THE ANGLICAN CAREER
OF
CARDINAL NEWMAN
THE ANGLICAN CAREER
OF
CARDINAL NEWMAN
BY
EDWIN A. ABBOTT
" This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory. . . . What a piece of work is a man ! How noble in reason ! how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable ! . . . the beauty of the world ! the paragon of animals ! _ And yet^ to me. what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me ; no, nor woman neither. ..."
Hamlet.
" I look out of myself into the world of men, and there I see a sight which fills me with unspeakable distress. . . . The sight of the world is nothing else than the prophet's scroll,, full of 'lamentations and mourning and woe.' "
NEWMAN'S Apologia.
VOL. II
11 o n "fj o n MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK 1892
The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved
RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BUNGAV.
41 Hsfii
V.2.
CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME CHAPTER XIX
THE LEADER AT HEADQUARTERS
I'AGK
§ 78. Newman in the pulpit i
§79. The message of " The Wrath of God" 7
§ 80. A Religion of Fear 12
§ 81. Yet a practical Religion 16
CHAPTER XX
THE SECRET OF THE LEADER'S POWER
§82. Pusey *s Tract on Baptism 22
§83. The Tractarian protest for deeds against words 25
§ 84. Newman , his own "secret" 28
CHAPTER XXI
THE FIRST TRACTAKIAX ATTACK
§ 85. Timing the assault 37
§ 86. Hampderts Bampton Lectures 40
§ 87. Newmaris " Elucidations " 44
CHAPTER XXII
VICTORY
§88. Which side was the more Anglican1! 51
3 89. Did the Victor fight fairly 1 56
§ 90. The result 60
viii CONTENTS
CHAPTER XXIII
PRESSING FORWARD
PACK
§91. A " cardinal point of time" 64
§92. Rose asks for an explanation 67
§ 93. " The Forgiveness of 'Sins" 72
§94. " The Prophetical Office*' 78
§ 95- "Justification by Faith" 83
§96. " Hippodeides doesn't care " 88
CHAPTER XXIV
DIVIDED COUNSELS
§ 97. The first check 94
§98. Quarrel between the Leaders 97
§99. Newman feels "a sort of bad conscience" 100
§ 100. '•'•Conscience'" 103,
CHAPTER XXV
ENTRENCHING A CAMP
§ 101. What is Faith ? no
§ 102. "Faith and Reason contrasted" 114
§ 103. " I really do think I have defined' Reason" 120
§104. " God exercises us with less evidence" 122
§105. The Understanding, " a sacrifice" to God 126
CHAPTER XXVI
NEWER ALLIES
§ 106. " The most prominent person"" in the New Contingent. . 129
§ 107. W. G. Ward 133
§ 1 08. How it came to pass that Ward made Newman say
" Yes " or " No ", when he did not wish to i$&
§ 109. Who was to blame ? r 144
CONTENTS CHAPTER XXVII
FEELING THE WAY
PAG K
§110. Last words as an Anglican 151
§111. "The comforts of life''' "the main cause" of "our
want of love to God" i56
§112. " Present Blessings " . 160
S 113. " We feel more joy than we know we do" 162
CHAPTER XXVIII
TWILIGHT
§114. Faith is " practically to colour evidence" 165
§115. "Love" is to be "the Safeguard of Faith" 169
§ 1 1 6. But "love" " does not mean love precisely " 171
§117. The faith of Mesha, King of Moab i?3
§118. " Surely you must also say something more'' 176
CHAPTER XXIX
A NIGHT ALARM
§119. " All is not well" J79
§120. "The Ghost", as described in 1850 183
§121. " The Ghost", as it was in fact 184
§ 122. "The omen" l86
§123. " The spirit that I have seen may be the devil" . • . • 190
§124. " We do it wrong, being so majestical" 197
CHAPTER XXX
CONFUSION
§125. " Being guided by his Reason" 202
§126. A breathing-space at Littlemore 212
§127. Project of a Monastic House 216
§128. Implicit and Explicit Reason 218
§129. He asks " leave" "to retain St. Mary 's 222
§130. He justifies the " leave" by " Explicit Reason" . . . . 229
x CONTENTS
CHAPTER XXXI
THE RALLY
§ 131. Preparing to " prove" the cannon 2^5
§132. The sermons that preceded Tract 90 239
§ 133. The "proving", or Tract 90 242
$ 134. What was amiss in Tract 90 245
§ '35- Signs of danger 2c2
CHAPTER XXXII
TAKING THE ENEMY IN FLANK
§ 136. Newman out-man&uvres his BisJiop 2-~
§ 137. Newman's notions of an "understanding" 26i
§138. The real "understanding" 26^
§139. Who broke the "understanding" 268
§140. Newman is " quite satisfied with the bargain" 2y2
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE EXPLOSION
§141. " Simplicity"? or "Jesuitism"? 2y7
§142. Ward makes things " absolutely dear" 280
§143. " Hoist with his own petard '" 234
£144- The " three blows" ,[[ 2gg
CHAPTER XXXIV
KEEPING THE PARTY TOGETHER
§145. Drawing the vanguard back §146. Pushing the rear §147. Janus-leadership
293
§ 146. Pushing the rearguard on
200
§148. "Bigotry" the sin of Whately ,02
§ 1 49. Sibthorp's conversion ^o6
§150. Preventing desertions
§151. " Grounds for steadfastness" --
CONTENTS
CHAPTER XXXV
RETIRING TO ENTRENCHMENTS
PACE
3 152. "Torres Vedras" ................ 317
5 153. Newman defends his position with " irony" ..... 320
§154 "AskPusey" .................. 326
§ 155. The Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles ........ 330
CHAPTER XXXVI
HARD PRESSED
§ 156. Retractations 334
Jj 157. " Is not my present position . . . a treachery towards the
Church?" 339
§158. " I think the Church of Rome the Catholic Church" . . 345
§ 159. Resignation of St. Mary's 349
CHAPTER XXXVII
NEGOTIATING WITH CONSCIENCE
1 60. Proposed censure oj Tract 90 354
161. Waiting for a " sign" 359
162. Fear of " a judicial delusion " 363
163. The white flag 368
CHAPTER XXXVIII
WAVING THE WHITE FLAG
§164. The Essay on Doctrinal Development . 375
§165. Thirlwall and Hare on this Essay 378
{5 1 66. Its rhetorical skill . 380
§167. " He did not intend to work out any problem" 383
Xll
CONTENTS
CHAPTER XXXIX
SURRENDER AT DISCRETION
PAGE
'§ 1 68. Still waiting for a sign 387
•5 169. " Show some token upon me " 395
§170. Some kind of '" sign" at last 399
'5 171. Newman "assents to a proposition made to him" . , . 401 :^ jy2. The end: — "Faith and Reason are incompatible,
perhaps" 405
CHAPTER XL
AFTERWARDS
S 173. " Fierceness and Sport" again 408
.55174. " 'The Home of Christian Mirth'* 4T5
THE MORAL
§ i. Positive § 2. Negative
NOTES . , 433
CHAPTER XIX
THE LEADER AT HEADQUARTERS
§ 78. Newman in the pulpit^-
UTHE Tracts," says Dean Church, "were not the most powerful instruments in drawing sympathy to the Movement. None but those who remember them can adequately estimate the effect of Mr. Newman's four o'clock sermons at St. Mary's. The world knows them, has heard a good deal about them, has passed its various judgments on them. But it hardly realizes that, without those sermons, the Movement might never have gone on ; certainly would not have been what it was. . . . While men were reading and talking about the Tracts, they were hearing and reading the sermons, and in the sermons they heard the living meaning and reason and bearing of the Tracts, their ethical affinities, their moral standard/'
If this be so, it is to the sermons, not as printed but as uttered in the pulpit of St. Mary's, that we must look for the main source of the strength and direction of the Tractarian advance ; and since we cannot " re member them " ourselves, we must try to remember them at second hand ; through the reminiscences of
1 References and dates will be found in the Notes at the end of the volume : *, and t, call special attention to them. 's VOL. II B
THE LEADER AT HEADQUARTERS
those who have recorded their impressions of them. Varied as these are, they all testify to a sense in the hearers that they were in the presence of a unique personality bringing them closer to invisible things. Oral tradition in Oxford still preserves the confessions of " fast men," altogether unprepared for deep religious impressions, who dropped in from curiosity some after noon to hear the Vicar of St. Mary's, and who never afterwards forgot the half-hour of cold terror into which they were drawn by his plain, quiet, irresistible statements of what seemed to be, when thus stated, undeniable facts and substantial realities. Many, it is said, of a very different type, who found themselves unable to follow the preacher to his dogmatic conclu sions, none the less gratefully acknowledged that they had been penetrated and animated by his religious principles, and believed that they had lived better lives, and had striven to do their duty more stead fastly, because of his teaching. Some lay stress on his mien, voice, and manner, as accessories or instru ments of his inexplicable fascination. Thin, pale, and with large lustrous eyes, piercing through this veil of men and things, as if hardly made for this world, the slight, tall, bent figure is described as a spiritual appari tion gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St. Mary's, rising into the pulpit, and then, in the most entrancing of voices breaking the silence with words which were, of themselves, a religious music, subtle, sweet, and mournful.
There were none at all of the arts or instincts by which an orator draws men into sympathy with him self by showing his sympathy with them, and first arrests and then retains the attention of his audience. Action there was none. The figure unmoved, the eyes
THE LEADER AT HEADQUARTERS
bent down upon the sermon, the motionless arm and hand, even the features rigidly kept under control, and the voice itself restrained from varied inflections lest it should do more than suggest the emotions which the preacher felt bound to suppress in the immediate presence of the Creator, the rapidly though clearly enunciated sentences, followed by a pause (a thing fatal to most oratory) as if to give the speaker time to ponder the divine precept or warning — all these things were characteristic rather of a priest delivering oracles than of a speaker addressing an assembly. Yet, says one of his hearers who has a right to judge, there was a stamp and seal upon the man as a whole, a solemn sweetness and music in the tone, a harmony between voice and figure and manner, all resulting in a com pleteness that exercised on his hearers an indescribable attraction.
To others the prominent charm was the versatility and clearness of his exposition, his knowledge of human nature, and his instinctive power of saying what appealed to the very heart of each of his hearers. "His illustrations," says Mr. J. A. Froude, "were in exhaustible. He seemed to be addressing the most secret consciousness of each one of us, as the eyes of a portrait appear to look at every person in the room. They appeared to me to be the outcome of continued meditation upon his fellow-creatures and their position in the world, their awful responsibilities, the mystery of their nature strangely mixed of good and evil, of strength and weakness A tone, not of fear but of infinite pity, ran through them all." A sermon from him is described as entering into all the hearer's feel ings, ideas, modes of viewing things ; realising vividly and almost sympathetically, the feelings of people who
e 2
THE LEADER AT HEADQUARTERS
might have been supposed most alien from him — the coarse man of the world, for example, who craves sensual excitement, and the pushing tradesman who is all for money-making, as well as the ambitious youth who is intent on cutting himself a path and making himself a name in the world.
It was not Newman's Tractarian doctrine, say some, it was his plastic self-adaptiveness to the manifold in firmities and temptations of his hearers, that under mined and captured their hearts. You might attend his sermons for weeks together, and hear little allusion to disputed ecclesiastical points : what there was of High Church teaching was implied rather than ex pressed ; his power showed itself chiefly in the un- looked for way in which he touched into life old truths, moral or spiritual, which all Christians acknow ledge, but few feel : as when he spoke of " unreal words," or "the individuality of the soul," or " the Cross of Christ the measure of the world," or " the Church a home for the lonely." Others again find the secret of his spell in something latent and hard to define ; one, for example, perceives behind (as it were) the preacher's will, and pressing upon it, a torrent of feeling which, at times, would burst forth in the streams of a rich, ardent and imaginative illus tration ; another notes a perplexing charm in the pathos of an inexplicable undertone of forlornness. Nega tively, almost all agree in being wholly silent as to the preacher's power of encouraging, heartening, strengthening, uplifting, or — to use a word that is found on almost every page of St. Paul's Epistles — - " comforting." Positively, they are as unanimous in attesting that few, after hearing him, failed to be drawn towards him ; none could afterwards believe
THE LEADER AT HEADQUARTERS
him to be insincere ; not many, that had once heard him, failed to love, or at least to entertain a liking for him ; many, who differed from him on religious points, retained a feeling of loyalty to him throughout their lives ; some felt that to him they owed their spiritual life itself.
