John Henry Newman preached this sermon in the London church of the Jesuit Fathers at the Requiem Mass for James Robert Hope Scott, and published it in 1873 with a short advertisement in which he insists the printed words are a poor shadow of the spoken ones. It is an expository memorial address—part eulogy, part meditation on ambition, wealth, and providence—built around a single life that Newman knew intimately for some thirty-five years.
“I only know that he is one of those whose departure hence has made the heavens dark to me.”
A Mourner’s Reluctant Task
Newman opens by confessing his unfitness for the task. Others, he says, knew the dead man far better; he can touch only a few points. What he knows is what the man was to him, and the loss has made the heavens dark. They never lived or travelled together—their lines of duty ran in different directions—but they met, corresponded, and shared confidences. He first knew Hope Scott, he supposes, in 1837 or 1838, a few years after the younger man became a Fellow of Merton College; by 1841 Hope Scott was turning to him as a natural adviser in difficulty, and kept doing so down to his last illness. The younger man had not yet reached thirty, yet inspired confidence. Strangers who saw him once might be startled by his fastidiousness and keen wit, but the impression dissolved on closer acquaintance, when his simplicity, seriousness, and sweetness of manner came through as he threw himself into another’s ideas, listened patiently, and gave clear judgment.
The Friend in Need
Newman’s broad portrait is of a man emphatically “a friend in need”: prompt, clear, decided, disinterested. He entered into other people’s pursuits, adapted himself to their dispositions, and brought strong, calm good sense to bear on their problems. Men gathered around him; when a grave question was agitated, all gave him the foremost place, which he accepted gracefully, throwing light on the subject, locating it, marking what was primary and what steps to take. Newman is told that when Hope Scott lived on his property in France, the neighbours made him a centre of advice and direction in the same way, won by his unselfishness and practical sense.
The Speech That Made a Fortune
Such a man, young and ardent, with birth and position behind him and entering public life at Westminster, might have been expected to rise high in his profession. Newman pauses to note that refinement of mind is sometimes fatal to public success—some men are too sensitive for the struggle with rivals, or too reserved to lavish their powers on a mixed company. If any man was the light and delight of his intimates, it was Hope Scott; he loved as tenderly as he was beloved and seemed made for domestic life. But it was by gifts distinct from mere clearness and judgment that he was carried forward at once as an advocate. His first great speech, delivered in a serious cause before an august assembly, drew a response that made his name. Newman believes it was in behalf of the Anglican Chapters, threatened by the reforming spirit of the day, that he addressed the House of Lords. Newman never heard him speak, but he completes the account of his gifts: readiness, fluency, eloquence, and beyond these the higher powers of oratory—his mien, manner, countenance, his youthfulness of mind that he never lost to the last, his joyous energy, his masterly yet prompt reasoning, his tact, his humour, his resource in emergencies. At Oxford it was common talk that the most distinguished lawyer of the day, himself a literary man and critic, on hearing the speech pronounced the verdict: “That young man’s fortune is made.” No prize of public life seemed beyond him, had he had the will.
The Man Without Ambition
What came of those prospects? He might almost have put out his hand and taken the honours and rewards of the world; his contemporaries who fill or have filled the highest offices of the State illustrate what he might have been. Yet his indifference to the prizes of life was as marked as his qualifications for them. Newman faces the objection squarely: success is almost a universal passion; that a young man of bold, enterprising mind, popular talents, and early success should be dead to his own manifest interests may look like a defect, even a fault. Why are talents given but for use? We are not born for ourselves but for our kind; to bury one’s talent in a napkin is selfishness and indolence, not virtue. Newman grants the truism—we owe much to those who devote themselves to public life—but insists there are other ways of being useful. In public life a man of elevated mind cannot make his own self tell simply and entirely; he must move in a groove, act with other men, compromise, and labour at measures whose issue is uncertain. And the religious aspect cannot be omitted: human society is an ordinance of God, but from the first an enemy has been busy in its depravation. Never do men come together in numbers but passion, self-will, pride, and unbelief burst into flame; even religious men formed into a body soon show the innate debility of human nature. This is what Scripture means by “the world.” Surely, then, men of great talent may prefer more direct ways of serving God—offices of kindness, labours of love in which the right hand knows not what the left does.
