John Henry Newman (1801-90) belongs to Anglican hymn-writers in virtue of his ‘Lead, kindly Light,’ though it may almost be described as his farewell to the Church of England. It marks at least the beginning of his long-drawn-out parting from the Establishment. Few hymns have won a wider popularity, and no doubt it has done much to accustom Nonconformist Churches to sympathize with the poetic and emotional side of the Oxford Movement. This hymn and the _Christian Year_ made absolute want of sympathy with the new devotion impossible. Moreover, the tone of perplexity, the confession of bewilderment, the sense of ‘encircling gloom,’ fell in with the prevailing spirit of religious emotion. To many men of his own school the hymn meant something very different from what it means to the average worshipper, who finds in it a comfortable sedative for vague religious depression. I confess that personally the hymn does not seem to me as great as its reputation, but it has brought help and comfort to myriads. Dr. Wm. Barry says— This most tender of pilgrim songs may be termed the March of the Tractarian Movement. It is pure melody, austere yet hopeful, strangely not unlike the stanzas which Carlyle has made familiar to the whole English race, the Mason-Song of Goethe, in its sublime sadness and invincible trust. Both are psalms of life, Hebrew or Northern, chanted in a clear-obscure where faith moves onward heroically to the day beyond.[175] Newman’s other great hymn, ‘Praise to the Holiest in the height,’ which owes its popularity largely to Mr. Gladstone’s affection for it—though it is in itself a fine hymn—belongs to his Romanist days. There was room for the new teaching. Perhaps Methodism was a little too buoyant, Evangelicalism too contented, and the Church was ready for a fresh upheaval. Coincidently with the rise of the Oxford Movement came, as we have seen, the rolling away of the reproach of hymn-singing. Even the strongholds of the Establishment capitulated, and hymns formed an important part in the new propaganda. Stanch Churchmen had disliked hymn-singing. To quote Canon Ellerton— It came to us from an unwelcome source—from the Dissenters, eminently from the Methodists. It was first adopted by those of the clergy who sympathized most with them; for many long years it was that dreaded thing, a party badge.[176]