The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎648r] (186/239)

FRANCIS WILLIAM NEWMAN.
155
the world was only a passing unimportant show; that, as Christ
might return at any instant to reign with the Saints upon earth,
“ to work for distant earthly objects was the part of a fool or an
unbeliever ’ ’; and that the one thing urgent was to preach the
Gospel in preparation for the coming of the Kingdom. Holding
these views, he naturally sought the society of men who shared
them; and so the most brilliant of the Fellows of Balliol fell
among Nonconformist preachers, and seemed for a while to be
led by the nose by men of inferior capacity—men who were
steering straight for fanaticism if they had not already reached
their goal. Some of them led him, while the others pushed or
pulled him as an unsectarian missionary to Baghdad. Truly an
incongruous group, though it was only the learned and logical
Fellow of Balliol whose presence gave the touch of incongruity.
The impetus seems to have been given by John Nelson Darby,
at that time a curate in County Wicklow, and subsequently the
founder of the Sect of the Darbyites—a kind of Plymouth
brethren whose chief raison d’etre would appear to have been to
quarrel with the other Plymouth brethren. It w T as in conversa
tion with him that Francis Newman had realised the practical
consequences commanded by a belief in the imminence of the
millennium. The attraction at Baghdad was supplied by Anthony
Norris Groves and his protege, John Kitto. The former was an
Exeter dentist, who had given up dentistry for evangelistic work;
and the latter was the son of a stonemason, stone deaf as the
result of an accident, who had been first a cobbler and afterwards
a compositor in the service of the Church Missionary Society.
Newman’s companions on his journey were a Dr. Cronin and
John Yesey Parnell, second Baron Congleton, whom conscien
tious scruples prevented from taking the oath and his seat in
the House of Lords. Nothing is more clear than that, for the
most brilliant of the Fellows of Balliol, there was no proper,
and could be no permanent, place in such a galley. He might
probably have said to himself, as truly as Nathaniel Hawthorne
said of iiis sojourn at Brook Farm, that “ the real Me was never
a member of the community.”
One sees this in an instant if one compares Newman’s
Personal Narrative of the missionary journey with the writings
of his fellow evangelists on the same subject—and notably with
the writings of John Nelson Darby and Anthony Norris Groves.
If one hesitates to say that Darby wrote on religion like a raving
maniac, that is out of regard rather for the decorum of con
troversy than for the claims of truth. When Newman’s faith
subsided for reasons which, whether mistaken or not, were at all
events transparently honest, Darby turned on him and denounced