Sunday, December 2, 2018

"...the right way to win the love of the world is to fight it."

[In light of the news that a second miracle has been approved, and consequently Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman will (hopefully) be canonized soon, perhaps next year, I think the following passage quite fitting to post.]

The life of Francis Newman is so well executed that one almost regrets that its lucidity was not employed on some more popular subject, as, for instance, Newman's brother, the great controversial Cardinal. And yet (when one comes to think of it) it is very odd that Francis Newman should be the unpopular subject and Cardinal Newman the popular one. Francis Newman flung himself into every modern cause; he was in the whole trend of his time; he was by grades a Puritan, a Unitarian, and an Agnostic; he was an anti-vivisectionist, a vegetarian, and an upholder of Female Suffrage; he was in the van of every recent progressive victory; and he is forgotten. John Henry Newman made everybody roar with laughter by proposing to rebuild the monasteries and do honour to St. Aidan and St. Edmund. But the result is that the Modernists and the whole modern world can hardly keep his name off their pens. I do not know what moral there is to this, except that the right way to win the love of the world is to fight it.
-September 22, 1909, Daily News

Also, from the same article, a bonus quote:
Cardinal Newman was a man who walked by truth as by the sun at noon; whose high reason and eloquence rang with sincerity like steel.

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