Newman called himself "the rhetorician" of his Party. And so he was ; and, as a writer, he was not much more. But as a preacher, he was far more. His style, his manner, his audience, his nature, are all inconsistent with the notion that he was a mere rhetorician in the pulpit. Yet as his influence was not that of an orator, sweeping away masses in a flood of contagious enthusiasm, so neither was it quite that of a prophet seeing the things of God distinctly and enunciating them with fervid force. He did not see, and did not profess to see, the principles of invisible things with distinctness ; he saw but their manifesta tions in the Scriptures. He saw merely enough to grope and to help others to grope, in fear and tremb ling. But he had this double merit, first that what he saw, he saw with quite enough clearness for the purpose of some kind of immediate action ; secondly, that what he saw, this, and no more, he professed to see. He sometimes took his hearers into his con fidence. It was clear to him, and sometimes he made it clear to them, that he and they were, so to speak, in the same boat, or on the same frail raft, striving after the same faintly-discerned and scarcely accessible harbour. He was pondering or pleading, rather than preaching, pleading his own cause, as well as theirs, blaming his own weaknesses, chiding and suppressing his own doubts, dictating the course of action needful for himself as well as for them.
THE LEADER AT HEADQUARTERS
To this was added, that he knew their minds — or, at least, all the obscure, unswept, and ungarnished corners of their minds — all their infirmities, vacilla tions, tortuosities, defects, and sins, as if he had been inside them and made a map of them. In church, this made men accept his preaching ; and out of church this made them attach a singular weight to his good opinion — especially if they really were prone to the faults for which he had the keenest eye — self-in trospective, or selfish, or fickle, or weak, or inconsistent. For then they knew themselves to be what he thought them : and this made them believe in him, the more they disbelieved in themselves ; and so some came to lean wholly on him (more than he himself would have desired) as their moral and spiritual director ; and one at least of his admirers was wont to put down in his journal records of his greater or less "kindness," on this or that day, as if that were a kind of spiritual barometer testing the writer's moral condition ! This was Mark Pattison. But Arnold, too, a man of very different type, open-hearted, fearless, sympathetic, and full of insight, paid a tribute to Newman's fascinating power when, after an evening spent by his side at the Oriel table, he told Stanley that " it would not do to meet him often." On this point, however, the strongest evidence comes from one of Newman's pupils, who, if any one, had a fair right to complain of his teacher ; for Newman (as we shall see hereafter) extorted from him, during the young man's oscillation between the two Churches, a promise not to join the Church of Rome (and thereby, possibly, to imperil, in his opinion, the safety of his soul) for a period of three years.
Yet this is the testimony of Father Lockhart (who very justifiably broke his promise and preceded his
THE LEADER AT HEADQUARTERS 7
teacher by two years in secession) to the influence exerted by Newman on him during his pupilage at Littlemore :
" To put into one sentence what struck him as the character of his whole teaching and influence, — it was to make them use their reasoning powers, to seek after the last satisfactory reason one could reach of everything, and this led them to the last reason of all, and they formed a religious personal belief in God the Creator, our Lord and Master. This was the first thing that Newman did for those young men under his care. He rooted in their hearts and minds a personal conviction of the living God. And he for one could say he never had had that feeling of God before he was brought into contact with Cardinal Newman. Who that had experience of it could forget Newman's majestic countenance ? — the meekness, the humility, the purity of a virgin heart ' in work and will,' as the poet says, a purity that was expressed in his eyes, his kindness, the sweet ness of his voice, his winning smile, his caressing way which had in it nothing of softness, but which you felt was a communication to you of strength from a strong soul — a thing to be felt in order to be realized. It was when Newman read the Scriptures from the lectern in St. Mary's Church at Oxford that one felt more than ever that his words were those of a seer who saw God and the things of God. Many men were impressive readers, but they did not reach the soul. They played on the senses and imagination, they were good actors, they did not forget themselves, and one did not forget them. But Newman had the power of so impressing the soul as to efface him self ; you thought only of the majestic soul that saw God. It was God speaking to you as He speaks to you through creation ; but in a deeper way, by the articulate voice of man made in the image of God and raised to His likeness by grace, communicating to your intelligence and sense and imagination, by words which were the signs of ideas, a transcript of the work and private thoughts that were in God."
§ 79. The Message of " The Wrath of God"
What was the message, which the preacher's marvel lous personal influence helped to bring home to the hearts of his hearers ? It may be described in those
8 THE LEADER AT HEADQUARTERS
apostolic words which — as the last of three reasons for being "not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ," — re mind us that " The wrath of God is revealed " thereby " against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who keep down the truth in unrighteousness." This aspect of the Good News, most important but still sub ordinate, in St. Paul's doctrine, to the revelation of God's love, is so exalted by Newman that — except perhaps during a brief period which will presently be considered — it may be regarded as at least co-ordinate, in his preaching, with the higher revelation, and far more frequently and prominently mentioned. The " wrath of God " is the main topic of his sermons ; but it is of course regarded in several aspects and illus trated with the richest variety. Sometimes he re fers to it as being what we call " the wrath of God," sometimes as being called in accommodation to our weakness " the wrath of God " —as though to indicate that, after all, it may be a mere anthropomorphic "economy," and that God may, possibly, not be really angry, even though He acts as if He were angry. But, however described, the meaning is much the same. It is a certain divine aversion from evil, a turning of the face of God away from sin, which results in all the effects that would be attributed (in man) to revenge. In other words, God's punishments are regarded as being inflicted on sin, as sin, vindic tively — quite apart from expediency, or from the general good of mankind, or from any ultimately corrective or remedial results of such punishments.
This doctrine seemed to him taught in the Bible, con sistent with the analogy of Nature, and all the more necessary to be inculcated because it was opposed to the cheerful form of Christianity then coming into
THE LEADER AT HEADQUARTERS 9
vogue among educated people. The last of these three reasons was perhaps not the least effective. Whenever he felt quite certain that he saw his way, as he seemed to see it here, Newman was rather pleased, than not, to find that the way was painful. By bear ing pain now, there seemed to him a better chance of avoiding it hereafter. Present fears, boldly faced and endured, were even, perhaps, a sort of propitiation of the Future, Why would men ignore plain, disagree able, facts ? The New Testament predicted that men would grow worse, not better, before the coming of Christ : why then did modern false prophets dare to anticipate good when the Gospel foretold evil ? Why did they say smooth things and prophesy peace, when there was no peace, but war, already, between the Church and the rebellious world ? WThy were some impious enough to base hopes on Reform and Free Trade, when Mount Olivet, like a second Sinai, had laid it down, as the Law of Christ, that Christians must fix their thoughts on the Son of man, soon to come in Judgment ? And why would even religious people speak with such a perverse sanguineness about the spread of the Gospel abroad, or its deepening influence at home, when it was certain that, in all ages, though " the many " might be called, only " the few " would be chosen ? Might not the Judge at any moment appear upon the clouds ? And, if He did, what would He find the English nation doing? Simply what Noah's foolish, faithless countrymen had been doing — eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage — up till the day when the deluge swept them to destruction ! How was it, then, that men would not practise some abstinence in these matters which, however lawful in themselves, the Son of God
io THE LEADER AT HEADQUARTERS
Himself had, by implication, called worldly and dangerous ?
And besides, there were other reasons for such self- restraint. How could men bear to read in their Bibles, and recognize with their lips, the absolute necessity that a Christian should " take up the cross " for Christ, and yet refuse in any regular way to practise self-denial, even in so simple a practice as fasting, and that, too, dictated (so Newman maintained) by the Bible, and enforced by the constant tradition of the Church ? Again, why did men speak emotionally of readiness to give up everything for Christ, yet grudge Him a few hours on a week-day now and then to attend His appointed service? It was of no avail to allege against this wilful and rebellious neglect of prescribed duties, that the disobeyers had found by experience that a full and formal observance of the old fastings and saints'-days had not altogether worked well for religion itself in times past ; that now, the revival of these in full force would be likely in some cases to injure health, in others, so to slacken labour as to increase the poverty of those already poor and to interfere with the prosperity of the whole country : all this would seem to Newman mere expediency — an impious plea to put forward against the express commands of Scripture ! As for any growth of justice, humanity, and mercy, if anyone had pointed to these, or to plans for well-directed alms-giving, or to systematic attempts to prevent destitution and disease, as tokens that the Spirit of Christ was even now at work among those who had cast off the discipline of the mediaeval Church, he would have replied that such a superficial philanthropy as this was part of the religion of " this world," little better than a device of
THE LEADER AT HEADQUARTERS 11
Satan to mislead us into a disobedient self-com placency. Yes, the modern alms-giving itself was a proof that modern men were serving this world and not Christ : for He had enjoined two duties, fasting and alms-giving ; and now-a-days men practised the latter but neglected the former. Why ? Because men believed the former to be, but the latter not to be, for the good of society — in other words, for their own good ! What could be a clearer token of men's worldliness and hypocrisy when, of two commands of their Lord, they adopted the one that the world approved ; rejected the one that the world disapproved ; and yet professed to be serving, not the world, but Christ !
To all who accept the Authorized Version of the New Testament as constituting a kind of Second Law for Christians — no less binding upon us than the . Levitical Law upon Israel — Newman must seem, at first sight, to occupy a strong position. His weak point he just hints at (of course unconsciously) in a passage in which he quotes St. Paul's saying that it was "good for a man" to remain unmarried. St. Paul's actual meaning is indicated by the context in his Epistle. The Apostle was giving the Corinthians no general precept, but special advice fitted for special circumstances ; that is, in his own words, for " the present distress." But Newman will not allow even the Apostle himself to limit his own words : for, if such limitations were once to be permitted, he saw that there would be no end to them, and that his Christian " Law " would melt into mere literature. If, he protests, the words " present distress " have not a bearing upon the present day, " the New Testament scarcely applies to us and will have to be re-written."
This alternative — which Newman refuses even to
12 THE LEADER AT HEADQUARTERS
entertain — represents what will appear to many (not excluding High Church theologians) the actual fact. The New Testament precepts do need, if not to be re-written, at all events to be interpreted and, as it were, proportionized, before they can be wholesomely and wisely applied to the special needs of our, or any, generation. Nothing in Newman's sermons is more frequently or more effectively used as a motive for modern Christians than the Apostolic antithesis between the Church and the World. Yet among recent English theologians few have more frankly recognized than Dean Church, that the Spirit of Christ " has in many respects transformed that society which is only for this time and life ; and, while calling and guiding souls one by one to the Father, He has made His gracious influence felt, even where it could be least expected. Even war and riches, even the Babel life of our great cities, even the high places of ambition and earthly honour, have been touched by His Spirit, have found how to be Christian."
§ 80. A Religion of Fear
How different is this conception of the modern world of men, as leavened by the Christian spirit, from Newman's imagination of it as a thing wholly evil in itself, like the prophet's scroll, written, within and without, with lamentation, mourning, and woe ; and conveying to him no reflection whatever of that Creator who occupied his whole soul and absorbed his every thought ! In Newman's view, mankind is in capable of spiritual progress. We cannot rise on the shoulders of our forefathers : the brain, but not the heart, can be improved as the cycles roll onward ; the
THE LEADER AT HEADQUARTERS 13
many will always perish ; none but the few will escape ; not even the Gospel itself has ever greatly improved, or can improve, the spiritual condition of the multi tude, who will in all ages be the prey of Satan ; and the lapse of time is more likely to obscure than to increase, or illustrate, religious knowledge. The Pri mitive Church, though not perfect, attained a standard of truth and holiness . which it is a mere dream to imagine that we can ever exceed. Why the so-called scheme of Redemption was ever planned by its Divine Author, or what was His final object therein, this— says the preacher — we neither know nor, in this world, ever can know : but so much is certain, that it was not intended to prociire the salvation of the world. The Scripture tells us that His final object was His own glory : but this, he confesses, is not intelligible to us. Yet it is all that we are permitted to know. Such are the spiritual prospects — or such our knowledge of the prospects — of " the human world," in the eyes of the man whose utterances from the pulpit of St. Mary's gave life, and force, and penetrative vigour to the Tractarian Movement.
