n the public press. His retirement to solitude and meditation
at Littlemore had been outrageously misunderstood, and it was openly
charged that his conversion was a cunningly devised plot to win a large
number of his followers to the Catholic church. This charge involved
others, and it was to defend them, as well as to vindicate himself, that
Newman wrote the _Apologia_. The perfect sincerity with which he traced his
religious history, showing that his conversion was only the final step in a
course he had been following since boyhood, silenced his critics and
revolutionized public opinion concerning himself and the church which he
had joined. As the revelation of a soul's history, and as a model of pure,
simple, unaffected English, this book, entirely apart from its doctrinal
teaching, deserves a high place in our prose literature.

In Newman's doctrinal works, the _Via Media_, the _Grammar of Assent_, and
in numerous controversial essays the student of literature will have little
interest. Much more significant are his sermons, the unconscious reflection
of a rare spiritual nature, of which Professor Shairp said: "His power
shows itself clearly in the new and unlooked-for way in which he touched
into life old truths, moral or spiritual.... And as he spoke, how the old
truth became new! and how it came home with a meaning never felt before! He
laid his finger how gently yet how powerfully on some inner place in the
hearer's heart, and told him things about himself he had never known till
then. Subtlest truths, which would have taken philosophers pages of
circumlocution and big words to state, were dropped out by the way in a
sentence or two of the most transparent Saxon." Of greater interest to the
general reader are _The Idea of a University_, discourses delivered at
Dublin, and his two works of fiction, _Loss and Gain_, treating of a man's
conversion to Catholicism, and _Callista_, which is, in his own words, "an
attempt to express the feelings and mutual relations of Christians and
heathens in the middle of the third century." The latter is, in our
judgment, the most readable and interesting of Newman's works. The
character of Callista, a beautiful Greek sculptor of idols, is powerfully
delineated; the style is clear and transparent as air, and the story of the
heroine's conversion and death makes one of the most fascinating chapters
in fiction, though it is not the story so much as the author's unconscious
revelation