Huguenot blood in their veins. And with Newman all this was informed with the attraction of a personality so rare and a nature so rich that the appeal is irresistible even to those who care little for his topics.
Yes, that was an exceptionally rich nature which has just been removed from the world. He moved many men, because he had within him the making of many men. He had points of contact with nearly all the currents of thought and feeling which were to transform the higher England in Queen Victoria's reign. That revolt of his against 'Liberalism.' as he called it, was prophetic of nearly all the deeper movements of our time. The resort to history for spiritual nourishment, which led him from the Evangelicalism of Simeon to Rome herself, has become a source of inspiration for the higher politics and economics of our time. There was something, too, of the romantic temper in him—that return to the mystic glow and imaginative colouring of the Middle Ages that has done so much for our literature and our art. Even the method of evolution appears to have operated on Newman's mind in the doctrine of development that finally led him to Rome. And that absorbing interest of Newman in dogmatic theology was but a foreshadowing of what has befallen most of England's higher minds