I do not see how it can be denied that the message, thus summarized (mostly in Newman's words), was a message of fear. Regarded from any point of view, whether as news about man, or about God, or about the relations between God and man, it seems to be per meated to the core with religious dread. Not content with insisting that the majority of the human race are doomed to everlasting destruction, it practically ignores the Fatherhood of God except as a special privilege for a chosen few. Even for these it is some times spoken of in language suggesting that the doctrine is but an anthropomorphic " accommodation "
I4 THE LEADER AT HEADQUARTERS
to our weak understandings. Nor is it enough that he hides God's attributes from us under a veil of " economy." Newman is at his worst when he praises God, as he sometimes does, for not doing things which any moderately just man would be ashamed to do, e.g. for not altogether casting off the human beings (whom He had Himself created) when they first went astray ; or for not making their life a source of unmixed misery, and their very senses avenues of pain ! Must a Christian be thought to have no command of his temper if he calls such praise as this altogether abject, servile, abominable ? What should we say of the servant of some great English nobleman, who should extol his Grace to his Grace's tenants, because his Grace, out of his great kindness, had not built all their cottages so that the chimneys might keep in the smoke, and the roofs let in the rain ?
The joyful side of the Gospel, Newman almost en tirely ignores. We are told that we are not in a con dition to rejoice in the Lord ; His very gifts are poisoned to us by our sickness. Fear is to accompany us to our graves as well as to overshadow our child hood. The only period during which a Christian can say, " I am safe," is the period after baptism, and before he is old enough to say anything. Even if we happen to be in the right path to-day, we cannot feel safe about to-morrow. Nor even about to-day can we feel confident. For without faith we are lost ; yet " whether we have faith or not we can but guess." Instead of the strengthening stimulus of Christ we find pervading Newman's doctrine and precepts a perpetual anxiety as to the best means of facing our dreadful Redeemer on the Judgment Day.
Yet, says Mr. J. A. Froude, "a tone not of fear but
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of infinite pity " ran through all his sermons. The ex pression reminds us of Bacon's description of the vene rable Priest of Nature, in the New Atlantis, who " had the aspect of one that pitied the miseries of mankind." And it was in point there. That venerable philoso pher was supposed to see, not only men's miseries, but also their remedies. He, therefore, might pity without any overpowering fear. But what did Newman see, so far as concerned mankind, except their all but uni versal ruin ? In him, not to fear would have argued the grossest insensibility. How, then, could the "tone of fear " in his teaching, so patent to those who read his sermons, have been imperceptible to Mr. Froude, who heard them ?
In part perhaps, fear was then in the air, common to large numbers of religious persons in those days, so that a doctrine of fear did not seem fearful, relatively, to those who assumed it in every sermon as a matter of course. When men like Arnold thought that the end of the world might be at hand, we cannot be surprised if many others of deep religious convictions were im pelled in the same direction by the spirit of unrest that was abroad moving in all the churches. The Evan gelicals, in making men anxious and alarmed about their souls, had prepared serious people in England to think that no preaching could be true that did not fill men with heart-searching anxieties — anxieties, very often of a non-moral and highly selfish nature. Science might have helped some. But there was little science in Oxford, at that time. Newman and his friends had a legal sense of system, i.e. external order, but very little sense of internal order, i.e. living law. Science, if it affected, enlarged their fears, making them talk of God as the " Creator" with bated breath because the
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world had turned out to be bigger and more curious than it had been known to be before. Hence we shall actually find one of Newman's principal followers deliberately describing the right attitude of man (even of a Christian man) to the " Creator" as " abject "! We all think, now, that men (not to say those who call themselves God's children) should approach God with reverence and devotion, but not with " abjectness " ; the very word conveys to us a sense of servility, a distrust in God's justice, a despicable fear, a creeping, fawning faithlessness, which repel and disgust people now ; but something approaching to these feelings seems to have been thought not blameworthy, but even pious, then. If therefore Newman's religion was " abject," it was perhaps what he intended it to be. He often prefers the language of the Old Testament (not the New) to describe the relations of men towards God. There he might read that man is made in God's image ; or that we are God's " sheep," or even God's " children." But the metaphor for which his frequent use evinces his special fondness, is that of " worms " ; once, at least, "grovelling worms*."
§ 8 1. Yet a practical Religion
Only recognize that the Gospel is a misnomer, and that Christianity is, and ought to be, a religion of fear, and it will be easy to discern much in Newman's message which would explain its power over those who heard it. Admit his hypothesis, and we must admit the good sense of the advice which he gives to the bewildered and troubled souls that resorted to him. Besides, who can fail to admire the uncompromising fairness and plainness with which he states unpleasing
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truths ; not supposing for a moment that his hearers like them ; indeed assuming, almost sympathetically and commiseratingly, that they do not like them, and scarcely professing to like them himself ; but still laying them down, as facts, without the least exaggera tion, and as it were saying, " Since we cannot deny these to be facts, why shut our eyes to them ? We cannot undo them. Let us then recognize and make the best of them. Is not this the nobler course as well as the wiser ? " It was to this appeal, perhaps, that young men at Oxford most keenly responded. They felt it was the nobler course (or at least the less ignoble), since they were in such extreme peril, to face it reso lutely ; and they trusted in Newman, because, instead of hiding the worst from them, he showed them how there was at least a chance of escaping from it. There were even in the Bible — he did not deny it — bright and cheerful and hopeful sayings about man, and about what might be man's life and prospects, even in this present world ; but these needed no priest or prophet to expound or enforce. Any one could find out and realise these for himself. His business was not with fair weather but with storms : he was a spiritual pilot holding in his hand a chart of the straits through which the soul must pass on its way to life or death ; and the use of a chart was to mark the rocks and quicksands — not the safe places.
It was as if some vessel, far out at sea, had caught fire in the night, and there was no hope of quenching the flames, and no boats for more than a fraction of the crew, and these leaky and unfit for use ; with a captain who lay in his hammock, disabled and sickly, and with no orders to give ; and an emotional first lieuten ant, who could say much that was eloquent, but nothing VOL. ii c
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to the point ; and suddenly there stepped forth one among the younger officers, who alone seemed to realise the danger, and yet retained his presence of mind ; bidding them not talk as yet about drawing lots as to who should have the boats, but first make the indispensable repairs and prepare the machinery for lowering them, and meantime keep back the flames so that they might all gain a few more minutes of respite from the expectant sharks, and might increase the chance for a poor handful of them to attain ulti mate safety — not blinking the peril, but bidding them meet it like men : — would not the wiser and more manly sort among the sailors, in a prospect so full of terror, discard their superior officers (the talkative Evangelicals and the torpid High and Dry) turning from those who could see nothing and from those who could say nothing, to this man, as their last hope, who seemed to them to see everything and to hide nothing, and who took his chance with the rest, knowing it to be but a chance ?
For indeed, though in his poems, and letters, and private utterances, Newman is revealed to us as one groping amid uncertainties, he does not appear in this character in the sermons. There, he checks himself, generally, from contemplating the "distant scene," and limits his view to the "one step" before him which sufficed for the present needs of himself and others. Within this very limited scope, he seemed to have taken in every detail with a perfect clearness and certainty which gave cogency to all his exhortations. Who, after receiving his short, definite, practical precepts, would any longer trust to his own mere feelings and professions, as a means of rescue from spiritual peril ? As well cast oneself into the deep
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with a swimming belt and trust to that for deliverance from the jaws of the sea-monsters! In the anxious enquirer, passionately craving to know what he must do to be saved, how great a confidence — at least comparatively, for men encompassed by such terrors —would be inspired by the precision with which he marked out the steps to be taken and the order of taking them ! His answer was, in effect, " First, do something. Do not be content with feelings, or words. Then, do something in the way of obedience to author ity, where you cannot possibly go wrong. Obey the precepts of Scripture. Come to Church ; pray ; fast ; give alms ; come to the Holy Communion. Here are definite precepts ; and, even if you do not at present realise all that is implied in these acts, yet at least you can do the acts. You may object that you do not at present love or trust God ; that you are wholly, or almost wholly, wrapped up in yourself; in a word, that you have no faith ; and that works without faith are dead. But I reply that faith is not what you suppose it to be. Faith is not the feeling of trust in. God, nor any other feeling. Faith is the temper of obedience to the precepts of God. It may be almost identified with obedience itself ; certainly, it cannot be separated from obedience. No doubt, the thing to be aimed at is a habit of mind, and not mere acts. But then a habit of mind cannot be formed except with the aid of time, by a prolonged succession of acts. Therefore begin by acts, even though you have at present no love of God or trust in God ; and begin by these acts, not as being dictated by love of man, nor out of any notion that they will in themselves do any good to anybody, but as being dictated by Scripture. " At first, you will find all this a kind of servitude.
c 2
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God's ' commandments ' will be, to you — just what the Apostle declared them not to be, to him — 'grievous/ So they ought to be. Prayer you will find irksome, tedious, monotonous ; and so of the rest. This must be so. God's commandments must be, at first, ' griev ous ' to you. You have made them grievous to your self by your past life of self-will and rebellion ; and you must now bear the burden patiently. Better to find them ' grievous ' and obey them, than to explain them away so as to disobey them. Nor is it safe for you to discriminate between the greater and smaller precepts of the Christian Law, between, for example, precepts as to fasting and precepts as to alms-giving. Do but note the importance of the exact enunciation of a few words in the form of Baptism. Upon these depends the regeneration of an immortal soul ! This being the case, how can you tell that, in God's sight, though not in man's, the principle, say, of Episcopal Succession, may not be as important as that of the Unity of God itself? Cease, then, to discriminate; learn to obey. The only safe course is to obey all precepts that come to you with authority ; obey readily, blindly, I might almost say, abjectly ; not because this or that is right, or rational, but out of faith; that is to say, out of the mere temper of docility and obedience which is ready to obey any command of God, however wrong or irrational it may seem. Christianity happens to be a rational religion. But it need not have been. It would have claimed obedience just the same. This, as I have admitted, is a yoke. But, by degrees, out of this mechanical obedience you will rise into a freer and higher state. By doing you will be enabled, in some cases, to understand, and in all, to believe."
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Presently we shall find Newman modifying this doctrine. Church-going, alms-giving, fasting, and participation in the Holy Communion, are all com patible with a servile terror (absolutely void of love or real reverence) which might make the superstitious observer of these duties, after each observance, say to himself, " There, that is over ! That is so much to my credit. Yet, alas, have I done enough ? Am I safe ? No, and I never shall be. Always this weary round of distasteful acts, and yet never to feel safe ! Yet it is my only chance, so I must persevere." In such a religious mill-round as this, the performer makes himself worse, not better, by every performance. Never will he be free. He is riveting on himself the chains of superstitious fear, hardening faithlessness into the solidity of a habit, making himself chronically blind to God's light, and permanently callous to the tender visitations of His love. Recognizing this danger, Newman will be found hereafter striving, though most inadequately, to meet it. But in his earlier teaching it is scarcely recognized at all. The nobler among his hearers might perhaps supply for themselves what was wanting. To them, his realisation of the tremendous struggle of life might give nerve and vigour ; and they would so tinge the fear with which he thrilled them that, in them, it might become wholesome awe. Yet his doctrine, in itself, is a doctrine of terror ; and for commonplace and vulgar minds one secret of his success is that, along with the danger, he indicates a method of deliverance which, though wearisome and in some respects apparently wasteful, yet at least shifts on to Scripture much of the burden of individual responsibility, and dispenses with the pain of thinking for oneself.
