“To love mercy!” That is the true sign of magnanimity in man. All holy men, all brave men, all great and knightly men have loved mercy. “It is an attribute to God Himself.”
Time passes, and succeeding races of mankind, like the leaves of autumn, are blown away and perish, but countless men of heroic mould, reaching back into the dim mists of legend and down through innumerable years while the great world spins “for ever down the ringing grooves of change,” have one and all been gloriously crowned with the same shining diadem of mercy.
CHAPTER X: CARDINAL NEWMAN
It is difficult perhaps for students of the younger generation to realise the immense influence exercised among his contemporaries by Cardinal Newman, nor will a study of his writings adequately explain it to them.
He has hardly survived as a standard author, though he wrote a pure and lucid prose. Those who leave the bulk of their literary work behind them in the form of sermons are inviting the world to neglect it.
Moreover, though he was a past master of controversy, the arena in which he fought with such doughty prowess amid the excited plaudits and dehortations of vast assemblies is now left solitary in echoing emptiness, and the crowds of to-day have passed away to abet the combatants, on one
side or the other, in very different fields of tourney.
Here and there his writing ascends to a fine note of eloquence, as in his great exclamatory passage on music that begins thus:—
There are seven notes in the scale; make them fourteen: yet what a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What science brings so much out of so little? Out of what poor elements does some great master in it create his new world!