More than one person has said to me in connection with this memoir: "If the whole of Frank Newman's heterodox religious opinions be not given, the book will lose half its point."

To my mind there are quite two, if not more, sides to this question. My strongest argument, however, in favour of only dealing briefly with them is this: It is quite true that Agnosticism more or less held its sway over him during the years between 1834 and 1879. I am quite aware of how tremendous a slice that is of a man's life. But it is not an overwhelming testimony when one comes to look at it not from the worldly point of view.

There are periods in which Time—as Time—seems almost beside the mark. "A thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday." When the Israelites had once achieved their journey through the wilderness—nay, even through the earlier time of tyranny amongst the Egyptians-I suppose the actual years seemed as a dream when one awaketh.

I myself have known forty years pass, for someone afflicted with a terrible mental disability, as a watch in the night, once light pierced through the clouds of the long-darkened mental vision. Time, as sex, is purely temporary. In this present world we cannot do without either, but when Time itself passes for good, the old implements which were necessary to make the clock go round will pass likewise.

So, in Newman's case, when that tremendous slice in a man's life—forty- five years—was overpast, he sloughed off the old garments of Agnosticism, and came back to the Christian faith professed by him in early childhood so conscientiously—and, indeed, up to the year after his missionary journey, 1834.

This fact influences me largely in the matter of dealing only briefly with the time-as regards his religious professions—which lies between these two dates, and for these reasons, which I hope to prove, carry considerable weight.

The first is that people are mistaken in considering that it was his religious opinions which made Newman great. The real valour of his life was shown in the splendid aspects of Social Reform which he showed to the world; the way of the New Citizenship, of the New Patriotism, which he was for ever preaching and writing about. He was the Perseus of To-day whose wholehearted efforts were spent in freeing the Andromedas from their antiquated bonds and fetters; whose good sword was ever pointed at the throats of the dragons which lift their ugly heads against freedom— against reforms of all sorts; the dragons who take so long in dying.

But there are many who will regret bitterly that a man who served his generation so splendidly as he did in these matters should ever have written a book such as the Phases of Faith; for though it is undeniably clever, yet it is not convincing; and very much of it is very painful reading for those who do not care to wander out of the way in the wilderness of religious speculation and doubt.

Newman declares in this book that he did not give up Christianity; yet he gave up all that made Christianity Christianity. He said in it that he was looking for a "religion which shall combine the tenderness, humility, and disinterestedness that are the glories of the purest Christianity, with that activity of intellect and untiring pursuit of truth." [Footnote: He said once he wished for a religion which should combine the best out of all religions in the world.]

When he mentions that, in his time, "of young men at Oxford not one in five seemed to have any convictions at all," he seems to imply that it was on account of the desire for a new religion; whereas it was far more traceable to the after-effects of Calvinism and Puritanism, which have stuck, as spiritual limpets, to England's religious rocks ever since they first reached them. They are certainly looser in their hold than was the case formerly, but they are there still.

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:—

"If I live through this year, I hope to effect, by aid of a friend's eyes, a third … edition of my Paul of Tarsus, with grateful acknowledgment that, in spite of a few details, I more and more come round to the substance of the views of my honoured friend, James Martineau. Also I close by my now sufficient definition of a Christian—'one, who in heart, and steadily, is a disciple of Jesus in upholding the prayer called the Lord's Prayer as the highest and purest in any known national religion.' I think J. M. will approve this."

I should also like to add Miss Bruce's own words in this connection:—

"He" (Newman) "was drawn back at the end of his long life by the sweet reasonableness and loving sympathy of his friend Anna Swanwick, and the teaching of Dr. Martineau."

Also these words from a letter written by Anna Swanwick: "It is delightful to me to think how, when the veil shall have fallen from the eyes of our friend" (F. W. Newman), "he will love and venerate Him in Whose footsteps he is unconsciously treading." Yet I must add here that in a letter from Newman to Anna Swanwick (to which I had access) in 1897, there is no definite statement of his belief in Immortality. "If God gives me immortality, I am content. If it pleases Him to annihilate me, it is well. Let Him do with me as seemeth to Him good."

