Every one acquainted with Newman's teaching was aware that he fully believed the doctrine-nay, that he had expressed that conviction in nearly every volume published by him subsequently to his conversion. Consequently, when a letter of his written to a private friend in Rome, and published without his knowledge, had been misunderstood, and had consequently produced a considerable though transient excitement, all such persons knew at once that what that letter contested was not the doctrine of the papal infallibility, but the expediency of defining it at that particular moment. When, some months later, the definition was made, it proved to be a most moderate one, and therefore much disappointed some so-called "Ultramontanes." Several years later Newman, in his "Letter to the Duke of Norfolk," replying to Mr. Gladstone's "Vatican Pamphlets," distinctly stated that the definition made by the council, so far from being an extreme one, was a strictly moderate one. It therefore belonged to that class of definitions which, six months before it was put forth, Newman had spoken of to me as being perfectly correct. As he has been much misrepresented in this subject, I deem it a duty to him to record that conversation.

To men who were acquainted with Newman only through his books, it was rather as a mind than as a man that he presented himself; but the converse was the case with those who enjoyed his intimacy. To them his great attraction lay in what belonged to his personal being, the strange force of which often made itself felt almost at once, so entirely free was he from conventionality. Amid the society of those with whom he was not in sympathy it is true that the shyness of his nature bred a marked reticence, but, notwithstanding, with that reserve there was mixed a frankness. You might be left with a restricted knowledge, but not with an erroneous impression.

W. S. Landor makes some one say that the thoughts of a true man should

stand as naked as the statues of the God of Light; but he might have added a converse assertion, viz., that a man's most sacred feelings should be shrouded in a dimness like that of the same God's Delphic laurel grove. There was much in Newman which could only be made known to those deeply in sympathy with him, and the disclosure of which to others could only have led them into error.

What men felt most in him was his extreme, though not self-engrossed, personality. It was a very human personality, one that imposed upon him a large share of human sensibilities, and, perhaps by necessary consequence, of sorrows, cares, and anxieties. He had also, it is true, a strong sense of humor; but in all serious matters his seriousness was exigent, and nothing came to him lightly, although he had, notwithstanding, a strength that raised him up under the weight of sadness. Silence and stillness but kindled more the internal fires; and a narrow limit increased their force. His nature, one

Built on a surging, subterranean fire, That stirred and lifted him to high attempts,1

was far more likely to be stimulated than kept down by the pressure of adversities. He had vehement impulses and moods which in his "Apologia” he calls "fierce;" and these were stung into activity in him, as in Edmund Burke, by the sight of oppression or injustice. But his temper was also one that abounded in sympathy. He was full of veneration. It was thus that, as he tells us, the lightest word of his bishop in his Anglican days was a conclusive challenge to his obedience. When some one pointed out Mr. Keble to him for the first time, he looked upon him with awe, and "when Mr. Keble took his hand he seemed sinking into the ground." He tells us also that the "Christian Year" had largely helped to teach him two great truths to which he had always clung closely, and that he had ever considered and kept the day on which Mr. Keble preached the 1 Philip van Artevelde.

assize sermon in the university pulpit as the start of the religious movement of 1833.

In others also he greatly valued veneration, and thought that even when a snare it was still a thing entitled to sympathy. He told me that Mr. Keble possessed that quality in an extreme and even unfortunate degree; that it had always been directed especially to his father; and that the thought that in becoming a Roman Catholic he would place a gulf of separation be tween him and his father must have rendered it difficult for him seriously even to ask himself the question whether such a step had become a duty. With Dr. Pusey-"dear Pusey" he almost always called him-the obstacle to conversion was of another sort. He remarked to me that with many great gifts, intellectual as well as spiritual, Dr. Pusey had this peculiarity, that "he never knew when he burned," the allusion being to a sport among children, when they have hidden something away and encourage the searcher as he gropes his way nearer and nearer to it, "Warm," "Hot," "You burn." Dr. Pusey, he said, might see a doctrine with clear insight, yet take no cognizance of another proximate to it-indeed, presupposed by it. "For years," he said, "many thought Pusey on the brink of Rome. He was never near it." Thus, strange as it seems, the two old friends co-operated even in separation; they stood at the two ends of the same bridge, and the one at the Anglican end of it passed the wayfarer on towards the Roman end, though he always strove to hold him back.

