You, more than any one else alive, have been the present and untiring agent by whom a great work has been effected in it; and, far more than is usual, you have received in your lifetime, as well as merited, the confidence of your brethren.  You cannot speak merely for yourself; your antecedents, your existing influence, are a pledge to us that what you may determine will be the determination of a multitude.  Numbers, too, for whom you cannot properly be said to speak, will be moved by your authority or your arguments; and numbers, again, who are of a school more recent than your own, and who are only not your followers because they have outstripped you in their free speeches and demonstrative acts in our behalf, will, for the occasion, accept you as their spokesman.  There is no one anywhere—­among ourselves, in your own body, or, I suppose, in the Greek Church—­who can affect so vast a circle of men, so virtuous, so able, so learned, so zealous, as come, more or less, under your influence; and I cannot pay them all a greater compliment than to tell them they ought all to be Catholics, nor do them a more affectionate service than to pray that they may one day become such....

I recollect well what an outcast I seemed to myself when I took down from the shelves of my library the volumes of St. Athanasius or St. Basil, and set myself to study them; and how, on the contrary, when at length I was brought into Catholicism, I kissed them with delight, with a feeling that in them I had more than all that I had lost, and, as though I were directly addressing the glorious saints who bequeathed them to the Church, I said to the inanimate pages, “You are now mine, and I am now yours, beyond any mistake.”  Such, I conceive, would be the joy of the persons I speak of if they could wake up one morning and find themselves possessed by right of Catholic traditions and hopes, without violence to their own sense of duty; and certainly I am the last man to say that such violence is in any case lawful, that the claims of conscience are not paramount, or that any one may overleap what he deliberately holds to be God’s command, in order to make his path easier for him or his heart lighter.

I am the last man to quarrel with this jealous deference to the voice of our conscience, whatever judgment others may form of us in consequence, for this reason, because their case, as it at present stands, has as you know been my own.  You recollect well what hard things were said against us twenty-five years ago which we knew in our hearts we did not deserve.  Hence, I am now in the position of the fugitive Queen in the well-known passage, who, “haud ignara mali” herself, had learned to sympathise with those who were inheritors of her past wanderings.

Dr. Newman’s hopes, and what most of his countrymen consider the hopes of truth and religion, are not the same.  His wish is, of course, that his friend