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JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

usual fraction of truth. He was born to lead men; the very modesty that caused him at times to deny this concealed his dissatisfaction even with the enormous mastery over men's souls and fates that he wielded for so many years. It was by personal intercourse that he sought to move the world, and did move it. The tenacity with which he clung to old friendships was significant of much. His whole life was a sermon, the text of which might well be the title of his epoch-making discourse, Personal Intercourse the Means of Propagating the Truth—the sermon that really started the Tractarian Movement, and not Keble's on National Apostasy. Throughout his Anglican period the ecclesiastical things which touched him most nearly were not things of dogma, but lay in the sphere of almost practical politics. At every point of his career it was some problem in the relations of Church and State that affected him most strongly. The abolition of the Irish bishoprics, the miserable muddle of the Jerusalem bishopric, the alliance of O'Connell and the Whigs—these things, and things like these, are the turning-points of his career. Even the diplomatic reserve and 'economy of truth' with which the world credited him for so many years were marks of the ecclesiastical statesman, not of the religious thinker.