Published August 12, 1890
We have to record, with feelings of the most sincere regret, the death of His
Eminence Cardinal Newman. He died last evening at the Oratory, Edgbaston, in
his 90th year, after less than three days' illness. The Cardinal has for
many years manifested the feebleness of advanced age, although he has fully
retained his mental faculties, and has rallied in a wonderful manner from
more than one severe illness. His last sermon at the Oratory church was
delivered three years ago last Easter, although he made a few comments on
the 1st of January, 1889, with reference to the Pope's sacerdotal jubilee.
Since then his physical weakness has developed, and he has had to depend
upon the support of two of the Fathers of the Oratory in entering and
quitting the chapel when assisting at the sacred function. The last
ecclesiastical function in which he took part was the solemn triduo which
was celebrated on July 18-20, in honour of the beatification of Juvenal
Ancina of the Roman Oratory. His feebleness on that occasion was specially
noticed, and at the opening service he was carried into the church seated on
a chair. At the Saturday and Sunday services his Eminence was not carried
through the church, but had his seat placed at the entrance to St. Philip's
Chapel, which has private communication with the Oratory. On the Saturday he
gave the Benediction to the congregation with the relics of the Saint. Two
evenings later—namely, on the 22nd ult., the Cardinal was among the company
who witnessed the Latin play—at this time the Andria, arranged by
himself—which is annually performed by the pupils of the Oratory school. He
also distributed the prizes to the pupils, addressing a few remarks to each.
From that time until Saturday last there was nothing abnormal in the
Cardinal's condition, and his medical attendant (Dr. Blunt) went to
Blackpool, leaving his illustrious patient in charge of Mr. C. H. Jenner
Hoog. On Saturday night the Cardinal had an attack of shivering, followed by
a sharp rise of temperature, and the symptoms indicative of pneumonia
rapidly supervened and became acute. Dr. Blunt was telegraphed for and
arrived from Blackpool the same evening. During the day Cardinal Newman,
though rapidly becoming worse, was able to speak to those about him, and in
the afternoon, at his request, the Rev. W. Neville recited with him the
Breviary. Yesterday morning he fell into an unconscious condition. He was
heard, in a mechanical way, to whisper "William," the Christian name of his
secretary, Father Neville, but he gave no signs of understanding any
question addressed to him. The Oratory Fathers were then informed that he
was sinking, and that the prolongation of his life was to be measured by
hours. Upon this the rite of extreme unction was performed by the Rev.
Austin Mills, in the presence of such members of the community as were at
the time in the Oratory, four of their number being away from Birmingham.
Owing to the patient's comatose condition the Viaticum was not administered,
but he received Holy Communion on Saturday. Information of the Cardinal's
condition was telegraphed to the Oratory, in London, and also to the Right
Rev. Bishop Illsley. The latter visited the Cardinal early in the afternoon,
and spent some time with him, and made the "commendation of his soul" in the
presence of the Oratory Fathers. There was an appointment on the part of the
doctors to meet for consultation at 8 o'clock last evening. At that time it
was seen that life was fast ebbing away, and both medical men remained until
12 minutes to 9, when Cardinal Newman breathed his last. He died in the
presence of the Fathers of the Congregation, and there is every reason to
believe that his death was painless.
The medical attendants have issued the following account of their patient's
last illness. "The Oratory, August 11, 1890. His Eminence Cardinal Newman
was seized with inflammation of the right lung at 2 o'clock a.m. on Sunday,
August 10. He very rapidly became worse until this evening at 8:45, when he
expired. His Eminence expressed himself as feeling quite well an hour before
this attack occurred.—G. Vernon Blunt, M.D.; C. H. Jenner Hogg, M.R.C.S.E."
The private prayers of the congregation were asked for the Cardinal at the
Oratory Church on Sunday, and in the evening there were numerous and anxious
inquiries respecting him. He will be buried at the little country retreat of
the Oratorians, at Rednall, where there is a private cemetery and chapel.
The body will be exposed in the Oratory Church from noon today until it is
removed for burial. The date of the funeral is not yet fixed.
The greatest name in that matter which most occupies, most unites, and most
divides men is now resigned to history. Cardinal Newman is gone to that rest
which for him will not be happiness if it does not give work to be done. His
disappearance from the stage of life is no sudden event. It is not as if an
army had lost its commander in mid-battle, or as if the tongue of the orator
had become suddenly mute, or the lyre had dropped from the poet's hand. It
is not a future that has vanished with the past, or a cataract of life that
has been arrested in full flow. The truth is the great Cardinal has occupied
so exceptional a place in human affairs that, while he has largely
influenced them, he has had himself to discover and even to recognize that
they could go on without him. Standing apart from the world, he has long
been on excellent terms with it, and they part in peace. Rome, wisely and
happily for its credit and its influence, eleven years ago added his name to
its highest list of honour; but, otherwise, Cardinal Newman may be said to
have been without a place in the earth's pedigrees and successions; to have
been left out of common reckoning, tied by no allegiance, complicated by no
secular ties, "without father or mother," in the links of causation and the
rolls of time. Forty years have now shown that the Church of England can
pursue its course without his guidance or his warnings; still more have they
shown that it is not such men the Church of Rome most trusts and employs.