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§ 82. Puseys Tract on Baptism
YET our question is not yet fully satisfactorily answered. To say that Newman's teaching attracted many of the most promising young men at Oxford, because, being austere and repellent, it was plainly and uncompromisingly stated, seems rather paradox than explanation. Nor indeed have we been able to do full justice to the austerity of the Tractarian teaching, following as we have followed, the chronological order of things : for it was not till the end of 1835 that the inherent darkness of the New Anglicanism was made fully visible by the publication, in the form of a Tract, of Pusey's discourses on Baptism, with special reference to the effects of post-baptismal sin. Mozley had heard him preach them and has described the effect they produced. "Irreparable," " irreparable "-—terror fell on those, even the religious and devout, who heard these awful words from the pulpit, warning them that sin after baptism could never in this life be fully pardoned. To think that almost all Christians must consider themselves, in spite of the Gospel and its promises of forgiveness, merely respited criminals up
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to the last day of their lives ! This doctrine startled some of the most devoted adherents of the Movement ; but Newman unreservedly defended it as the teaching of the Fathers :
" Pusey's doctrine— that is, that of the Fathers — is this : That in Baptism there is a plenary remission of all that is passed. That none such occurs again in this life, none such till the Day of Judg ment. But it does not thence follow that there is no kind of Absolu tion besides promised us. There is ; and of it the Collect for Ash Wednesday, &c., speak. It is this : we are admitted, as a transgress ing child might be, not to the same absolute election, but from time to time, according as we pray, repent, and are absolved, to a lower state in our Father's favour. We are admitted to Church ordinances? Church privileges, and the state of grace which is in the Church, a place of rest, refreshment, respite, of present help ; without more, however, than the suspension of our sins over our heads. Now think of this, and see whether both Prayer Book and Pusey do not teach this concordantly."
Like an advancing fog that might spread its darkness no one knew whither, this doctrine threatened to cast its gloom over the whole of the application of the Christian religion to the life of man. Newman him self, in a previous letter to the same enquirer, admits this, though from an ecclesiastical point of view. He does not think of the horror or the injustice ; his mind is bent on working the doctrine into a symmetrical system : " I do not say he (Pusey) has finished his subject ; rather he has opened, a large circle of subjects." This indeed was no more than the truth. Confession, and Penance, are, at once, thus " opened." If Pusey's theory was correct, it became of the utmost importance to distinguish between venial faults that did not, and sins that did, wash out for the time baptismal grace. To draw this distinction fairly, who would be sufficient in his own case? How useful,
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how indispensable, to confess one's sins to some spiritual director who could tell one how to manage one's own soul, and who would suggest, works of penance appropriate for each occasion ! Then, again, as to Absolution itself, what a new and vast importance it would assume! If the act was needful, after each sin, to restore the sinner even to " the lower state " of "respite" ; if a man who died unabsolved, after the commission of some sin not " venial," died " unres- pited," cast out even from the lower class of reprieved criminals into the lowest of all, the class of sinners under sentence of eternal damnation — how natural and right to be alarmed during every hour of one's life in which no absolver was at hand, and how cheap at any price the prompt services of a duly ordained priest! Further, as to the priest himself, how much more than ever important to ascertain that he had the right to absolve ! How dear, at any price, the services of an absoiver who, though he possessed all the virtues and graces of which non-sacerdotal humanity was capable, yet, by no fault of his own, but through some fatal break in Apostolical Succession at any point in the spiritual chain, had been cut off from the source of the special grace of absolution !
The question of the validity of Orders was thus brought up again, and there loomed in the close future the contrast between the historical continuity of the Apostolic Succession in the great Church of Rome and the disputed transmission of sacerdotal grace in the dislocated and insulated Church of England. But, apart from these doubts in prospect, there was enough at hand to fill the anxious enquirer with terror. God, it seemed, might forgive through his duly-ordained Priests ; yet still, there remained a remnant of dis-
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pleasure for the sinner. Whoever had sinned after baptism — and who had not ? — was incapable of re ceiving full forgiveness till the Judgment Day. God M forgave " —but, as it were, in inverted commas ; with a forgiveness of His own ; not as human fathers forgave. He was still angry ; or at least He appeared to be so. Do what a Christian might, his sins were still " in suspension " over him. Even after the most orthodox and unimpeachable of absolutions, this was the most he could ask for : "I will arise and go to my Father and will say unto Him, — ' Make me but a respited criminal in thy sight'."
§ 83. The Tractarian Protest for deeds against words
Is not such a religion as this repellent ? And to say that Newman did not conceal its repulsive nature —is this to be accepted as a reason why it did not repel ? There must be other reasons. One has been just touched on above ; but it deserves more than a mere passing reference.
Beneath some perversions and exaggerations, New man's doctrine of the wrath and holiness of God contained, and did not quite conceal, a good deal that was both true and new to that generation. God does require from us righteousness ; righteousness does (though not in theory, yet in practice, and if we deal with life as a whole, and not with a few isolated and exceptional cases) require outward acts ; and there is a danger that emotion, expressed ostentatiously, or even indulgently and unreservedly, may let off, and surfer to escape unused, the energy which should have been expended in action. Again, the consequences of some sins — even though the sins themselves may be
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forgiven — are in some cases manifestly not remitted- Moreover, cause and effect do hold good, in the spiritual, as in the material, world. Habits, and states of mind, are caused by a series of acts ; and a series of acts needs time ; and this applies to the state of mind of a confirmed Christian ; so that, as a rule, the formation of the Christian character is not the affair of an instant nor the mere result of one supernatural impulse. Further, God's love and bene volence to men — if they are of the same kind as His love towards Him who taught us the full meaning of the divine Fatherhood — are compatible with the imposition of terrible trials and burdens even upon the most saintly of mankind. Much more, as regards the sinful and unrepentant, may we be prepared to believe that, in proportion to the depth of His love, will be the penetrative power of His punishments. How wide may be their scope we know not ; we only know (through faith) that not one drop of the cup of pain will have been wasted or drunk without His super vision. But we expect no indulgence. We are sure that He will spare us no anguish that may amend our sinful souls. It may be that what our planet suffers, other planets may behold and take warning from it, so that they may not suffer : but all such thoughts as these are as far off and visionary as imaginative romances about four or five dimensions, and the only justification for either is, that they keep us intellect ually modest and truthful and sometimes uplift our weary souls a little when we find our flight drooping and bringing us within view of that gulf of gulfs, that only heresy of heresies — the thought that God can be less good, and less just, than the best, and most just, of men,
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In such spiritual truths as these any man may believe with awe yet without servility ; and from their contemplation he will arise with an increased sense of the hatefulness of sin ; of the mystery of the conflict between good and evil ; and yet with as profound a conviction as ever that God is most truly revealed to men as " unmixed benevolence," or as it is expressed in the New Testament, as " Love." The obstacles in the way of his belief he will not deny ; but he will point out that the faith which he cherishes does not commit him to any falsification or glossing of facts. It merely commits him to what nothing in heaven or earth can prove or disprove — a belief in motives. But the mischief of Newman's view of spiritual things was that it distorted all these truths by taking them out of the province of morality into that of authority. Hence it is that we have found him not daring to sever himself from the literal meaning of Scriptural precepts ; hence also he is disposed to deny, or ignore, the facts of modern life and science which show the inapplicability of his Scriptural rules to present needs. It is on this account, too, that he lays so strange and undue a stress on frequent Church -going and fasting, as compared with those acts of kindness (or even of mere thoughtfulness and consideration) which come naturally in the path of social life. His argument is clear. The former are specially Scriptural, the latter are not; "this world" regards the former with dis favour, while it favours the latter ; therefore it is (< safe " to prefer the former. Hence, too, when cir cumstances hereafter force him to attempt to formulate his notions about God's justifying forgiveness, we shall find him actually venturing to say that it consists in God's saying as to our past lives what, as a fact, is not
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trite. The time will come indeed when he will be driven to perceive that all his system is likely to fail for want of a basis, and that, as a basis, love is " the one thing needful." And this, for a brief season, may seem to drive authority to the wall. Yet even then we shall find him soon repenting of this relapse into Evangelicalism and into " trusting one's own feelings " ; so that he will protest, almost immediately after uttering the fatal word " love," that he has not really meant what he said, and that he must explain himself in Latin, for, after all, k< love " does not mean love precisely ; but it is pia affectio, or voluntas pie credendi, or what ever else some scholastic authority may have made it out to be.
§ 84. Newman, his own " secret "
Such a " system " as this cannot have succeeded by its own merits. Like many other theologians, New man was superior to his system : and the superiority which we can only here and there perceive in the volumes of his printed sermons may have been far more perceptible to those who heard him. It is nothing new that the presence of a man should trans mit his spirit to others in a degree not attainable by written words. And, deep down beneath the doubts and fears as to the means of obtaining divine grace, and as to the amount of reality, or unreality, in " economies," and ''accommodations," and the claims of contending churches, there was always, at bottom, an unvarying conviction, not only of the existence of a God, but also of One in whom, whether he himself was to be saved or damned, he could not but feel whatever trust he was capable of feeling. Precluded though he was (as he thought) by Scripture from
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teaching that this Being was good or just, in accord ance with human notions of goodness or justice, yet in his heart of hearts he did, however tremulously, cling to the faith that God in the end would be seen to be really good, even in the human sense.
Noble passages in his sermons — few, but conclusive on this point in their passionate earnestness — breathe the spirit of him who cried, ''Though he slay me, yet will I put my trust in him." Others, which suggest a kind of austere and cruel Retribution in the backeround
o
as the real Ruler of the Universe, nevertheless take us (for a short time at all events) out of that depressing dread with which the preacher mostly leads us to regard the Saviour. These represent Christ as being, so to speak, under coercion ; as passionately begging us to trust in Him ; as assuring us that there is nothing that can be done for us that He would not gladly do ; nay, even as protesting that, in the strict final Judg ment, He will judge us with the most anxious solici tude to give full weight to all that may weigh on our side, and with a longing to enlarge the fruits of His Passion by returning the verdict of " not guilty," wherever we ourselves, or the demands of Justice, will allow Him to do so. Others again, with a tender and compassionate sympathy, without concealing or lighten ing the possible horrors of our impending doom, yet urge on us that, even if we should lose everything, it would be better to lose it while trying to please God, than to gain what this world can give, leading the life of the flesh. The illustration of a merchant's or a gamester's venture is elsewhere brought to bear ; and we are told that there is something noble-minded as well as possibly lucrative, a kind of mercantile heroism, and a generosity at once magnanimous and profitable,
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in risking everything on " God's word." Best of all, men are sometimes bidden to rejoice and thank God for one another, and especially for the friends whom, after giving them to us for a time, He has taken to Himself, that we, by them, may be drawn closer to Him. Such passages as these are necessarily rare, for they are inconsistent with his formal and usual doctrine that, as we cannot be sure about our own salvation, so neither can we about that of others ; that we have enough to do with thinking and fearing about our own eternal concerns ; that, as before God, no man can help another, for we must not only die alone but live alone, nor can there be any spiritual contact between soul and soul in this life^. Yet at least on one occasion his feelings were too strong for his dogma. When Froude drew near to death, Newman refused to fear for his sake. With him in his mind he would not use his favourite metaphor of " grovelling worms " to describe the relations between the human and the divine. Casting away all reserve, all doubts, and all terrors, he shoots up to a Miltonic height in the confidence that God cannot waste this immortal soul which He has made. Thus he writes to Froude himself —
11 It . . . made me think how many posts there are in His king dom, how many offices, Who says to one, Do this, and he doeth it, &c. It is quite impossible that, some way or other, you are not destined to be the instrument of God's purposes. Though I saw the earth cleave, and you fall in, or Heaven open and a chariot appear, I should say just the same. God has ten thousand posts of service. You might be of use in the central elemental fire ; you might be of use in the depths of the sea."
The same passionate conviction, based not upon Authority nor upon Scripture but upon his own sense
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of what must be right , finds expression also in a sermon, written about the same time. Once more, his feelings are too strong for his " system." On grounds of logic and probability, if "the many" perish ever lastingly, and if outward life affords no certain criterion as to the inward state, the preacher ought, I suppose, to calculate the odds against a man, and to shudder in silence over his grave. But a better faith constrains him to pour forth his trust in God as to the destinies of the dead, while he conjectures that they may be ordained in some way to help the living.
