Chapter 7: Spiritual Direction and Friendship

7

Spiritual Direction and Friendship

“Blessings of friends which to my door,Unasked, unhoped, have come.”812

John Henry Newman was a mixture of contrasting qualities. He manifested a certain detachment from the world and from things, yet he was never alone, never isolated from his friends. He had the gift of inspiring affection as well as reverence in those who came under his influence. He was preeminently a man who did not follow others, but whom others followed, at Oriel, at Littlemore, at Edgbaston—he became the center of a group of men for the most part younger than himself, who admired him and took him for their guide. To these disciples, he was always a hero, a person quite apart, yet both attractive and attracting.

A person’s uniqueness is very often discovered through correspondence. Letters, whose purpose is so different from a book or sermon, enable us to catch a glimpse of the inner workings of a person. This was certainly true of Newman. Emerging from his Letters are certain qualities that tend to go unnoticed in his other literary works. The dominant quality that surfaces in Newman’s correspondence with his friends is his humanness. With them he felt an interior freedom that enabled him to talk about himself. With them he could “let his guard down” and be comfortable, sincerely manifesting what was on his mind and in his heart. It is in his Letters to his friends that he spoke about his real feelings, his needs, his struggles, his joys.

Yet Newman had the need not simply to be admired, but to have persons with whom he could share his life—to have friends. In a very unique way, his personal correspondence portrays him not as a writer nor as a religious leader, but simply as a person who lived with others, who was loved by them and loved them in return. Since the experience of friendship is very significant in a person’s development and spiritual life, this chapter investigates Newman’s friendships in relation to his spiritual direction.

Newman’s Conversion and His Friends

Prior to his reception into the Roman Catholic Church, Newman was living at Littlemore and struggling with his decision about the future. His own family lacked sympathy for and understanding of his crisis of confidence. When he began telling his family and friends that he intended to give up his Fellowship at Oriel, his sister Jemima protested, “What can be worse than this? It is like hearing that some dear friend must die. I cannot shut my eyes to this overpowering event that threatens any longer.”813 In a letter on Palm Sunday 1845, he described his anguish to his sister Jemima:

At my time of life men love ease. I love ease myself. I am giving up a maintenance involving no duties and adequate to all my wants. What in the world am I doing this for (I ask myself this) except I think I am called to do so? I am making a large income by my sermons. I am, to say the very least, risking this; the chance is that my sermons will have no further sale at all. I have a good name with many; I am deliberately sacrificing it. I have a bad name with more; I am fulfilling all their worst wishes, and giving them their most coveted triumph. I am distressing all I love, unsetthng all I have instructed or aided. I am going to those I do not know, and of whom I expect very little. Oh, what can it be but a stern necessity which causes this?

Pity me, my dear Jemima. What have I done thus to be deserted, thus to be left to take the wrong course, if it is wrong . . .?

Continually do I pray that He would discover to me if I am under a delusion; what can I do more? What hope have I but in Him? . . . All is against me—may He not add Himself as an adversary . . . !

Who has a right to judge me but my judge?

. . . He may have purposes so merciful as they are beyond us. Let us do our best and leave the event to Him; He will give us strength to bear. Surely I have to bear most; and if I do not shrink from bearing it, others must not shrink. May I do my best; am I not trying to do my best?—may we not trust it will turn to the best?814

Similarly, his conversion caused a great reaction among his friends and significantly influenced his understanding of the meaning and importance of friendship both in his own life and for others. In 1863, he wrote to Charles Robins that the loss of his Oxford friends was “the greatest trial of my change of religion.”815 A week after his entrance into the Roman Catholic Church, his great friend and collaborator, Edward Pusey published a favorable reaction in a letter in the English Churchman:

He (Newman) is gone unconscious (as all great instruments of God are) what he himself is. He has gone as a simple act of duty with no view for himself, placing himself entirely in God’s hands. And such are they whom God employs. He seems to me not so much gone from us, as transplanted into another part of the Vineyard, where the full energies of his powerful mind can be employed, which here they were not. And who knows what in the mysterious purposes of God’s good Providence may be the effect of such a person among them? . . . It is perhaps the greatest event which has happened since the Communion of the Churches has been interrupted, that such a one, so formed in our Church, and the work of God’s Spirit as dwelling within her, should be transplanted to theirs.816

Such tolerance was the exception, however, and even Newman’s relationship with Pusey became quite strained.817 Moreover, Newman’s brother-in-law, James Mozley, publically questioned Newman’s motives in an article in the Christian Remembrance.818 The loss of old friends was keenly felt by Newman, as a letter to Miss Giberne revealed:

Can you point to any one who has lost more in the way of friendship, whether by death or alienation, than I have? . . . So many dead, so many separated. My mother gone; my sisters nothing to me, or rather foreign to me; of my greatest friends Froude, Wood, Bowden taken away, all of whom would now be, or be coming, on my side. Other dear friends who are preserved in life not moving with me; Pusey strongly bent on an opposite course, Williams protesting against my conduct as rationalistic, and dying—Rogers and J. Mozley viewing it with utter repugnance. Of my friends of a dozen years ago who have I now? and what did I know of my present friends a dozen years ago?819

Although Newman had anticipated the price he would have to pay in the loss of friends, the impact was more than he expected. In 1854, he wrote to Robert Wilberforce: “In my own case, the separation from friends was the one thing which weighed on me for two years before I became a Catholic—and it affected my health most seriously”820 For him, this was a special sacrifice that he offered to God. Seven years later, he described to Isaac Williams, what a trial this had been: “There is no pleasure of this world which to me would be so great in itself, as to see you and other of my old friends. Before I became what I am, the loss of them was the great trouble which lay before me, and it has not ceased to be, up to this hour, the special sacrifice which I offer up to my Lord and Saviour out of my deep unworthiness as a plea in my behalf when He comes to me in judgement.”821 Similarly, in a response to a writer in the Literary Churchman, Newman wrote: “No one knows as I do, what a piercing sorrow it was to me to part from my dear friends twenty years ago, and no one knows as I do how imperative was my duty, and how great has been the reward.”822

After a separation of eighteen years, Newman, Keble and Pusey met again. In a letter to Keble on August 15, 1863, Newman expressed the depth of his friendship along with his love of God:

Never have I doubted for one moment your affection for me—never have I been hurt at your silence. I interpreted it easily—it was not the silence of men, nor the forgetfulness of men, who can recollect about me and talk about me enough, when there is something to be said to my disparagement. You are always with me a thought of reverence and love—and there is nothing I love better than you, and Isaac, and Copeland and many others I could name, except Him whom I ought to love the best of all and supremely. May He Himself, who is the over abundant compensation for all losses, give me His own Presence—and then I shall want nothing and desiderate nothing—but none but He, can make up for the losses of those old familiar faces which haunt me continually.823

Newman’s own loss of friends at his conversion became an avenue for his spiritual direction of others. Knowing how difficult his own loss of friends had been, he encouraged others to write about their fears of the possible loss of friendship over their pending conversion. Frequently, Newman shared his own struggle so that others might have some encouragement. Lady Chatterton had written to him concerning the unsettlement and skepticism her friends were experiencing when a person converted to the Church of Rome. Newman responded:

I entirely sympathize in what you say about the force of the argument against a member of the Protestant Church leaving it for Catholicism, on the ground of the unsettlement and skepticism which it tends to produce in friends who do not feel the evidence for Catholicism as he may do. I felt it most forcefully myself. It made me miserable to think, that many and many a friend, whom I had been instrumental in bringing on a certain way towards the recognition of a dogmatic and organic Church, could not be brought further than what is called Puseyism, and, instead of going on with myself, would relapse into indifference or doubt. It was one of the principle sorrows I had to endure as I made up my mind to be a Catholic, and the prospect of it made me very slow and cautious before I finally decided on becoming one.

But then I felt, the question was one of personal duty in the most solemn of matters—and that, if I saw that there was one Church to which the promises were made, and that I as yet was not in it, I must join it, and leave to the Providence of God to overrule all consequences, and must act on faith that He who called me could order things better than I could, with a higher wisdom and in unknown ways—and, sad as it has been for me to see that my anticipations have been fulfilled, I never have for an instant repented of the step which gave occasion to them.824

When the Marquise de Salvo was concerned that her conversion would pain her relatives, Newman counseled her to trust in God:

You say you have to pain relations by your step—that is the trial which all have to go through. You hardly can be called on to inflict such pain as has been the duty of some of my friends—nay perhaps such, as has been my own duty to inflict. But God will support you under every trial He puts upon you—and you will have the strength of the whole Church of all saints who ever lived. You will be one of a body who have gone through far more than any of us are called to undergo—and their prayers and their sanctity will operate in you, and raise you above yourself. I am not speaking necessarily of sensible comfort, but of real power which will be yours in God’s presence.825

Similarly, when Miss Giberne expressed her loneliness over the loss of her friends at her conversion, Newman understood how she felt and advised her to believe that God’s mercy would more than compensate for her loss.

Your feelings at present must indeed be very much tried, and I sincerely thank you for letting me share them. Take your present trial as you do, as a gracious means of bringing you under the more intimate protection of your true friends, those Saints and Angels unseen, who can do so much more for you with God, and in the course of life, than any mere child of man, however dear and excellent. . . . But even as regards friends of this world I have found that Divine Mercy wonderfully makes up my losses, as if “instead of thy fathers thou shalt have children” were fulfilled in individuals as well as to the Church. . . . I am very happy with them, (his new Catholic friends) and can truly say with St. Paul “I have all and abound”—and moreover, I have with them, what I never can have had with others, Catholic hopes and beliefs—Catholic objects. And so in your own case, depend on it, God’s Mercy will make up to you all you lose, and you will be blessed, not indeed in the same way, but in a higher.826

Although Newman was denied the pleasure of personal contact with his family and friends for many years, he did not neglect to remember them in prayer. Each Thursday he prayed for a long list of his Protestant friends. To his sister Jemima he wrote in 1865: “You have let your children grow up, and I not know them (sic). They have ever been in my prayers.”827

Friendship as Gift

Newman realized that one could not force friendship; he considered friendship a gift of God, based on many human qualities. Acknowledging a compliment paid to him by his lifelong friend Mrs. William Froude, he wrote: “This only I know, that all through my life God has mercifully given me good friends, and that I never know how to be grateful enough to Him for so precious a gift.”828 Before Newman became a Catholic, he subscribed to the Tractarian notion “that mutual love must have as its basis mutual reverence,”829 so that basic to his understanding of friendship as gift was the sacredness of the other person.830 Coupled with this, was his emphasis on the uniqueness and individuality of the person. When Henry Ryder discovered that his father did not want him to join the Oratory, he wrote to Newman for direction. After attempting to allay his fears, Newman said: “We love you for your own sake, and St. Philip will provide.”831

Considering friendship a gift, Newman believed that it should not be taken lightly. He wrote to H. A. Woodgate in 1865: “I can only say, friendships are not put on, put off, put on again, like a glove.”832 Through the years, as his friendships matured through some difficult experiences, he came to see that if they were to endure, then they had to be based on honesty. In a relationship he felt that it was important that the other person truly know him and not simply some “idea” of him. Reflecting on this with his friend Sister Mary du Boulay, he advised her to have a more realistic understanding of who he was. “And am I not wise, not to lessen the sort of imagination you have of me—so kind, yet so unreal, by showing myself in propria persona? I always feel like a hypocrite who can be detected by holy eyes, just as an accomplished thief or thimble rigger is at once recognized by a police officer. But at a distance I look like a great man, without any hang dog look which I can’t throw off, do what I will, when I am in places where brass will not go for gold.”833

Even before Newman published his Letter in response to the Irenicon that his friend Edward Pusey had written in 1865, Newman wrote to him personally explaining as honestly as he could how he intended to reply.

You must not be made anxious that I am going to publish a Letter on your Irenicon. I wish to accept it as such, and shall write in that spirit. And I write, if not to hinder, for that is not in my power, but to balance and neutralize other things which may be written upon it. It will not be any great length. If I shall say anything which is in the way of remonstrance, it will be, because, unless I were perfectly honest, I should not only do no good, but carry no one with me—but I am taking the greatest possible pains not to say a word which I should be sorry for afterwards.834

In 1831, he preached a sermon on the Feast of St. John the Evangelist on the subject of “Love of Relations and Friends.”835 Commenting on Christ’s special friendship for John, “the beloved disciple,” Newman affirmed

that there is nothing contrary to the spirit of the Gospel, nothing inconsistent with the fullness of Christian love, in having our affections directed in a special way . . . towards those whom the circumstances of our past life, or some peculiarities of character, have endeared to us. There have been men before now, who have supposed Christian love was so diffusive as not to admit of concentration upon individuals; so that we ought to love all men equally. . . . Now I shall here maintain . . . that the best preparation for loving the world at large, and loving it duly and wisely, is to cultivate an intimate friendship and affection towards those who are immediately about us. . . . We are to begin with loving our friends about us, and gradually to enlarge the circle of our affections, till it reaches all Christians, and then all men. Besides, it is obviously impossible to love all men in any strict and true sense. What is meant by loving all men, is to be ready to assist them.836

Both the continuity and development of his thought was manifested in a letter written eighteen years later to Faber concerning “particular friendship” in community life. Rather than simply reiterating his former belief, he added a new dimension by stating that it is normal for people to feel differently towards individuals; what makes the difference is the way that one shows it or acts upon it. “As to particular friendships, I have much wished a definition of what is meant. St. James and St. John had a sort of particular friendship among the Apostles—so must brothers in a Congregation ever—i.e. there must be feelings between them which are not between others. The point, I conceive, is that they should not show it,—should not act upon it. . . . Again what is more striking, think of Our Lord’s love for St. John.”837 Speaking of his own friendship with Ambrose St. John, he went on to say: “For if from circumstances I have been brought closer to F. Ambrose than to others, let me hide the fact as I will, I can do nothing to undo it, unless I actually did cease to love him as well as I do. All I can do is to try to love others as well—which if I omit to try to do is certainly a fault.”838

Soon after his conversion, Newman went to Rome to study for the priesthood. From there he wrote a letter to Henry Wilberforce reflecting on the value of long friendship.

I am tempted to write to you again . . . the more because it is pleasant to think of an old friend in a far country. Nothing can exceed the kindness of the people with whom I am . . . but after all there is nothing like an old friend. New friends cannot love one, if they would; they know nothing of one—but to one who has known another for twenty years his face and his name is a history; a long series of associations is bound up with every word or deed which comes from him, which has a meaning and an interpretation in those associations. And thus I feel that no one here can sympathize with me daily—for even those who think highly of me have the vaguest, most shadowy, fantastic notions attached to their idea of me—feel a respect, not for me but for some imagination of their own which bears my name.839

Newman understood friendship not only as a gift but as a source of healing. He felt that in our human condition, one of the ways that God brought us comfort and healing was through our friends. To Catherine Bathurst in 1863, he wrote: “While then I sympathize with you, it is a sort of comfort to me to know I am not alone in this kind of suffering—would I could feel and believe that you allowed yourself so to take interest in the similar sufferings of others, as to feel the comfort I speak of yourself!”840 Nonetheless, Newman had no illusions about friendship and realized that it was not always possible for a friend to know one’s trials, as he wrote late in his life: “It is difficult for others to know one’s trials, and their kindness often mistakes where the sharpness of them really lies. We certainly have some great anxieties, but they are not easy to guess; and, as to the one to which you seem to refer, what to the many friends would seem the trial is to me the greatest relief and compensation of it. But God who knows all secrets answers their kind prayers for us by a true interpretation of them.”841

Comfort of Friends

During his Roman Catholic years, Newman did not hesitate to write to his friends concerning the various trials and difficulties he experienced. When he felt disappointed or discouraged, when he was physically ill or in mental turmoil, he not only sought comfort and healing from God, but he also looked to his friends. When his good friend, Mrs. William Froude wrote to him concerning his health, Newman replied:

As to health, I never was better or so well—the only disposition is that I am always tired—but that I think is merely owing to the growth of years. As time goes on too, one’s features grow more heavy—At least I feel it an effort to brighten up. Or rather, I believe those sad long years of anxiety have stamped themselves on my face—and now that they are at an end, yet I cannot change what has become a physical effect.

And now you know all about me, as far as I am able, or can get myself, to talk of myself, I will but add that the Hand of God is most wonderfully over me, that I am full of blessings and privileges . . . 

O that I were near to you, and could have a talk with you!—but then I should need great grace to know what to say to you—this is one thing that keeps me silent—it is, dear friends, because I don’t know what to say to you. If I had more faith, I should doubtless know well enough; I should then say “Come to the Church, and you will find all you seek.” I have myself found all I seek.842

Several weeks later, when he was not feeling well and taking medicine, he wrote to Ambrose St. John: “It (the medicine) makes me languid and drowsy, and then I can’t do my duties, and people think me reserved etc. when I don’t mean to be.

