The Catholic World, Vol. 02, October, 1865 to March, 1866: A Monthly Eclectic MagazineVarious
Religion
The Catholic World, Vol. 02, October, 1865 to March, 1866: A Monthly Eclectic Magazine
Various
Catholic Church -- Periodicals
perjury. Such a man ought to have been secure of honorable treatment;
and yet he has not been spared in the strife of tongues; and if he has
at last triumphed over calumny, it has only been by overpowering his
enemies with the superior weight of his armor and strength of his arm,
and not because his holy retirement and spotless name have been
respected. However, after long years, during whose lapse the English
people have disdained and slighted the man of genius and the pure
Christian who is one of the greatest ornaments of their literature, on
account of their intense hostility to his religion, their love of fair
play, and admiration for intellectual greatness and prowess, has
gained a signal victory, and we give them due credit for it. The
demand for the "_Apologia_" on its first publication in successive
numbers was so great that the Longmans were unable to keep up with it.
That it has not been unappreciated also in this country is proved by
the fact that four editions of the American reprint have been
exhausted. Of the book itself, it is almost superfluous to speak at
this late day. It will bear to be read and re-read, and the repeated
perusal, instead of wearying, only brings out new charms and occasions
an increasing delight. We have read and admired Dr. Newman's writings
for more than twenty years, but have never so fully appreciated the
wonderful subtlety and vigor of his intellect as we have done since
reading his last book. It is like the keen, bright, dexterously
wielded, and irresistible scimeter of Saladin. At his conversion
Anglicanism lost a champion far more capable than any other of coping
with its stoutest antagonists, and the Catholic Church gained over the
most formidable of her foes who wields an English pen. Even as now
reproduced by himself, as a mere history of the past, his method of
defending the Church of England against Rome appears to us so much
more subtle and plausible, and adroitly managed, not through any
designed artifice on his part, but from the acuteness with which his
mind detects all the most defensible points of his own position and
the most assailable ones of the opposite, than that of any other
writer, that we instinctively say, no man but John Henry Newman could
fully refute himself. Each successive post at which he pauses in his
gradual approach to the Catholic Church seems as defensible as the
others which he has abandoned as untenable. At his very last halting
place, he has the air of a man who is about to defend himself there to
the last, and is not to be driven further. Indeed, he was not _driven_
by any mind more powerful than his own; for although the arguments of
Cardinal Wiseman had considerable weight with him, neither he nor any
other Catholic writer really answered the difficulties which were in
his own mind, or fully refuted, in a manner consonant to his
intellectual convictions, the plausible arguments by which he
justified to himself and recommended to others a continuance in the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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