Moreover, though he was a past master of controversy, the arena in which he fought with such doughty prowess amid the excited plaudits and dehortations of vast assemblies is now left solitary in echoing emptiness, and the crowds of to-day have passed away to abet the combatants, on one side or the other, in very different fields of tourney. Here and there his writing ascends to a fine note of eloquence, as in his great exclamatory passage on music that begins thus:-- There are seven notes in the scale; make them fourteen: yet what a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What science brings so much out of so little? Out of what poor elements does some great master in it create his new world! But all his writings, religious and controversial, will not explain the immense and dominating effect Newman produced upon his contemporaries. That effect was due to the irresistible magic of his personality. He was manifestly one of the Saints of God, and his presence brought with it into any company a sense of mighty power gloved in stainless humility. Though habitually bearing an aspect of wistful gentleness, his entry into a room crowded with distinguished people made them all seem to be something less than they were before his arrival. A man of such a character commands by his visible presence, and those who have not felt the spell of it do not comprehend the cause of his authoritative influence among those who have. The teaching of Newman on the great question of man's relation to the sentient creatures placed in his power in the world, must come to us with all the weight that is implicit in the utterance of one of such unquestioned sanctity. It would be difficult in all his voluminous works to discover anything more touching and moving than his reference to the sufferings of animals, who as he says "have done no harm," which is embedded in the seventh volume of his Parochial and Plain Sermons:-- First, as to these sufferings, you will observe that our Lord is called a Lamb in the text; that is, He was as defenceless and as innocent as a lamb is. Since then Scripture compares Him to this inoffensive and unprotected animal, we may, without presumption or irreverence, take the image as a means of conveying to our minds those feelings which our Lord's sufferings should excite in us. I mean, consider how very horrible it is to read the accounts which sometimes meet us of cruelties exercised on brute animals. Does it not sometimes make us shudder to hear tell of them, or to read them in some chance publication which we take up? At one time it is the wanton deed of barbarous and angry owners who ill-treat their cattle, or beasts of burden; and at another it is the cold-blooded and calculating act of men of science, who make experiments on brute animals, perhaps merely from a sort of curiosity.