always content with homeliness in his figures, but now and then lets his imagination have freer rein. He is speaking of the visitations of God,-how silent, sudden, unforeseen they are, whether in the deliverance of His people or in the destruction of His enemies:

"His operation has been calm, equable, gradual, farspreading, overtaking, intimate, irresistible. What is so awfully silent, so mighty, so inevitable, so encompassing, as a flood of water? Fire alarms from the first: we see it and we scent it; there is a crashing and downfall, smoke and flame; it makes an inroad here and there; it

is uncertain and wayward;-but a flood is the reverse of all this. It gives no tokens of its coming; it lets men sleep through the night, and they wake and find themselves hopelessly besieged; prompt, secret, successful, and equable, it preserves one level; it is everywhere; there is no refuge. And it makes its way to the foundations; towers and palaces rear themselves as usual; they have lost nothing of their perfection, and give no sign of danger, till at length suddenly they totter and fall. And here and there it is the same, as if by some secret understanding; for by one and the same agency the mighty movement goes on here and there and everywhere, and all things seem to act in concert with it, and to conspire together for their own ruin. And in the end they are utterly removed, and perish from off the face of the earth. Fire, which threatens more fiercely, leaves behind it relics and monuments of its agency; but water buries as well as destroys; it wipes off the memorial of its victims from the earth; it covers the chariot and the horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh, and sweeps them away; 'the waters overwhelm them, there is not one of them left.'"

Thus one might go on indefinitely, citing instances, each different, each pregnant with poetry, each (such was Newman's passion for lucidity) a very lamp unto the feet of them that tread with him the narrow ways of peace. There is one more example, however, that it is hard to resist quoting, though it is among the bestknown passages of Newman's sermons. Newman loved music and it was but natural that he should find in it a beautiful analogy, unsurpassed of its kind since St. Augustine, in which, as Hutton says so well, "he dwells upon the wonders of musical expression, as suggesting that, in spite of its limitations, human nature contains within itself elements capable of expansion into infinite and eternal meanings." Says Newman: