JOHN HENRY, CARDINAL NEWMAN 1801-1890 John Henry Newman was the son of a London banker, and his early days were therefore passed in the comfort and ease which, in men of his spiritual temperament, promote religious meditation and intellectual studies. English refinement and high-breeding were in him united with freedom from materiality and physical grossness. Newman was of a delicate make; yet so well were the elements of his organization balanced, that he lived for ninety years, devoting his whole existence to thought and action upon the highest subjects that can engage the human mind. He was born within a few weeks of the birthday of the nineteenth century—on February 25, 1801. He went to Oxford, where he took his degree in 1820, from Trinity College; and two years later he was elected a fellow of Oriel. Here he began his friendship with Edward Bouverie Pusey, whose influence upon church thought and procedure was later to become historical. Pusey was less than a year older than Newman, was also a fellow of Oriel, and his mind tended to the same lines of development as did that of the future cardinal. In 1832, Newman made a voyage up the Mediterranean, which in its effects might be called a religious sentimental pilgrimage. It was during this journey that the poem or hymn, "Lead, Kindly Light," was composed. On returning to Oxford, he began to take an active part in the religious discussions of that epoch. There had been a strong drift towards liberalism in the Church of England, and the so-called Oxford Movement was designed to conteract this, and to bring the Church back to the primitive simplicity and faith of the Christian Fathers. Tracts were written and published with this end in view, and what is known as Tractarianism soon became important. Both Newman and Pusey contributed to the propaganda; and the tone of their writings gradually brought them nearer to a belief which was hardly to be distinguished from Roman Catholicism. Pusey was disbarred from preaching for three years for publishing his sermon on "The Holy Eucharist a Comfort to the Penitent"; and it was from his initiative that the practice of confession was established among extreme ritualists of the Established Church. Pusey, however, never took the final step which would have separated him from the English communion; but Newman, though for some years he hoped that a middle ground between the Roman and the English dispensations might be found, finally gave up that hope, and in 1843 he formally withdrew from the Anglican Church; and two years afterwards the Roman Catholic Church accepted him as a convert. In 1849 he established an English branch of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, a Roman Catholic religious order founded in 1575, which is composed of simple priests, under no vows. The latter part of his pure and tranquil life was spent in writing and preaching, and under his influence, the Church of Rome received many recruits from England. Newman's literary style is exquisite; and his eloquence as a preacher had a sacred sweetness and fire, and a lofty gentleness of persuasion, unsurpassed in his day. THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?-Matt. xvi. 26 I SUPPOSE there is no tolerably informed Christian but considers he has a correct notion of the difference between our religion and the paganism which it supplanted. Everyone, if asked what it is we have gained by the gospel, will promptly answer, that we have gained the knowledge of our immortality, of our having souls which will live forever; that the heathen did not know this, but that Christ taught it and that His disciples know it. Everyone will say, and say truly, that this was the great and solemn doctrine which gave the gospel a claim to be heard when first preached, which arrested the thoughtless multitudes who were busied in the pleasures and pursuits of this life, awed them with the vision of the life to come, and sobered them till they turned to God with a true heart. It will be said, and said truly, that this doctrine of a future life was the doctrine which broke the power and the fascination of paganism. The poor benighted heathen were engaged in all the frivolities and absurdities of a false ritual, which had obscured the light of nature. They knew God, but they forsook Him for the inventions of men; they made protectors and guardians for themselves; and had "gods many and lords many." They had their profane worship, their gaudy processions, their indulgent creed, their easy observances, their sensual festivities, their childish extravagance such as might suitably be the religion of beings who were to live for seventy or eighty years, and then die once for all, never to live again. "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," was their doctrine and their rule of life. "To-morrow we die;" this the Holy Apostles admitted. They taught so far as the heathen; "To-morrow we die;" but then they added, “And after death the judg 11 Cor. viii. 5. ment"; judgment upon the eternal soul, which lives in spite of the death of the body. And this was the truth, which awakened men to the necessity of having a better and deeper religion than that which had spread over the earth, when Christ came -which so wrought upon them that they left that old false worship of theirs, and it fell. Yes! though throned in all the power of the world, a sight such as eye had never before seen, though supported by the great and the many, the magnificence of kings and the stubbornness of people, it fell. Its ruins remain scattered over the face of the earth; the shattered works of its great upholders, that fierce enemy of God, the pagan Roman Empire. Those ruins are found even among ourselves, and show how marvellously great was its power, and therefore how much more powerful was that which broke its power; and this was the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. So entire is the revolution which is produced among men wherever this high truth is really received. I have said that every one of us is able fluently to speak of this doctrine, and is aware that the knowledge of it forms the fundamental difference between our state and that of the heathen. And yet, in spite of our being able to speak about it and our "form of knowledge "2 (as St. Paul terms it), there seems scarcely room to doubt that the greater number of those who are called Christians in no true sense realize it in their own minds at all. Indeed, it is a very difficult thing to bring home to us, and to feel that we have souls; and there cannot be a more fatal mistake than to suppose we see what the doctrine means as soon as we can use the words which signify it. So great a thing is it to understand that we have souls, that the knowing it, taken in connection with its results, is all one with being serious, i.e., truly religious. To discern our immortality is necessarily connected with fear and trembling and repentance in the case of every Christian. Who is there but would be sobered by an actual sight of the flames of hell-fire and the souls therein hopelessly enclosed? Would not all his thoughts be drawn to that awful sight, so that he would stand still, gazing fixedly upon it, and forgetting everything else; seeing nothing else, hearing nothing, engrossed with the contemplation of it; and when the sight was withdrawn, still having it fixed in his Rom. ii. 20. |