Famous Reviews eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 678 pages of information about Famous Reviews.

Famous Reviews eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 678 pages of information about Famous Reviews.
author intended them to be used.  They were meant to exhibit to his countrymen the whole secret of his moral and spiritual anatomy; they were intended to prove that he was altogether free from that foul and disgraceful taint of innate dishonesty, the unspoken suspicion of which in so many quarters had so long troubled him; the open utterance of which, from the lips of a popular and respectable writer, was so absolutely intolerable to him.  From that imputation it is but bare justice to say he does thoroughly clear himself.  The post-mortem examination of his life is complete; the hand which guided the dissecting-knife has trembled nowhere, nor shrunk from any incision.  All lies perfectly open, and the foul taint is nowhere.  And yet, looking back with the writer on the changes which this strange narrative records, from his subscribing, in 1828, towards the first start of the “Record” newspaper to his receiving on the 9th of October, 1845, at Littlemore, the “remarkable-looking man, evidently a foreigner, shabbily dressed in black,"[2] who received him into the Papal Communion, we see abundant reason, even without the action of that prevalent suspicion of secret dishonesty somewhere, which in English minds inevitably connects itself with the spread of Popery, for the widely-diffused impression of that being true which it is so pleasant to find unfounded.

[1] “Collection of Papers, &c.” p. 16. [2] “Historical Notes of the Tractarian Movement,” by Canon Oakley. 
    Dublin Review, No. v, p. 190.

From first to last these pages exhibit the habit of Dr. Newman’s mind as eminently subjective.  It might almost be described as the exact opposite of that of S. Athanasius:  with a like all-engrossing love for truth; with ecclesiastical habits often strangely similar; with cognate gifts of the imperishable inheritance of genius, the contradiction here is almost absolute.  The abstract proposition, the rightly-balanced proposition, is everything to the Eastern, it is well-nigh nothing to the English Divine.  When led by circumstances to embark in the close examination of Dogma, as in his “History of the Arians,” his Nazarite locks of strength appear to have been shorn, and the giant, at whose might we have been marvelling, becomes as any other man.  The dogmatic portion of this work is poor and tame; it is only when the writer escapes from dogma into the dramatic representation of the actors in the strife that his powers reappear.  For abstract truth it is true to us that he has no engrossing affection:  his strength lay in his own apprehension of it, in his power of defending it when once it had been so apprehended and had become engrafted into him; and it is to this as made one with himself, and to his own inward life as fed and nourished by it, that he perpetually reverts.

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Famous Reviews from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.