“At times the sense of weight (of responsibility) and desolateness has come on me so strongly, that I could fancy it might grow equal to any pain . . . . It is useless to tell you on paper all the little trials which constitute all this—and it is ungrateful in me not to be more cheered with the improvement of things in some quarters.”843

The most problematic period in Newman’s life were the years 1850–1862. Within these dozen years, a number of events had a tremendous impact on him: the division of the two Oratories, the Achilli trial, the Catholic University in Dublin, the Scripture translation project, the Rambler incident, and the Oratory school foundation. As one might expect, the inner anguish and turmoil of these events are clearly manifest in his correspondence, which exemplify his human struggle and the important role that friends played in his life during these years.

Because of the difficulties connected with the division of the two Oratories in 1850 and of the ordeal of the Achilli trial which culminated on June 25, 1852, Newman became extremely tired. The events of these past years had drained him physically and mentally. Almost immediately he began to write to his friends expressing his feelings, looking for understanding and consolation. For example, a month after his trial was completed, he wrote to J. D. Dalgairns about how he was feeling and his desire to be with his friends. “I am very much tried, as you may think. . . . What tries me most, is, at my age, the difficulty of keeping up the steam. Nothing but grace can do it for me. I want a holiday so bad, and have not had one for two years; not a week of uninterrupted rest. . . . How I should like a quiet week, with some of you at Sydenham!”844

Two letters to Sister Mary Imelda Poole within a week of each other indicate both his physical and mental strain. “It is now above a year that my medical adviser told me, my life almost ultimately depended on my laying by for a while, and this year has been the most exhausting I ever have had.”845 Nine days later he continued: “He (the doctor) now tells me distinctly I shall have a premature old age, and an early death—because the only thing which can save me is a simple lying by. He says my brain and nerves cannot bear it. . . . He says I have nothing the matter with me at present, but that my vital powers are so low that mischief might take place at any time—and that nothing can keep me up but tonics.”846 Meanwhile, in November 1851, before the Achilli trial had been completed, Newman accepted the offer to be the first rector of a Catholic university in Ireland. Until he resigned in 1857, this also was to be a constant source of tension.847

Another very human dimension sometimes emerged when people put pressure on Newman to accomplish things. He was feeling this in 1853 when he wrote to his friend, Mrs. Bowden: “People won’t believe me. Because I seem to do things easy, they say, ‘O, Dr. Newman writes so easily—it gives him no trouble—he writes things off—he can sit up and write a sermon for next morning—he merely talks, he does not exert himself’—and they simply discredit me. I can’t get Cardinal, Bishop, or any one else to believe me—and I am tried day by day by earnest requests, I would come only here, or only there—and though I do refuse, yet people think me ungracious and unaccommodating.”848

Whenever he became frustrated because he could not explain something adequately, he felt comfortable sharing that frustration with a friend. Highlighting some recent difficulties in 1856, he told Ambrose St. John:

One hears tales of men who cannot speak and are bound, and taken to and fro at the will of others. . . . I go to Rome to be snubbed. I come to Dublin to be repelled by Dr. McHale and worn away by Dr. Cullen. The Cardinal taunts me with his Dedications, and Fr. Faber insults me with his letters. I would be let alone, but I have no means of defending myself more than if my hands and tongue were tied I cannot explain any thing to friend or foe intelligibly. Ryder strikes me, for I can call it nothing else. When I drop a word to H. W. [Henry Wilberforce] he talks of “sensitiveness, which is the penalty of great ability.” . . . What enormous irritation Job must have felt, when his friends came and prosed to him.849

Moreover, Newman believed at this time that the anxieties he was going through actually affected his preaching. Patrick Leahy, Archbishop-elect of Cashel wrote to Newman asking him to preach at his consecration and Newman replied: “And I am as eager that you should not think me ungrateful in asking you to let me answer it in the negative. I really am obliged to do so;—not only have I not the gift of preaching, but I have not power just now to turn my mind to any duty which will require so much thought and effort to discharge it suitably. I am oppressed with cares and anxieties both here and in Dublin, and have too much on my hands even to fulfill the responsibilities of each day as it comes.”850

During the course of the problems with Darnell over the management of the Oratory school, Newman again was able to express his feelings to a friend at the beginning of 1860:

You must not think that several things I have said to you lately, came of low spirits, which I fancy you have done, and taken them as a proof I was out of health—It is not this—It is good for me to have trials—and I am in a state of chronic trial, which only those who come very close to me know. This has been the way with me for many years, the clouds of one kind or another returning after the rain, or, as I have before now expressed it, a shower of meteoric stones falling about me, as those which fall down from heaven, in a regular return, in the month of November. I might almost say that a pleasant event has not happened to me for more than I can count.851

Newman needed the understanding and concern of his friends and often it was their words that enabled him to feel comfortable in pouring out his heart to them. For example, his good friend Sister Mary Gabriel du Boulay wrote him a very consoling and encouraging letter which meant a great deal to him.

We are so very sorry to hear of continued weakness and shaken health, and shall pray most earnestly that sufficient strength may be given you to work on, yet many years in the service of your Lord and Love . . .

Earth is indeed full of desolateness as far as anything belonging to it is concerned, and the greater the soul the more it must suffer from its keen vision of the hollowness and corruption of all things merely human.—The love and labour and the tender sympathy it pours out on every soul with which it comes in contact, must widen the circle of its suffering—and help to wear out the bodily frame. But each suffering brings forth its own child of benediction which will not die because it is not of nature but of grace. There are thousands of such springing up from you very dear Father in hidden places, where you do not suspect them:—hearts that love you as their guide into the Faith—hearts that you have reconciled—that you have comforted, that you have guided to the bridal chamber of their Spouse.—Those many voices of childlike love and gratitude all blend in one persevering prayer that you may be rewarded with Life, Eternal Life, for all the good things that you have done to them. They will be with you through old age, in death and after death, and you will let them cheer you, though they come from the least and lowest.

It would seem such an impertinence writing all this to you, only that you know so well, that the deepest expression of reverence is the uttermost confidence—It is just because you are so great, and I am so little that I have ever felt my heart might speak out all it felt to you.852

Her letter enabled Newman to recount the things that were troubling him.

Your letter was a great consolation to me. . . . I am much better—but what has been so long coming on, will not easily go off.

I have not the faith, patience, and resignation which I ought to have—but this is another matter. My ailment is a physical effect, I may call it, on my mind. It is said that in a naval engagement, while the vessels near, and the men are standing quite still, the knees of the bravest shake. It is so bad to be simply passive in suffering. When we act as well as suffer, the effort alleviates the pain; in that case men are troubled without knowing it; but it is otherwise when you are hit, without hitting. It would have been better with me humanly and naturally, had I given as good as I took.

Now excuse my folly in speaking. Thirty years have passed since I have been a sort of target for a shot, when any one wished to try his hand, and had nothing better to do. I used as a Protestant, to say, that no one, except O’Connell was so well abused as I was. I have very seldom replied; if so, for the sake of others, or of our cause. . . . Gross misrepresentations remain of me to this day, and even now they bring up what I did 20 years ago, knowing that they can speak, and I cannot.853

After mentioning several things that people brought up, he continued: “These are little and ridiculous things taken separately, but they form an atmosphere of flies—one can’t enjoy a walk without this finger on the nerves of the mind. They are nothing in the eye of reason, but they weary.

“For myself, I don’t think I have called any one a bad name, or been ill natured. I never charged any one with any crime or fault except Achilli, and I suffered for that pretty considerably.”854

Newman began to speak of his sense of failure.

Then I have tried to do works for God year after year, and for thirty years, so far forth as they were works, they have all failed. My first sermon as an Anglican, was on the text “Man goes forth to his work and to his labour until the evening”; and now the evening is come and I have done nothing. I think of Keble’s lines “In disappointment thou canst bless etc.”—and I know that it is better for me to seem to have done nothing—but still it is most difficult to go on working in the face of thirty years disappointment. And so it is—every thing seems to crumble under my hands, as if one were making ropes of sand.855

Newman concluded this letter by indicating that we are all fragile vessels, which, in spite of their weakness, hold a treasure:

And so one man’s skin endures a hair shirt better than another’s—so it is with the effect of these trials on different minds respectively. For myself, I know I am deeply deficient in that higher life which lasts and grows in spite of the ills of mortality—but had I ever so much of supernatural love and devotion, I could not be in any different state from the Apostle, who in the most beautiful of his inspired epistles speaks with such touching and consoling vividness of those troubles, in the midst of which these earthen vessels of ours hold the treasure of grace and truth.856

Several months later, Newman wrote to his faithful friend Ambrose St. John and enumerated some of his difficulties by outhning his life in ten-year segments:

I then said that, as, when I was 20 I was cut off from the rising talent of the University by my failure in the Schools, as, when 30, I was cut off from distinction in the governing body by being deprived of my Tutorship, as, when 40, I was virtually cast out of the Church of England, by the affair of Number 90, as when 50 I was cast out of what may be called society by the disgrace of the Achilli sentence, so, when I should arrive at 60 years, I should be cast out of the good books of Catholics, and especially of ecclesiastical authorities. This appalls me in this way—viz what is to happen, if I live to be seventy? Am I to lose all of you and to be left desolate? Or is our house to be burned to the ground? Or am I to be smitten with some afflicting disorder?

These are the questions which come before me, and don’t be angry with me for mentioning them—for it is a great relief to me to speak, and a pain to be silent. Well, I suppose it is all intended to keep me from being too happy. How happy should I be, if let alone—how fond of living! On the other hand, certainly I have been carried marvelously thro’ all those troubles which have come on me hitherto, and so I believe I shall be to the end.857

By the end of 1862, Newman’s health had improved, and he was involved with running the Oratory school. Letters to friends indicate that he now possessed more energy and was concerned that “perhaps I am hiding my talent in a napkin.”858 Reflecting on past years, he wrote: “We have had, as you seem to know, great trials—though no one can know them, as we know them—but we have been, and are, wonderfully prospered under and through them.”859

Friendship, Encouragement, and Support

Another important value of friendship relates to Newman’s understanding of the Christian life: friends are given to each other for encouragement and support. Often he would write to friends encouraging them in some way and they would reciprocate. For example, to Sir John Simeon he wrote in 1867: “I do not know in what terms to thank you enough for your letter so full of hearty affectionate feeling for me. It is the great compensation for such small trials as come upon me, to have such expressions of true friendship.

“The mercy of God gives me only just so much to endure, as suffices to serve for an occasion of bringing to me so much to take pleasure and rejoice in—for can there be a greater blessing here below than to have good friends who sympathize both with the good and evil that befalls one?”860

After the division of the Oratory, T. F. Knox joined the London Oratory but soon wrote to Newman expressing his gratitude for his friendship by saying: “As this is the first time I have written to you since the Separation, I cannot let pass the opportunity of expressing to you my sorrow that we are parted, and also to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the love and forbearance you have shown me. The more I think over the past the more deeply I feel how miserably in every way I have acted towards you in the last fifteen months.”861

Similarly, in 1857, John Flanagan told Newman that “you are the tenderest and gentlest of men,”862 while Robert Whitty said, “I hope you will sometimes remember one who has not lost one particle of his veneration and affection for you.”863 Late in his life, Newman responded to T. W. Allies’ expression of gratitude by writing: “I thank you for your affectionate letter. Of course I am not worthy of all you say, but if you had not a love of me, it would not come into your mind to speak of me as you do, and it is a token, which comforts me, that you do not forget me in your prayers.”864

When Mrs. William Froude was trying to discern whether she should join the Catholic Church, it meant a great deal to her to have Newman as a friend who could help her in her religious quest. “I am almost ashamed to trouble you with these questions, as I daresay I could find them in books, though I don’t exactly know where to look for them—also to have the opinion and support of a kind friend is a great comfort.”865 Similarly, when Newman’s name was unjustly being maligned in the extremely anti-Catholic Standard, his friend Bishop Ullathorne defended him: “I will take the liberty of saying that I know of no dignitary in the Catholic Church whom I consider more sound in orthodoxy, more solidly formed in the ecclesiastical and Christian virtues, or more deferential to church authority than Dr. Newman. I love him as one of my dearest friends; I have often consulted his judgement, and admired his prudence; and I have nothing either in my mind, or my heart, that I could have the slightest wish to conceal from his knowledge.”866 Along the same lines, Robert Ornsby, who had worked with Newman at the Catholic University in Dublin spoke of his personal loss at Newman’s resignation. “Now for three years or more, I have had the continual advantage of your friendship and counsel, besides the great trust of working with you in one of the most important vocations of your life.”867

Although Mother Margaret Hallahan hardly ever saw Newman, nevertheless it meant a great deal to her to have him as her friend. More than once she personally expressed her appreciation; responding to a letter he had written to her in 1865, she said: “Your handwriting always gives me a thrill of delight it is so kind and condescending of you to write to me. True friends, and true friendships are such rare things that I hope and pray that what has ever been felt by this Community and by their worthless mother towards you and all that concerns you may ever be the same.”868 Sister Mary Gabriel du Boulay also wrote of the pleasure Newman’s letter gave Mother Margaret, “As years pass on, there seems to grow a feeling of confidence and freedom of heart, which is strange considering she never sees you.”869

The following year Mother Margaret became ill, and Newman wrote to her telling her that he would offer Mass for her once a week. Sister Imelda Poole replied for her: “Our dear Mother is deeply grateful to you for your most kind letter and still kinder promise of prayers. She cannot express all she feels in words—all she can say is, and she bids me tell you so—that she always was fond of you and now shall be fonder of you than ever, and she is afraid she shall live and die with an irregular affection for you—these are her own words.”870 After her superior’s death in 1868, Sister Imelda Poole wrote about Mother Margaret Hallahan’s “special” regard for Newman: “She instinctively felt that you understood her, and as many did not understand her—she felt a freedom of soul with those who did—and could show her genuine self to them. You were one of those for whom she most constantly prayed and she took the most lively interest as you know in all that concerned her.”871

However, it was not always the friends who were closest to him who expressed their feelings toward Newman. Sometimes it was an estranged friend or someone who disagreed with him. James Hope and Newman had not corresponded for several years, and after Newman took the initiative to write, Hope answered:

It [your letter] renews a correspondence which I value very highly and which my own stupidity had interrupted—Offence I had never taken, but causes such as you describe much better than I could have done, were the occasion of my silence. You may now find that you have brought some trouble on yourself, for there are many things on which I should like to ask you questions. . . . However at present my chief object is to assure you how very glad I am again to write to you as the friend whom I almost feared I had thrown away.

Whatever occurs do not let us again be estranged. It is not easy as one gets older to form new friendships of any kind and least of all such as I have always considered yours.872

Although Isaac Williams disagreed with Newman over religious issues, he still wrote to him, expressing his friendship and affection, whenever he learned of Newman’s troubles.

I can no longer forbear writing to you a few lines to express my deep sympathy and affection for you in your troubles—How can I forbear to do so when the mere thought of you fills my eyes as it has so often done with tears? Of your trials I mean first and chiefly the loss of your sister Harriet, knowing what she once was to you and that you have so little remaining to fill up such a place in your mind.

Your other troubles [Newman has written above the line “(Achilli)”] of another kind must be very harassing to you I am sure, and I cannot but hope that at such a time a line from an old friend may be not unacceptable to you. And indeed, my dear Newman, I do earnestly hope that we have a place in each others’ prayers—other offices of friendship have long ceased between us— . . . Although of course there are many things which you think and do with which I cannot agree—yet they are not such as can impair that glad hope and confidence which one must always entertain for you.873

Even some members of his religious community, who disagreed with him concerning certain things, expressed their true feelings to him. Richard Stanton, who opposed Newman’s position on the division of the Oratory, wrote to him in 1856 stating:

My immediate object is only to secure an expression or two of kindness for myself, a consolation of which I feel great need—I have during my life entertained great love and friendship for various persons (though now I hardly know whether I have a friend) but towards yourself my feelings have always been something quite peculiar, for regard and attachment. Since I have been parted from you, the rare occasions on which I have met you, have been of the pleasantest hours of the whole year, and the few lines you have from time to time written been among my greatest treasures.874

Even Nicholas Darnell, who was at the center of the Oratory boys’ school controversy, wrote to Newman saying: “Need I say that in spite of your infatuation, and my own coldness and pride, I love you from my heart and shall always love you from my heart and shall always love you, better if possible, than my own Father.”875

Not only did Newman receive expressions of love and friendship from others, he also expressed his feelings to others.876 Realizing the importance of encouraging and supporting others, he often expressed how he felt about someone either to that person or to someone else. Writing to R. A. Coffin in 1849, he said: “I long to see you, my dear F. Rector, and to have some quiet talk with you and others who are so much in my heart.”877 Years later, when Newman learned that John Keble’s wife was dying, he struggled to find words that expressed his feelings.

