Abstract
It is now over one hundred and seventy years since that genius of English life, John Henry Cardinal Newman, was born, and it is more than eighty years since he went to his certain rest as one of the most enlightened Catholics of the nineteenth century. The years between those events (on February 21, 1801, and August 11, 1890) contained a life that was a monumental pilgrimage in two fields: religion and English literature. Religion was the much more important endeavor; all the other facets of Newman’s life, especially his writing, sprang from it. Newman was a priest, almost all of his adult life, a complete man of God if there ever was one. Beside this fact, all else was minor. Only a few have been so devoted to the Church; hardly anyone else has had his whole life so colored by his involvement in hie faith. In Newman's case it leavened everything, particularly his literary art, which naturally grew and evolved as a reflection of his spirit. By the time he was a great prose master, perhaps the greatest of his language, he had long been a great soul. If he had not the time to become a great poet, albeit the writer of such first-rate selections as The Dream of Gerontius and "Lead Kindly Light" among others, it was not because of a dearth of talent, but it was the press of a deeper cause.