The Cardinal has long taken his position as a "Father" of we know not what
century in that constellation of acute and saintly minds that still
illumines the dark interval between ancient and modern civilization. It was
his own choice to be Athanasius contra mundum. Whether from his ashes will
arise the avenger, to do for him the work he has not seen done with his own
eyes, and so reverse the judgment of time, is beyond even conjecture. For
the present a mighty man has fallen, yet we are much as we were.
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[His Life]
John Henry Newman began his life with the century, for he was born in the city
of London on February 21, 1801. His father was a partner in two successive
banking firms, from the French Revolution to the disastrous crisis of 1816,
when his firm, like a crowd of others, had temporarily to suspend payment.
His mother was of a Huguenot family long resident in London, and remarkable
for ingenuity and enterprise. Two of her brothers brought over, perfected,
and established the paper-making machine. John H. Newman, with his not less
remarkable brother Frank, was sent to Dr. Nicholas, at Ealing, the best
private school in England, at a time when the tide of opinion had turned
against public schools. Newman was easily and soon the top boy of the
school. He had already shown a decided taste for music, becoming at 13 a
proficient on the violin, and composing a sort of opera. Music was in the
blood, and also in the Newman circle of friendship. At 15 he received the
impulse, ever after credited with the formation of his career. This was
through Mr. Walter Mayers, who had much talk with him, and lent him books,
which were devoured, probably, as they had never been before. As far as
Englishmen can be described in Continental terms, this excellent and very
amiable clergyman was a Calvinist. Through him, and especially through one
of Scott's works lent by him, Newman felt himself converted. From that year
he ever dated his spiritual life, or his "regeneration." In his "Apologia"
he utterly ignores the first 15 years of his life, including all that
father, mother, brothers and sisters, clergymen, or other friends might have
done for him. In so doing he has given scope for inferences for which he
seemed not to have been quite prepared. Of course, he learnt the Church
Catechism, but he also read the Bible thoroughly, and acquired a great
liking for it, which is by no means a matter of course in boyhood. Did he
read the Bible without any interpreter? Did he read it, also, without
profit? Did he return again and again to the study of the Word without being
yet a child of grace? That at 15 he might be persuaded to think little of
himself is likely enough, but it is strange to find so little felt, at least
said, for his natural teachers. Yet every one who has had to do with the
teaching or training of boys must be painfully aware that in one sense it is
a most thankless task. At about 15 there is such an expansion of mind and
real development of character that in the new vision of life the old is
forgotten. A grown-up man looks back and sees himself emerging out of the
bright mist separating boyhood from youth. This is the beginning of his
mental history.
Still under these novel impressions, Newman went to Trinity College, Oxford.
About the same time the family came down from affluence to simple
competency, and Newman been destined for the Bar, felt a higher calling. His
own religious feelings disposed him to friendships in what were then the not
very large or very distinguished, or, indeed, very refined Evangelical
circles. But the college system operates as a cross division in all social
matters, and just as it brings together different classes, so it gives to
different schools of opinion the opportunity of a friendly disagreement and
sometimes final approximation. Newman's Trinity friendships were his longest
and, perhaps, his deepest; but they were out of the Evangelical circle in
which he first appeared at Oxford. As all the world knows, and as has
happened to many others from whom great things were expected, Newman failed
for honours. His reading, he used to say, had been too discursive. His
health, however, had broken down. He was only 19, the age at which many men
now enter the University. Much also depends on the Examiners. Perhaps it may
be added that Newman's independent and autocratic character might easily put
him out of the groove in an examination. He certainly was more likely to say
things his own way than in the way expected by an Examiner; and, if the
Examiner could only understand things in his own way, there would ensue a
continual misunderstanding. It was as a Scholar of Trinity, and residing in
that very pleasant college, that Newman, together with his dear friend John
Bowden, wrote and published the now famous poem on St. Bartholomew's Eve.
The Cardinal was always proud of that work, perhaps as his first-born, and
he even took the pains to put on record his share of it. This might be to
show that it was no ignorance of Rome, or early leaning, that he finally
submitted to her and became her champion.
Three years after taking his degree Newman was elected Fellow of the College
with which his name will ever be most associated, and which is proud to
place him by the side of Raleigh, Butler, and, we may add, Copleston in the
highest rank of its worthies. Though evidently not understood by the
last-named, who was then Provost, and who measured men by the figure they
made in a literary tournament, Newman rapidly won a place in the hearts of
many good men. It was here, and in this interval of peace and quietness,
that he became Whately's ally and Vice-Principal, and the long-attached
friend of Keble, Pusey, Froude, and Robert and Henry Wilberforce. It was
here that he learnt to love and revere Edward Hawkins, in whose long and
steadfast course the Cardinal's Oxford career seems but a brief episode. Dr.