What am I to say to your most touching letter? I can do no more than think of you and her. I cannot write except to tell you that I am so thinking.

You are under the severest trial which man can suffer; and I earnestly pray that you and she may be supplied in all your need, day by day, and have every grace necessary to bring you both to heaven. When I think how ill you have been lately, I am full of anxiety.

I can do no more than think of you and love you. I wish I could do more—but there is only One who can will and do.878

The following month he wrote to R. F. Wilson about his friendship for Keble. “He is, and ever has been, ‘pars animae’ [“part of my soul”] in so special a sense, though I have but once seen him in twenty years and more, that I can’t tell how I shall feel when he is taken away.”879

When Catherine Bowden asked Newman to be present at the Mass in which she began her novitiate with the Dominican nuns, he responded: “I congratulate you most sincerely on your approaching clothing. If any thing would carry me away from my ‘nido’ (nest) here, it would be the claim which you and yours have on me for every [sic] the most affectionate manifestation of my interest in you and for your welfare; but the greatest thing I can do is to say Mass for you.”880

Joseph Gordon, after a year as a novice in Newman’s community, wrote to him complaining of being “let alone,” and of an absence of friendliness on the part of the community, and that Newman did not seem to want his love. Reassuring him of his love, Newman responded: “And now what can I say in return but what with all my heart I love you? As you would see, if you could look into it.”881

However, Newman was also sensitive to the fact that some individuals had a difficult time manifesting their love or friendship for others. With Philip Gordon, Joseph’s brother, Newman took the initiative in writing; sensing Gordon’s difficulty, Newman wrote, using the words of a song: “Many is the time I have stood over the fire at breakfast or looked at you at Recreation, hunting for something to talk about. The song says that ‘Love cannot live on flowers;’ not so; yet it requires material, if not for sustenance, at least for display.”882 In turn, Gordon was able to express his own feelings: “It was very kind of you to write to me. I have never doubted that you loved me as one of your children although the most unworthy of all. I have ever had the greatest difficulty in manifesting my affections and this in proportion to their depth, it almost pains me to have to profess my love.”883

At times Newman would express his feelings to another person; for example, writing to H. A. Woodgate about his friend Hope-Scott, Newman said: “He is a man I love with my whole heart, and his loss to me is very grevious [sic].”884 In the same way, he wrote to Lady Herbert of Lea concerning his friend Isy Froude: “It is pleasant to hear you talk so warmly of Isy Froude—I love her so much.”885

“Speaking the Truth in Love”

Although people were able to express their feelings for Newman and he for them, because he believed friendship had to be based on honesty, he was honest with people even though it meant communicating difficult matters or perhaps risking the loss of their friendship. In 1849, after Newman had backed Faber in a controversy concerning the Lives of the Saints, it seemed that Faber was still provoking certain groups of people. So Newman wrote to him:

This is what has fidgeted me and more than fidgeted, about the whole matter. I have been trying all along to put you on your true footing in the eyes of certain old Catholics—I identified myself wholly with you last Autumn—and now you seem to wish to show the world that after all there is something unmanageable in you, that you can’t be relied on, that you are fickle, take up schemes, give them up, insult benefactors, are heartless and willful. Now though such an accusation is of course absurd, yet I do think you have given countenance to it—I don’t wonder if people so think;—“a clever man, but you can’t depend upon him.” I am sure this is said. It has provoked me very much.886

Two years later Faber was sent to the continent to rest for six months, but word got back to Newman that he was preaching and teaching and finally returned to England early. This occasioned a rebuke from Newman:

I am going to write you a very ungracious letter, that is, to express my sorrow at your return.

The truth is, I have been fuming ever since you went, at the way you have been going on . . .

St. Philip used to obey his physician. Have you taken one of the few opportunities a Father Superior has for obedience? I saw his letter—he prescribed six months for you.

You are not recovered—the very impatience with which you have come back shows it. As far as I can see, you are still bound to obey your medical advisor . . . Your life is precious.

This, I know is very ungracious but I am bound to say it.887

When J. D. Dalgairns, who was acting as occasional confessor to Mother Hallahan’s nuns, began to act as a censor and reformer, Newman corrected him: “I spoke severely to you in the Congregation, because I thought you gave evidence of that deep self conceit (for I know you wish me to speak plainly) which you sometimes show. It would have been better, if you had come directly after the meeting to me, and I would have explained it to you, instead of waiting till now.”888

In 1846, Newman felt that a member of his community, J. B. Morris, was living in a very selfish way. This situation prompted the following letter which Newman re-wrote several times. He began by encouraging Morris to see this as an opportunity to learn something about himself for his own growth.

One is so seldom able in the common course of things to hear from others what concerns oneself, that I cannot bring myself to let slip the opportunity which now offers of begging you to hear me say about you what will be painful to me as well as to you, yet acceptable to you, I am sure notwithstanding. Nay I feel confident, that, even though you should not see the justice of some things I am going to say, you will on the whole thank me still, from the chance of your learning something or other about yourself amid whatever I may say irrelevant or erroneous. Angel visits are said to be “few and far between”: and speaking as I wish to do in Christian charity, I know, my dear Morris, you will pay me back that charity, and consider my words, in spite of their infirmity, as almost an Angel’s, and a blessing.

Nor am I unmindful, as I do trust, of what may be the beam in my own eye while I venture to speak of the mote in another’s; nor again do I forget the weakness of your general health, which may seem to account for some points which I am to notice. And here I am brought at once to my subject.

Weak health certainly has a tendency to make us selfish, unless we are watchful; and though I dare not use so hard a word of so good a person as you, yet I do think it has made you your own center, more than is expedient, to the disparagement of the Scripture exhortations of yielding to one another, consulting for each other, and bearing one another’s burdens.889

Newman then detailed a number of instances in community life where this self-centeredness had been manifested, before concluding:

These are illustrations, my dear Morris, of what I mean to point out to you; and it distresses me to pursue the tokens of a similar habit of mind into other matters. I am reluctantly led to think that you like your way, more than you ought, generally. You have before now done serious things which ever seemed to me to be marks of something faulty in you, and for which I have not been able to account. . . . You are apt too, without knowing it, to set up your own views as a standard, in different matters, so as even to smile on those who measure things differently. You would be surprised to be made aware how frequent the word “I” is in your mouth. E.g., your first remark on a book being mentioned is, “This is a book I have never read,” though it is nihil ad rem (nothing pertinent) to say so, or “I have read part of that book,” or “That is a book I don’t think much of.” And as perhaps one remembers best, what has been personal to oneself, I will add my feeling, that you have been bent, more than you are aware of, on forcing your own judgement on me in my matters.

And now, My dear Morris, I beg your pardon if I have not written this as kindly as I might have done. I have been anxious to do it well, and have written it more than once over; but I know well that had I more of the spirit of love, I should have written it better.890

In his relationship with others, Newman tried to be sensitive and understanding, even while disagreeing on specific issues. Moreover, if he felt that he had been insensitive or wrong, he did not hesitate to apologize and asked forgiveness. To his lifelong friend, Henry Wilberforce, he wrote:

I wish very much to write to you, though I have very little to say. But somehow I was left with a painful impression on my mind after seeing you that I had, not knowing how very much depressed you were, been in a former letter inconsiderate towards you. In writing as I did in an apparent offhand manner, I acted as I thought rightly—because I did not wish to say what I had to say seriously—but, when I saw you, I fully saw that you were too sad to be able to bear what would at other times have been the natural tone for me to write to you in—so forgive me.891

During the controversy about the nature of the Oratorian, numerous letters were exchanged between the two Oratories; misunderstandings occurred and false rumors were publicized; these caused both Newman and Faber as well as others a great deal of pain. In 1853, in two successive letters, Newman apologized to Faber for any unkindness he might have shown to him. “This alone I will say that the thought of the pain I was giving to all of you has afflicted me, and will afflict me, in a way which you cannot believe.

“At present I will only ask your pardon, my dear F. Wilfrid, for every unkindness or want of consideration I may have shown you in the business—and beg you to suggest to me any thing I can do to show you the perfect love and gratitude which I feel to you and all of you.”892 In a letter the next day, Newman wrote about the pain this situation caused.

You say that I must bear with all of you, if you are sad. How little you know or can estimate what I have felt in this matter! Part of my pain, indeed, which has been great and continued, has been about myself,—because nothing I could do, as I ought and wished to do—but mixed the most miserable rudeness and inconsiderateness in every thing I did. But a very great portion of it has arisen from the vivid perception of the pain of yourselves; which, though I have not made it lighter by bearing, indeed I have borne . . .

One thing I will add to the many things I have to say, though it is hateful to me to say it. Never, for an instant, I solemnly declare, did I mean to accuse you of treachery. Never did I accuse you of any deliberate act of unkindness. Never did I doubt your love of me, nor impute any thing to you inconsistent with the substance and reality of that love.893

In the same way, he apologized to T. F. Knox:

I thank you most warmly for your affectionate letter. Be assured that you are all of you always in my thoughts, and that I wish your welfare just as I do those with whom I happen to live . . .

As to yourself in particular, My dear F. Francis. It is always a subject of regret to me, that I show to you so little the love I really bear you. And the more so, because I think I have been sometimes unjust to you. Forgive me for every rash thought or word I have had about you, and believe me.894

After a disagreement with his friend and fellow Oratorian, Edward Caswell, Newman apologized:

You may think how much I was touched by your affectionateness last night—but it was impossible I could at a moment, and at that moment, say what you wished me.

I will say it now. I have not for an instance thought, that by your letter you meant to hurt me; nor to be inconsiderate to me in any way I think you meant to exercise the virtue of obedience, and to do just what I wished. Indeed, I know perfectly well that you love me, as I love you . . .

Having said all this, I have said all I have to say on the subject—I feel most grateful to you for your affection, as shown to me last night, and I am much distressed that I should have been obliged so much to pain you.

But I have more to say—I wish to pass it all over and to think no more about it, for the following reason, which weighs very much with me. My dearest Edward, I have long had it on my conscience, that from time to time I have behaved very rudely to you in conversation—and it certainly is not for me to complain of any real or supposed inconsiderateness of you to me. So begging you to forgive me for what I have so often done amiss, and begging God to give me grace to forgive you as a first step to my being forgiven.895

Once, when Newman’s friends, the Wilberforces, visited him, he thought he had been unconversational in the evening after supper. Sensing that the evening had not been a pleasant one for them, he wrote to Mrs. Wilberforce:

Ever since you were here, I have been intending to write to you to express my great annoyance at having been so very unconversational in the evening. You know my infirmity, but, in spite of that, it was a great trouble to me that I should have used so ill the opportunity of seeing you which your dining here gave me. The immediate cause was that I had been walking about and talking all day, and being very tired, became (alas) very drowsy. The provoking thing is that I am generally much better than I used to be—and have not been in so wretched a condition once since I have been here except on that unlucky evening, and only twice at all tired.

I wish I could promise myself the prospect of making my apology to you in person—but in one way or other my time is taken up—and I have not been absent from Birmingham many days running.896

In 1860, when Mrs. Ward came to visit him, Newman guided the conversation in his own direction rather than allowing her to speak freely. Realizing later what he had done, he apologized and asked her as “the truest act of friendship” to tell him anything she could think of about himself that annoyed her.

I felt some perplexity that, when you called on me the other morning so kindly, “in order to say something” to me, yet you said nothing—and the more, because you were not the first person who has thus balked me. Since then, I have found that you really had something to say. Forgive me, if, by myself beginning the conversation and going off to questions of my own or in any other way, I have been the cause of your not fulfilling your intention.

Now you must be so good in writing to fulfill your intention.

It is impossible you can hurt me for many reasons. As to yourself, I shall account it the truest act of friendship, and shall be very grateful to you for getting yourself to do what you do not like to do, for my sake and for the sake of the Oratory.897

Because Newman trusted her, he encouraged her to confide in him:

You know well that for many, many years I have been the object of innumerable idle reports, and it is impossible you can pain me, if what you have to say is of that nature. There are things which I could deny or explain at once. There are things, which, from circumstances of duty, I should have to be silent about—leaving it to time, which so often has been God’s instrument in clearing me, to clear me now. There may be definite things about myself or others, which I might be able to correct. Or there may be definite and serious charges which I should find it a duty to refute. Of all that you had to say, might be of that light and unsubstantial kind, which is the sure attendant of anyone who attempts to do a work, and which, as I have said, has been my lot all through life, things said in the air and carried about by the winds, and if annihilated today, sure to be brought into being again tomorrow—but, whatever it is, I can never, I am sure, feel anything but gratitude to you for having the courage to tell me of them.898

Seeking Advice and Expressing Concern

Another characteristic of Newman’s friendships was that he sought the advice and opinion of his friends whenever he was uncertain. During the Achilli trial, whenever Newman’s lawyer wanted to work for a lighter verdict by retraction, saying that Newman did not speak about Achilli on personal knowledge, but rather on knowledge based on an article in the Dublin Review, Newman wrote to James Hope for his advice:

Will you give me your wise judgement?

The Judges are against me and there is a Protestant feeling over Westminster Hall altogether, tho’ this must not be said. Lewin, my lawyer, called the Judges prejudiced. It is impossible I can escape before a Jury—what I can do is to lighten the judgement [verdict] and to blacken Achilli.

Lewin wishes me to admit (if the opposite side will let me)—i.e., I suppose say I did not speak on personal knowledge, but on the Dublin Review etc.

Now there are two questions I wish you to consider for me.

Write to me soon in Birmingham—give me your prayers—and may you be guided to give me a good, honest, and sound opinion on the point.899

In his literary endeavors, Newman often asked for advice and criticism from others as he did in the following letter to Robert Ornsby. “At last I find a quarter of an hour to begin to write. Your criticisms on my Composition Paper are very valuable—and please always give me your remarks, whether I always take them or not—for they are always a guide to me, even when I do not literally act upon them.”900

Correspondingly, Newman’s care for his friends was manifest. No situation seemed unimportant to him. When he learned that a friend was in need, he either tried to help that individual personally, or, if that wasn’t possible, he never hesitated to ask someone else to help his friends. When Eleanor Bretherton seemed to be experiencing difficulties because of her engagement, Newman noticed it and wrote of his concern to her mother.

I should not forgive myself, if I did not write to you about dear Eleanor. I never saw her as she was yesterday. All her playfulness was gone; she was very serious; and her manner, though she was not conscious of it, was nervous, and had the appearance of a mind anxious and uneasy . . .

I seemed to myself to see the day when dear Eleanor’s face was pale, and her manner habitually subdued and sad . . .

These are the reasons which lead me to urge on you if possible to come to some understanding with his parents. Eleanor is too precious to trifle with. They must take the case up in earnest. Else, the affair will linger, languish on—nothing settled—every thing in prospect—hope—disappointment—hope again—to and fro, and no end of it.901

Moreover, when the opportunity presented itself, Newman was quick to praise his friends. He praised the goodness of his friend, Hope-Scott, in a letter to Emily Bowles: “It is rare to find a man of the world so deeply religious, so holy in the inner man. A man may have many good points, yet have no interior: Hope-Scott speaks for himself.”902

Maria Giberne, a close friend of Newman, entered a convent at Autun, a city which was bombarded by the Garibaldians in 1870. Newman, learning that she had developed some kind of nervous symptoms during the battle, feared for her health and safety. Immediately he wrote to the Bishop of Marseilles for help.

I write to you in great anxiety about a friend of your Lordship and myself, who is in great trouble, at Autun—Sister Pia, Miss Giberne. A letter has come to me from her this morning dated the 22nd of November, which is such that I doubt whether, if the Bishop of Autun or her Mother Superior proposed to her to leave for England, she would not gladly accept the proposition.

I know well in what great anxieties you are yourself—and I had thought [of] writing to the Cardinal Archbishop of Besancon about her, not to your Lordship . . .

. . . I write to say that if you will decide what to do in her behalf, I will bear the expense whatever it is. Perhaps it will be best for her (1) to remain at Autun, and be supplied with money by some messenger, or, (2) if it be possible, supplied by his Lordship the Bishop of Autun—or (3) for some messenger to go to fetch her, either to Marseilles, and from whence she may proceed to England by sea, or (4) to Geneva hence she might go round by the Rhine to England; whatever you think best for her, pray be kind enough to do, without regard to the expense.903

Newman also helped his friends to find employment. In 1851, he wrote a letter to Archbishop Cullen in Ireland about employing T. W. Allies and Henry Wilberforce to teach at the Catholic University.904 At the same time, he took a sincere interest in the financial difficulties of several friends and actively sought help for them; for example, in 1857, Newman wrote to William Leigh about a mutual acquaintance:

I take the liberty of writing to you on the subject of a lady, with whom members of your Family were, I believe, at one time intimate, and had opportunities of knowing and valuing more than I can have had. Yet, as I have heard of her several times lately, and you probably have not, I seem to have a reason for introducing her name to you—I mean Miss Holmes.

