a man
possessed, and to impress a strong character with elevated and enduring
ideas of life and duty. Mr. Newman, with Mr. Hurrell Froude and Mr.
Robert Wilberforce, had recently been appointed tutors of their college
by Dr. Copleston. They were in the first eagerness of their enthusiasm
to do great things with the college, and the story goes that Mr.
Newman, on the look-out for promising pupils, wrote to an Eton friend,
asking him to recommend some good Eton men for admission at Oriel.
Frederic Rogers, so the story goes, was one of those mentioned; at any
rate, he entered at Oriel, and became acquainted with Mr. Newman as a
tutor, and the admiration and attachment of the undergraduate ripened
into the most unreserved and affectionate friendship of the grown
man--a friendship which has lasted through all storms and difficulties,
and through strong differences of opinion, till death only has ended
it. From Mr. Newman his pupil caught that earnest devotion to the cause
of the Church which was supreme with him through life. He entered
heartily into Mr. Newman's purpose to lift the level of the English
Church and its clergy. While Mr. Newman at Oxford was fighting the
battle of the English Church, there was no one who was a closer friend
than Rogers, no one in whom Mr. Newman had such trust, none whose
judgment he so valued, no one in whose companionship he so delighted;
and the master's friendship was returned by the disciple with a noble
and tender, and yet manly honesty. There came, as we know, times which
strained even that friendship; when the disciple, just at the moment
when the master most needed and longed for sympathy and counsel, had to
choose between his duty to his Church and the claims and ties of
friendship. He could not follow in the course which his master and
friend had found inevitable; and that deepest and most delightful
friendship had to be given up. But it was given up, not indeed without
great suffering on both sides, but without bitterness or unworthy
thoughts. The friend had seen too closely the greatness and purity of
his master's character to fail in tenderness and loyalty, even when he
thought his master going most wrong. He recognised that the error,
deplorable as he thought it, was the mistake of a lofty and unselfish
soul; and in the height of the popular outcry against him he came
forward, with a distant and touching reverence, to take his old
friend's part and rebuke the clamour. And at leng