"They are taken away for some purpose surely; their gifts are not lost to us ; their soaring minds, the fire of their contemplations, the sanctity of their desires, the vigour of their faith, the sweetness and gentleness of their affections, were not given without an object. Yea, doubtless, they are keeping up the perpetual chant in the shrine above, praying and praising God day and night in His Temple, like Moses upon the Mount, while Joshua and his host fight with Amalek."
This Newman may possibly have called " trust " and not " faith " *: but it seems to savour far more of real faith than did his determined acceptance of the doctrine —whether Pusey's, or Patristic, or both — about " res pite " and the "lower state of favour," and the "sus pension of sins." And this feeling of fundamental trust in God — though not always, perhaps, consciously present in his heart, and still less frequently expressed in the printed pages of his sermons — may have been far more often manifest to those who then heard him than to those who now read him, and may largely account for the wholesome influence attested by so many of his hearers. " Here," they said to themselves, "is a man who, in his heart, believes in God." Some of them perhaps added, " He believes, or thinks he
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believes, a great many hard sayings about God which we cannot accept ; but that matters little. The point for us is that he believes in God, and that, in his presence we too feel better able to believe." Some went far beyond this. " My creed," said one of his followers, who will soon attract more of our attention, "is extremely simple, Credo in Newmannum" He meant, of course, " I have been helped to believe in God by Newman, so that, while believing in him, I am as it were believing in God." Yet, however we may water down this strong saying, there remains in it enough of the dangerous. It is a bad thing when a crowd 11 believes " in a political orator rather than in a cause ; but a much worse, when the orator is a preacher, and the cause is spiritual jruth. Generally we blame an orator of that captivating character, who centres the thoughts of his audience on himself and not on some thing higher. Was Newman to blame that some of the young Oxford men, after hearing him at St. Mary's, went back to their rooms saying " I believe in Newman " ?
Nothing in his printed sermons would suggest that he was to blame. He called himself, as we have seen above, a " rhetorician." And he certainly had an ir repressible instinct for discerning at a glance all the audacious assertions, and all the frank admissions, by which he could strengthen his position, because he could justify the former, and more than neutralize the latter — wholly ignoring any really weak point in his case or weak link in his argument. Yet, in his ser mons, he is never guilty of popular rhetoric. If he deceives others, it is never without first deceiving him self. A great gulf divides him from the popular orator. The orator addresses the multitude ; but
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Newman, even when speaking to his hearers, is almost always really speaking to God about himself and them. The political speaker is said to reproduce in rain what he has gathered in mist from the audience whose opinions, while appearing to guide, he largely obeys ; but the preacher we are considering, mostly speaks as though there were no audience at all, discoursing about facts, as they are — as an explorer might describe seas unknown to others — about shoals, rocks, quicksands, engulfing whirlpools. The former courts the favour of his hearers : the latter seems ever on his guard against the charge of pleasing them or even falling in with their opinions. If he does not offend them, or startle them, or make them uneasy or afraid, he has done nothing ; nay, he has don^ worse than nothing ; he has been false to his trust. One who heard him has told us that the preacher's " eyes were bent upon his sermon." But a later witness, who lived for seven years under the same roof with him, adds something that means more than this. " Newman," he says, " never saw his congregation."*
That is trebly true. The preacher's bodily and mental and spiritual faculties were all concentrated upon invisible things, not upon visible human beings. An illustration of this may be drawn from that most subjective of novels, Callista, in which Newman himself clearly speaks through the Christian priest, Caecilius. When the priest is attempting to convert her, the pagan heroine abruptly reproaches him with soliloquizing instead of addressing her : " Father, you are thinking of yourself and not of me " ; to which he replies, that when he is pleading for souls to God, he desires to feel alone with God, nothing intervening. It is in this mood that Newman for the most part
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34 THE SECRET OF THE LEADER'S POWER
preaches. The words preach ; but the preacher is not preaching, but pleading — " solus cum solo": for him self first, and then for others ; for humanity, in, or with, himself. Hence it is that, although he is always thinking about himself while preaching, yet it is with out the slightest trace of that conceit which Arnold (so Newman tells us) wrongly imputed to him. He is anxiously revolving his own problems and doubts and dangers, not his privileges or successes. If his friend lies dying, he comforts himself with the thought of the mission of the dead to the living ; if his own life seems a tissue of disappointments, he exhorts himself with a sermon on Jeremiah ; if the woods of Dartington tempt him to forsake his pilgrim lot, he reminds him self that the pleasant lights of this world are "to try us." Or, to look forward a little, if his Party is pros perous and making a noise, and a little too much noise, in the world, we shall find him preaching about "unreal words"; and when he receives the first ghost-like summons to Rome, he tosses to and fro the questionings of his doubting heart in the sermon on " Divine calls."
How came it to pass, then, that a teacher, so intent on truth, caused some of his followers to fasten their belief, not on the truth, but on himself ? So far as this happened, it was the system, not the conceit of the teacher that was to blame. " The truth," as New man preached it, did not require his hearers to use their own thoughts, but rather to beware of thinking. It bade them be docile ; believe on authority ; distrust their own powers of judging ; do certain acts ; repeat certain words ; and, by means of these doings and these repetitions, it encouraged them to hope that they might, in time, believe. Hence, a frank and honest
THE SECRET OF THE LEADER'S POWER 35
man, when called on to accept a great mass of propo sitions (many of them new, or regarded in a new light), feeling that he could not honestly say he believed all this, and yet feeling a strong confidence that the preacher could not be deceived, thought that the best description of his creed was, " I believe in Newman/' A short creed, indeed, but not " extremely simple." How little those who committed themselves to it knew to what they were committed ! Compared with this unwilling misguider, the most fallacious of Sirens was but a beginner in deceits. All the more deceitful, because so unwilling to deceive ; so complex and tortuous in reality, yet so fatally attractive by an obvious transparency of thought and superficial smoothness of expression — here was a leader who seemed to see clearly whatever he spoke about, yet in reality saw but one step before him, and not always even that. Yet are the language and the grammar of religion, and especially of a new and reformed reli gion, of so very elementary a nature that the teacher can afford to be but one or two lessons in advance of his pupils ? Was not Tractarianism an affair of books ? And was not Newman undertaking to teach it before he had " prepared his books"? What was the difference between him and other teachers who attempt to teach what they have not yet themselves learned ?
There was this great difference. In Newman there was a something that he had not learned, yet knew without learning, and could communicate to those who were in sympathy with him, not by written but by | spoken words. In his voice some heard echoes of truths from distances far beyond the reach of their own souls — truths cold, and pitiless, and painful to
D 2
36 THE SECRET OF THE LEADER'S POWER
hear, but still truths, and therefore not to be neglected. His countenance seemed to reflect a light, terrible sometimes and awful, yet at least not of this world, a light that showed them to themselves, and made them shudder at the sight. Through him some felt that they had been irresistibly drawn out of their old carnal and contemptible existence into a purer and nobler, if somewhat sombre, region, whence there was good hope that they might rise in time still highe towards that ineffable Holiness beneath whose shadow the preacher himself seemed to stand, pleading for himself and them. These, owing to him their own better selves, would not deny him their future selves Out of him they were — what they were loth to think of. In him they seemed to be near God. Believing in him, they thought they believed in God. Wha more ? Whithersoever he might hereafter draw them thither they had no choice but to follow.
CHAPTER XXI
THE FIRST TRACTARIAN ATTACK
§ 85. Timing the assault
DR. HAMPDEN has come before us already. In the struggle between the Provost and Tutors of Oriel, he it was whom the former called in as a lecturer, and thereby gained the victory. He had succeeded Whately as Principal of St. Alban Hall, and was identified with him in religious opinions. In 1832 he had delivered the Bampton Lectures. They had attracted no special attention at the time, but were of a liberal tendency, and replete with learning. In 1834 he was appointed to the Professorship of Moral Philosophy, against Newman, who had sought the office for the sake of its influence.* Subsequently he had taken an active part in advocating the admission of Dis senters to the University of Oxford. It was not sur prising, therefore — not, at least, to the outside world— that when the death of Dr. Burton (in the winter of 1835) threw open the Regius Professorship of Divinity, the Prime Minister nominated Hampden to fill the vacancy.
But to the Tractarians it came as a shock. We have seen that it was a part of their policy to organize petitions against appointing 'Max men" to high posts
38 THE FIRST TRACTARIAN ATTACK
in the Church. Accordingly, as soon as he heard that Hampden was thought of, Newman urged both Pusey and Keble to do what they could to prevent his ap pointment. He himself got up at Oxford a petition to the King, which he forwarded to the Archbishop. An unofficial reply from Rose, the Archbishop's chap lain, informed Newman that every step had been taken to rescue the University from this evil, but the determination of the Prime Minister was too strong. In his official answer, the Archbishop l( retained" the petition, saying that " it was desirable to avoid so strong a step as presenting it." A separate protest from Pusey to Lord Melbourne was received with a rebuff. Newman now resolved to appeal to the Oxford Convocation. They could not turn the Professor out, but they might stigmatize him and force him to resign. He had already made preparations. Two days after the appointment had been announced, he had begun (10 February) a " pamphlet against Hampden," and " sat up all night at it." Three days afterwards it was in the hands of those who were to be asked to condemn the new Professor.
It was entitled Elucidations of Dr. Hampden s Theological Statements^ as set forth in his Bampton Lectures (and in some Observations subsequently pub lished). Hampden's lectures had been delivered in 1832. They were now, for the first time, attacked in 1836. To this delay the opponents of the Tractarians pointed as a proof that the attack was prompted by mere spite. But this was certainly not the case. In 1832 Newman and Froude, the two fighting spirits of the Party, were out of health, and on the point 01 leaving England ; the Party itself had not yet been organized ; Whately had not yet incurred their enmity,
THE FIRST TRACTARIAN ATTACK 39
and Hampden, Whately's ally, seemed hardly heter odox enough, or important enough, to need opposition ; Bampton Lectures were presumably orthodox, mostly dull, and took time to read and digest ; and Newman — abroad, or occupied with the Movement, in 1833— would not be likely to have read them till 1834 or 1835. I shall give reasons hereafter for thinking that he probably did not read them till 1836.^ But assume that he read them in 1834 or 1835, and found them heterodox. Still, it was rather late to attack them ; and, having delayed so long, he might naturally have refrained from attacking them altogether, but for the following unforeseen incident.
In 1834 there had been a debate in the House of Commons on a Bill for the admission of Dissenters to the University of Oxford, and Newman had been vehement in getting up petitions against it. In the following year an attempt had been made in the Oxford Convocation to obtain their admission by a compro mise. Undergraduates were to be released from the obligation to subscribe the Thirty-nine Articles and were simply to sign a Declaration of Conformity to the Church of England. This had been defeated by a majority of 459 to 57 ; and the Tractarians had been prominent on the winning side. But Hampden, who had all along actively supported the admission of Dissenters, had sent a pamphlet of his, in favour of the measure (November 1834) to Newman, who had frankly replied that, while acknowledging " the tone of piety " t in which it was written, he strenuously objected to its principles and regarded it as a declaration of war. The Government, therefore, seemed now to be forcing Hampclen's appointment on the University as a punish ment for their resistance. It was in this light, at all
40 THE FIRST TRACTARIAN ATTACK
events, that the Tractarians regarded it — as a challenge from the enemies of the Church. Why, they asked, should they not meet it ? Last year they had con tributed a small but energetic contingent to the victori ous side. Why should they not now take the field again, and try, by discrediting Hampden, to beat the Government and Liberalism a second time ? There was nothing blameworthy either in the attempt, or in the time chosen for the attempt. It was a party fight. The only question is, whether the battle was fought fairly. To answer that question, we must take a view of Hampden's position.
§ 86. Hampden s B amp ton Lectures
The controverted Bampton Lectures may be de scribed briefly as an extreme statement of what every one knows to be laid down in the Anglican Articles, viz., that the Scriptures alone are to be accepted as the basis of Christian dogma ; that General Councils (i.e., the Church) may err, and have erred, "even in things pertaining to God " ; that even those venerable monuments of ancient Christian faith, the Creeds themselves, are to be accepted, not because they have been handed down by the Church, but because " they may be proved by most certain warrant of holy Scrip ture " ; that the Church is "a witness and keeper of Holy Writ " (and, by implication, not an infallible in terpreter) ; that nothing is to be thought requisite or necessary to salvation unless it is " read in " the Scrip tures, " or may be proved thereby"; that the Churches of Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome (and no exception is made of the Church of England) have erred, not only as to discipline and ceremonies, but also " in matters of Faith."