She is at Boulogne, and I fear in some pecuniary embarrassment—to what extent I do not know—I suppose not much. The anxiety seems to have affected her health—a fresh letter has just come to me from her—and she speaks of having been confined to her room for a month, but now getting about . . .

No one regrets more than I can, to find her so often change her plans. I have never attempted to offer her any advice on the subject, when she has happened to write to me, as knowing literally nothing, and having no means of judging, about the circumstances which influenced her—but I have been grieved to see that, as years go on, she is as uncertain about the future, and as destitute of means of meeting it, as ever.

I am writing to you, as I have written to a friend elsewhere who knows her, from the interest I take in her, and my own utter incapacity to give advice—and, while I have reason to believe that you take interest in her also, I am quite sure that you are far more able than I to make suggestions which may be of service to her in her present difficulties.

She has no notion whatever that I am writing to any one about her.905

Another friend of his, Miss Bowles, had written a text book for use in Irish schools, but had to wait until her work could be revised and published before she could be paid. However, because she needed the money badly, Newman wrote to another friend, William Monsell, asking if he could advance her half the money.

Miss Bowles has done her work—and writes to know when she shall get her money. I was surprised to find she was literally unable to pay for her lodgings—it was simple news to me that she was in distress—though I knew she had lost her patrimony.

I answered that it was necessary that her work should pass revision and be published, before she had paid, and she wrote back acquiescing. However, if you thought you could conscientiously advance half the money, it would I know be a great kindness. Her brother here has lent her some pounds for the moment. It is, I know, on your part, a question of justice, since it is trust money.906

Friendship and Trials

Every person is vulnerable to sickness and death, as well as personal trials, which need to be accepted as part of maturity and life. To be supported and encouraged at such times by an understanding person is a special privilege and to receive a letter from Newman in a moment of trial was a great consolation. During his Roman Catholic years, his personal correspondence is filled with letters to friends—consoling, encouraging, supporting, and directing them amid the vicissitudes of life. His desire was to be present with them, to support them in their times of trial.

Because the sufferings and trials of individuals are so unique, Newman found himself directing and encouraging persons who experienced many different kinds of spiritual trials. When Miss Giberne (Sister Pia) wrote to him about feeling less pleasing to God, Newman responded:

I don’t think seriously of what you tell me except as it is a trial to you. It is no proof that you are less pleasing to God; perhaps you are more so. One may fairly argue that it is indeed that it is a special honour to you that you are thus tried. It is easy to serve God, when consolations abound. Think of the lives of the Saints; consider what desolations weighed upon them for years. Do you think that none of them, though it is not mentioned in their history, had the very same cause of unsettlement of mind and desolation which you have? . . . Who says that it is easy to love those who ill-treat us? I should never be surprised if your trial was long, but it would be, long or short, a sign of God’s special love towards you.907

Because Newman had experienced the anguish of being separated from friends due to his conversion, he could understand his friend, Robert Wilberforce, who spoke of broken friendships as “rending the heart.” By sharing his own struggle, Newman hoped to give him strength.

I have been saying Mass for you this morning, and have just received your letter, which you may be sure I read with great interest. Of course I can enter into your special pain, better than anyone else except Manning. In my own case the separation from friends was the one thing which weighed on me for two years before I became a Catholic—and it affected my health most seriously. It is the price we pay for a great good. Every one has to give his best—There are few things, besides, which either you or I had to give; for I don’t suppose that either of us cared much for any thing else.908

Similarly, after Mrs. William Clark, whose husband was the Vicar of St. Mary Magdalen Church in Taunton, became a Catholic in October 1877, she began to experience puzzling difficulties. In one of three different letters supporting and encouraging her, Newman said:

I am grieved to hear from Mrs. Pereira that you are too much overcome by your great trial to be able to come with her here. Few indeed have so heavy a cross laid upon their shoulders—but I am sure grace and strength will be given to you according to your day, and that on looking back on this sad time you will be able to thank Him who so afflicted you, both for the affliction and for His Presence all through it.

It is such trials as yours which makes one feel what it was that the early martyrs suffered. I have not forgotten you in my prayers, and I earnestly hope and trust and am sure that a portion of that special comfort from the Paraclete which was given to them will be given to you—“To him that overcometh,” is the inscription which our Lord has written on His banner, let us pray Him for the gift of perseverance—and, towards the attaining it, for a real and vivid sense of the shortness of this life and the length of Eternity Ah, how short this life will seem, when it is gone.909

Trials in religious life as well as ecclesiastical difficulties also received his attention. For example, Newman gently guided T. F. Knox, an Oratorian friend, who was upset because of a misunderstanding: “Meanwhile be sure that no one can feel more affectionately minded to you than myself. It is little indeed to say, but what you ask leads me to assure you, that you are constantly in my remembrance at sacred times. And I trust you will find a home with us, and that we all may have the comfort, for we all need it in our various ways, of each other’s love.”910

Trials in family life found Newman supporting his friends. Briefly comparing married life with religious life, Newman told T. W. Allies that his responsibility was to care for his family. “Your trial is one of the severest which can befall a man, but be sure that all who take the step we have taken, in some way or other have to pay for it to the world. The world asks a price to let us go. Your trial is care, which is a most exceedingly great one, but those who are unmarried have their own. They are solitary and thrown among strangers more intimately and intensely than married people can be. You have a home. We have not had one.”911

In 1851, William Dodsworth, a married man with a large family, wrote to Newman saying that he wanted to become a Catholic but was hesitant because of his family. Supporting his decision, Newman replied: “Indeed I do not undervalue the great sacrifices you are making from obeying the divine call made to you, and it has long seemed to me that these were as great as have been exacted of any one, if not greater. But He who has put on you the burden, will enable you to bear it, and will repay you sevenfold for all you do for Him.”912

Whenever Lady Simeon became discouraged over the direction the lives of her boys were taking, Newman wrote her an encouraging letter. “All the blessings of this sacred season be upon you—and they will be, since you so courageously do the work which God gives you to do, amid that weight of suffering and that deep despondency which, after so great a trial, you cannot escape. I trust, and I believe, that even here you will be rewarded by seeing the good fruit which must come of your anxious care of the boys.”913 Similarly, when W. J. Daunt wrote an anxious letter to Newman because his son would not listen to his advice, he advised his friend to be patient. “I am sorry to hear the anxiety you are in about your son. Personal trial is often the only way in which young men learn wisdom, which they might have gained cheaply and at once if they would only profit by the experience of others. But generally the trial and the wisdom comes sooner to them then we think—and I trust it will not be long before your son learns at least so much as this, that those who love him well are better guides for him than himself.”914

On several occasions, Newman had the opportunity to support a friend who was upset at the decision of a family member to follow a religious vocation. When Emily Bowden wanted to become a nun, Newman knew it would be difficult for her mother, and so he immediately wrote to Mrs. Bowden:

It took me quite by surprise to hear from dear Emily. You must indeed be very much tried just now—Yet still, how joyful it is, and what an honor to you, that you should be allowed thus to give up to your Lord those He has given you!—and what a wonderful contrast to the uncertainties, risks and darkness of the future, to which a mother generally surrenders her children, and thinks herself happy in the surrender, what a contrast to this will be your parting with these dear girls, whom I cannot look at without wishing to weep, as a relief to me.915

Likewise, Agnes Wilberforce found it difficult to accept that her sister Caroline wanted to be a Franciscan nun. Anticipating her struggle, Newman took the initiative in writing.

This is a sad Christmas for you and Mama, I am sending you all my best Christmas greetings—and hope you will not forget me in your prayers—and I don’t forget on my part how you too need the prayers of all friends in what is so like the loss of a sister and a daughter. She indeed has left you for a better home—and she therefore can bear the separation better. She has her career visible and clear before her—to serve God in His Temple and to go to heaven—but that it should happen at Christmas, the special festival of our earthly home, perhaps makes the Will of God more trying for you. However, He does all things well.916

After Lady Simeon’s daughter’s vocation ran into difficulties, Newman was quick to support her.

Though I had not felt C’s [Cecilia] vocation to be otherwise than uncertain as yet, the failure of it has, on your account, given me very great pain. It is not by any means a common blow, and I grieve for it with all my heart. You have nobly and with great self-denial and silent suffering taken on you a very difficult office and work for the sake of most dear and ever present memories, and it seemed as if your reward had come, and the day of peace had come for you. . . . I am saying more perhaps than you will yourself allow—but it is the way I view it for you, though I know full well you will be strengthened and cheered and prospered to do whatever is God’s will in respect to you.

May God bless you and guide you and lift up His countenance upon you, and give you peace.917

In addition to the trials experienced by his friends in their spiritual lives or in their families, Newman also dealt with the personal sorrows of those he loved. Because he had experienced failure in his own life, he was able to help others understand theirs. In 1830, after he had to resign his tutorship at Oriel College because of a disagreement with the Provost over the duties of a tutor, Newman wrote to his friend, Hurrell Froude. “All my plans fail. When did I ever succeed in any exertion for others?”918 Many years later as a Roman Catholic, Newman shared his own sense of failure with John Flanagan as a way of helping him.

Don’t be cast down—all will turn out well. Recollect, and let me myself recollect, that from the first it has been my fortune to be ever failing, yet after all not to fail. From the first I have had bad strokes of fortune—yet on the whole I have made way. Hardly had I begun life, when misfortunes happened to my family—then I failed in the Schools; then I was put out of office at College; then came Number 90—and later the Achilli matter. You talk of “brilliant success” as not our portion—it is not. . . . When I was a boy, I was taken beyond any thing in Homer, with Ulysses seeming “like a fool or an idiot,” when he began to speak—and yet somehow doing more than others, as St. Paul with his weakness and foolishness. I think this was from some presentiment of what was to happen to me. Depend upon it, we shall be happier and more blessed and more successful in my way than in any other.919

In his letters, Newman did not explicitly write a great deal about mental problems or sufferings. Nevertheless, he certainly felt emotionally drained, especially through the 1850s and early 1860s.920 To a great extent, the source of his sufferings during these years was the anxiety produced by his apparent failures. Consequently, he was very sensitive to the anxieties that other people experienced. Writing to Lady Henry Kerr in 1857, he said: “I think suspense and the anxiety connected with it one of the greatest of mental troubles.”921 One time, in a reflective letter to his friend, Ambrose St. John, Newman shared a passage from a book he happened to be reading: “I am reading Ellen Middleton for the first time, and have been struck with the following passage: ‘I have often wondered whether the sensation of moral suffering is as surely allied to physical pain in every one else as in myself. The expression of an aching heart has always appeared to me to have a literal as well as a figurative sense; there is a sort of positive pain which accompanies certain kinds of mental sufferings, different in its nature from the feeling of grief, even in its highest degree.’”922

Without literally stating whether he agreed with the passage or not, he concluded his letter by saying: “I have just finished Ellen Middleton—It is far superior to Grantley Manor—But I hardly know whether I ought to have read it—it has distressed me so. I wish people would not write sad things—they only make one’s head ache; there are sad things enough in the world.”923

Four years after his conversion, in a letter to Mrs. Bowden, Newman spoke of the trials of advancing years and the feeling of loneliness that accompanied them: “It is this day 27 years that I was elected Fellow of Oriel—what a changed state of things I find myself in! One of the trials of advancing years is, that one has no one to recollect those earlier days, and to whom one can converse about them. This day was quite a turning point in my life—and, humanly speaking, I should never have been a Catholic but for God’s Providence to me upon it.”924 The following year, William Maskell wrote to Newman about his feelings of loneliness that accompanied his position of responsibility. Although Newman could certainly identify with this kind of loneliness, at the same time he realized how unique this experience was for each person. Since he was not satisfied with a facile answer, he encouraged Maskell to turn to the Lord. “Every one thinks his own trial worst, else I do not know why you should not allow I can feel sympathy in yours from my own experience. I feel sympathy so fully that I will not attempt to do for you what is beyond me. You must in your circumstances stand by yourself. He alone can bring you through your trial, who will. I have always felt responsibility to be one of the heaviest of sorrows, an over whelming oppression. Doubtless it was one of the causes of the Agony, the weight of a whole world. Loneliness is its very condition.”925

Sickness and Death

Newman, who had been seriously ill several times in his life, realized that sickness can be a great trial, not only to those who are ill but also to those who are close to the sick. Very often he wrote to his friends empathizing with them and assuring them of his prayers. At times these letters would try explicitly to help people accept their illness as part of God’s providential will; at other times his intention seemed to be more of an attempt to show that he cared about the person who was ill. For example, wondering how his own recent conversion would affect his relationship with someone who was ill, Newman wrote to Francis Demainbray expressing his concern. “I was told last night how ill you were—and you will believe without my saying it how deeply it concerned me. Though I am now in another communion, do not refuse to let me express to you my deep sympathy in your trial.”926

Feeling that the illness of his friend, Miss Munro, was at least partially caused by anxiety, he tried to reassure her. “I am very sorry to hear you speak of being unwell—as I cannot help fearing it is in good measure owing to anxiety of mind from not being settled. When you get here, I am sanguine that your way will be clear before you, for we have every prospect of success.”927

His love for his friend and fellow Oratorian, John Flanagan, was manifest in a long letter responding to a report that Flanagan had sent from his doctor in London concerning his lungs. Because Newman was concerned that he be given the best possible care, he encouraged Flanagan to seek a second opinion as to the best course of treatment. After discussing the entire matter with all the Oratorians, he delineated six possible ways to proceed.928 However, with his own sister, Newman took a very common sense approach in directing her in her illness. “I am sorry to hear your account of yourself on the whole—but I am sure every one who knows you would say that the best restorative is rest, if you can take it, but you ought to take it now. Especially, what is most difficult and hardly in your power, rest, in the sense of sleep; for you never used to sleep hours enough, and that habit of getting up so early or lying awake, I am certain, is very bad for you.”929

When his friend, Marianne Bowden, whom he had known from birth, wrote on July 14 that “I get worse by steady degrees, though with no marked symptoms”,930 Newman responded the very next day.

Your letter of this morning brought tears into my eyes—first because you spoke so affectionately of me, and said, that, wherever you are, you will not forget me. When God brings you to His Blessed Presence, then at length you will know how weak I am, though so old, and how I need your prayers, and what good you can do me by them. You are one of my most faithful friends—I have ever said Mass for you under that title—and you will not cease to be faithful to me, though God calls you to Himself. Meanwhile, if He gives me grace, I will try to do what I can to merit your remembrance of me, by keeping you and your present necessities in mind.

You are one of those to whom God has been most good—He has shielded you from evil all your life long—He has brought you into His Holy Church, and then made you one of His own elect children and spouses and now if it is His blessed will to take you hence, it is in order to bring you to Himself for all eternity . . . May our Lord Jesus and His dear Mother and St. Joseph be with you, when ever that solemn change comes.931

The illness or death of a friend affected Newman a great deal. He came to realize the value of writing to his friends at these times; simultaneously, he understood how someone else could feel when one of his family members or friends was ill, and so he would often write an encouraging or consoling letter. For example, to Mrs. Bretherton, whose daughter Eleanor was ill, he promised to say Mass for her:

I am deeply concerned at what you say about dear Eleanor, but do trust that your own natural anxiety makes you fear more than you have need to fear . . .

I trust to say Mass for her for the next three days—but before then I hope you will write me word that all anxiety is over.932

Learning that Fr. Gordon’s mother was seriously ill, Newman quickly wrote to console him. “I . . . said Mass this morning for your dear mother. . . . You and your sister have long expected it, but that does not make the trial less, when at last it comes. Please say every thing kind from me to her.”933

The reality of death offered Newman a unique way to manifest his love for his friends. Frequently, at the death of a friend, Newman wrote down how he felt about a person. In this way, his capacity for friendship is reflected over the many years of his long life since he survived most of his friends. Reflecting once on our lack of knowledge in general as to the time of one’s death, he wrote: “One of the most awful aspects of our ignorance here, is ignorance of the time of death. To what different kinds of work should one give oneself, if one knew that life was to be continued for one, two, or three years, or on the other hand for 20! Such is the trial of a person at my age—I may be entering on a long course of years, or closing my reckoning.”934

In any case, the death of his close friends had a deep impact on him which is clearly reflected in his correspondence. When he received word of a death, he would often write to a number of other people, reminiscing about the friend who had just died. Writing about his feelings was apparently a part of the healing process enabling him to cope with his sense of loss. Similarly, he wrote numerous letters of consolation or encouragement to a friend who had lost someone by death.935 In both situations, the sheer volume of letters indicates Newman’s great sensitivity to the feelings of people, as well as his personal concern for each individual.

