_Phases of Faith_ was published in 1850. But the year before a book of far more religious suggestiveness had come out, though that too was a book of opposition to the accepted forms of religion, _The Soul: its Sorrows and Aspirations_. Regarded as a work postulating a new spiritual point of view, it was vague and unsatisfying. It was without form and void. It desired that most unsatisfying thing, a religion with no dogmas:--those stakes which preserve the ground on which grow the flowers of religious truth, from those who come but to spoil and destroy. Yet, with all its lack of convincing power, and those parts of it which are, like _Phases of Faith_, painful reading and profitless--to Christians--there are here and again striking passages such as this, whose beauty cannot fail to appeal to us: "None can enter the kingdom of Heaven without becoming a little child. But behind and after this there is a mystery revealed to but few; namely, if the Soul is to go on into higher spiritual blessedness, it must become a _woman_. Yes, however manly thou be among men, it must learn to love being dependent; must lean on God, not solely from distress and alarm, but because it does not like independence or loneliness.... God is _not_ a stern Judge; exacting every tittle of some law from us.... He does not act towards us (spiritually) by generalities ... but His perfection consists in dealing with each case by itself as if there were no other...." And again: "The Bible is a blessed book if we do not stifle the Holy Spirit within us." The second reason why I touch on these religious opinions (before mentioned) but briefly, is because of my own _strong impression_ since I have been writing this memoir, that in that next chapter of existence upon which Newman has now entered, he may not impossibly be nearer the Light, the religious truth, which here he so earnestly sought, but mistakenly; and in his regret for his own phases of religious unfaith, now cast aside, may not wish them to be recapitulated anew. There is a certain pathetic sentence of his, in a letter in later life, which seems to give a certain amount of confirmation to this idea: "It is a sad thing to have printed erroneous fact. I have three or four times contradicted and renounced the passage ... _but I cannot reach those whom I have misled_." I have mentioned before that Francis Newman returned to his earlier faith in Christianity a few years before his death. It remains, therefore, to give the proofs which have been put into my hands regarding this fact. Two of his very greatest friends, Anna Swanwick and Dr. Martineau, received from his own hands the knowledge that he wished it to be known that he died a Christian. I shall give a quotation from one of Newman's last letters to the former, from Miss Bruce's _Memoir of Recollections of Anna Swanwick_. In almost illegible writing, he says:--