As regards Dr. Martineau's statement, I quote now from a letter received by me from Mr. William Tallack, who gave me particulars of a letter written in 1903, by Mr. W. Garrett Horder, on a meeting he had with Dr. Martineau:—

"Not more than three or four years before his death I was sitting in an omnibus at Oxford Circus, when Dr. Martineau, accompanied by his daughter, got in and took seats by my side. After I had confessed my pleasure at seeing him, he said, 'I think you ought to know that the other day I had a letter from Frank Newman saying that, when he died, he wished it to be known that he died in the Christian faith.'"

To my mind these strong assertions that Newman wished it known that he "died a Christian," which he wrote to two of his closest friends, speak for themselves.

There was also another, Rev. J. Temperley Grey, who visited Newman constantly in his last illness, and who said of his final conversion these words, in the "In Memoriam" address he gave at Newman's funeral:—

"Of late his" (Newman's) "attitude towards Christ had undergone a great change. He confessed to me only very recently that for years he had held on to Christianity by the skirts of S. Paul; 'but now,' he said, 'Paul is less and less, and Christ is more and more.' He made this statement with an emphasis and an emotion which conveyed the impression that he wished it to be regarded as a final testimony."

To those of us who are Christians these are strong words, showing clearly where, in his last illness and failing strength, he had turned for final help.

Some have called Francis Newman an atheist. But he was no atheist. A theist for many years he was: but it was because he was unable to reconcile certain historical difficulties, or to get rid of certain earlier Calvinistic tendencies, or to accept certain dogmas which seemed to him impossible of acceptation, and in this last respect he is certainly not alone.

Mr. Temperley Grey's testimony to Newman as a fellow townsman, during his last days at Weston-super-Mare (he died 6th Oct., 1897), shows him to us as a man who acted to his fellow men, and women, as a Christian should, although he did not, till near the end, believe as one.

"Without depreciating in the least his illustrious brother, it may truly be said that while the one was a saint in the cloister, the other was a saint in the very thick of life's battle. [Footnote: "Henry Newman… stood for a spiritual Tory; while Francis Newman was a spiritual Radical" (Morning Leader, October, 1897).] … I would speak of him rather as the neighbour and townsman who moved to and fro among us … and whom, distrusting at first, we ultimately reverenced and loved for his nobility of character, his simplicity of life, his tenderness of conscience, his devoutness of spirit, and his generosity of heart.

"Theologically we were far apart, but we were entirely with him in his enthusiasm for righteousness, his sympathy with downtrodden and oppressed peoples…. We were with him also in his untiring efforts to secure for women their rightful place in the shaping of our national life, and in his splendid protests against the tortures inflicted in the name of science on the poor, helpless animals, our dumb brothers. To hear the old man eloquently discourse upon these themes was to be morally uplifted…. Those of us who were admitted into the inner circle of his friends were profoundly impressed by his devoutness. He lived as in the Presence of God, and his prayers in the home, so simple, so trustful, so reverential, were always a means of grace, a real refreshment.

* * * * *

"He was a true philanthropist. He championed the cause of the oppressed everywhere…. A room in his house was set apart as a guest-chamber for persons needing a change to the seaside, but whose circumstances barred the way; and not a few were fresh equipped for the work and battle of life, as a result of his thoughtful hospitality…. Francis Newman stood by himself in his greatness, his goodness, his simplicity, and we shall not find his like again…. Above all, our friend was a truth seeker. This was the ruling passion of his life."