Before his conversion, Newman keenly felt the death of his friend Richard Hurrell Froude. When the letter arrived with the news, “Newman opened the letter in my room,” Tom Mozley wrote to his sister, “and could only put it into my hand with no remark.”936 Later, Newman wrote to Bowden: “He was so very dear to me that it is an effort to me to reflect on my thoughts about him. I can never have a greater loss; for he was to me, and was likely to be ever, in the same degree of familiarity which I enjoyed with yourself in our Undergraduate days. . . . Everything was so bright and beautiful about him, that to think of him must always be a comfort.”937

To Miss Giberne he wrote: “As to dear Froude, I cannot speak of him consistently with my own deep feelings about him, though they are all right and pleasant. . . . I love to think and muse upon one who had the most angelic mind of any person I ever fell in with—the most unearthly, the most gifted. I have no painful thoughts in speaking of him (though I cannot trust myself to speak of him to many) but I feel the longer I live, the more I shall miss him.”938

After his conversion and as he grew older, Newman began to reflect more in his personal correspondence on the reality of death. He was shocked to receive word of his sister Harriet’s sudden death and wrote immediately to his friend, Mrs. J. W. Bowden: “It is to me most unexpected—and indeed the whole matter is a most painful mystery.”939 In 1873, when he learned of the death of his good friend, Edward Bellasis, he quickly wrote a consoling letter to his wife:

I have just got your letter, so very sad, yet so very joyful. For is it not joyful to know that a soul so dear to God is at length in His glorious Presence and His Eternal Embrace? He has now the reward of his long faithfulness to God’s service, and assuredly not one of his many good deeds, not any day of his life long devotion, not any one of the many services he has done to religion, not any part of his care for his family, of his kindness to his friends, of his dutifulness to the Church, of his zeal for the faith, no aspect of his bright and beautiful example, but is now having its full reward.

I know my pain is nothing to yours and those about you—but I feel deeply I have lost one of my best, my most constant, dearest friends—still it is a great consolation beyond words to think that I have such a friend with God, who I am sure still loves me, although he is now cleansed from all sin and infirmity and I am still encompassed by both, that I have such an intimate friend so near to my Saviour and my Judge. You, my dear Mrs. Bellasis, must feel the bitter and the sweet, a hundred times more intensely than I—you have an irreparable loss, but you have an inestimable gain. You have a memory which will cheer and support you through life, and will gladden you in that hour, whenever it shall be, when Divine Mercy shall call you hence. As for me, I can only trust and pray that, when my own time comes, I may be found as ready to leave the world as he has been.940

Only three months later, his good friend, Henry Wilberforce, died and on the day of his death, Newman, greatly affected, penned these words to his son:

There never was a man more humble than your dear father—never one so intimately realized what it was to die—and how little we know, and how much we have to know about it. Now he knows all: he knows all that we do not know. He has the reward of all his prayers; there is an end of all his fears. He has served God with a single aim all through his life, and he now understands how good it has been to have done so. I have known him most intimately for forty-seven years and he has always been the same. . . .

May God sustain your dear Mother and all of you—but I don’t doubt they will have abundant strength and consolation in their trial.941

The occasion of the death of his fellow Oratorian, Edward Caswell, in 1878, allowed Newman to reflect on how the loss of many of his friends affected him: “Thank you for your kind words about dear Fr. Edward. We have so long expected his death that we are in a way prepared for it—but there is a sorrow for the loss of friends which grows with years, because (to use the hacked phrase) they become ‘conspicuous by their absence.’”942 Similarly, fifty-four years after his sister Mary’s death in 1828, Newman manifested his continued love for her on the anniversary of her death. “This is the anniversary of my dear Mary’s death in 1828, an age ago; but she is as fresh in my memory and as dear to my heart, as if it were yesterday; and often I cannot mention her name without tears coming into my eyes.”943

Not only did the death of a friend affect Newman personally, but he was keenly aware of friends who had lost someone through death. Numerous letters manifest his sensitivity to the feelings of people, along with his desire to comfort and support them in their loss. Frequently, these were not long letters; rather they indicated his wish to be present with the bereaved in their sorrow.

For Newman, the loss of one’s mother was one of the greatest trials. Consequently, whenever he learned that a friend’s mother had died, he wrote immediately. For example, to Sir John Acton, he wrote: “Not supposing that any human words whatever could aid you in so great a suffering. A mother can be lost but once. And the trial is unlike any trial before or after it.”944 To William Leigh he said: “I have said Mass for the soul of your dead Mother this morning. No trial is greater than that of losing a mother, and in your case, it is more than usual because it is the final of many losses.”945 Newman encouraged Charlotte Wood, who had cared for her sick mother for years:

I have said Mass for your dear Mother this morning. I could not be surprised. The end must have come soon, the wonder is, it has not come sooner. In spite of your present grief, you have happy memories to cheer you, as you move out of the cloud which at first must over shadow you. You have been allowed many years of affectionate service to her whom you have lost. God has accepted all you have done for her in return for what she once did for you; and now your anxious service is at length ended.—You must bless God and rejoice.946

Similarly, when John Hardman’s father died, Newman’s letter concentrated on his father’s goodness as a way of consoling him.

I said Mass for the soul of your dear Father, as soon as I heard he was taken from us. . . .

Of course I have little right to speak about him to you, who knew him so well—but still the witness of one who saw him as I saw him has a value of its own, and therefore I will say to you that I don’t think I ever met with any one who came up more exactly to my idea of a good Christian—a God-fearing, honest, straightforward, single-minded man—a man of clear simple robust faith, and of large charity. It is pleasant to think of such, for they are the salt of the earth. He was ever most friendly to the Oratory and me—and has done us many a service—and we now mourn over his death, as a personal sorrow as well as a public loss. May we live his life, and die his death.947

Persons who had lost a member of their family received the most attention from Newman. Parents whose son or daughter had died were always remembered; for example to Mrs. Ward, whose son had died of diphtheria, he wrote:

Your letter is most touching and long to be remembered. May we all be as ready for death, when out time comes, as that dear boy was. He could never be more fit to die than now, and so God took him. And for what, my dear Mrs. Ward, was he given to you, what was your mission in cherishing and rearing him up so carefully, except to bring him to heaven? That was your very work,—not to gain him a long life and a happy one, but to educate him for his God. That was your work, and through God’s grace you have done it. You have carried it home. What can you want more? Your loving Lord has fulfilled all your largest prayers—and now your dear boy will pay them back to you a hundred fold by praying for you and for all who are so dear to him. And one of his first prayers, be sure, will be that his Mother may be able to bear her loss well.948

Similarly, he counseled his friend, Mrs. J. W. Bowden, to have patience with herself—that with time she would be able to integrate the loss of her son into her life.

I know there is only One who can comfort you in your present great suffering. All those mercies which you have had shown you more than other Mothers, that you have had so much of his company up to the very last, and spent a life with him, and that you have for so many years had him in charge and lived for him, and your recollections of him at so many different ages, and that sweet sereneness and peace which his dear Father used to talk to me of, when he was an Eton boy, and the picture of him which you must bear about with you in your mind, all these mercies now only make the trial greater. But in a little time they will come to you as mercies again, when you are able to bear them. And they will enable you almost to touch that heaven, to which so innocent and blameless a life has, one cannot doubt, already carried him.

What can you desire more than to have given a soul to God?949

Again, having learned that Sir Rowland and Lady Blennerhassett’s second son died at the age of nine months, Newman tried to comfort them by saying:

I write a line to say, what you cannot doubt, that I was very much concerned that you and Lady Blennerhassett should have so trying an affliction.

None but yourselves can understand how great it is but any one may be able to foretell, that in proportion to the pain of your loss now, will be the comfort, as time goes on to know that one so dear and precious to you is safe lodged in heaven—And you feel already something of this consolation.950

Comparing his friend, Mrs. William Froude, to the Blessed Virgin under the cross at the death of her son, he said: “This is a sorrowful Easter day for you—yet a joyful one too. Through the past week you have been like the Blessed Virgin under the Cross. What a great mercy it was he should die at home, and not in some foreign place among strangers. This is what makes a time of mourning so bright. You have landed him safe on the eternal shore—What could you wish better?”951

In the same way, he would often write to a friend whose brother or sister had died. Sensing that the death of the sister of his lifelong friend, Miss Giberne, would be difficult for her, Newman wrote: “By this time you must have heard of your dear Sister’s death. Tho’, as having given yourself to your Lord, you have died to the world, still it must pain you deeply, for invisible ties connect us with the earth while we are in it. To me of course, it is very touching as throwing me back to the thought of her husband, and snapping remembrances while it re-kindles them.

“I hope that you are well . . . and that you are supported by the full consolations of the Almighty Paraclete.”952

In 1872, Tom Mozley died; his father had bequeathed his house in Derby to him, but he had sold it on his mother’s death with the result that his unmarried sisters had to leave their home. Knowing of the family reconciliation before his death, Newman wrote these words of consolation to his sister Anne:

It is very kind of you to write to me. I supposed you would form a large party, and rejoice indeed at what you tell me about Tom. You have had, I can feel, a very great loss, which cannot be made up—and of which perhaps you will be more sensible as time goes on—but it still will be a great consolation to you always to look back on yesterday—as a time, when the last sad duties and offices towards one you loved so much, in themselves so soothing as well as so powerful, were sealed and consecrated by a reconciliation.953

The death of a spouse provided Newman with another opportunity to manifest his friendship. Sir John Simeon’s death in Switzerland prompted Newman to share his reflections on the gifts of this friend with his widow:

Our good God has visited you with a dreadful blow, and has put upon you a very heavy burden—but He will enable you to sustain both.

He never will forsake you or afflict you overmuch, He will ever be with you—Already, I am sure, He has made you feel how strong His strength is.

He has given you a brave spirit, and He will both try it and reward it.

It is a most dear and pleasant thought, as to him whom we have lost, to think how much he has gained by our losing him—There is now an end with him of all distress, anxiety, heaviness, perplexity, and end for ever.

No one can know as you know, how honest and true were all his thoughts, and how beautiful his inward self. God gave him many gifts. He gave him uprightness and religiousness of mind—and amid severe trials, has led him forward, and at length brought him through and out of this scene of confusion and infirmity into that state of being which is true and eternal. Shadows have departed for him, and he is with his God. Those who have gone from us, have, so far, a blessing which the best and holiest of men cannot have here. He is beyond sin, trial, fear and uncertainty. If we had the power of bringing him back by wishing, we could not bring ourselves to wish it.954

Besides writing to friends who had lost relatives through death, it is evident from his correspondence that Newman also wrote to his friends who had suffered the loss of cherished acquaintances. Richard Jelf, a close friend of Pusey, died in 1871, and Newman immediately wrote: “I am grieved indeed to hear of the great loss you have had in dear Jelf’s death. To you it must be a very severe trial—when even to me it is really felt as a great loss—for I have always calculated on the chance of seeing him again, having never lost the affection for him which so affectionate heart as his created in his friends. But he has been to you from the time he was at Eton an intimate companion—and for many years a confidential adviser and associate.”955

Fidelity and Friendship

One final characteristic of friendship embedded in Newman’s correspondence is fidelity. To be faithful to one’s friends was the desired goal; although some events in his life, such as his conversion, at times made fidelity difficult, nevertheless it was for him an important value. Newman was a realist and realized that in every friendship there would be joy and sorrow, as well as the need for reconciliation. At the same time, his own lasting relationships with people attest to the importance of fidelity.

In 1862, Newman wrote to Miss Holmes about the value of having “unchanging friends” in a changing world. “In this world of change, it is a great thing to have unchanging friends—and you are one of those who have been most faithful to me amid all vicissitudes.”956 Three years later, briefly reminiscing about his life, Newman thanked Isaac Williams for his faithfulness as a friend in contrast to others who had abandoned him on his conversion. “I don’t forget, but remember with much gratitude, how for twenty years you are perhaps the only one of my old friends who has never lost sight of me—but by letters, or messages, or inquiries, have ever kept up the memory of past and happy days. How mysterious it is that the holiest ties are snapped and cast to the winds by the holiest promptings—and that they who would fain live together in a covenant of gospel peace, hear each of them a voice and a contrary voice, calling on them to break it!”957

Ten years later, Newman expressed to Miss Giberne his thankfulness to God for his many faithful friends who had supported him throughout the years. He began by noting the fidelity of Ambrose St. John in 1875:

What a faithful friend he has been to me for 32 years! yet there are others as faithful. What a wonderful mercy it is to me that God has given me so many faithful friends! He has never left me without support at trying times. How much you did for me in the Achilli trial, (and at other times), and I have never thanked you, as I ought to have done. This sometimes oppresses me, as if I was very ungrateful. You truly say that you have been [seen?] my beginning, middle, and end. Since his death, I have been reproaching myself for not expressing to him how much I felt his love—and I write this lest I should feel the same about you, should it be God’s will that I should outhve you. I have above mentioned the Achilli matter, but that is only one specimen of the devotion, which by word and deed and prayer, you have been continually showing towards me most unworthy.958

Through the years, Newman was reconciled with many friends who had found his conversion difficult to accept. In 1856, he wrote about the general situation, noting: “As in Job’s case, the friends lost by my becoming a Catholic, are now nearly made up to me in full tale—and they themselves are constantly coming over.”959 Although Newman had corresponded with both Pusey and Keble, he had not seen either of them for almost twenty years—not until 1865. In a letter to Ambrose St. John, Newman wrote a long description of their re-union at Keble’s home. Arriving for supper, Newman wrote of Keble: “Keble was at the door, he did not know me, nor I him. How mysterious that first sight of friends is! For when I came to contemplate him, it was the old face and manner, but the first effect and impression was different.”960 Continuing, he spoke of Pusey:

Indeed, the alteration in him shocked me . . . it pained and grieved me. I should have known him any where—his face is not changed, but it is as if you looked at him through a prodigious magnifier. I recollect him short and small—with a round head—smallish features—flaxen curly hair—huddled up together from his shoulders downward—and walking fast. This was a young man—but comparing him even when last I saw him [in 1846], when he was slow in his motions and staid in his figure, still there is a wonderful change. His head and his features are half as large again—his chest is very broad—and he has, I think, a paunch. His voice is the same—were my eyes shut, I should not have been sensible of any lapse of time.961

Yet Newman knew that somehow the wounds of broken friendships could be very deep even after reconciliation. In a letter to William Froude in 1860, he wrote: “When I became a Catholic, I think I wrote to Rogers to beg his forgiveness if in any thing I had acted unkindly to him. My severance from him and others is a wound which will never heal. This is no inconsistency to say so, though I feel myself in possession of supernatural truth and consolation. The natural heart has wounds as well as the body.”962

In Newman’s correspondence, there are literally hundreds of letters to friends in which he promised to offer Mass or to pray for them. For example, he regularly offered Mass for several women whom he called his “faithful friends”—it was “the greatest thing” he could do for them.963 In 1864, he wrote to one of these women, Marianne Bowden, who became a nun in 1852:

Now I have said Mass for your two holy sisters departed, and for your Anniversary—ten years! what a time! It is well to think and trust that we are so much nearer to our Eternal House. God grant it may be so. How pleasant it is to think of those who have gone and are secure. Your account of your Sisters was very interesting. I say Mass for you continually. There are eight ladies, you make a 9th, whom I call my faithful friends—and for whom I say Mass at short intervals. . . . And there are certain days besides, on which I always say Mass for you.964

Three years later, she became very ill and wrote to Newman expressing her gratitude for his friendship:

I get worse by steady degrees, though with no marked symptoms. Thank God I feel very calm and peaceful, and though I have no idea whatever what I shall find in Eternity, still I feel most happy to go, for I know that God loves me. And what you have so often said, He now enables me to feel very strongly, that as He has always been so good to me, He will continue to be as good hereafter. I wish I had more ardent desires for heaven, but really I can only say that I have been very happy to live and shall be still more happy to die whenever our Lord pleases. . . . I need not say dear Father that wherever I am I can never forget you, and if God shows me mercy as I trust, I hope you will feel the effects of my prayers.965

Newman responded the very next day, calling her one of his most faithful friends: “Your letter of this morning brought tears into my eyes—first because you spoke so affectionately of me, and said, that, wherever you are, you will not forget me. When God brings you to His Blessed presence, then at length you will know how weak I am, though so old, and how I need your prayers, and what good you can do me by them. You are one of my most faithful friends—I have ever said Mass for you under that title—and you will not cease to be faithful to me, though God calls you to Himself.”966

Newman understood that friendship is permeated with both joy and sorrow. The manner in which a person reacts to these experiences determines whether or not the friendship will grow and deepen. Newman wanted to share his own joys with his friends. Although he did not do this to any great extent, scattered letters indicate that at certain times and in his own quiet way, he wrote to others about some joyful event in his own life.

In 1877, Samuel Wayte, president of Trinity College, Oxford, wrote to Newman inviting him to become the first Honorary Fellow of the College.967 Reflecting on whether he should accept or not, he quickly wrote to Bishop Ullathorne: “I have just received a very great compliment, perhaps the greatest I ever received and I don’t like not to tell you of it one of the first.”968 Deciding to accept several days later, he replied to Samuel Wayte, saying: “It has been a singular gratification to me to receive your letter, informing me of the proposal of your Society to make me an Honorary Fellow of Trinity, it being the first instance of their exercising the power given them of making such an appointment, and I accept with a full heart an honour which is as great a surprise to me as it is a pleasure.