The intellectual ardor of Newman is curiously illustrated by a remark made by Mr. Woolner, the sculptor, when he contemplated the plaster cast which he had made of Newman's bust as placed at last in his studio when finished. He turned to a friend and said, "Those marble busts around us represent some of the most eminent men of our time, and I used to look on them with pride. Something seems the matter with them now. When I turn from Newman's

head to theirs they look like vegetables." What he was struck by was the intense personality of Newman's facea still intensity.

Newman's humanity was not more marked by his relations with Mr. Keble than by his relations with Dr. Pusey. In the early years of the "High Church" movement, to which he contributed more than all its other supporters put together, he had no desire to be its head, and was ever pushing Dr. Pusey into that position. And yet with that humility he united a strong belief in his own powers and a conviction that God had imparted to him a high and special mission. That conviction must have been a great support to him during all the numerous trials of his long life. One of the severest of those trials came upon him towards the close of that life. During its last two years the state of his eyes rendered it impossible for him to say mass. Few of his many afflictions pained him so deeply.

Nothing more characterized Newman than his unconscious refinement. It would have been impossible for him to tolerate coarse society, or coarse books, or manners seriously deficient in self-respect and respect for others. There was also in him a tenderness marked by a smile of magical sweetness, but a sweetness that had in it nothing of softness. On the contrary, there was a decided severity in his face, that severity which enables a man alike to exact from others, and himself to render, whatever painful service or sacrifice justice may claim. With his early conviction that he had a mission, there had come to him the "thought that deliverance is wrought not by the many, but by the few." In his "Apologia" he says: "I repeated to myself the words which have ever been dear to me from my school days: Exoriare aliquis. Now, too, Southey's beautiful poem of "Thalaba," for which I had an immense liking. came forcibly to my mind." The saying, "Out of the strong came forth sweetness," was realized in Newman more than in any one else whom I have

known. In other matters, also, apparent opposites were in him blended. Thus while his intellect was pre-eminently a logical one, and while it seemed to him impossible or immoral to disown the authority of logic, when plainly exercised within her legitimate domain, yet no one felt more deeply that both the heart and the moral sense possess their own sacred tribunals in matters of reasoning as well as of sentiment. It was this consciousness which protected him from the narrowing tendencies to which the logical passion, or habit, when acting by itself, so often leads. Many a vigorous mind includes but a single section of a mind like his. The logical faculty was in his case most fortunately supplemented by an expansive imagination, which grasped thoughts immeasurably beyond the range of the mere logician. The largeness of his intellect thus, as well as his reverence and humility, protected him from the scepticism imputed to him by men who, in his place, would have become not sceptics only, but unbelievers. It was that wide imagination which made him grasp the hidden but substantial analogies between the chief schools of religious thought in the nineteenth century and the corresponding schools in the fifth. analogies which had never revealed themselves to minds perhaps as logical as his own, but which he could never repel, however much they distressed him. In Newman, again, above both the logical and the imaginative faculty there ever hung the spiritual mind, a firmament full of light, though clouds at times overswept it. These were the characteristics of Newman which made him write the memorable sentence: "No number of difficulties need produce a single doubt"-he meant doubt in a mind capable of real convictions. His mind swung through a wide arc and thoughts apparently antagonistic often seemed to him supplemental each to the other. Thus he tells us in his "Apologia" that the existence in the world even of such sin and suffering as sometimes seem to make it incapable of reflecting its Maker's countenance, im

plies, for the true Theist, nothing disparaging to true Theism. What it teaches him is that the world cannot have remained what the Creator made it; that some dreadful catastrophe must have overtaken it, and wrecked its chief of creatures, Man-viz., the Fall that, to keep due proportion, a second mystery, not less wonderful than that of a Creation must be true no less, viz., an Incarnation, a Redemption, a De-. liverance-in other words, that not only Theism is true, but that Christianity, the practical Theism, is its supplemental truth.

