during the past half-century, even when it has led them to agnosticism. England is the only European country that cares for theology, say continental observers, and its passionate interest in theology begins in this century with the movement with which Newman's name will for ever be connected. Even the rise of the interest in art and music seems to be foreshadowed in Newman's own personal fondness for them. Newmanism, as we may call it, included all these things, and thus touched the national life in the early decades of Queen Victoria's reign in far more points than might seem at first sight to be the case.
But it was chiefly and mainly in his passion for theology that he came nearest to the higher strivings of his countrymen. In no one of his time was manifested more strongly the wish to believe which some of his disciples have ranked so high above the desire to know. His whole life was dominated by this wish, and it is this that gives such dramatic unity to the Apologia. No other autobiography—certainly not that of St. Augustine, its nearest prototype in literature—is so intensely theological. It is not the life of a man we read, it is the drama of a soul, and of a soul entirely occupied with the relations of itself to God. Surely few men have always lived their life so completely in the