“It is indeed a most strange good fortune, after a long sixty years and more, to become again a freshman of my first and dear College.”969

In a letter to his lifelong friend, Mrs. William Froude, two days before Christmas, one can sense Newman’s joy about receiving the honorary fellowship: “I have a piece of news to tell you, which William will be glad to hear—the Trinity President and Fellows, my old Undergraduate College, have made me an Honorary Fellow of their Society. I have always cherished a great love for the College—greater than for any thing in Oxford—and it is a great gratification to me. It is only two or three days since this gracious act was done—and you are one of the first I have thought of telling, knowing your affectionate thoughts of me.”970

Another occasion which provided Newman the opportunity of sharing his joy was the offer of Leo XIII to raise Newman to the Cardinalate. Initially, thinking that he should decline the offer, he wrote to Bishop Ullathorne:

I trust that his Holiness and the most eminent Cardinal Nina will not think me a thoroughly discourteous and unfeeling man, who is not touched by the commendation, or a sense of gratitude or the splendour of dignity, when I say to you, my Bishop, who knows me so well, that I regard as altogether above me the great honour which the Holy Father proposes with wonderful kindness to confer on one so insignificant, an honour quite transcendent and unparalleled, than which his Holiness has none greater to bestow.

For I am, indeed, old and distrustful of myself; I have lived now thirty years “in my little nest” in my much loved Oratory, sheltered and happy, and would therefore entreat his Holiness not to take me from St. Philip, my Father and Patron.

By the love and reverence with which a long succession of Popes have regarded and trusted my St. Philip, I pray and entreat his Holiness in compassion of my diffidence of mind, in consideration of my feeble health, my nearly eighty years, the retired course of my life from my youth, my ignorance of foreign languages, and my lack of experience in business, to let me die where I have so long lived. Since I know now and henceforth that his Holiness thinks kindly of me, what more can I desire?971

However, at the urging of Bishop Ullathorne and other friends972 and after further reflection, Newman decided to accept. Writing to Bishop Ullathorne in gratitude, Newman said: “You may fancy how I am overcome by the Pope’s goodness. And it is only the crown of the kindness and affectionateness of so many. And specifically of yourself, for whom I shall always give thanks and pray as one of my benefactors.”973 In the same way, he shared his happiness with Anne Mozley explaining why he had accepted the invitation of the Pope:

I have this very day learned that the offer of a Cardinal’s Hat is to be made to me with the privilege of living still here as before. So great a kindness, made with so personal a feeling towards me by the Pope I could not resist, and I shall accept it.

It puts an end to all those reports that my teaching is not Catholic or my books trustworthy, which has been so great a trial to me so long.

Refusal too would have created a suspicion that it was true that I was but half and half Catholic, who dared not commit himself to a close union with the Church of Rome, and who wished to be independent.

It would have unsettled some Catholics, and would have thrown back inquirers.

It would [have] disheartened so many zealous well-wishers, who had so rejoiced or so laboured personally, that my fair name should be vindicated, and who felt that a refusal would be most ungracious to the Pope, nay, as it was expressed to me, “a snub and no mistake to him,” and would be shrinking from aiding him in my place when he was pursuing the very line of policy which for so many years I had desiderated at Rome.974

At other times, Newman would write to his friends as they celebrated joyful occasions in their lives. He often used these events, such as wedding anniversaries, a person’s reception into the Church or birthdays, as opportunities to encourage them in some way as well as promising them his prayers. For example, he wrote in 1878 to Helen and Mary Church, who were twins, on the occasion of their twentieth birthday saying: “How shall I best show kindness to you on your birthday? It is by wishing and praying that year by year you may grow more and more in God’s favour and in inward peace,—in an equanimity and cheerfulness under all circumstances which is the fruit of faith, and a devotion which finds no duties difficult, for it is inspired by love. This I do with all my heart, and am, my dear children very affectionately yours.”975

Newman realized that at times difficulties would arise between friends, that disagreement and misunderstandings would cause pain and sorrow. In fact, some of his own greatest suffering occurred because of the reaction of some of his friends at the time of his conversion. In time he came to realize that some of the events of life that affected his friendships could not be changed. These he tried to accept without bitterness and to offer to God.976

Yet he also realized that time was a great healing factor; he remained open to the possibility of reconciliation with former friends and appropriately pursued this reconciliation. In his later years, Newman was reconciled with many Anglicans who had once been his friends.

Newman understood disagreements among friends not as lessening or destroying friendship, but rather as an opportunity for growth. With some of his closest friends Newman disagreed the most. Writing to Lady Acland in 1882 about his good friend, Pusey, who was now dying, Newman said: “I said Mass for him this morning. I have known him for sixty years; and he has ever been the same, subduing me by his many high virtues, and, amid severe trials of friendship, the most faithful of friends.”977 The challenge in friendship, in relation to disagreements, was to remain open to the other person. The temptation for most people, he felt, was to close off the other person.

Although he felt the immense pain of separation from his friends at the time of his conversion, he tried to understand their objections to his move.978 Waiting patiently, he believed that with time reconciliation would occur; he also believed that the separation of friends because of conversion, might also be the trial necessary to bring others into the Church. For example, several months after his own conversion he wrote to Henry Wilberforce: “And as doubt long continued may be the fiery process by which one person is brought into the Church, so the loss or alienation of friends by their conversion may be the divinely sent trial of others. It may be the gradual operation by which God prepares their own souls for the truth.”979

With friends who disagreed about religious beliefs, Newman manifested a great tolerance and a continual willingness to dialogue. For example, his skeptic friend, William Froude, wrote him a long letter in 1859 elaborating his position.980 Newman answered several days later, saying he was thankful that Froude wrote explaining how he felt: “Your letter of this morning has been a very great comfort to me. The greatest of evils in the intercourse of friends is ignorance about each other’s feelings.”981

At times disagreements or misunderstandings strain a friendship. This was the situation with Newman’s friend of many years, George Ryder. In 1855, Ryder apparently felt that Newman was in some way coming between him and his son, Harry, who was attending the Catholic University in Dublin. Newman decided to write to Ryder’s brother-in-law, Henry Wilberforce.

One of my great trials is about poor George Ryder. Last June year, as if thundering out of a clear sky, he suddenly accused me of something like lying. Within the last fortnight on my having occasion to notice this to him, he did not deny it—and, since I wrote to you, he has sent me a letter beginning “Revd Sir,” ending “Your obt Servant,” and in the course of it saying “You treated me a greater insult than ever I sustained. I demand of you, as you will answer for it hereafter, not to take my son Harry as a novice.” Is he mad? I am conscious of nothing but great affection and active kindness towards him—and I really don’t know what his charge is. As far as I can make out, it is that I have tried to make his sons like me more than him—but there is something he has said to Harry, which he has not said to me. You may conceive what a dreadful trial this is at the moment for dearest Harry.982

Division or separation was another area of life that caused pain for Newman in relation to his friends. When the Oratory was divided and some members were assigned to the London foundation, Newman felt the separation very keenly. Speaking of the separation from Dalgairns, he wrote in 1849: “Your loss to me, my dearest F. Bernard, is in many ways very great indeed. I have the tenderest recollections of you, and shall always love you; and I hope and know you will always give me your prayers, nor shall I be so far off as not to have still the comfort of your intimacy and your counsel.”983

Similarly, after Newman had gone to Ireland to assume the rectorship of the Catholic University, he wrote back to his fellow Oratorian, Edward Caswell, saying how difficult it was to leave his friends and community. “No one knows but myself the desolateness I sustain in leaving Birmingham, and being thrown among strangers—I trust it will be taken as my penance, and be of eternal good to me—but it has been my lot through life, to make friends and to be sent away from them.”984 When Newman accepted this position in Ireland, he had hoped that his friend, Henry Wilberforce, would come and be one of the professors. Wilberforce kept vacillating, and Newman’s disappointment is obvious in the following letter.

I have certainly thought you were trifling with the University for some time, and I have said to people “O he will never take part in it.” . . .

And now you still are going on your shilly shally way. I have offered you a Professorship and you won’t say whether you will take it or not . . .

From the first you have taken up the whole matter in quite a different way from Thompson or Stewart. They have thrown themselves into it with enthusiasm. But I have long said to Ambrose, “H. W. never comes into any of my plans, much as he loves me.” . . . I don’t wish you to do so, merely because I ask you;—unless you do it with love, I don’t want you to do it at all.985

Newman’s Genius for Friendship

Newman had a genius for friendship. When one visits his room at the Birmingham Oratory, one is struck by the fact that the wall above the alcove, where his little altar is located, is lined with photographs of his friends. As he offered Mass, he remembered them. When, in October 1845, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, what pained him was the separation of friends. He felt it physically—as a pain about the heart. The loneliness was intense. “It was like going on the open sea.” However, he was now consoled by the real presence in the Blessed Sacrament. “This is what swallows up every pain,” he wrote to his close friend, Henry Wilberforce. “When I am thus in his presence you are not forgotten. It is the place for intercession.”986

Newman never forgot that people are social beings, that they do not live in a vacuum, and that only by cultivating natural love and friendship, will they learn to love supernaturally. How deeply he felt the need for friendship and intimacy emerges from an entry in his diary for March 25, 1840. After a detailed description of his illness in Sicily, he asked himself why he was writing all this:

For myself, I may look at it once or twice in my whole life, and what sympathy is there in my looking at it? Whom have I, whom can I have, who would take interest in it? . . . This is the sort of interest which a wife takes and none but she—it is a woman’s interest—and that interest, so be it, shall never be taken in me. All my habits for years, my tendencies, are towards celibacy. I could not take that interest in this world which marriage requires. . . . And therefore, I willingly give up the possession of that sympathy, which I feel is not, cannot be, granted to me. Yet, not the less do I feel the need of it. Who will care to be told such details as I have put down above? Shall I ever have in my old age spiritual children who will take an interest such as a wife does? . . . What a dream is life. I used to regret festival days going quick. They are come and they are gone; but, so it is, time is nothing except as the seed of eternity.987

Newman’s capacity for friendship and love can be measured by the love he inspired in others, because no one is loved who is not lovable, and no one is lovable who is not loving. However, love can diminish with age if a person becomes circumscribed, even totally imprisoned in his own habits and wishes. Yet, in spite of his shyness and the difficult gift of self-awareness, Newman’s love and sympathy for others did not narrow as he grew older, but increased and included quite different types of people. Newman seems to have acquired this openness by the way he passed through the successive crises of his personal development. In his youth, Newman experienced the temptation of intellectualism and self-will. Later in life, he experienced repeated rejection. However, he not only survived these crises but each time emerged with a greater capacity to feel for others.

When Newman became a Roman Catholic and had to choose a form of life to follow, it was natural that he did not choose a “regimented” religious life, but something more informal, not a rule, but a fellowship—what he was to call a “weapon-less condition.” He believed that a religious congregation could be established upon those uncoerced relationships which characterize a good family. If a family is to survive, it must strive for some kind of homogeneity of spirit, not by means of an imposed rule, but by the exercise of the wise diplomacy of love. Each member had to understand the minds of the rest and consult them, to consult them, to take their hints and to try and please them. Tact, not obedience to the rule, is the rule of the family. It is informed by the patient spirit of an active charity. Such were the virtues of many of the middle class families of Victorian England: these virtues were Newman’s own and he believed that a religious congregation could rest upon such foundations, in which friendship could substitute for vows.

Newman’s qualities were evident in the way he dealt with his academic colleagues at the Catholic University. He was firm without being assertive. The challenge of his job was to bring together and work with many different kinds of persons—to utilize talents while minimizing limitations and to inspire diverse personalities to work together for a common good. His professor of fine arts, John Pollen has described their association:

“What a time it was! Reading, thinking, writing, working, walking with him in times of recreation over the pleasant fields, parks and gardens of the Phoenix; listening to talk that was never didactic and never dull. . . . He shed cheerfulness as a sunbeam sheds lights, even when many difficulties were pressing. He encouraged you to put your conclusions into terms; to see what they looked like from various sides . . . but all this under the form of easy conversation.”988

Newman had an ability to make friends easily—especially among the laity. In turn, they were attracted to him because he was “natural, energetic, humorous and practical.” He likewise fostered a spirituality which may be better understood by laymen than by clergy. Many of his most famous and profound generalizations about the spiritual life arise from a prolonged and detailed examination of some friend or correspondent. He was certainly a master of the spiritual life as lay-people understood it, and he kept this balance to the very end. In 1879, referring to Newman’s Biglietto speech when he received the Cardinal’s hat, his friend Pusey remarked: “The great day of John Henry Newman has come and gone, and his grand speech has been made. It was a beautiful speech, quite the old John Henry Newman speaking out the truth, yet not wounding a single heart.”989

Summary

Since friendship is significant in the development of a person’s spiritual life, Newman’s personal concern for his friends was an important aspect of his spiritual direction. Newman possessed the rare gift of inspiring affection as well as reverence in those who came to know him intimately. For many people, he was a leader whom they admired and looked to for guidance. But there was another dimension of his personality that emerges from his correspondence. It was his humanness. In his letters to his friends, he felt comfortable speaking about his real feelings, his fears, his struggles, his needs, and his joys.

Newman’s conversion to the Roman Catholic Church caused an adverse reaction among his family and friends, which significantly influenced his understanding of the meaning and importance of friendship. His loss of friends because of his conversion became a vehicle for his spiritual direction of others. As they sensed how difficult his conversion had been for him in regard to severed friendships, they felt comfortable seeking his advice in their struggles.

Newman came to understand friendship as a gift of God, yet a gift based on many human qualities. Basic to his understanding of friendship as gift was the sacredness, uniqueness and individuality of other persons. He understood friendship as one of the ways God manifests comfort and healing power in our world. When he felt disappointed or discouraged, he not only sought comfort and healing from God, but he also looked to his friends. In addition, he believed that friends were given to each other for encouragement and support. In fidelity to his friends, he would often write to encourage them and expected them to do the same. Honesty was an important quality in Newman’s understanding of friendship. He always desired to “speak the truth in love,” even at the risk of losing a person’s friendship. However, if he felt that he had been insensitive or wrong, he did not hesitate to ask forgiveness. During his Roman Catholic years, his correspondence is filled with letters to friends consoling, encouraging, supporting, and directing them in the trials of life. His own sufferings and struggles caused him to be sensitive and empathetic to the anxieties and trials of others.

One notable characteristic of friendship embedded in Newman’s correspondence is fidelity. Realizing that in every friendship there would be joy and sorrow, as well as the need for reconciliation, his Letters attest to his lasting relationships with people. Thus, he understood difficulties or disagreements among friends as an opportunity for growth rather than occasions for diminishing or destroying friendship.

Newman has sometimes been criticized for being cold and unemotional. However, his Letters certainly do not verify this charge. Emerging from his correspondence, is the portrait of a man who at times tended to be reserved yet was sensitive to others, a person who could feel and express his feelings for others. He was a man who had the ability to make friends easily and who felt the need for friendship and intimacy. While possessing a great sensitivity to others, he nevertheless remained a man of principle.

Summarizing his own way of looking at life and friendship, Newman wrote in 1880:

Looking beyond this life, my first prayer, aim, and hope is that I may see God. The thought of being blest with the sight of earthly friends pales before that thought. I believe that I shall never die; this awful prospect would crush me, were it not that I trusted and prayed that it would be an eternity in God’s Presence. How is eternity a boon, unless He goes with it?

And, for others dear to me, my one prayer is that they may see God.

It is the thought of God, His Presence, His strength which makes up, which repairs all bereavements.

“Give what Thou wilt, without Thee we are poor,

“And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt away.”

I prayed that it might be so, when I lost so many friends 35 years ago; what else could I look to?990

A press notice, which appeared in the Athenaeum shortly after Newman’s death in 1890, summarized the effect that Newman had on others: “It seems almost a paradox to say of the author of fifty volumes that his true sphere was in action, not thought or literature, yet it is a paradox that contains more than the usual fraction of truth. He was born to lead men; the very modesty that caused him at times to deny this concealed his dissatisfaction even with the enormous mastery he wielded over men’s souls and fates for so many years. It was by personal intercourse he sought to move the world and did move it.”991

812. Newman, Apologia, 25. Newman wrote: “It was not I who sought friends, but friends who sought me. Never man had kinder or more indulgent friends than I have had. . . . They have gone; they came to my great joy, they went to my great grief. He who gave took away.”