THE FIRST TRACTARIAN ATTACK 41
Proceeding on these lines, Dr. Hampden drew a marked distinction between the statements on matters of faith in the Bible, and those in Creeds, or Articles. The former he called " facts " ; the latter he called " doctrines " — a somewhat pedantical use of the words, not to be defended in point of style (except perhaps in a University sermon), but not likely to deceive any educated person who had read a dozen pages in his Lectures consecutively. He had mainly in his mind —and the very title* of his Lecture showed this — the vocabulary, and the logical deductions of the School men. The impress, he said, of the technical or scholastic terms, and of the Aristotelian Logic, with which theologians and Schoolmen had made war against the heretics of different ages, stamped the later Creeds and the ecclesiastical formularies of all Churches, not excepting the Anglican, with an inferiority and in adequacy which distinguished them from the directly inspired language of Scripture. Creeds and Articles, he fully admitted, were necessary ; but it was because of the infirmity of human nature, and the need of some order and unity in each Church ; they could not claim equality with the propositions of Scripture. The three Creeds, and the Anglican Articles, he himself frankly received ; and since it would have been dishonest for him to reject them, he admitted — and here his reason ing is curiously similar to that of Froude's quoted above — that for him the Creeds contained things " necessary to salvation.''
But he refused to make the same assertion about other Christians. If men received the " facts " of Scripture, that is to say, not the mere historical facts, but all the statements of Scripture about the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, the Atonement, the Lord's
42 THE FIRST TRACTARIAN ATTACK
Supper, Baptism, the Forgiveness of Sins, the Resur rection, the Judgment, he could not deny to them the name of Christians, although they might interpret these " facts," and draw inferences from these " facts," in a manner that seemed to him erroneous. No one can fail to see the application of these views to the ad mission of Dissenters to the Universities. They, as well as Anglicans, were all to be covered under the common term of " Bible Christians," differing widely among themselves in discipline, ceremonies, and per haps even in matters of faith, but not so differing that Churchmen could say to Nonconformists, " We deny your right to use the name of Christian, for you have no real part or lot in Christ."
It is not our business to attack or defend this position. If it were, I should prefer to attack it as illogical, and to defend it as Anglican, charitable, and, on the whole, working fairly well. The briefest dialectic would show the inconsistency of the theory. But, against dialectic, common sense might make answer, for the framers of the Articles, " What would you have ? You must begin somewhere. Even in science you must assume your own existence and the existence of matter. What would you have liked us to begin with in religion — attempting as we were to build up the National Church on the sixteenth century ? With Tradition ? It had been distorted and corrupted. With the Churches ? They had brought us to idola tries and purchaseable forgiveness of sins. We thought we would try the Bible — nay, we will even admit that we practically based our new system on the English version of the Bible, as being a great religious reality appealing to the national conscience. Indirectly, we felt that we should be quite enough influenced by the Churches
THE FIRST TRACTARIAN ATTACK 43
and Traditions, even though we rejected their direct influence. We therefore took the Bible as the legal basis for our National Church ; and, having regard to the mischief of Tradition, we would not impose even the Creeds themselves as having been once proved from Scripture, but we imposed them as to be believed because they may be proved from Scripture. And this is what we meant when, in our Twentieth Article, we gave to the Church ' authority in controversies of faith/ By this, we meant that the English Church should from time to time decide what may, and what may not, be legally taught by its Ministers, not because the Church is infallible, but because it must keep some kind of order. Thus we established an appeal to 'proof,' and reason, and judgment, for all time, in the English Church. But the Bible was to remain our basis."
How distasteful this " Bible Christianity " was to the Tractarians we know very well : but it does not seem so obvious how they could attack with controversial advantage an exposition that seemed generally in ac cordance with the first principles of the Anglican Articles. And, besides — as appears from Hampden's Introduction subsequently appended to the second edition of his Lectures — he went, in practice, a little nearer to the Tractarians and a little further from "Bible Christianity" than his strict system allowed. He protested, for example, that such a proposition as that Christ is truly God as well as man, and united the human and divine natures in one Person, is " nothing more than what has been already affirmed in Scrip ture ; " and he added " whatever can be thus argued from Scripture is as true as Scripture is true " —mean ing by " thus argued," that kind of argument in which the conclusion ^necessarily follows from the premises.
44 THE FIRST TRACTARIAN ATTACK
This was inconsistent. It would have been more con sistent to have said that the language of St. Paul, or St. John, or St. James, or St. Peter, or of our Lord Himself, in stating divine truths, was so immeasurably more adequate to the truths than any human interpre tative, or deductive, expressions of them, that the latter could not possibly be regarded as so true as the former ; the latter must always bear the stamp of inadequacy. Now what is inadequate must, to some extent, give a false impression and be untrue. All later ecclesiastical statements therefore about spiritual things ought to be declared by a strict a Bible Christian " to be not quite faithful to the truth, and indeed to be (relatively) un true. If Hampden had said that, he would have been consistent, and would have at once laid himself open to the cry, " Dr. Hampden declares that the Creeds are untrue? That he did not mean this, would not have prevented the outcry. That he did not say it, was — at first sight, and to ordinary minds — something of a difficulty.
§87. Newmans "Elucidations"
But it was not a difficulty to Newman, " sitting up all night " at his Elucidations* He swooped at once on the enemy's weak point. Hampden had not been heterodox from the Anglican point of view ; but he had been pedantical — or at least too learned for the non-resident members of an Oxford Convocation. He had used the word "facts" to mean spiritual facts, spiritual realities, as distinct from scholastic specu lations or theories. The very title of his lectures, " The Scholastic Philosophy considered in its relation to Christian Theology," might have prepared any ordinary reader for a somewhat scholastic use of terms :
THE FIRST TRACTARIAN ATTACK 45
and Hampden, perhaps, had fondly imagined that any one who would take the trouble to read his lectures would also try to understand his meaning. Indeed for any one desiring to get information from them the sense of the term is patent.
No fair critic could quote a page of Hampden's remarks on " facts," without doing one of two things. He must either do as Dean Church always does, put the word in inverted commas ; or else he must explain that Hampden meant to use the word in a philosophic sense, meaning spiritual realities. Doing either of these things, he might then, fairly enough, have scoffed at the pedantry of the new Regius Professor of Divinity whom the Government proposed to inflict on the Oxford youth. A third course was open, decidedly unfair — to use the word " facts " without any warning as to its peculiar meaning, and with the result of puzzling all and misleading most. Newman did none of these things. He resorted to a fourth course, even more unfair than that last mentioned — so unfair or else so careless, that, whatever may be the explanation, it must always form one of the most discreditable in cidents in his life. Stating Hampden's theory about " facts," he inserted the word " historical " !
This he does at the very outset ; which alone would suffice to make the whole of his pamphlet fatally fallacious even though he did not repeat the error. It is — to use one of Newman's own controversial phrases which he used with such effect against Kingsley — a veritable " poisoning of the wells." But, that the reader may have the means of judging for himself, I will quote the first nine lines of the Elucidations, simply italicizing, after Newman's controversial fashion, the important words : —
46 THE FIRST TRACTARIAN ATTACK
" Here first it is necessary to explain Dr. H.'s views concerning Theological Statements.
" He considers that the only belief necessary for a Christian, as such, is belief that the Scripture is the word of God ; that no state ment whatever, even though correctly deduced from the text of Scripture, is part of the revelation ; that no right conclusions about theological truth can be drawn from Scripture; that Scripture is a mere record of historical fads"
Subsequently he again interpolates the misleading word in a passage in which Dr. Hampden is made to declare the Apostles' Creed to be " defensible only when con sidered as a record of historical facts" Yet such further ''poisonings" were hardly necessary. The reader had been led hopelessly astray from the very beginning : and by inserting (for the third time) the words "historical and moral," but omitting the word " spiritual," the writer misleads him to the very end, till he reaches the following " conclusion? as he calls it, in which I again italicize the important words : —
" Conclusion.
" Dr. H.'s views then seem at length to issue in the following theory : that there is one and only one truth ; that that truth is the record of facts, historical and moral, contained in the text of Scrip ture : that whatever is beyond that text, even to the classifying of its sentences, is human opinion, and unrevealed ; that, though a thoughtful person cannot help forming opinions upon the Scripture record, and is bound to act upon and confess these opinions which he considers to be true, yet he has no right to identify his own opinion on any point, however sacred in itself, with the facts of the revealed history. ..."
Besides thus putting the reader on a wrong scent by
inserting what Hampden did not say, Newman also
omits what Hampden did say ; with the result of
making him appear to say what he did not say. Thus
—whereas Hampden is at some pains to distinguish
THE FIRST TRACTARIAN ATTACK 47
the Scriptural doctrine of the Trinity from the techni cal language in which it has been expressed in later times, and describes " the truth of the Trinitarian doctrine " as emerging " from these mists of speculation " like land from fog — Newman omits all this; inserts nothing but Hampden's attack on the "speculative" doctrine ; and then leaves the reader to infer that Hampden practically rejects the doctrine altogether. Commenting on these tactics, Arnold, in the Edinburgh Review, declared that " these omissions happen so un luckily to fall upon passages which would have altered the whole tone and character of the quotations, that there is no possibility of acquitting the compiler of deliberate dishonesty." I do not accept this judgment. But the reader may be glad to see Hampden's state ment in full, with the omitted portions bracketed :—
" [The examination then, I would observe, has forcibly impressed on my mind the conviction, that the principal, if not the only, diffi culties on the doctrine of the Trinity, arise from metaphysical con siderations — from abstractions of our own mind, quite distinct from the proper, intrinsic, mystery of the holy truth in itself. Perplexities from the nature of Number, of Time, of Being ; in short, all those various conceptions of the mind which are its ultimate facts, and beyond which no power of analysis can reach; these, I think, the course of the present inquiry has tended to show, are our real stumbling-block, causing the wisdom of God to be received as the foolishness of man. These have forced themselves on the form of the Divine Mystery, and given it that theoretic air, that atmosphere of repulsion, in which it is invested.
"The truth itself of the Trinitarian doctrine emerges from these mists of human speculation, like the bold, naked land, on which an atmosphere of fog has for awhile rested, and then been dispersed.] No one can be more convinced than I am, that there is a real mystery of God revealed in the Christian dispensation ; and that no scheme of Unitarianism can solve the whole of the pheno mena which Scripture records. But I am also as fully sensible, that
48 THE FIRST TRACTARIAN ATTACK
there is a mystery attached to the subject, which is not a mystery of God.
" Take, for instance, the notion of the Divine Unity. We are apt to conceive that the Unity must be understood numerically ; l that we may reason from the notion of Unity, to the properties of the Divine Being. But is this a just notion of the Unity of God ? [Is it not rather a bare fact, a limit of speculation, instead of a point of outset ? For how was it revealed in that system, in which it was the great leading article of divine instruction ? When Moses called upon the people : — 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord : ' — was it not a declaration, that Jehovah is not that host of heaven, — that multiplicity of the objects of divine worship, which heathen idolatry has enshrined, but the God in heaven, and in the earth, and in the sea, — not the Teraphim of domestic worship, but the Uni versal Governor, overshadowing all things with the ubiquarian tutelage of his Providence ?] Surely the revelation of the Divine Unity was not meant to convey to Israel any speculative notion of the oneness of the Deity ; but, practically, to influence their minds in regard to the superstitions from which they had been brought out. [It was no other than the command, ' Thou shalt have no other Gods but me ']."
Although * 'deliberate dishonesty " is not the explana tion of these omissions, they are certainly somewhat unfair, even in themselves ; and all the more when con sidered in conjunction with Newman's effective com ment — in which he declares that Hampden regards the doctrines of the Trinity and incarnation as merely " unrevealed opinions " and " pious deductions." He also catches at Hampden's antique phrase, u solve the phenomena which Scripture records," to suggest that
1 " In Gregory Nazianzen, Orat. 45, p. 417, the question is proposed, 'If the nature of God is simple, how will it admit the number three ? ' &c.
