Dr. Martineau from Newman.
"7 P.V.E., "30th May, 1857.
"My dear Martineau,
"Perhaps you are already pulling up your tent-pegs: rather a heart- breaking work, especially to those who so love beauty and have surrounded themselves within doors with so much. You need, dear friend, a broad and fruitful field in London for your spiritual activity to recompense the great—the very great—sacrifices you must make in parting from all that you have loved in Liverpool. I have felt this so deeply that I never knew exactly how to wish that you might come to London; and, indeed, this place, so emphatically dissipated," [that is, mente dissipatá distractá] "does not prize its great minds so much as smaller places would. … Beloved friend, you know that great expectations are formed of you. It is hard, most hard, not to let this draw you into great intellectual effort, from which I fear much. For your literary lecturing, of course, I have no word of dissuasion. But let me assure you that in your preaching there is superfluous intellectual effort. It would be spiritually more effective if there were far less perfection of literary beauty and less condensation of refined thought and imaginative metaphor. I hear again and again from intellectual persons the complaint that the effort to follow your meaning is too great, and impairs both the pleasure and profit of listening to you. I myself am conscious that wonder and admiration of your talent is apt to absorb and stifle the properly spiritual influence, and when I read your sermons, I often pause so long on single sentences as to be fully aware that I could have got little good from hearing them. I know that no two men's nature is the same, and habit is a second nature. Do not imagine that I wish you not to be yourself. (There is no danger of that.) But I am sure that by cultivating more of what the French call 'abandon'—by preparing with less intellectual effort for each separate sermon—though, of course, not with less devotional purpose—and by letting your immediate impulse have a large play in comparison to your previous study, there will be less danger of overworking your mind and fuller effect on those who are to benefit. … I dare say you received from me the new volume of Religious Duties. Its author seems to me primitively to have belonged to what you call the class of ethical minds, but to have passed beyond it, and now to be at once Passionate and Spiritual. And is not this the natural and rightful thing, that though we begin with a fragmentary, we tend towards an integral religion? This book has been to me most delightful and profitable, and I trust you will also find it so. Such a revelation of a pure, tender, ardent spirit is itself an inexpressible stimulus, and has given me quite a flood of joy and sympathy.
"The doctrine of immortality so unhesitatingly avowed (?) affects me as nothing from Theodore Parker on the same subject ever did. The love and joy in God flowing out of it is so spontaneous and kindling as to make me long to say,—I now no longer hope only, but I am sure. In any case I do rejoice that others can so believe, and I pray that if this be a mere cloud over my eyes, it may at length be taken away. Not that I have any deficiency of happiness from this, but I have a great deficiency of power, and I am painfully out of sympathy with others by it.
"I want to cultivate, if I knew how, rather more free communication with those who supremely love God as the Good One, and who will bear with me! I much need this, if I could get it. But however shut up I may seem, believe that a fire of love for you burns in my heart. With warm regards to Mrs. Martineau,
"Your affectionate friend,
"F. W. Newman."
I should like to quote here words illustrative of this side of Newman's personality, that side which reveals him "at once passionate and spiritual," longing to attain to religious truth, and not railing against the forms of dogma which have led other men into "the kingdom of heaven," as was his too frequent habit. These words were written by him when he seemed to himself to have reached some measure of spiritual intuition, and there is great beauty in them:—
"None can enter the kingdom of heaven without becoming a little child. But behind and after this, there is a mystery revealed to but few, namely, that if the soul is to go on into higher spiritual blessedness it must become a woman. Yes, however manly thou be among men, it must learn to love being dependent; must lean on God, not solely from distress or alarm, but because it does not like independence or loneliness…. God is not a stern judge, exacting every tittle of some law from us…. He does not act towards us (spiritually) by generalities… but His perfection consists in dealing with each case by itself as if there were no others."