813. Trevor, Newman: The Pillar, 349. Newman had written to Jemima that her letters “would have brought one to many tears unless I had so hard a heart. You must take what I do in faith . . . my circumstances are not of my making. One’s duty is to act under circumstances. Is it a light thing to give up Littlemore? Am I not providing dreariness for myself? If others, whom I am pierced to think about, because I cannot help them, suffer, shall I not suffer in my own way?” Graef, God and Myself, 96.

814. Bouyer, Newman, 241–42.

815. JHN to Charles Robins, 20 May 1863, in LD 20:449.

816. Liddon, Life, 2:461.

817 See Newman’s letter to Pusey, February 21, 1846, in LD 11:123–24: “How rightly I judged that it was best at present that we should not meet! This has been the reason of my keeping away from you. Since I saw you on Wednesday, I have heard that you thought my manner, on the only time I called, at the beginning of December, sharp. Such misunderstanding must be just now. . . . Would that I could say something which would sound less cold than this, but really I dare not. I could not without saying something which would seem rude. Alas! I have no alternative between silence and saying what would pain me. May the day come, when it will not be so. Then old times will come again, and happier.”

818 Trevor, Newman: The Pillar, 371–72.

819 JHN to Miss Giberne, 28 January 1846, in LD 11:101–2. See also, over thirty years later, JHN to R. W. Church, 9 December 1889, in LD 31:280.

820 JHN to Robert Wilberforce, 1 September 1854, in LD 16:242.

821 JHN to Isaac Williams, 21 October 1861, in LD 20:59–60.

822 JHN, 28 February 1864, in LD 21:65. The Literary Churchman was published by former Tractarians from 1855 until 1892. High Church in outlook, it aimed at being literary rather than controversial. Newman’s response was to an article that had appeared in the Literary Churchman 10, February 27, 1864, 83–84, concerning his pamphlet “Mr. Kingsley and Dr. Newman.”

823. JHN to John Keble, 15 August 1863, in LD 20:503.

824. JHN to Lady Chatterton, 19 July 1863, in LD 20:495.

825. JHN to Marquise de Salvo, 18 December 1845, in LD 11:71.

826. JHN to Miss Giberne, 28 January 1846, in LD 11:101–2.

827. JHN to Mrs. John Mozley, 31 October 1865, in LD 22:86. See also JHN to H. A. Woodgate, 29 October 1872, in LD 26:193. However, in one interesting sentence in a letter written to Mrs. Bowden, Newman stated that he felt that many of the friends he had lost at the time of his conversion had returned. “As in Job’s case, the friends lost by me becoming a Catholic, are now nearly made up to me in full tale—and they themselves are constantly coming over.” JHN to J. W. Bowden, 13 September 1856, in LD 17:378.

828. JHN to Mrs. William Froude, 9 July 1876, in LD 28:86.

829. Tristram, Newman and His Friends, vii.

830. In discussing with Faber how to treat the boys attending their school, Newman told him, “I think their persons should be sacred.” JHN to F. W. Faber, 6 February 1849, in LD 13:27.

831. JHN to Henry Ryder, 4 September 1865, in LD 17:372.

832. JHN to H. A. Woodgate, 16 December 1865, in LD 22:121.

833. JHN to Sister Mary Gabriel du Boulay, 7 April 1863, in LD 20:317.

834. JHN to E. B. Pusey, 8 December 1865, in LD 22:119.

835. Newman, Sermon 5, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, 2:51–60; December 27, 1831.

836. Ibid. Newman went on to emphasize the fact that it is by a person loving their friends that their hearts are rooted in charity.

837. JHN to F. W. Faber, 7 February 1849, in LD 13:30.

838. Ibid., 30–31. See also JHN to F. W. Faber, 9 February 1849, in LD 13:34–35.

839. JHN to Henry Wilberforce, 13 December 1846, in LD 11:294. Newman continued to speak about how the lack of presence of his friend helped him to turn more to God. “Both what people here can do for me, and what they cannot, carries off the mind to Him, who ‘has fed me all my life long unto this day—’ whom I find protecting me most wonderfully under such new circumstances, just as He ever has before, and who can give me that sympathy which man cannot give.”

840. JHN to Catherine Bathurst, 21 January 1863, in LD 20:398.

841. JHN to Robert Whitty, 26 January 1884, in LD 30:301.

842. JHN to Mrs. William Froude, 16 June 1848, in LD 12:223.

843. JHN to Ambrose St. John, 12 July 1848, in LD 12:243.

844. JHN to J. D. Dalgairns, 23 July 1852, in LD 15:133.

845. JHN to Sister Mary Imelda Poole, 13 October 1852, in LD 15:181. At this time, Newman was also in the process of writing his University Discourses which put him under added pressure; he commented on how difficult he found it to write: “The first book I wrote, my ‘Arians’ I was almost fainting daily, when I was finishing it—and (except my Parochial Sermons) every book I have written, before and since I was a Catholic, has been a sort of operation, the distress has been so great.” JHN to Sister Mary Imelda Poole, 22 October 1852, in LD 15:183.

846. Ibid.

847. See the following letters concerning some of the problems that caused anxiety for Newman as rector of the university:

JHN to Henry Wilberforce, 30 December 1853, in LD 14:517–18;

JHN to Richard Stanton, 28 February 1854, in LD 16:64–65;

JHN to Archbishop Cullen, 18 June 1854, in LD 16:166–67;

JHN to William Monsell, 21 August 1855, in LD 16:530;

JHN to Patrick Leahy, Archbishop of Cashel, 31 July 1857, in LD 18:108;

JHN to James Hope-Scott, 5 August 1857, in LD 18:111;

JHN to Robert Ornsby, 21 December 1857, in LD 18:211–12;

JHN to Robert Ornsby, 5 January 1858, in LD 18:219–22;

JHN to John O’Hagan, 11 October 1858, in LD 18:483.

848. JHN to Mrs. J. W. Bowden, 9 December 1853, in LD 15:494.

849. JHN to Ambrose St. John, 30 October 1856, in LD 17:426. Sometimes part of the healing process for Newman occurred not only when he could verbalize his feelings, but also when he received his friend’s response. To the above letter, Ambrose encouraged Newman not to take matters so seriously. “In spite of your troubles though it is a shame to say so, your last letter amused me considerably. I don’t care for you when you have got your tail up, because it shows you are not anxious about the result, but see light thro’ the cloud. I cared for you (though you don’t believe it) when you were in the anxieties of the A. [Achilli] trial much more than I did when we were drinking the judges’ health in the Queen’s Bench.” Ibid., 427n1. See also JHN to Ambrose St. John, 26 October 1856, in LD 17:420.

850. JHN to Patrick Leahy, 17 June 1857, in LD 18:57.

851. JHN to William Froude, 28 February 1860, in LD 19:313. After Darnell’s resignation, Newman was able to run the school as he wished and his health began to improve. The doctor ordered him to take a vacation and simply rest, which he did with two of his friends. Soon after he left for his vacation, Edward Bellasis wrote expressing his concern over his health and Newman replied: “On Friday next I go to London for final advice and directions—meanwhile, I have had a very able opinion in London, and am assured in the strongest terms that there is nothing at all seriously the matter with me—but that sorrows (for though not great ones, they have been various and continual) of thirty years have at last told upon my nerves—and that I want rest.” JHN to Edward Bellasis, 5 August 1861, in LD 20:21. See also:

JHN to Ambrose St. John, 6 July 1861, in LD 20:8–9;

JHN to Sir John Acton, 21 August 1861, in LD 20:35–36;

JHN to Marianne Bowden, 11 September 1861, in LD 20:43.

852. Sister Mary Gabriel du Boulay to JHN, Mid August 1861, in LD 20:28–29.

853. JHN to Sister Mary Gabriel du Boulay, 18 August 1861, in LD 20:29.

854. Ibid., 30.

855. Ibid., 30–31.

856. Ibid., 31. Two days later, August 20, 1861, Newman wrote a similar letter to Edward Bellasis: “But I cannot in a few words express to you what the matter is with what I may call the physical texture of my soul. It is not a matter of reason, nor of grace—but, just as the body wearies under continual toil, so does the mind. . . . I think I never have been praised for any thing I did, except once, for my lectures on Catholicism in England by the Bishop and Catholics of Birmingham.” LD 20:34. See another letter eight days later to his friend Miss Giberne: JHN to Miss M. R. Giberne, 28 August 1861, in LD 20:37–38.

857. JHN to Ambrose St. John, 25 October 1862, in LD 20:328–29.

858. JHN to Emily Bowles, 29 May 1863, in LD 20:454.

859. JHN to A. J. Hammer, 25 December 1862, in LD 20:373. See also JHN to Mrs. Henry Bowden, 31 December 1862, in LD 20:380–81.

860. JHN to Sir John Simeon, 10 April 1867, in LD 23:140.

861. T. F. Knox to JHN, 29 April 1849, in LD 13:139n1. Newman replied: “Thank you for your affectionate remarks about myself. I do trust things are progressing well now, under God’s blessing and with the powerful intercession of our Lady and St. Philip, for a permanent arrangement of all those difficulties which have hitherto tried us.” JHN to T. F. Knox, 5 May 1849, in LD 13:139.

862. John Flanagan to JHN, 21 February 1857, in LD 17:529n2.

863. Robert Whitty to JHN, 11 April 1857, in LD 18:44n2.

864. JHN to T. W. Allies, 24 February 1884, in LD 30:313.

865. Mrs. William Froude to JHN, 20 May 1856, in LD 17:243n2.

866. Bishop Ullathorne to JHN, 4 October 1851, in LD 14:382n1.

867. Robert Ornsby to JHN, 8 January 1858, in LD 18:225n2.

868. Mother Margaret Hallahan to JHN, 12 May 1865, in LD 21:465n1.

869. Ibid.

870. Sister Imelda Poole to JHN, 1 February 1866, in LD 22:145n2.

871. Sister Imelda Poole to JHN, 31 December 1868, in LD 24:196n2. Newman responded by saying: “It is as great, as it is an unmerited and unexpected mercy to me, that your dear Mother should have thought of me with such affection.” Ibid.

872. James Hope to JHN, 27 November 1850, in LD 14:147n4.

873. Isaac Williams to JHN, 17 December 1852, in LD 15:226–27n4. Newman began his response to Williams, “I received your affectionate letter here last night, and thank you for it with all my heart.” Ibid.

874. Richard Stanton to JHN, 21 February 1856, in LD 17:160.

875. Nicholas Darnell to JHN, 28 December 1861, in LD 20:93n2. Newman answered: “Your letter was an extreme consolation to me. I return your affection with all my heart.” Ibid.

876. Newman has been criticized for being cold and unemotional: his Letters certainly do not support this position. While at times he tended to be somewhat reserved, he was a man who felt things very personally himself, and one who could feel and express his feelings for others.

877. JHN to R. A. Coffin, 25 April 1849, in LD 13:124.

878. JHN to John Keble, 7 February 1866, in LD 22:147–48.

879. JHN to R. F. Wilson, 28 March 1866, in LD 22:193. For expressions of friendship to Newman from John Keble, see the following letters: John Keble to JHN, 28 June 1864, in LD 21:143n1; John Keble to JHN, 3 February 1866, in LD 22:147n3. Bracketed translation added.

880. JHN to Catherine Bowden, 25 November 1868, in LD 24:175.

881. JHN to Joseph Gordon, 7 February 1849, in LD 13:31–32.

882. JHN to Philip Gordon, 7 February 1849, in LD 13:32. He was the brother of Joseph Gordon; both Philip and Joseph joined the Oratory on February 24, 1848.

883. Philip Gordon to JHN, 8 February 1849, in LD 13:32n3.

884. JHN to H. A. Woodgate, 29 October 1872, in LD 26:193.

885. JHN to Lady Herbert of Lea, 7 February 1873, in LD 26:246.

886. JHN to F. W. Faber, 22 May 1849, in LD 13:160–61.

887. JHN to F. W. Faber, 30 December 1851, in LD 14:490.

888. JHN to J. D. Dalgairns, 22 January 1855, in LD 16:357–58. Dalgairns replied to Newman, “I am often conscious of the fault you mention. In the midst of so much to dishearten one, it is not encouraging to know that at the age of six and thirty, such a fault is still so little subdued as to be visible. However it is better that it should be out than in; and I beg of you to let me know whenever you perceive it.” Ibid., 358n1.

889. JHN to J. B. Morris, 8 May 1846, in LD 11:156–57.

890. Ibid., 158–59.

891. JHN to Henry Wilberforce, 24 September 1846, in LD 11:251–52.

892. JHN to F. W. Faber, 4 October 1853, in LD 15:448–49.

893. JHN to F. W. Faber, 5 October 1853, in LD 15:451–52.

894. JHN to T. F. Knox, 30 September 1853, in LD 15:441.

895. JHN to Edward Caswell, 22 March 1854, in LD 16:94.

896. JHN to Mrs. Henry Wilberforce, 4 December 1861, in LD 20:75.

897. JHN to F. R. Ward, 13 September 1860, in LD 19:403–4.

898. Ibid., 404. For others letters where Newman apologized to someone, see his letters to Stephen Flanagan, 26 December 1856, in LD 17:487, and to Ignatius Grant, 23 December 1882, in LD 30:165.

899. JHN to James Hope, 21 November 1851, in LD 14:431–32. On November 24, Hope replied that although Achilli might be glad to let the matter drop, his supporters would only do so in return for an acknowledgment that he had been traduced. “My opinion then is—1. that you cannot avoid fighting except by retracting. 2. that a complete legal victory is not essential to the cause of the Church or to your own justification—But I do not forget the two points which personally affect you—expense and punishment. As to the former of these we ought all to help you, and I for one am ready. As to the second I cannot see that, short of retraction, you can hope in any way to escape so lightly as by proving all you can against Achilli . . . and if you can prove him a fornicator or an adulterer I doubt much whether an English jury will consider his theology.” Ibid., 432n1.

900. JHN to Robert Ornsby, 19 July 1854, in LD 16:198. For similar letters where Newman asked advice from others, see JHN to Edward Badeley, 14 April 1853, in LD 15:345–46; JHN to Richard Simpson, 14 March 1859, in LD 19:79–80.

901. JHN to Mrs. Peter Bretherton, 17 May 1865, in LD 21:468–69. With his non-Catholic friends, Newman maintained a vital interest in their faith and looked for ways in which he might interest them in Catholicism. See also JHN to H. P. Liddon, 31 March 1878, in LD 18:337, when Newman learned that his friend Pusey was dying.

902. JHN to Emily Bowles, 13 April 1882, in LD 30:77. Likewise, when Maria Trench was preparing for publication of Keble’s Occasional Papers and Reviews, she asked Newman for an evaluation and criticism of Keble and his literary works, which once again gave Newman the chance to praise his friend. For this letter, see JHN to Maria Trench, 29 October 1875, in LD 27:370–73.

903. JHN to Charles Place, Bishop of Marseilles, 5 December 1870, in LD 25:239–40. At the beginning of December, the Mother Superior at Autun sent Miss Giberne to the Visitation Convent at Fribourg in Switzerland. Mgr. Place, who received Newman’s letter on December 16, wrote on December 17, to tell Newman that Miss Giberne had left Autun.

904. JHN to Archbishop Cullen, 28 April 1851, in LD 14:268.

905. JHN to William Leigh, 7 October 1857, in LD 18:138. Mr. Leigh agreed to help as a letter from Newman on October 10 indicated: “I am very much pleased to receive so kind a letter from you. And I also thank you and Mrs. Leigh very much, for showing me so promptly that I judged rightly in believing that you took a warm interest in Miss Holmes.” LD 18:141.

906. JHN to William Monsell, 22 December 1857, in LD 18:212.

907. JHN to Miss Giberne, 5 December 1880, in LD 29:324. Sixteen years earlier, Newman had encouraged her on December 26, 1864: “I do trust those sad trials of mind, which you spoke of, are not what they were; and that, in place of such desolation, you have begun to reap the fruits of your generous and singular Sacrifice of yourself to our dear Lord.” LD 21:356.

908. JHN to Robert Wilberforce, 1 September 1854, in LD 16:242. Wilberforce became a Roman Catholic on November 1.

909. JHN to Mrs. William Clark, 14 March 1878, in LD 28:329. Newman wrote two more letters to Mrs. Clark: on December 7, 1877, in LD 28:276, and on December 30, 1878, in LD 28:437. For similar letters concerning the spiritual trials of converts, see his letters to Louisa Simeon on April 29, 1869, in LD 24:248, and to Miss Rowe on June 21, 1874, in LD 27:81.

910. JHN to T. F. Knox, 13 January 1846, in LD 11:92–93.

911. JHN to T. W. Allies, 7 April 1851, in LD 14:248.

912. JHN to William Dodsworth, 1 January 1851, in LD 14:187–88.

913. JHN to Lady Simeon, 5 January 1872, in LD 26:6–7. Several months later, one son married outside the Church; thirteen years later, when the second son was also planning to do the same thing, Newman again wrote her a supportive letter on July 22, 1885, in LD 31:75.