Mrs. Temperley Grey tells me that it was always Newman's first wife's great hope that her husband should be the means, through his ministrations during the last part of Newman's life, of leading him back to his original faith. Mrs. Newman used deeply to regret Newman's lack of definite belief, but always said when the subject was raised, "Cannot they understand that my husband is under a cloud—a mist, as it were?" Both the brothers, the Cardinal and Francis Newman, through the greater part of their lives had been restlessly searching for truth—for certainty—in their faith. Calvinism had been the black cloud under which they had both been brought up. If the obiter dictum of a celebrated Cardinal in the Roman Church be correct: "Give me the child till he is seven years old, and he will be a Jesuit all his life," then indeed it shows the tremendous power of habit, for it was only through much tribulation, through passionate inward wrestlings with those terrible tenets, and through many searchings of heart, that either brother made his way out of its toils at length. The Cardinal sought above all things Truth, through authority; no one will forget those soul-stirring words of his in his Apologia pro Vit Su in which he speaks of the great peace that at last quieted his doubts and fears when he was received into the Roman Church. To many of us Authority is the life-buoy which supports us "o'er crag and torrent till the night is gone"; but Francis Newman could not believe in it. "Authority is the bane," he would say, "of religion." He must see with his intellectual eyes, to be saved. He must see and touch Truth for himself; his intellectual self must be convinced, or he must stand outside the creeds he knew—a questioner still.

But he was honest and open in his aloofness. Did it mean loss of a distinguished brilliant worldly career (as it did at Oxford in 1830)? Well, then the career must be lost, for he could not bring himself to sign to doctrines which he did not believe. Did it mean unpopularity, that he held certain views on Social Reform? Well, rather than compromise, rather than temporize, he would stand out alone rather than yield an iota of what he held to be the true Progressive Aims for People and Land. Only—and this was a flaw, and no small one either—he often wrote his religious opinions so openly as to pain his readers. In many of his letters which I have read there are expressions relating to the religious dogmas held by his correspondents which are bluntly, unrestrainedly, bitterly used. It is true that often, at the close of a letter, there follows a hope that he had not hurt his friends' feelings; but that he must, at all costs, be open as to his own beliefs. But that apology only came as an after-thought, as it were as an attempt to dress the wound which he himself had made, and is quite unable to do away with the impression produced by the written word. Litera scripta manet.

In writing on "The National Church" thirty-three years after he had refused to sign the Thirty-nine Articles, he said, with emphasis, "Truthfulness of the individual man is essential to moral worth; but for this very reason the system of the Church must be lax in order to allow truthfulness to individuals." This is curious reasoning, and subversive of the idea of Unity. Still, as no one can deny that as Life implies Progression, so as regards the Churches, the inspired words that they should be "led into all truth" surely allow for progression also into higher regions of knowledge and methods of teaching. To allow for this spirit of progression Newman held that a State Church should not be tied down to fixed conditions. "No general Church system will go so far as the foremost minds…. All the moderate and wisest historians of the Anglican Church have extolled its foundations. They have judged that, take it as a whole, the Reformation went as far as the collective nation was then able to go." That it "was necessary to reform it in the sixteenth century in order to harmonize it with the higher intelligence of the best minds, so far as could be done without making it useless to the inferior minds." All this has a certain truth, but when all is said, the fact forces itself upon one that after all it is a matter for debate whether the Reformation was a "progressive" movement at all: whether it did not in reality delay progression. For it is well known to-day that it was really managed by the machinations of one of the most selfish and unprincipled of kings [Footnote: Whose conduct at this time largely hinged on the refusal of the Pope to grant him his wished-for divorce from Katherine.]—who was only progressive in the matter of wives—and by his ministers, who were, many of them, men of vile characters and greed. As to motive, it is very patent to-day what that was. It was that of the man who covets his neighbour's goods, i.e. the lands and moneys of the monasteries and churches, and who whitewashes his sin when his desire is satisfied. There is besides sufficient proof to-day that the great bulk of the unrepresented nation did not regard this act of wholesale robbery as "lawful and necessary," nor that it "harmonized" the Church "with the higher intelligence of the best minds."

To the end of his life (from his Oxford days to his death), of course, Newman was never greatly in sympathy with the Anglican Church. He did not, even at the end, own himself bound by her dogmas or obedient to her conditions. To go further into the question is, I think, not desirable here. It is enough to say that though he was outside the visible Church, yet he was, in life and spirit, "not far off". As was said of Stanley, "he believed more than he knew." His "life was in the right," though his doubts and rationalism led him into unbeliefs, which only at the close of his long life he renounced. And he had a far deeper longing for religious truth than have many conventional Churchmen.