Another most remarkable union in Newman of qualities commonly opposed to each other, was that of a dauntless courage with profound thoughtfulness. The men of thought and study are often timid men, and, when not timid, are indolent and averse to action, a thing which takes them out of that region in which they can trust themselves, and into a region in which their battle is a left-handed one. Men of this order may not on that account be consciously false to their convictions; but they wish to serve Truth, a jealous divinity, in their own way, not in hers; and they swerve aside from it on specious pretexts, when approaching near to that point from which the conclusion must be rudely plain, and where there can remain no other alternative except that of avowed faithlessness, or-serious inconvenience. In Newman there existed the rare union of the contemplative mind and the heroic soul. Otherwise he might have pointed out its way to another generation; but he would not have "led forth the pilgrimage."

It would be a mistake to suppose that Newman's imagination, religious as it was, could spare no space for earthly interests. Had its energies been thus restricted, it would have dealt less vigorously with heavenly subjects. Many of his writings show how keenly he had studied human character, and the degree in which it affects that great drama of providence called by us "History," in which whole nations have their entrances and their exits, like act

ors on the stage of life. Nothing except his zeal for the highest spiritual truths could exceed the sympathy felt by him with all that concerns the "Humanities;" and I well remember the look of stern disapproval with which he spoke to me of the Abbé Gaume's theory of education, one that must have excluded the Greek and Latin classics from the schools of Christian youth, or left them but a small place therein. Another able and excellent man, Dr. Ward, would, I think, in that matter have sympathized with the abbe's opinions more than with Newman's. I recollect once, when I had remarked in a letter to him on the lamentable loss which the world must have sustained if all the works of Eschylus and the other Greek dramatists had perished, as most of them have, Dr. Ward's replying that in the surviving works of those men he could really find almost nothing of a character to be call "ascetic," and that therefore he could not see what loss would have followed if the whole of them had disappeared. Newman could heartily admire, also, in spite of its limitations, the heroism of the early world. His admiration for the greatest of early heroes, Alexander the Great, was ardently expressed in a letter to me on my sending him my drama bearing that name. It demanded, "Who was there but he whose object it was to carry on civilization and the arts of peace, while he was a conqueror? Compare him to Attila or Tamerlane. Julius Cæsar compared with him was but a party man and a great general."

I have thus recorded some of those traits that struck me as most remarkable in Newman's character. His career bore a singular resemblance to that character. Till his forty-fifth year it was a disturbed one. If, as he informs us in his "Apologia," his submission to the Roman Catholic Church imparted to his soul a profound and lasting peace, while (a fact admitted alike by friend and foe), far from chill ing or contracting, it greatly stimulated his genius and energies, it is not less true that the antecedent process of

conversion was to him an unusually painful one. That conversion meant a separation from all whom he most loved and honored, and also, but only apparently, a desertion of what was then regarded by many as the battlefield of principles, and as, in its place, at least an external fellowship with many to whom he had long felt a strong antipathy on the ground of their philosophic "liberalism," or of the part they took in political “agitation." Newman was an intense loyalist, and he had once deemed it a duty of loyalty for him, as a Churchman, to see matters theological, as long as that was possible, from an Anglican point of view. Eventually he had to choose between thinking independently and discarding those great main principles which for so many years had been consolidating themselves both within his intellect and his heart, but which, as he had reluctantly discovered, could not be realized in England's Established Church, and were realized, as they had ever been, in the Roman Catholic Church.