914. JHN to W. J. Daunt, 29 August 1868, in LD 24:134–35.

915. JHN to Mrs. J. W. Bowden, 19 July 1852, in LD 15:127.

916. JHN to Agnes Wilberforce, 24 December 1873, in LD 26:398.

917. JHN to Lady Simeon, 21 March 1882, in LD 30:70.

918. Trevor, Newman’s Journey, 42. However, out of the ruin of his hopes at this time, he composed Sermon 9, “Jeremiah, a Lesson for the Disappointed,” in Parochial and Plain Sermons, 8:124–40, September 12, 1830, in which he meditated on a recurring theme, that Christians must expect disappointment in this world: to the world, Christ was a failure.

919. JHN to John Flanagan, 24 February 1858, in LD 18:271.

920. Trevor, Newman’s Journey, 202, remarked: “Newman certainly came near to a nervous breakdown in these years.”

921. JHN to Lady Henry Kerr, 8 December 1857, in LD 18:197.

922. JHN to Ambrose St. John, 4 August 1852, in LD 15:141.

923. Ibid. Lady Georgiana Fullerton (1812–1885), a convert to Roman Catholicism in 1846, was the author of novels Ellen Middleton (1844) and Grantley Manor (1847).

924. JHN to J. W. Bowden, 12 April 1849, in LD 13:108.

925. JHN to William Maskell, 6 April 1850, in LD 13:459.

926. JHN to Francis Demainbray, 30 October 1845, in LD 11:21–22. Newman was received into the Roman Catholic Church three weeks earlier.

927. JHN to Miss Munro, 9 November 1849, in LD 13:289.

928. JHN to John Flanagan, 21 February 1858, in LD 18:264–66.

929. JHN to Mrs. John Mozley, 14 October 1861, in LD 20:56.

930. Marianne Bowden to JHN, 14 July 1867, in LD 23:267n2.

931. JHN to Marianne Bowden, 15 July 1867, in LD 23:267–68.

932. JHN to Mrs. Peter Bretherton, 3 July 1865, in LD 22:6.

933. JHN to William Gordon, 29 May 1872, in LD 26:101.

934. JHN to Bishop Ullathorne, 27 February 1857, in LD 17:534. Newman lived for another thirty-three years.

935. One of Newman’s methods of encouragement and consolation at the time of death was to urge his friend to see the mystery of death as part of God’s Providence.

936. Trevor, Newman’s Journey, 70.

937. Ibid.

938. Ibid. At the back of his diary, in 1837, when he was preparing Froude’s Remains for publication, are the scribbled lines: “Farewell most loved, so much missed, until that Day which shall make you, known to so few, manifest to all as you were.” Ibid.

939. JHN to Mrs. J. W. Bowden, 18 July 1852, in LD 15:126.

940. JHN to Mrs. Edward Bellasis, 27 January 1873, in LD 26:240. Several days later, on February 11, 1873, Newman wrote to H. P. Liddon about the death of Bellasis: “I have, through God’s mercy, had many friends, but never a truer than he.” LD 26:250.

941. JHN to Wilfrid Wilberforce, 23 April 1873, in LD 26:296. The Weekly Register, May 10, 1873, 295, gave the following account of Newman’s presence at the funeral. “At the end of Mass, Father Bertrand Arthur Wilberforce said something to Dr. Newman, and after a little whispering, the venerable man was conducted to the pulpit. For some minutes, however, he was utterly incapable of speaking, and stood, his face covered with his hands, making vain efforts to master his emotion. I was quite afraid he would have to give it up. At last, however, after two or three attempts, he managed to steady his voice and to tell us ‘that he knew him so intimately and loved him so much that it was almost impossible for him to command himself sufficiently to do what he had so unexpectedly been asked to do—viz., to bid his dear friend farewell. He had known him for fifty years, and though no doubt there were some there who knew his goodness better than he did, yet it seemed to him that no one could mourn him more than he did.’ Then he drew a little outhne of his life—of the position of comfort, and all ‘that this world calls good,’ in which he found himself, and of the prospects of advancement, ‘if he had been an ambitious man.’ ‘When the word of the Lord came to him as it did to Abraham of old, to go forth from that pleasant home and from his friends, and all he held dear, and become’—here he fairly broke down again, but, at last, lifting up his head again, finished his sentence—‘a fool for Christ’s sake.’ Then he said that he now committed him to the hands of his Saviour.” See LD 26:300n1; see also Newman’s letter to Lady Herbert of Lea about Wilberforce’s death, 3 May 1873, in LD 26:303.

942. JHN to Mrs. F. R. Ward, 13 January 1878, in LD 28:301. See also JHN to Miss Caswall, 2 January 1878, in LD 28:292. He wrote to Caswall’s sister on the day of his death: “He was one of my dearest friends, and is a great loss to us all, for he was loved far and wide round about the Oratory. That God may comfort you and your sister under this great grief is the sincere prayer of

Yours most truly John H. Newman.”

943. JHN to Miss M. R. Giberne, 5 January 1882, in LD 30:48. For similar letters where death provided Newman the opportunity to express his love for his friends, see:

On the death of Fr. Joseph Gordon, an Oratorian:

JHN to William Gordon, 14 February 1853, in LD 15:299–300;

JHN to J. Spencer Northcote, 14 February 1853, in LD 15:300–301;

JHN to Bishop Ullathorne, 14 February 1853, in LD 15:301–2;

JHN to Nicholas Darnell, 18 February 1853, in LD 15:304;

JHN to Henry Wilberforce, 23 February 1853, in LD 15:309.

On the death of Robert Wilberforce: JHN to Mrs. John Mozley, 20 February 1857, in LD 17:527–28.

On the death of Faber: JHN to W. J. Copeland, 27 September 1863, in LD 20:529;

JHN to J. D. Dalgairns, 27 September 1863, in LD 20:30;

JHN to Miss Holmes, 20 November 1863, in LD 20:559–60.

On the death of Marianne Bowden: JHN to Mother Margaret Weld, 12 October 1867, in LD 23:352; JHN to Mrs. J. W. Bowden, 13 October 1867, in LD 23:352.

On the death of Sister Agnes Philip (Moore): JHN to Mother Mary Imelda Poole, 26 April 1872, in LD 26:74.

On the death of Miss Holmes: JHN to Mrs. Brackenbury, 2 October 1878, in LD 28:402.

On the death of Mother Mary Imelda Poole: JHN to Sister Mary Gabriel du Boulay, 15 October 1881, in LD 30:8–9; JHN to Augusta Drance, 16 October 1881, in LD 29:9.

On the death of Maria Giberne: JHN to the Superior of the Visitation Convent at Autun, 15 December 1885, in LD 31:102.

944. JHN to Sir John Acton, 19 March 1860, in LD 19:316.

945. JHN to William Leigh, 20 October 1878, in LD 28:411. He was also a widower.

946. JHN to Charlotte Wood, 16 December 1873, in LD 26:396. For similar letters where Newman wrote to friends whose mothers had died, see:

JHN to J. D. Dalgairns, 12 September 1852, in LD 15:163;

JHN to Miss Holmes, 10 August 1858, in LD 18:438;

JHN to William Monsell, 5 January 1859, in LD 19:8;

JHN to Charles Devaux, 2 August 1870, in LD 25:170;

JHN to Mrs. John Kenyon, 13 February 1884, in LD 30:309.

947. JHN to John Hardman, Junior, 1 June 1867, in LD 23:244. For other letters to friends whose fathers had died see:

JHN to Richard Westmacott, 5 September 1856, in LD 17:374;

JHN to Mrs. Frederick Lee, 17 September 1870, in LD 25:207–8;

JHN to Hugh Blount, 3 May 1881, in LD 29:369;

JHN to A son of Sir Henry Cole, 20 April 1882, in LD 30:80;

JHN to James Wheble, 29 January 1884, in LD 30:302;

JHN to Joseph Monteith, 31 March 1884, in LD 30:339;

JHN to Lady Wolseley, 19 June 1885, in LD 31:73.

948. JHN to Mrs. F. R. Ward, 22 September 1866, in LD 22:92.

949. JHN to J. W. Bowden, 14 December 1874, in LD 27:172.

950. JHN to Sir Rowland Blennerhassett, 24 September 1878, in LD 28:400–401.

951. JHN to Mrs. William Froude, Easter Day, 1868, in LD 24:61; her son Arthur died at Chelston Cross, Torquay, at the age of twenty-four. He was in the Royal Navy and had become a Catholic at seventeen. Reflecting on the importance of Newman’s friendship with her family, Mrs. Froude wrote on February 20: “I thank God every year more and more, that we have had you for a friend. It is curious to me to see that—although my children are all so different, yet there is something in your writings which fits into their minds in a way that no other serious reading does. I read your books over and over again to Arthur, now that he is ill, and he is never tired of hearing them. . . . I cannot help feeling that . . . this quiet time at home, for thought and attention to his religious duties, will have been of great advantage to him.” Ibid., n3. For other letters where Newman wrote to a parent who had lost a son, see:

JHN to Henry Wilberforce, 10 March 1847, in LD 12:61;

JHN to The Marchioness of Lothian, 26 January 1855, in LD 16:365;

JHN to John Pollen, 24 January 1858, in LD 18:238–39;

JHN to Mrs. Gordon, 24 February 1858, in LD 18:253;

JHN to Lord Charles Thyme, 9 February 1881, in LD 29:337;

JHN to Richard Lamb, 17 April 1881, in LD 31:96–97 Supplement.

For letters to parents who had lost a daughter see:

JHN to John Hardman, 1 November 1861, in LD 20:62;

JHN to James Hope-Scott, 9 June 1862, in LD 20:204–5;

JHN to John Sparrow, 13 March 1865, in LD 21:429;

JHN to Mrs. Buckle, 19 June 1869, in LD 24:272;

JHN to George Ryder, 15 August 1877, in LD 28:231;

JHN to Henry Ellacombe, 1 January 1885, in LD 31 Supplement:51.

952. JHN to Miss M. R. Giberne, 21 July 1865, in LD 22:17. In 1824, Sarah Giberne married Walter Mayers, who died in 1828. A master at Ealing School, Mayers in 1816 was “the human means” of Newman’s first conversion. Mayers was appointed Rector of Over Worton, near Banbury, in the church there Newman preached his first sermon on June 23, 1824.

953. JHN to Anne Mozley, 29 October 1872, in LD 26:192.

954. JHN to Lady Simeon, 30 May 1870, in LD 25:136–37.

955. JHN to E. B. Pusey, 20 September 1871, in LD 25:404–5.

956. JHN to Miss Holmes, 2 April 1862, in LD 20:180. Similarly, in 1867 he asked Sir John Simeon: “Can there be a greater blessing here below than to have good friends who sympathize both with the good and evil that befalls one?” JHN to Sir John Simeon, 10 April 1867, in LD 23:140.

957. JHN to Isaac Williams, 31 March 1865, in LD 21:441–42.

958. JHN to Miss M. R. Giberne, 4 June 1875, in LD 27:311. See also a letter on December 31, 1883, to Mrs. Borlase who, in 1883, sent Newman a Christmas turkey which his good friend, Mr. Copeland, had sent for the past twenty years. Commenting on Copeland’s faithfulness, Newman wrote: “My dear friend [Copeland] has sent it to us for at least twenty years past, and it has been a record year by year, and a symbol, of that loyalty to friends, which was one of his characteristic traits. I have had, through a kind of Providence, many friends, but few can be put in comparison of him for faithfulness.” LD 30:284. For an example of Newman’s fidelity in friendship, see his correspondence with Mark Pattison in 1883. Newman, then in his eighties, had known Pattison for over forty years. Pattison, who had been a Catholic, but no longer practiced his faith, was in his last illness, and it was thought that only Newman could have a good effect upon him. Newman wrote to him asking him if there was any way in which he could serve him, along with asking if he could come and see him at Oxford. Even though Pattison refused at first, eventually Newman was able to make the trip. The journey was a very difficult one for Newman at his age. Nevertheless, because of their friendship and because of Newman’s hope of being able to reconcile Pattison with the Church, he went. Although he was unsuccessful in terms of reconciling him to the Church, it meant a great deal to Pattison. For their correspondence, see the following letters:

JHN to Mark Pattison, 25 December 1883, in LD 30:282;

JHN to Mark Pattison, 27 December 1883, in LD 30:283;

Mark Pattison to JHN, 28 December 1883, in LD 30:284;

JHN to Mark Pattison, 2 January 1884, in LD 30:287–88;

JHN to Mark Pattison, 4 January 1884, in LD 30:288–89;

Mark Pattison to JHN, 5 January 1884, in LD 30:290;

JHN to Anne Mozley, 7 January 1884, in LD 30:291;

JHN to Mark Pattison, 8 January 1884, in LD 30:292–93.

959. JHN to Mrs. J. W. Bowden, 13 September 1856, in LD 17:378.

960. JHN to Ambrose St. John, 13 September 1865, in LD 22:52.

961. Ibid.

962. JHN to William Froude, 2 January 1860, in LD 19:273.

963. JHN to Catherine Bowden, Sister Mary Alban, 25 November 1868, in LD 24:175.

964. JHN to Marianne Bowden, 14 January 1864, in LD 21:16–17.

965. Marianne Bowden to JHN, 14 July 1867, in LD 23:267n2.

966. JHN to Marianne Bowden, 15 July 1867, in LD 23:267. See also Newman’s letter to Sister Mary Gabriel du Boulay on December 27, 1870: “I was glad to have your affectionate note. You are one of those whom I emphatically call my ‘Faithful women’ for whom I have said 52 Masses this year.” LD 25:256.

967. In his letter to Newman on December 14, 1877, Samuel Wayte noted: “I may mention that if you should do so, you will be the first person in whose case the College will have exercised the power which was given to it in 1857, and that at present it is not contemplated to elect another Honorary Fellow.” LD 28:279n4.

968. JHN to Bishop Ullathorne, 18 December 1877, in LD 28:283.

969. JHN to Samuel Wayte, 20 December 1877, in LD 28:285.

970. JHN to Mrs. William Froude, 23 December 1877, in LD 28:288.

971. JHN to Bishop Ullathorne, 2 February 1879, in LD 29:18–19. Newman was advised by his brother Francis to decline the invitation in a letter dated February 27, 1879, in LD 29:44n1.

972. Soon after the accession of Leo XIII, there were rumors that Newman was to be made a Cardinal. When Cardinal Howard arrived in London in July 1878, his cousin, the Duke of Norfolk, asked him what the possibilities were, and then with Lord Ripon made an approach to Manning. For these letters, see LD 29:423–26, appendix 1.

973. JHN to Bishop Ullathorne, 1 March 1879, in LD 29:51.

974. JHN to Anne Mozley, 1 March 1879, in LD 29:50.

975. JHN to Helen and Mary Church, 21 February 1878, in LD 28:315–16;

976. JHN to Mrs. John Mozley, 28 September 1850, in LD 14:78–79. In this letter, Newman spoke of his sorrow because of his sister Jemima’s lack of openness to the Catholic faith.

977. JHN to Lady Acland, 15 September 1882, in LD 30:126.

978. JHN to Mrs. William Froude, 3 July 1848, in LD 12:232–33. In 1858, Newman said: “The thing I do feel is the falling off of friends.” JHN to John Flanagan, 31 May 1858, in LD 18:361.

979. JHN to Henry Wilberforce, 29 May 1846, in LD 11:166–67. In this letter, he went on to speak of his joy at his first Catholic godson.

980. William Froude to JHN, 29 December 1859, in LD 19:270. Newman continued in dialogue with Froude concerning certainty in faith for over twenty years.

981. JHN to William Froude, 2 January 1860, in LD 19:272.

982. JHN to Henry Wilberforce, 25 October 1856, in LD 17:418. For other letters where a misunderstanding or disagreement occurred, see the following letters: JHN to Henry Wilberforce, 18 January 1859, in LD 19:21–22; JHN to J. R. Bloxam, 8 March 1877, in LD 28:174.

983. JHN to J. D. Dalgairns, 26 April 1849, in LD 13:131.

984. JHN to Edward Caswall, 25 February 1854, in LD 16:58.

985. JHN to Henry Wilberforce, 13 June 1854, in LD 16:159–60.

986. JHN to Henry Wilberforce, 26 February 1846, in LD 11:129.

987. Newman, Autobiographical Writings, 137–38.

988. Letter from J. H. Pollen, 13 May 1855, in McGrath, Newman’s University, 359.

989. LD 29, 144n1. His remark was contained in a letter by Dr. Pusey to the Rev. Belaney, at Christ Church, Oxford, May 20, 1879. It was reproduced in the Guardian, June 4, 1879, 766, and published by the Weekly Register, May 24, 1879, 330–31.

990. JHN to John Mozley, 26 February 1880, in LD 29:241.

991. Hodge, “Was Newman a Saint?” 12.

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