sorrow of heart also. And if you
are not both sobered in your mind and full of an unquenchable sorrow in
your heart, O yes! attend to it, for you are not yet begun to be what God
would have you to be. Dr. Newman, with all his mistakes and all his
faults, was a master in two things: his own heart and the English
language. And in writing home to his mother a confidential letter from
college on his birthday, he confides to her that he often 'shudders at
himself.' 'No,' he answered to his mother's fears and advices about food
and air and exercise: 'No, I am neither nervous, nor in ill-health, nor
do I study too much. I am neither melancholy, nor morose, nor austere,
nor distant, nor reserved, nor sullen. I am always cheerful, ready and
eager to join in any merriment. I am not clouded with sadness, nor
absent in mind, nor deficient in action. No; take me when I am most
foolish at home and extend mirth into childishness; yet all the time I am
shuddering at myself.' There spake the future author of the immortal
sermons. There spake a mind and a heart that have deepened the minds and
the hearts of Christian men more than any other influence of the century;
a mind and a heart, moreover, that will shine and beat in our best
literature and in our deepest devotion for centuries to come. You must
all know by this time another classical passage from the pen of another
spiritual genius in the Church of England, that greatly gifted church.
Let me repeat it to illustrate how sober-mindedness and great sorrow of
heart always come to the best of men. 'Let any man consider that if the
world knew all that of him which he knows of himself; if they saw what
vanity and what passions govern his inside, and what secret tempers sully
and corrupt his best actions; and he would have no more pretence to be
honoured and admired for his goodness and wisdom than a rotten and
distempered body is to be loved and admired for its beauty and
comeliness. And, perhaps, there are very few people in the world who
would not rather choose to die than to have all their secret follies, the
errors of their judgments, the vanity of their minds, the falseness of
their pretences, the frequency of their vain and disorderly passions,
their uneasinesses, hatreds, envies, and vexations made known to the
world. And shall pride be entertained in a heart thus conscious of its
own miserable behaviour?' No wonder that Mr. Prywell was sober-minded!
No wonder that D