had applied the same ruling idea to organic nature. That this should have led him and his school to Rome is easily comprehensible now, but Newman's history in the Anglican Church was a bold attempt to claim for her the same privileges as the Church of Rome in this respect.
Mr. Hutton rests his claim for Newman's greatness on the persistency with which he applied himself to the working out in full detail of his main conceptions in theology, and on the greatness of the powers which, as Mr. Hutton intimates, he sacrificed to those objects. He might have been, it is argued, a great poet or a great literary artist in prose, and he gave this up in order to save the Church of England and to devote his whole energies to theology. It is very doubtful, we think, whether Newman would have become a great poet in any other way than he did, as a hymn-writer and as the author of The Dream of Geronitius. It is, again, somewhat difficult to guess in what direction but the theological Newman's exquisite prose, which at times became over-florid in his Romish works, could have been effective. He had few of the qualities that make the great historian, his literary essays are not even readable nowadays, and his so-called novels are only of interest in their theological bear-
