ewes, and Ken,
and Bull, of Butler and Wilson, are as strong and natural as the
barriers which outwardly keep them asunder are to human eyes
hopelessly insurmountable?

XXX

CARDINAL NEWMAN'S COURSE[34]

[34]
_Guardian_, 13th August 1890.

The long life is closed. And men, according to their knowledge and
intelligence, turn to seek for some governing idea or aspect of things,
by which to interpret the movements and changes of a course which, in
spite of its great changes, is felt at bottom to have been a uniform
and consistent one. For it seems that, at starting, he is at once
intolerant, even to harshness, to the Roman Church, and tolerant,
though not sympathetic, to the English; then the parts are reversed,
and he is intolerant to the English and tolerant to the Roman; and then
at last, when he finally anchored in the Roman Church, he is seen
as--not tolerant, for that would involve dogmatic points on which he
was most jealous, but--sympathetic in all that was of interest to
England, and ready to recognise what was good and high in the English
Church.

Is not the ultimate key to Newman's history his keen and profound sense
of the life, society, and principles of action presented in the New
Testament? To this New Testament life he saw, opposed and in contrast,
the ways and assumptions of English life, religious as well as secular.
He saw that the organisation of society had been carried, and was still
being carried, to great and wonderful perfection; only it was the
perfection of a society and way of life adapted to the present world,
and having its ends here; only it was as different as anything can be
from the picture which the writers of the New Testament, consciously
and unconsciously, give of themselves and their friends. Here was a
Church, a religion, a "Christian nation," professing to be identical in
spirit and rules of faith and conduct with the Church and religion of
the Gospels and Epistles; and what was the identity, beyond certain
phrases and conventional suppositions? He could not see a trace in
English society of that simple and severe hold of the unseen and the
future which is the colour and breath, as well as the outward form, of
the New Testament life. Nothing could be more perfect, nothing grander
and nobler, than all the current arrangements for this life; its
justice and order and increasing gentleness, its widening sympathies
between men; but it was all for the perfection and i