I go on now to other works of Dr. Newman, from which (as I told him in my first letter) I had conceived an opinion unfavourable to his honesty.

I shall be expected to adduce, first and foremost, the toonotorious No. 90 of "Tracts for the Times." I shall not do so. On reading that tract over again, I have been confirmed in the opinion which I formed of it at first, that, questionable as it was, it was not meant to be consciously dishonest; that some few sayings in it were just and true; that many of its extravagances were pardonable, as the natural fruit of a revulsion against the popular cry of those days, which called on clergymen to interpret the Articles only in their Calvinistic sense, instead of including under them (as their wise framers intended) not only the Calvinistic, but the Anglican form of thought. There were pages in it which shocked me, and which shock me still. I will instance the commentaries on the 5th, on the 7th, on the 9th, and on the 12th Articles; because in them Dr. Newman seemed to me trying to make the Articles say the very thing which (I believe) the Articles were meant not to say. But I attributed to him no intentional dishonesty. The fullest licence of interpretation should be given to every man who is bound by the letter of a document. The animus imponentium should be heard of as little as possible, because it is almost certain to become merely the animus interpretantium. And more: Every excuse was to be made for a man struggling desperately to keep himself in what was, in fact, his right place, to remain a member of the Church of England, where Providence had placed him, while he felt himself irresistibly attracted towards Rome. But I saw in that tract

a fearful danger for the writer. It was but too probable, that if he continued to demand of that subtle brain of his, such tours de force as he had all but succeeded in performing, when he tried to show that the Article against “the sacrifice of masses" "did not speak against the mass itself," he

would surely end in one or other of two misfortunes. He would either destroy his own sense of honesty-i. e. conscious truthfulness-and become a dishonest person; or he would destroy his common sense-i. e. unconscious truthfulness, and become the slave and puppet seemingly of his own logic, really of his own fancy, ready to believe anything, however preposterous, into which he could, for the moment, argue himself. I thought, for years past, that he had become the former; I now see that he has become the latter.

I beg pardon for saying so much about myself. But this is a personal matter between Dr. Newman and me, and I say what I say simply to show, not Dr. Newman, but my fellow-Protestants, that my opinion of him was not an impulsive" or "hastily-formed one." I know his writings of old, and now. But I was so far just to him, that No. 90, which made all the rest of England believe him a dishonest man, had not the same effect on me.

But again

I found Dr. Newman, while yet (as far as could be now discovered) a member of the Church of England, aiding and abetting the publication of certain "Lives of the English Saints," of which I must say, that no such public outrage on historic truth, and on plain common sense, has been perpetrated in this generation. I do not intend to impute to any of the gentlemen who wrote these lives-and more than one of whom, I believe, I knew personally-the least deliberate intention to deceive. They said what they believed; at least, what they had been taught to believe that they ought to believe. And who had taught them? Dr. Newman can best answer that question. He had, at least, that power over them, and in those days over hundreds more, which genius can always command. He might have used it well. He might have made those "Lives of Saints," what they ought to have been, books to turn the hearts of the children to

the Fathers, and to make the present generation acknowledge and respect the true sanctity which there was, in spite of all mistakes, in those great men of old-a sanctity founded on true virtue and true piety, which required no tawdry superstructure of lying and ridiculous wonders. He might have said to the author of the "Life of St. Augustine," when he found him, in the heat and haste of youthful fanaticism, outraging historic truth and the law of evidence: "This must "not be. Truth for its own sake is a more precious thing "than any purpose, however pious and useful, which we "may have in hand." But when I found him allowing the world to accept, as notoriously sanctioned by him, such statements as are found in that life, was my mistake a hasty, or far-fetched, or unfounded one, when I concluded that he did. not care for truth for its own sake, or teach his disciples to regard it as a virtue? I found that "Life of St. Augustine" saying, that though the pretended visit of St. Peter to England wanted historic evidence, "yet it has undoubtedly "been received as a pious opinion by the Church at large, as we learn from some often-quoted words of St. Innocent I. (who wrote A.D. 416), that St. Peter was instrumental in the conversion of the West generally. And this sort of "argument, though it ought to be kept quite distinct from documentary and historic proof, and will form no substitute "for such proof with those who stipulate for something like legal accuracy in inquiries of this nature, will not be with"out its effect upon devout minds, accustomed to rest in the thought of God's watchful guardianship over His Church."

