28 FEBRUARY 1925, Page 19

THIS WEEK'S BOOKS

THERE is nothing of exceptional importance among the books we have received this week. Mr. Bertram Newman has written a very clear and temperate study of Cardinal Newman (Bell). Even when Newman was an Evangelical under- graduate, one of the secretaries of the " Oxford Auxiliary Bible Society," and in the habit of using " flippant language about the Fathers," he disliked exceedingly the fervour and obtrusiveness of Evangelical thought and language. To one of the Society's pamphlets he proposed two hundred and fifty amendments, and his connexion with the Society came to an end. Though he was of a gentle and feminine nature himself, he was all his life involved in controversy : and he conducted his quarrels with a gusto which would seem almost brutal to us now. " Do you know what ruined that man ? " Cardinal Manning said of him. " Temper, temper." But Cardinal Manning probably took his lack of diplomacy and church statesmanship for temper. The records of antagonism between Manning and Newman are half illuminating and half distasteful. We take an awful glee in seeing the two Christians meeting each other in attempts at reconciliation and parting with the assurance that each will say prayers for the increase of charity in the other.