Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 40.djvu/352

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his lecture. At the trial in the court of queen's bench on 21, 22, 23, and 24 June 1852 a number of witnesses, brought for the most part from Italy, gave evidence establishing those facts. The jury, however, influenced probably by the summing up of the presiding judge (Lord Campbell) in a sense adverse to the defendant, gave their verdict against him, and, a motion for a new trial having been refused, Newman was fined 100l. by Mr. Justice Coleridge on 23 Jan. 1853. His expenses in connection with this case, amounting to over 14,000l., were defrayed by a public subscription, to which many foreign catholics contributed.

In 1854 Newman went to Dublin, at the invitation of the Irish catholic bishops, as rector of the catholic university, recently established there. It is related in the ‘Memoirs’ of Mr. J. R. Hope Scott that this invitation was given in consequence of a suggestion made by him to Archbishop (afterwards Cardinal) Cullen, who eagerly adopted it, exclaiming, ‘If we once had Dr. Newman engaged as president, I would fear for nothing. After that everything would be easy.’ The event did not justify this expectation. The catholic university in Dublin was, from the first, a predestined failure, owing to its non-recognition by the state and many other causes, one of which unquestionably was a certain native incapacity in Newman himself for practical organisation. Newman's special gift was not of rule, but of intellectual, ethical, and spiritual inspiration. The most considerable outcome of the Dublin experiment was Newman's volume on the ‘Idea of a University,’ in which he laid down, with great precision of thought and power of language, what he considered the true aims and principles of education. After Newman's return to Birmingham, in 1858, he was much occupied with a project for the establishment at Oxford of a branch house of the Oratory, which might in some sort have become a catholic college; he, indeed, went so far as to purchase the ground for it. The project, however, came to nothing in consequence of the opposition of certain influential catholics, among them being Cardinal (then Provost) Manning and William George Ward [q. v.] A scheme for a new English rendering of the Vulgate, which he took up at the suggestion of Cardinal Wiseman, shared the same fate, through the hostility, as is affirmed, of divers booksellers and others interested in the sale of the Douay version. In 1859 Newman established at Edgbaston the school for the sons of catholics of the upper classes, in which, down to the day of his death, he took the deepest interest, and which has done much for higher catholic education in England.

In January 1864 Charles Kingsley, reviewing anonymously in ‘Macmillan's Magazine’ Froude's ‘History of England,’ took occasion to remark: ‘Truth for its own sake had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not to be.’ This passage being brought to Newman's notice, he at once wrote to Messrs. Macmillan complaining of this ‘grave and gratuitous slander.’ Thereupon Kingsley avowed himself its author, and a correspondence ensued, in which Newman called upon his accuser either to substantiate the charge by passages from his writings or to confess that he was unable to do so. Kingsley declined to adopt either of these courses, or to go beyond an expression of satisfaction that he had mistaken Newman's meaning. Newman's sense of justice was not satisfied, and he proceeded to publish the correspondence, appending to it certain pungent remarks of his own. Kingsley replied in a pamphlet, entitled ‘What, then, does Dr. Newman mean?’ where he returned to his original accusation, which he had professed to abandon, and endeavoured to support it by a number of extracts from various works of Newman, both catholic and anglican. By way of rejoinder, Newman wrote his ‘Apologia pro Vita Sua,’ in which, at the cost of no small suffering to a nature eminently sensitive and shrinking from publicity, the veil was lifted from forty-five years of his inner life. Few books have so triumphantly accomplished their purpose as that remarkable work. Its simple candour wrought conviction even in theological opponents, while it revolutionised the popular estimate of its author. From that time until his death, widely as most of his countrymen differed from his religious opinions, there was probably no living man in whose unswerving rectitude they more entirely believed, or for whom they entertained a greater reverence.

In 1868 the new and uniform edition of Newman's works began with the republication of his Oxford ‘Plain and Parochial Sermons.’ The series was brought to a close in 1881 by his translation of the select treatises of St. Athanasius against the Arians. It extends to thirty-six volumes. Two of them, specially curious and interesting, are those entitled ‘The Via Media,’ which contain lectures, tracts, and letters written between 1830 and 1841 in exposition of that system, with an elaborate preface and frequent notes, wherein the author corrects and refutes his former self.

In 1874 Mr. Gladstone published an article in the ‘Contemporary Review,’ in the course