where, with a few followers, he led a life of almost monastic seclusion, still striving to reconcile his changing belief with the doctrines of his own church.  Two years later he resigned his charge at St. Mary’s and left the Anglican communion,—­not bitterly, but with a deep and tender regret.  His last sermon at Littlemore on “The Parting of Friends” still moves us profoundly, like the cry of a prophet torn by personal anguish in the face of duty.  In 1845 he was received into the Catholic church, and the following year, at Rome, he joined the community of St. Philip Neri, “the saint of gentleness and kindness,” as Newman describes him, and was ordained to the Roman priesthood.

By his preaching and writing Newman had exercised a strong influence over his cultivated English hearers, and the effect of his conversion was tremendous.  Into the theological controversy of the next twenty years we have no mind to enter.  Through it all Newman retained his serenity, and, though a master of irony and satire, kept his literary power always subordinate to his chief aim, which was to establish the truth as he saw it.  Whether or not we agree with his conclusions, we must all admire the spirit of the man, which is above praise or criticism.  His most widely read work, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), was written in answer to an unfortunate attack by Charles Kingsley, which would long since have been forgotten had it not led to this remarkable book.  In 1854 Newman was appointed rector of the Catholic University in Dublin, but after four years returned to England and founded a Catholic school at Edgbaston.  In 1879 he was made cardinal by Pope Leo XIII.  The grace and dignity of his life, quite as much as the sincerity of his Apologia, had long since disarmed criticism, and at his death, in 1890, the thought of all England might well be expressed by his own lines in “The Dream of Gerontius”: 

    I had a dream.  Yes, some one softly said,
      “He’s gone,” and then a sigh went round the room;
    And then I surely heard a priestly voice
        Cry Subvenite; and they knelt in prayer.

WORKS OF NEWMAN.  Readers approach Newman from so many different motives, some for doctrine, some for argument, some for a pure prose style, that it is difficult to recommend the best works for the beginner’s use.  As an expression of Newman’s spiritual struggle the Apologia Pro Vita Sua is perhaps the most significant.  This book is not light reading and one who opens it should understand clearly the reasons for which it was written.  Newman had been accused of insincerity, not only by Kingsley but by many other men, in the public press.  His retirement to solitude and meditation at Littlemore had been outrageously misunderstood, and it was openly charged that his conversion was a cunningly devised plot to win a large number of his followers to the Catholic church.  This charge involved others, and it was