Glasgow Courier. — 1853-02-08 (Glasgow, Strathclyde, Scotland)

THE RECENT JUDGMENT AGAINST DR. NEWMAN.  (From the Standard.)  Many will think too lenient the sentence imposed by the Court of Queen's Bench upon Dr. Newman. We do not altogether concur in this opinion. Doubtless, compared with the savage penalties inflicted in no very remote times upon persons convicted of far less foul and far less false libels than that of which the apostate doctor has been found guilty, the fine of one hundred pounds may seem a ridiculously inadequate punishment; and it must at first sight appear difficult to reconcile the sentence passed, but the other day, upon a nobleman of weak intellect for libelling men whose character placed them above the danger of serious injury from calumny--a sentence of twelve months' imprisonment in the common jail—with the demand of .£lOO as the atonement for Newman's filthy slanders upon an unprotected foreigner, of whom little of his private history could possibly he known to shield Lim from the shafts of malignant falsehood. The defence, too, advanced from first to last in justification of Newman's libel was but an aggravation of his crime. 1 We speak of the attempt to verify the vile imputelions of the libel; but we will add that the attempt to defend, or rather to palliate, the libel as a retaliation on the part of the Church of Rome was, to say the least, absurd. Whatever Dr. Achilli had published against that church was directed against it in its corporate character. Ile had maligned no British subject whatever, and accused no foreigner but the chiefs of that church; and no British subject coming forward as the volunteer champion of Rome had a right to retort by the abominable imputations upon his personal character published by Newinan—impu'tations difficult, if not impossible, to be refuted in the whole by their object, how false soever they might be. Controversy is one thing, personal slander another. In controversy it is lawful to assail doctrines and opinions as best we may, and even to support the assault by exhibiting the effect of these doctrines in the conduct of men of other times and other countries • but here the license of controversy ends. Whatever we may say of the doctrines and opinions of men entitled to the protection , of the same laws by which we ourselves are I protected, we have no right to impeach their personal character; for there controversy ends and libel begins. Newman avows himself a zealot of Popery, and as such he is at liberty to magnify the whole catalogue of Popish miracles—as he has done —with no other danger than that of being laughed at; but his Popish zeal does not entitle him to impute the grossest and most profligate impurity to all who laugh at his legend of miracles, and show, by reference too ther times and other countries, the enormous evils to which a belief in these • lying wonders' must necessarily tend. Popish zeal does not afford an apology for libel any mdre than an apology for murder, though it has often been used as an apology for both. Conceding, then, that the libels, oe rather volume of libels, of the pubii. cation of which Newman has been convicted, to be incapable of. defence or apology, and to be of the very foulest character, we are still pleased that, Newman's offence has been visited as lig•htly as it has been. The legitimate end of all judicial punishment among men is example, not vengeance, for vengeance is not for man, and we do not think that the severe punishment of a person who, in our judgment, is simply a blockhead, would have any wholesome exemplary influence. We know that our ' opinion of the measure of Newman's intellect will be disputed, and that even on Monday the man was com. plimented upon his former exercise of intellectual ability; but we cannot correct opinions long since formed and confirmed by all that we have seen or . read of the man during many years. Long before . his apostacy, Newman seemed to us but one of those dreamy w ord retailers of the school o.' Kant, who, without a single definite Ides, make books and systems