And much more in the same tone, which is worthily, and consistently summed up by the question: "On what " evidence do we put faith in the existence of St. George, the "patron of England? Upon such, assuredly, as an acute

critic or skilful pleader might easily scatter to the winds; "the belief of prejudiced or credulous witnesses; the un

"written record of empty pageants and bauble decorations. "On the side of scepticism might be exhibited a powerful

array of suspicious legends and exploded acts. Yet, after all, what Catholic is there but would count it a profaneness "to question the existence of St. George?"

in

When I found Dr. Newman allowing his disciplesmembers, even then, of the Protestant Church of Englandpage after page, in Life after Life, to talk nonsense of this kind, which is not only sheer Popery, but saps the very foundation of historic truth, was it so wonderful that I conceived him to have taught and thought like them?

But more. I found, that although the responsibility of these Saints' Lives was carefully divided and guarded by anonymousness, and by Dr. Newman's advertisement in No. 1, that the different lives would be "published by their respective authors on their own responsibility," yet that Dr. Newman had, in what I must now consider merely a moment of amiable weakness, connected himself formally with one of the most offensive of these Lives, and with its most ridiculous statements. I speak of the "Life of St. Walburga." There is, in all the Lives, the same tendency to repeat childish miracles, to waive the common laws of evidence, to say to the reader, You must believe all or nothing." But some of them, the writers, for instance, of Vol. IV., which contains, among others, a charming life of St. Neot-treat the stories openly as legends and myths, and tell them as they stand, without asking the reader, or themselves, to believe them altogether. The method is harmless enough, if the legends had stood alone; but dangerous enough, when they stand side by side with stories told in earnest, like that of St. Walburga. In that, not only has the writer expatiated upon some of the most nauseous superstitions of the middle age, but Dr. Newman has, in a preface signed with his initials, solemnly set his seal to the same.

The writer-an Oxford scholar, and, as far as I know, then

a professed member of the Church of England-dares to tell us of such miracles as these:

How a little girl, playing with a ball near the monastery, was punished for her over-fondness for play, by finding the ball stick to her hand, and, running to St. Walburga's shrine to pray, had the ball immediately taken off.

How a woman who would spin on festival-days in like manner found her distaff cling to her hand, and had to beg of St Walburga's bone, before she could get rid of it.

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How a man who came into the church to pray, verently kept his rough gauntlets, or gloves, on his hands,

as he joined them in the posture of prayer." How they were miraculously torn off, and then, when he repented, "restored by a miracle." "All these," says the writer, “have "the character of a gentle mother correcting the idleness and faults of careless and thoughtless children with tenderness." "But the most remarkable and lasting miracle, attesting the holy Walburga's sanctity, is that which reckons her among the saints who are called 'Elæophori,' or 'unguentiferous,' becoming, almost in a literal sense, olive-trees in the courts "of God. These are they from whose bones a holy oil distils. "That oil of charity and gentle mercy which graced them 'while alive, and fed in them the flame of universal love at “their death, still permeates their bodily remains." After quoting the names of male saints who have possessed this property, the author goes on to detail how this holy oil fell, in drops, sometimes the size of a hazel-nut, sometimes of a pea, into the silver bowl beneath the stone slab. How, when the state of Aichstadt was laid under an interdict, the holy oil ceased, "until the Church regained its rights," and so forth, and so forth; and then, returning to his original image, metaphor, illustration, proof, or whatever else it may be called by reasoners such as he and Dr. Newman, he says that the same flow of oil or dew is related of this female saint and that