Chapter X: Cardinal Newman

[Picture: Cardinal Newman. From the portrait by Jane Fortescue, Lady
Coleridge]

It is difficult perhaps for students of the younger generation to realise the immense influence exercised among his contemporaries by Cardinal Newman, nor will a study of his writings adequately explain it to them.

He has hardly survived as a standard author, though he wrote a pure and lucid prose. Those who leave the bulk of their literary work behind them in the form of sermons are inviting the world to neglect it.

Moreover, though he was a past master of controversy, the arena in which he fought with such doughty prowess amid the excited plaudits and dehortations of vast assemblies is now left solitary in echoing emptiness, and the crowds of to-day have passed away to abet the combatants, on one side or the other, in very different fields of tourney.

Here and there his writing ascends to a fine note of eloquence, as in his great exclamatory passage on music that begins thus:--

There are seven notes in the scale; make them fourteen: yet what a
slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What science brings so
much out of so little? Out of what poor elements does some great
master in it create his new world!

But all his writings, religious and controversial, will not explain the immense and dominating effect Newman produced upon his contemporaries. That effect was due to the irresistible magic of his personality. He was manifestly one of the Saints of God, and his presence brought with it into any company a sense of mighty power gloved in stainless humility. Though habitually bearing an aspect of wistful gentleness, his entry into a room crowded with distinguished people made them all seem to be something less than they were before his arrival.

A man of such a character commands by his visible presence, and those who have not felt the spell of it do not comprehend the cause of his authoritative influence among those who have.

The teaching of Newman on the great question of man's relation to the sentient creatures placed in his power in the world, must come to us with all the weight that is implicit in the utterance of one of such unquestioned sanctity.

It would be difficult in all his voluminous works to discover anything more touching and moving than his reference to the sufferings of animals, who as he says "have done no harm," which is embedded in the seventh volume of his Parochial and Plain Sermons:--

First, as to these sufferings, you will observe that our Lord is
called a Lamb in the text; that is, He was as defenceless and as
innocent as a lamb is. Since then Scripture compares Him to this
inoffensive and unprotected animal, we may, without presumption or
irreverence, take the image as a means of conveying to our minds
those feelings which our Lord's sufferings should excite in us. I
mean, consider how very horrible it is to read the accounts which
sometimes meet us of cruelties exercised on brute animals. Does it
not sometimes make us shudder to hear tell of them, or to read them
in some chance publication which we take up? At one time it is the
wanton deed of barbarous and angry owners who ill-treat their cattle,
or beasts of burden; and at another it is the cold-blooded and
calculating act of men of science, who make experiments on brute
animals, perhaps merely from a sort of curiosity.

I do not like to go into particulars, for many reasons, but one of
those instances which we read of as happening in this day, and which
seems more shocking than the rest, is when the poor dumb victim is
fastened against a wall, pierced, gashed, and so left to linger out
its life. Now, do you not see that I have a reason for saying this,
and am not using these distressing words for nothing? For what was
this but the very cruelty inflicted upon our Lord? He was gashed
with the scourge, pierced through hands and feet, and so fastened to
the Cross, and there left, and that as a spectacle. Now, what is it
moves our very hearts and sickens us so much as cruelty shown to poor
brutes? I suppose this first, that they have done no harm; next,
that they have no power whatever of resistance; it is the cowardice
and tyranny of which they are the victims which make their sufferings
so especially touching. For instance, if they were dangerous
animals, take the case of wild beasts at large, able not only to
defend themselves, but even to attack us; much as we might dislike to
hear of their wounds and agony, yet our feelings would be of a very
different kind, but there is something so very dreadful, so satanic
in tormenting those who never have harmed us, and who cannot defend
themselves, who are utterly in our power, who have weapons neither of
offence nor defence, that none but very hardened persons can endure
the thought of it.

Let us listen with all our hearts to this beautiful appeal. Let us reverence the saintly man who made it, and who still speaks to us out of the past. Let us remember that Knowledge and the search for it may often be cruel, but that Wisdom and those who follow it are always merciful.