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Some persons have expressed surprise that a mind like Newman's should have been so slow in making that discovery. They forget the difference " 'twixt now and then." They should remember that the wild cry of "The mass is idolatry!" had rung for several centuries over the land, and that its echoes, though dying away in the distance, had sounded in the ears of Newman's generation. When passionate polemical errors have lived their time, and died, so far as the intellect is concerned, their angry ghosts continue yet for a season to haunt the imagination. We should also remember that when, in the sixteenth century, the very idea of the Church seemed to have been suddenly sponged out of the northern mind (otherwise the practical reforms then doubtless much needed must have been sought in a General Council, not imposed by local authorities), and when, in the nineteenth century, that idea had been partially restored, the last part of it to reappear was that of the Church's visible unity. The new

reformers thought it sufficient to resist Erastian tyranny and to revive the general teaching of Christian antiquity. It is easier to measure the swiftness or slowness of purely intellectual movements than of mixed movements, intellectual and spiritual both, because in the latter case we have to deal with Grace and with Reason both; in the former with Reason alone. Even in scientific enquiries, the philosopher's pace has not the regularity which belongs to that of the man of business or the man of fashion. The philosopher does not grudge the time he spends on reiterated experiments, though he often asserts that, in the end, the great discovery is reached by a bound, no one can say how. In Science that bound is commonly a flash of that ge nius which is an inspiration in itself. In the case of Religion it is often an act of the highest Faith when to the humility and insight of Faith it has added her courage.

AUBREY DE VERE.

From The National Review. THE FAMILY COUNCIL IN FRANCE.

1.

ITS HISTORY AND ORIGIN.

We cannot with any certitude determine the origin of that extra-legal tribunal in France, known as the "Conseil de Famille," a domestic court of justice accessible alike to rich and poor and at nominal cost, occupying itself with questions the most momentous as well as the minutest, vigilantly guarding the interests of imbecile and orphan, outside the law, yet by the law rendered authoritative and binding. For hundreds of years the Family Council or informal Court of Chancery has thus acted an intermediary part; here summoned by humble members of the third estate to decide upon the guardianship of fatherless children, there convened in the Tuilleries on the occasion of an imperial betrothal. From the Middle Ages down to our own time, noble and

"roturier," wealthy merchant and small shopkeeper, have taken part in these conclaves, the exercise of such a function being regarded both as a civic duty and moral obligation. One object and one only is kept in view, namely, the protection of the weak. The law is stript of its cumbrous machinery, above all, deprived of its mercenary spirit. Not a loophole is left for underhand dealing or peculation. Simplicity itself, this system has been so nicely devised and framed that interested motive finds no place in it. Questions of property form the chief subject of enquiry and debate, yet so hedged round by precautions is the fortune of minor or incapacitated that it incurs no risk. And in no other institution is witnessed to the same extent the uncompromising nature of French economy. Justice here rendered is all but gratuitous.

According to the best authorities this elaborate code of domestic legislation is the development of mediæval or even earlier customs. Under the name of "l'avis de parents," we find family councils alike in those provinces having their own legal systems or "coutumes," and those strictly adhering to Roman law. By little and little such usages were formalized, and so gradually becoming obligatory, in the fact, if not in the letter, were regarded as law. The extra-legal character of the family council is one of its most curious features.

Among the oldest documents referring to the subject is an edict of the fifteenth century, signed by Réné, father of Margaret of Anjou. The presiding judge is herein forbidden to appoint any guardianship till he has heard the testimony of three syndics, as well as of the child's relations, concerning the trustees proposed, their circumstances, position in life, and reputation. The syndics, be it remarked, were rural and municipal functionaries, replaced in 1789 by Statepaid "juges de paix." Intermediaries between the law and the people, the syndics were elected by vote, their term of office generally lasting a year.

The coutumes of Brittany and Normandy took especial care to define and