to defend them, as well as to vindicate himself, that Newman wrote the Apologia.  The perfect sincerity with which he traced his religious history, showing that his conversion was only the final step in a course he had been following since boyhood, silenced his critics and revolutionized public opinion concerning himself and the church which he had joined.  As the revelation of a soul’s history, and as a model of pure, simple, unaffected English, this book, entirely apart from its doctrinal teaching, deserves a high place in our prose literature.

In Newman’s doctrinal works, the Via Media, the Grammar of Assent, and in numerous controversial essays the student of literature will have little interest.  Much more significant are his sermons, the unconscious reflection of a rare spiritual nature, of which Professor Shairp said:  “His power shows itself clearly in the new and unlooked-for way in which he touched into life old truths, moral or spiritual....  And as he spoke, how the old truth became new! and how it came home with a meaning never felt before!  He laid his finger how gently yet how powerfully on some inner place in the hearer’s heart, and told him things about himself he had never known till then.  Subtlest truths, which would have taken philosophers pages of circumlocution and big words to state, were dropped out by the way in a sentence or two of the most transparent Saxon.”  Of greater interest to the general reader are The Idea of a University, discourses delivered at Dublin, and his two works of fiction, Loss and Gain, treating of a man’s conversion to Catholicism, and Callista, which is, in his own words, “an attempt to express the feelings and mutual relations of Christians and heathens in the middle of the third century.”  The latter is, in our judgment, the most readable and interesting of Newman’s works.  The character of Callista, a beautiful Greek sculptor of idols, is powerfully delineated; the style is clear and transparent as air, and the story of the heroine’s conversion and death makes one of the most fascinating chapters in fiction, though it is not the story so much as the author’s unconscious revelation of himself that charms us.  It would be well to read this novel in connection with Kingsley’s Hypatia, which attempts to reconstruct the life and ideals of the same period.

Newman’s poems are not so well known as his prose, but the reader who examines the Lyra Apostolica and Verses on Various Occasions will find many short poems that stir a religious nature profoundly by their pure and lofty imagination; and future generations may pronounce one of these poems, “The Dream of Gerontius,” to be Newman’s most enduring work.  This poem aims to reproduce the thoughts and feelings of a man whose soul is just quitting the body, and who is just beginning a new and greater life.  Both in style and in thought “The Dream” is a powerful and original poem and is worthy of attention not only for itself but, as a modern critic suggests, “as a revelation of that high spiritual purpose which animated Newman’s life from beginning to end.”