"Again, ' Integer, perfectus numerus Trinitatis est.' Condi. Sirmiens. A.D. 357. Hilar. De Synodis, Opera, p. 466. — Tlpbs Se /cai QVCTIK)) avdyKij /jiovaSa elvai 5ua5os apx'nv. Damasc. De Fid. Orthod. I. c. 5.
' ' The Valentinian system was a play of numbers. The Pythagorean part of Platonism, the philosophy of Numbers, it cannot be doubted must have exercised great influence over the minds of the early philosophic Christians. So also would the Jewish mystical application of Numbers, on the converts from Judaism."
THE FIRST TRACTARIAN ATTACK 49
the lecturer regards them, not as realities but as "phenomena" i.e., mere appearances. Again, he de scribes his opponent as admitting that " there is some mystery," but what it is, " is not revealed "* ; Hampden declares, he says, that it is l< not scriptural or necessary to insist upon the numerical or real unity of the Supreme Being." Here, by the audacious insertion of " real," he altogether misses, or ignores, the fact that Hampden did insist upon the real unity, but protested that the merely numerical unity was not the " real " one, which was of a spiritual nature. What the Lecture is attacking, is not the doctrines, but the later metaphy sical expositions of the doctrines, as may be seen by its conclusion, in which Augustine is quoted as confessing himself unable to distinguish between " begotten " and " proceeding " when applied to the " Persons " in the Trinity :
"The only ancient, only Catholic, truth is the Scriptural fact. Let us hold that fast in its depth and breadth — in nothing extenuat ing, in nothing abridging it — in simplicity and sincerity; and we can neither be Sabellians, or Tritheists, or Socinians. Attempt to explain, to satisfy scruples, to reconcile difficulties ; and the chance is, that, however we may disclaim the heterodoxy which lurks on every step of our path, we incur, at least, the scandal at the hands of others, whose piety, or prejudices, or acuteness, may be offended by our words.
" I should hope the discussions in which we have now been en gaged, will leave this impression on the mind. Historically regarded they evidence the reality of those sacred facts of Divine Providence which we comprehensively denote by the doctrine of a Trinity in Unity. But let us not identify this reality with the theories couched under a logical phraseology. I firmly and devoutly believe that word, which has declared the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. But who can pretend to that exactness of thought on the subject, on which our technical language is based?
VOL. II E
5o THE FIRST TRACTARIAN ATTACK
Looking to the simple truth of Scripture, I would say, in the language of Augustine : Hac sew. Distinguere autem inter illam Generatio- nem et hanc Frocessionem, nestio, non valeo, non sufficiol — Verius emm cogitatur Deus, quam dicitur, d verius est quam cogitatur.^
1 " Contra Maxinnn." III. p. 237. 4to. ed 3 "De Trin. VII. c. 4."
CHAPTER XXII
VICTORY
§ 88. Which side was the more Anglican ?
USING the word Tradition in its broadest sense, many who may not sympathize with Newman in this assault, may feel some sympathy with his cause. We may admire Hampden's charitableness, and yet doubt whether the Bible-Christian theory, however useful once, is well fitted for the present age. It worked well for the sixteenth century, but will it work for the twentieth ? The Reformers had to repair, or rebuild, and that in haste, a Church that was partly falling, partly already in ruins ; to patch, to touch up, prop, besides pulling down what seemed quite unsound and building the fragments into the restored edifice. For them, nothing could be better than to take the Bible as the basis for religious doctrine, and the whole nation (not the clergy merely) as the judge of such in terpretations of the Bible as any man must accept if he was to receive the authority of the nation with the view of publicly teaching religious truth in a national pulpit. They could not have said this ; for it would have been an anachronism. But this was what they did.
But in 1832 it was time, perhaps, to go further than this. The hour had almost arrived when it was
E 2
52 VICTORY
needful to add that Christian Tradition is the handing on, from age to age, not only of the letter, but also of the interpretation of the Christian Scriptures, and this, not always without some change ; so that " interpreting " the Bible might include revising or re-editing the Bible. Hampden's views tended rather in the opposite direction. His marked distinc tion between the "facts," or realities, of Scripture, and the speculative deductions of interpreters, would lead us to lay more stress than ever on the former as the sole depository of religious truth. This would confirm many in the belief that every word of the Bible was so dictated to its writer by God Himself as to be spiritually or morally true if it related to matters of spiritual or moral truth ; and historically or scientifi cally true if it bore on facts of history or science. It may be urged that, as against the Tractarians, this view was not distinctively Hampden's : they held it as well, and Newman as decidedly as any of them. But they supplemented it so as to prepare the way for something different. They admitted that some of their most cherished beliefs could not be found in Scripture, unless Scripture were interpreted by Tradition. Prac tically therefore they did — what Froude was prepared to do in theory as well as in practice — they agreed that Tradition must be accepted, not only as the " witness " and " keeper," but also as the " interpreter," of Scripture.
In this way they did good, though unintentionally. Some of them would have liked to confine " Tradition " to the first three or four centuries ; but when the principle was once admitted, this arbitrary limitation became difficult. Pressed by Rome, on the one side I and by rational Christians on the other, what answei
VICTORY 53
could they make to the questions, " Why stop at the fourth century ? " " Why stop at the fourteenth or fifteenth?" " Why at the eighteenth?" Thus, we may imagine an ultra-Traditionist cordially accepting Tradition, but stating his views somewhat to this effect : " Tradition is doctrine so based on experience and reason as to obtain acceptance of a kind that does not necessitate constant appeal to private judgment ; and this must not be limited to any century nor to any people, nor to any class : — not, for example, to Greeks or Romans of the later Empire, nor to the clergy merely. Even in the nineteenth century a ' tradition ' may be established ; and Englishmen and Germans may help to establish it. And the laity may play their part. Scripture must be interpreted by Tradition ; but ' inter preted ' must be used freely and amply so as to include more or less modification in the light of fresh dis coveries. Thus, some expressions that have been supposed to be literal or historical may have to be regarded as metaphorical, or poetical, or inaccurate ; others that were regarded as inaccurate may be shown to be literally true. Precepts, again, that may apply in the letter to one age, may apply in the spirit alone to another. And the moral judgments of some of the Scriptural writers may, under the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit, be perceived not only to be wrong for us now, but even to have been wrong for the writers then." As a preparation for such a view of the Scrip tures as this, the Tractarian attack on Dr. Hampden was indirectly not without some use.
But it is altogether a different question whether the Tractarians as a whole, and Newman in particular, deserved to triumph on the purely Anglican merits of the case. To speak, first, of the Tractarians. They,
54
VICTORY
on their side, might complain that, whereas Hampden had pledged himself to belief in the Athanasian Creed, he practically rejected it. For the Creed repeatedly says that whoever "will be saved " must " think about the Trinity " as the Creed dictates, and that this is " necessary to everlasting salvation " ; but Hampden declared that belief in this detailed and technical expo sition, although, in a way, " necessary " for his own salvation — because he believes it and would be acting dishonestly if he professed to reject it — yet is not 11 necessary" for the salvation of those who, with equal honesty, cannot find these propositions either in Scrip ture, or in any conclusive deductions from Scripture. So far, the Tractarians appear to be the more orthodox. And perhaps they may also seem to be more consistent : for it certainly does seem absurd to say, "Such and such a belief is ' necessary ' for the salvation of those who believe it, but not ' necessary ' for the salvation of those who disbelieve it."
Yet Hampden would have a defence, too, and, from the Anglican point of view, not a bad one. As to orthodoxy, he might reply that, in the Anglican Church, the Anglican reasons given for the acceptance of the Athanasian Creed indicate an ultimate appeal to Scrip ture ; and that plain and simple people — who heartily accept all Scripture, but cannot even understand the meaning of the Athanasian Creed ; much less, under stand the proof of it from Scripture ; least of all, find it in Scripture — cannot be supposed to be condemned to " perish everlastingly " on account of their inability. More forcibly still, he might argue that the Anglican Church claims no more infallibility for herself, even as to " matters of faith," than she allows to the Churches of Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome ; so that, even
VICTORY 55
when she says to her members, " Believe this, or perish everlastingly," she always adds sotto voce, " But, re member, I may be in error as to any matter of faith, and therefore as to this." Hence, at the worst — he might argue — all Anglican threats of damnation are always to be taken as merely conditional or provisional. Besides, as against the Tractarian leaders, if he had access to the cabinet in which Newman kept Froude's letters, Hampden might have said that his position with reference to " things necessary to salvation " was precisely the same, in principle, as that of Froude. For Froude had said that everything that a man honestly believed was " necessary " for his (the believer's) salvation, and nothing was " necessary, "for kirn, that he could not honestly believe ; but that the Church might impose certain beliefs as necessary terms of Communion. ° This," Hampden might have said, " is precisely my view. Only, whereas Froude would have accepted every clause in the Athanasian Creed as ' necessary ' in this sense, and would have ' waived' the Articles, I, being an Anglican, prefer to ' waive ' some of the Athanasian clauses and abide by the Anglican Articles : and this I conceive to be, from the Anglican point of view, the more orthodox of the two positions."
This seems plausible. Nevertheless there remains the obstinate fact that every Anglican minister who takes Froude's and Hampden's view of these appa rently uncharitable expressions in the Athanasian Creed does so explain them as to explain them away. It would be better to disuse the words than to use them thus. On the whole, let us say that, as between Hampden and the Tractarians, the Anglican merits of the case are about evenly balanced.
VICTORY
§89. Did the Victor fight fairly ?
But we can hardly say the same as between Hamp- den and Newman. Of these two, there can be no doubt that the former was by far the more faithful to the spirit of the Anglican Articles ; and the latter ought to have at least tempered the fierceness of his attack by recognizing this. Newman must have been conscious that his Via Media depended upon an ability in his new Anglican Church to say to Dissenters, " We are, in matters of faith, practically speaking, infallible ; within our pale, you are safe ; step outside it, and we cannot call you even Christians." But he knew also that this was totally antagonistic to the Article which declared that General Councils have erred and may err "in matters pertaining to God." So well did he know this that we shall presently find him explaining away that Article by asserting that it did not apply to General Councils called together in the name of Christ- an evasion so gross that even his devoted follower W. G. Ward could not accept it, nor has Dean Church found himself able to defend it.
Moreover, even in the haste in which he composed his Elucidations, it was unpardonable in him to take advantage of Hampden's disparagement of the meta physical and numerical expositions of the doctrine of the Trinity in order to suggest that his opponent had no practical belief in the doctrine at all. His own experience of the results of pondering over these mysteries ought to have made him more charitable. When he was writing and re-writing The Arians, he himself had been "fussed" and "fagged" in those labyrinthine speculations. To such straits had he been
VICTORY 57
driven that he hardly ventured to make an assertion, and had confessed to a friend that he should resort to " hypothetical " in dealing with the Incarnation and the Trinity : " your if" he had said, " is a great peace maker." Did it become one living in a house so transparently fragile to be so prominent and so violent in throwing stones at a fellow-theologian who honestly confessed that, though he believed the doctrine in a spiritual sense, he could not accept all the technical phraseology with which it had been enveloped by a polemical scholasticism borrowing the language of Aristotle to confute heresy ?