A Fountain of Generosity
Here was a large field for Hope Scott’s active goodness, and he did not neglect it. He gave others his thoughts, time, and trouble without grudging; he was their support and stay. When wealth came to him he was free in its use—one of those rare men who do not merely give a tithe of their increase, but are a fount of generosity ever flowing: religious offerings, presents, donations, works upon his estates, care of his people, almsdeeds. Newman has been told of his extraordinary care of families left in distress, his aid in educating them and setting them out in life. The liberality was so incessant and minute, so well ordered, so directed to religious objects, that it almost evidences its supernatural origin. Newman dwells on it because it bears on the absence of ambition: in itself that freedom might be a natural temper, the magnanimity of ancient Greece or Rome, but in him it was more—a fruit and token of religious sensitiveness bestowed from above. If his heart was fixed on divine objects, that accounts for what seemed so strange and paradoxical to the world’s judgment: his distaste for the honours and pageants of earth. His real inner self gleamed out from beneath the working-day dress of his secular occupations.
A Conscience Awake to God
Newman cannot do justice to the impression the man made on him. He had a tender conscience—more than that, the emotion of a heart always alive and awake at the thought of God. When a religious question arose suddenly in conversation, he no longer had the manner and voice of a man of the world; there was a simplicity, earnestness, and gravity one could not forget, speaking of a loving desire to please God, a single-minded preference for His service, a resolve to approach Him by His appointed ways. He did not assume that following one’s own best opinion equaled obeying God’s will, nor that a vague sincerity was all that is required. He had deep within him that gift of faith which St. Paul and St. John speak of—a living, loving faith that overcomes the world by seeking a better country, a heavenly one—and it kept him unspotted from the world amid worldly engagements. No wonder such a man was gradually led into the Catholic Church. Judging from the event, Newman recognizes in him an elect soul prepared from all eternity. His clear good sense did not fail him in religious inquiry; he instinctively turned from bye-ways and cross-paths and took a broad, intelligible view of the issues. Once within the Fold, his solicitude to conform to the decisions of Holy Church, his conviction of her superhuman authority, the comfort he found in her sacraments, and the trust with which he betook himself to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, of St. Michael, of St. Margaret, and all the Saints—all this Newman could not exaggerate.
The Rod Against the Heart
Newman then approaches a sacred subject he cannot touch without reverence and fear. One might think a man already severed in spirit from the world would be spared unusual trials; but those for whom God has a love more than ordinary He watches over with no ordinary jealousy, and if the world smiles on them, He sends crosses so much the more. He is not content they should be His by any common title; because they are dear to Him, He provides afflictions to bring them nearer still. Newman knows God has His own dealings with every soul, and what He determines for one is no rule for another; he interprets God’s ways only toward the man before him. There was just one aspect of this lower world Hope Scott might innocently love—the assemblage of objects included under the dear name of Home. If rest and solace were to be found on earth, he found it there. And it was there that He who loved him with infinite love met him, not once or twice but again and again, with a stern rod of chastisement: stroke after stroke, blow after blow, stab after stab, dealt against his very heart. Newman quotes the song of the redeemed—”Great and wonderful are Thy works, O Lord God Almighty; just and true are Thy ways, O King of ages”—and says he may speak with more vivid knowledge here than elsewhere, for he was one of the confidants of the man’s extreme suffering under that succession of terrible inflictions, which left wounds never to be healed. They ended only with his life: the complaint that eventually mastered him was brought into activity by his final bereavement. Nor was even that the last. His call to go hence was itself the final agony of that tender, loving heart. He who had in time past been left desolate by others was now to leave others desolate—torn away, as if before his time, from those who needed him exceedingly, called upon to surrender them in faith to Him who had given them.
The Argument of a Life
The sermon’s central ideas knit together into a single case. Newman takes the world’s measure of a man—talents, prospects, the verdict that a fortune is made—and then reads the life against the grain of that measure. The absence of ambition, which the world might call a defect, becomes evidence of unworldliness; the flowing generosity becomes evidence that his heart was elsewhere; the blows struck at his one earthly sanctuary become evidence of a love more than ordinary. The three movements of the sermon—high natural gifts, freedom from ambition traced to religiousness of mind, and the chastisements of providence—are not three topics but one argument: that a soul prepared for heaven is trained for it, and that the very losses which look like ruin are the signature of election. Newman’s text, “the world passeth away,” governs the whole: the man who seemed to have the world within his grasp is shown to have held it loosely, and the eulogy becomes a meditation on what it means to overcome the world while still living in it.
A Sermon That Became a Memorial
Newman’s advertisement frames the printed sermon as a concession to love rather than a literary performance: words spoken by mourner to mourners, when hearts are open, have a life that departs with utterance, and written down they become mere memorials of their own tameness and impotence. Those who asked him to speak then asked him to put it on paper, and he complied with the mournful pleasure of recording a long friendship. Dated May 14th, 1873, the preface is itself part of the sermon’s meaning—an honest admission that grief outruns prose. What survives is a portrait drawn by one friend of another, valuable less as a biography than as a study in holiness: a public man who might have had everything, and who chose, or was chosen, for something else.
