A PRESENT FROM AUSTRALIA TO CARDINAL NEWMAN.

Marlborough Daily Times, Volume II, Issue 144, 6 August 1880, Page 1 (Supplement)

A PRESENT FROM AUSTRALIA TO CARDINAL NEWMAN.

At the half-yearly meeting of the Catholic Union of Great Britain, after an address from Cardinal Newman on the conversion of England to tire Catholic faith, the Duke of Norfolk handed to JI is Eminence a present from the Catholics of Australia, consisting lof a massive gold salver. Cardinal Newman in reply said, — It has been a great and most welcome surprise to me to find that I, dwelling in England, should have succeeded in gaining friends at the oilier end of the earth, friends so many anil so warm, friends whom I seem to myself to have done so little to deserve, yet who have been so resolute in making known both their warmth and their numbers to the world at large. Besides the addres which high and low have with such wondci fill unanimity joined in sending to mo, the, have made me a beautiful, costly, am singularly artistic present, which speaks o their country by virtue of the ridi iudigenou material of which it consists, and of tliei kind hearts in the flattering and touching words which are engraven upon it. Am that these words might be the more gratefu to me the donors have boon at pains to gaii in the choice of them the aid of a woll-knowi and highly-distinguished scholar, who liar known me years ago, when he was an in habitant of the great Metropolitan centre ii which my lot was cast. I must make : further remark. It is well known that ii conferring on me my high dignity, the Sovereign Pontiff, in consideration of my agt aud delicate health, suspended in my cast the ordinary rule, and condescended to allow me, by a rare privilege, to remain, though a Cardinal of the Holy Bomai; Church, in my own country—nay, in my jilaec in the Oratory. This being so, I notice it as a happy coincidence ihat, as if in anticipation of His Holiness's indulgence to me, his Australian children have engraven on their gift, with a true instinct of what would please me as regards it, and as if looking on to the time when others must lie owners of it, not only my own name, but the names of those Fathers whom, by search into one of my publications, they found to have been for'so many years my intimate friends and brothers in the Oratory at .Birmingham. 'J’licie was just one other set of kindue-s open to them, and they had not lot it slip. When the time came for my receivin'.: I him gift, they'did not choose that it. should’bo presented to me by the mere mechanic.!! process of the steam vessel and the railroad train, but it is now placed in my hands by a great person, by one whom I have been allowed to know, love, and take interest in, even fine his childhood, whom the Cat ledies of England recognise as their ln-redita. \ chief, and whose pnr'.jeipathm in this act of grace associate s in my honour the fresh life and bright future .of Colonial England, with the grand memories of the past and the romance of its mediicyal period. On the rt(position of the Duke of Norfolk the Cardinal gave his blessing to the audience, which soon after separated.