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CARDINAL NEWMAN


AGREAT leader of men, an influential ecclesiastic, a man of saintly life, a spiritual force of great power, a master of English prose, has passed away from us with John Henry Newman. To modern England he has been as one of the dead from the night Father Dominic, the Passionist, passed over his threshold at Littlemore, and he has himself written the biography of that dead self in one of the masterpieces of English literature. What Father Newman did in life and letters is of quite subordinate interest to the spiritual career of the Fellow of Oriel, who exercised so much influence on the Church of England and might have exercised more. It is only so far as that career has affected the inner life of England and its manifestations in English letters that it can be considered in this place.

It seems almost a paradox to say of the author of forty volumes that his true sphere was in action, not thought or literature. Yet it is a paradox that contains more than the

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