A NOTABLE CONVERT.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XIX, Issue 4, 24 October 1890, Page 19

A NOTABLE CONVERT.

Ma. C. KKOA.N PAUL, head of the important firm of publishers, Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner. and Co., was received mto tbe Church the day after Cardinal Newman's death, and attended the Requiem Mass and funeral at Birmingham as a Nathalie. Though very few knew that he had taken the important step, it was not altogether unexpected. Going up to Oxford shortly after the publication of Tract XC, and when the University was agitated by the storm of the Tractarian movement, he" soon fell under the powerful influence of Newman's revival. Unlike the majoity of Newman's admirers and diaciples, however, he did not at that time feel any attraction towards the (Jathol c Church. He accordingly waa ordained a clergyman in the Established Church, but ha exercise 1 the ministry for only a short time. He resigned his positi m and became an agnostic, which he remained till his reception into the true Fold. Mr. Kegan Paul is a man of learning and culture as well as an excellent man of business. Besides managing the whole of the literary department of the firm, he finds time to write original works, magaame articles, and translations. The conversion of Mr. C. Kegan Paul to Cardinal Newman's creed at the moment that the Times and its imiutors were proclaiming the dead Cardinal's influence to have gone for ever and gone long since, neem9 to possess a special significance. The author of Obiter Dicta " reminded those weighers out of posthumous power that a Roman Cardinal was at least as influential as an Anglican Bishop, and Mr. Kegan Paul now come* to proclaim that the tfewmau philoaiphy has not lost its force. In the current number of the Nen Review he concludes a sympathetic estimate of Newman's work by a reference to that assertion of the critics. " Because his works have been always before tbe public," writes Mr. Kegan Paul, "and because his saintly life has beja known, he has continued, even in retirement, to exercise an extraordinary influence un men. 'He really died long since ; hiß work has long been over,' writes one. How little they know who thus speak 1 No intellectual conversion in England or America has taken place thesa twenty years of his retirement wherein he has not borne a part ; and, when converts flew as doves to the windows, his has been tbe hand which drew them in. There are some who have m-ide their submission to the Church since his death, and the arnari aliquid in their joy aad thankfulness has been that they could not, in tnis life, tell him that ho was the agent of their conversion and ask his blessing." He makes this exceedingly tender acknowledgment : "Ah 1 dear and honoured Master and Father, it may be that Thou kno west now how largely ,h»s thatjthy prayer been fulfilled, written on the Feast of Corpus Christi twenty-six years ago : ' And I earnestly pray for this whole company, with a hope against hope, that all of us who once

were so united and so happy in our union, may even now be brought, by the power of ths Divine will, into One Fjld and under One Shepherd.'" Of the whole company, the writer was almost the farthest away since, but he has been drawn back aad within it.