Hawkins was a member of Oriel College 70 years, Provost 55. Though Newman
lived long in a short time, his whole connexion with the College only
extended to twenty-three years. His mental acquaintance with the future
Provost began as early as his own undergraduate days, when he heard the
latter's sermon on "Unauthoritative Tradition," which sent his thoughts in a
new direction. When he became better acquainted with the preacher he learnt
from him to weigh his words and to be cautious in his statements. Hawkins
bestowed friendly and useful criticisms on the first sermon he wrote. He
leant Newman Sumner's treatise on Apostolical teaching, which Newman says
dispelled his remaining Calvinism. If he did not receive this creed until
15, he could easily dismiss it at 23. The doctrine of "Apostolical
Succession," he said, he received from Mr. William James, a very good and
very sensible Fellow of the College, but not the man one would expect to
change the current of a national theology. Long before this, in his
unconverted state as he afterwards deemed it, he had employed himself with
evidence, reading "The Age of Reason," Hume's Essays, and Voltaire. Later on
he wrote a long but now forgotten article on the miraculous story of
Apollonius Tyanaeus, to distinguish between false miracles and true.
Of all his contemporaries, or early friends, the one whose relations with him
have excited the most curiosity is Keble. Newman has put on record that
Keble was shy of him at first and for some time. Being where they then were
they had every reason for being shy of one another; but the truth is Keble
was shy of everybody at first; and at that time Newman was also. At this
distance of time it seems almost inconceivable that for several years the
most constant and familiar member of Oriel society was that very
interesting, but very singular personage, Blanco White, with his mediaeval
lore and his philosophical ideas. Like many other brooding spirits, he
deeply felt the power of music, and, though an indifferent performer, had
frequent quartettes with Newman at his lodgings.
At 23 Newman was ordained deacon, and took charge of the Trasteverine parish
of St. Clement's for four years. There is a certain mystery about his
preaching during this period, for all his published sermons bear St. Mary's
on their face. The old church of St. Clement's was a mean little structure,
on the eastern slope of the well-known bridge, which of late years has had
to sacrifice its picturesque features to give space to a tramway. Newman had
to see to the building of a new church on a conspicuous but not very
accessible site. His preaching excited some curiosity, not so much in the
University at large as in Evangelical circles, where close agreement and
familiar phrases were wont to be expected, and could not be missed without
suspicion. In 1825, on the death of Peter Elmsley, Whately became Principal
of St. Alban's Hall, and invited Newman to share the teaching of his small
and awkward squad as Vice-Principal. Whately always liked to have somebody
about him ready and competent to receive his emanations. The habit is a good
one, but risky, and Whately had his failures. To judge by the sequel, Newman
was one of these. For the present, however, they appreciated one another,
and there was even a time when Newman had a better opinion of Whately's
orthodoxy than Whately of his. Very quickly, however, Newman made the
discovery that Whately's turn of mind was negative and destructive; that
logic was the one thing not to be found in his book on that subject, and
that he could only lash the waters, without having his net ready to secure
the fish. Yet in after years Newman felt he had to thank Whately for weaning
him from the Erastian views of Church polity which he believed to have been
part of his own original composition. Up to 1826 Newman had held loyally to
the ideal of Church and State as shown in Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity;
but at this day he and all Oxford were greatly stirred by an anonymous
pamphlet, generally ascribed to Whately, and never repudiated by him, to the
effect that this was a double usurpation and a double injury.
In this year Newman became tutor of his college in place of Jelf, who was now
tutor to Prince George of Cumberland. Lloyd, whose private theological
lectures Newman had been attending, sent for him first, but finding him two
years under the stipulated age, had to pass him over for Jelf. Few will now
doubt that the latter was the better adapted for the purpose. It would,
indeed, have been hard to find any one better adapted. Up to that date the
undergraduates of Oriel had been equally divided between four tutors, each
of whom stood in loco parentis to his own men, a score perhaps. The relation
was variously understood, and variously carried out, but it was a tradition
of the University that the office admitted of a large significance. Newman
immediately let it be known that he was only too willing to give his pupils
all the direction, advice, assistance, and actual instruction they might
desire, and some half-dozen or more gladly availed themselves of the
invitation. There ensued in most instances a life-long friendship. Two
younger tutors, as they succeeded to office, followed the example, and there
was a time when the greater part of the College stood thus restored to what
was really the original idea. Newman was soon after appointed a public
examiner in Lit. Hum., and for a year he was to be seen every day in
High-street in the velvet-striped gown indicating a Pro-Proctor.