Still, Newman's flagrant fault is the controversial unfairness with which he poisoned the minds of those who read his Elucidations by the insertions and omissions which have been mentioned above. Some allowance must be made, perhaps, for the indirect effect of political feeling at Oxford in connection with the proposed admission of Dissenters to the University, and for Newman's sense of " provocation." Certainly, in these days, it would be thought shocking to quote ex tracts from an opponent and to omit passages without inserting marks of omission : yet Newman, in two con secutive quotations, makes three^ such unnoticed omissions (I have not searched for more). Yet even for that polemical age the collective injustice of Newman's Elucidations was too gross. What Arnold said of it, has been quoted above, imputing " deliberate dishonesty " to the author ; but Arnold was not only a theological opponent but also person ally unacquainted with Newman's character. Far more surprising is the testimony of Whately. Partisan though he may have been, up to certain limits, Whately was nevertheless a man in whom the
58 VICTORY
logical element was more potent that any polemics ; and he was pre-eminently just. If Newman, by fair logical measures, could have convicted. Hampden of heresy, Whately might have extenuated the fault, or censured the criticism as bitter and spiteful : but he could hardly have brought against Hampden's opponents, and against Newman in particular, the following accusations :—
" A ' pure and holy man ' is one who fasts twice in the week but neglects the weightier matters of the law, 'judgment and justice and mercy.' I think the ' holy men ' who garbled and distorted Hampden's Bampton Lectures with the deliberate design of holding him up to the hatred and persecution of unthinking bigots, are the genuine descendants of those Roman Emperors who dressed up the early Christians in the skins of beasts and then set dogs at them to worry them to death."
And again in a letter to Hawkins in 1843 :—
" It is several years now since the Elucidations of Hampden was published ; and I cannot conceive anyone either writing or reading that tissue of deliberate and artful misrepresentations (comparing it with Hampden's own volume) without perceiving — unless he were a downright fool — that it consisted of the ' suppressio veri ' so con trived as to amount to the ' suggestio falsi ' — the kind of lies which Swift justly calls the worst, 'a lie guarded.' The author and the approvers of such a work (as many as were acquainted with Hampden's) could have nothing to learn from the 'Slanderer' himself."
Archdeacon Hare is another witness, not indeed against the Elucidations, but for the value and general orthodoxy of Hampden's work. He wrote twelve years after the controversy, when people had time to review it coolly ; and he speaks of it as "learned and thoughtful," and as distinguished by " philosophical candour and sobriety." Hampden's use of the word "facts" he regards as " one of the chief causes of the suspicion he has incurred " ; and he says
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that " in preaching to a common congregation " it would have been very injudicious to use such a term in any .other than its ordinary sense ; but, "as he was preaching to the University of Oxford, he thought he might assume that, notwithstanding their adherence to the philosophy of Aristotle, they would understand the Baconian use of the word which the context in several places plainly sets forth " : and then he quotes from the Lectures a passage about ''those sacred facts of Divine Providence which we compre hensively denote by the doctrine of a Trinity in Unity." Proceeding to discuss some of the documents circulated by Hampden's enemies in 1836 as sum maries, or as condemnations, of his lectures, he conclu sively shows their unfairness, and charges them with " effrontery," " clamour on the part of the accusers, ignorance on that of their hearers," describes some of their propositions as " dishonest," and goes through the detailed process of " untying one knot of falsehood after another." This evidence is rendered important by the character and learning of the writer, his detach ment from the time and scene of the original con flict, and his careful study of the Lectures. The reader will note that, although he makes no mention of the Elucidations, he indirectly condemns it by censuring its chief fault, that is, the misrepresentation of Hampden as having said that Scripture is a mere record of historical facts.
Francis Newman (who tells us that he, too, had been misled by his brother's Elucidations] adds an interesting story about Samuel Wilberforce and his change of opinion as to the merits of the controversy. About a dozen years after he had been attacked as a Professor, it was Hampden's fate to rouse a second
60 VICTORY
controversy as a prospective bishop. Samuel VVilber- force, then Bishop of Oxford, came up on a visit to Hawkins, prepared to listen favourably to a protest from the clergy against Hampden's consecration — and this, simply on the same grounds on which, as a curate, he had voted against Hampden in 1836. He had read Newman's Elucidations. It had seemed con clusive. There appeared no need to read the Lectures, and he had never read them. In answer to the Provost's remonstrance, he said that he could trust Newman for the facts and quotations, and that they spoke for themselves ; there was no answering them. But he was persuaded to spend an evening over the Lectures, and that evening convinced him that he had been grossly deceived.
§ 90. The result
If this was the case with two men of such ability and
opportunities for getting information, we may easily
understand that a good many of the country clergy
who flocked up to Oxford to support the Church of
England by voting against heresy, were not only
deceived at the time but never undeceived. Was it
in accordance with human nature to buy and read an
expensive book, and what might seem to most of them
a dull book — a book of 548 pages, written by an
enemy — when they could read all of it that was
necessary for their purpose in a pamphlet of 47 pages,
containing the objectionable passages in large, clear,
print and in separate paragraphs ; with a summary
of them, in still larger and clearer print ; beginning
with an introduction which told them that the
Regius Professor of Divinity whom Lord Melbourne
intended to inflict on the University, had stated the
VICTORY 61
Scripture to be " a mere record of historical • facts," and ending with the following peroration : — ?
"What may be the issue of the present anxious conflict of opinion in this place, He will order according to His wisdom, who has pro mised that all things shall work together for good for those who love Him. But should it end in the appointment of Dr. H. to the theo logical Chair, he* believes that ten years hence, those who are in no way protesting against his appointment now, would, if then alive, feel that they had upon them a responsibility greater than has been in curred by Members of this University for many centuries."
The result was what might have been expected. Hampden indeed became Regius Professor, for the Government would not give way. They did not intend to allow Oxford to exclude Dissenters for ever, and they therefore refused to accept the resignation which he placed in their hands. But, as far as Oxford was concerned, the Tractarians gained a complete victory. The Elucidations elucidated Hampden most effectively, and this, not only for the country clergy but for the residents also *. The Heads of Houses brought in a proposal to stigmatize the new Professor by depriving him of his vote in the choice of Select Preachers till the University should otherwise determine. The veto of the Proctors in March served only to delay their triumph ; and in the following May Hampden was formally humiliated by the splendid majority of 474 to 94. I call the triumph a Tractarian one for it was theirs by right. Numerically, the High and Dry, and the Evangelicals, constituted, of course, the larger portion of the victorious band ; to which the Tractarians sent but a small contingent. But the inspiring force had proceeded from the Tractarian Leader. The hands were the hands of the orthodox ;
62 VICTORY
but the voice that had moved them was that of the author of the Elucidations.
No rational person, reviewing the facts, can maintain that the victor had fought fairly. But it does not follow that he was guilty of the " deliberate dis honesty " imputed to him by Arnold and Whately. There was very little, if any, more unfairness in the Elucidations than in the Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles ; and in both cases it sprang from mental, rather than from moral deficiency. Subtle and keen though he usually was, there were seasons when Newman lost all patience, all steadiness of thought, all power of suspending judgment. This was always a fault of his when he worked under unusual pressure. At such times he simply could not see his adversary's position. Probably he had not read Hampden's Lectures with any attention till he looked at them in order to detect heresy in the newly-appointed Pro fessor. As he broke down in the Schools as an under graduate, and again as an examiner, and then, once more in his Arians, and afterwards in his Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles, and after that in his Essay on Doctrinal Development ; and, in each case, through excessive haste, and inadequate steadiness in persistent preparation, so here : he broke down with a mental rather than a moral collapse, succumbing to theological prejudice, and party spirit, and to the excitement of consciously championing what seemed to be a noble cause, "sitting up all night" and trying to summarize a learned, thoughtful, and scholarlike work of more than 500 pages, in such a way as to ruin the prospects of its author. But he was not "dishonest," nor was he — what Whately suggests as an alternative — a. " fool." The true explanation, in
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the main, of this and some other of Newman's aberra tions, was given by Sir James Stephen, as follows :
"As for Newman himself, I am sorry that his integrity should be impugned. I am convinced that a more upright man does not exist. But his understanding is essentially illogical and inveterately imagi native ; and I have reason to fear that he labours under a degree of cerebral excitement, which unfits him for the mastery of his own thoughts and the guidance of his own pen."
Not a week after the Elucidations had appeared, Newman wrote to Bowden : " I suppose I shall soon hear something from Hampden in answer to my pam phlet — though that must be in other words, in answer to himself, since I do but quote him." This is, surely, a convincing proof that Newman was not conscious that he had done his adversary any injustice. Yet that he had violated some of the most obvious rules of literary controversy, must be apparent to all who now give five minutes to the dispassionate consideration of the question. The inference is, that on questions of this kind, Newman's conscience did not guide him rightly. He obeyed it, so far as he heard it ; but either its voice was silenced by other voices within him, or, if not, then his conscience itself led him wrong, being what he calls somewhere " a sort of bad con science." Morally, as well as intellectually, neither of these alternatives appears to represent a wholly satisfactory state of mind ; for moral honesty cannot say to intellectual dishonesty, " Thus far shalt thou go and no farther." But where " cerebral excitement " steps in, there irresponsibility begins ; and we gladly acquit Newman of the tremendous charge expressed in Whately's reprobation, by recognizing that in this and other cases, in spite of his skill in logical fence, he was incapable of reasoning fairly upon evidence, when he was under the influence of strong desire.
CHAPTER XXIII
PRESSING FORWARD
§ 91. "A Cardinal Point of Time"
" MARCH, 1836," says Newman, reviewing his own career, "is a cardinal point of time.5' Among other important events which clustered round that " cardinal point," he mentions his mother's death which took place in the following May. Its suddenness, and his consequent inability to exchange last words with her, add to the pathos with which he deplores the recent estrangement between them : —
" What has been to me distressing in my work, is, that it has been one of the causes which kept me from being much with my mother lately. But there was another cause. I mean of late years my mother has much misunderstood my religious views, and considered she differed from me ; and she thought I was surrounded by admirers, and had everything my own way ; and in consequence I, who am conscious to myself I never thought anything more precious than her sympathy and praise, had none of it."
The editor of the Letters appends a note of explana tion. Mrs. Newman, she says, was uniformly kind and amiable to all her children and to their friends ; but the stir and tone of the Movement might well disturb her inner thoughts. She was not constituted to throw herself into it, either by temperament or by circum-
PRESSING FORWARD 65
stance ; and she could not give her son what he missed —her sympathy : " He sorrowfully confesses to his sister, looking back, that his manner, under the change, might sometimes ill express what was in his heart."
Deprived of Froude, and now of his mother, with one sister married, and the other to be married a few months afterwards, Newman must have felt alone indeed. Yet he assures his younger sister she must not think of him as lonely : u God intends me to be lonely ; He has so framed my mind that I am in a great measure beyond the sympathies of other people and thrown upon Himself. .... God, I trust, will support me in following whither He leads." Similarly to Harriett: "at the worst", he says, he is but returning to the state in which he was before he knew Froude. " Ever since that time"* he had learned to throw himself upon himself; and, after all, life is short; it is "better to be pursuing what seems God's will than to be look ing after one's own comfort " ; "I am learning more than hitherto to live in the presence of the dead — this is a gain which strange faces cannot take away." How much this feeling of communion with the departed had been growing in Newman may be seen from the only two poems of 1835 — the last until we come to the Roman period — both of which bring before us the in tercession of the Dead for the Living. There can be no doubt whose voice Newman was henceforth to hear most distinctly amid all the earthly din and uproar of the conflict of the Tracts : it was that of the man whose Breviary — assigned to him by a chance utterance of some friend which he accepted as a message from heaven — lay always on his study table — destined to lie there for half a century, to the possession of which he attached such importance that, besides minutely
VOL. II F
66 PRESSING FORWARD
describing the incident in the Apologia, he records it in the Letters, along with his mother's death, as one of nine important events of this critical year :— " my knowing and using the Breviary."
From his youth, Newman took a pleasure in being alone. But whatever was pleasurable he generally suspected as a snare. Hence we might have supposed that he might sometimes regard his love of solitude as a temptation to egotism, self-exaltation, or theological hardness. But the precedents of saintly solitude in the ancient Church— besides the deep and bitter pain at tending this new solitude — would dispel such doubts. Thus, therefore, confirmed and hardened in his unsym pathetic detachment from the common world by the belief that " God intended it," he plunged with fresh ardour into the battle for the Church. Everything was full of promise. The skirmishing of the Tracts having thinned the enemy's ranks, it was now proposed to complete their rout by the heavier artillery of larger treatises. Attacks were to go on from all quarters. The Lyra Apostolica was to be printed ; a Library of the Fathers to be started— at Pusey's suggestion, but Newman was to help, and to write the preface ; Hur- rell Froude's Remains too were to be edited by Keble and himself ; and he was also laboriously working at a series of lectures which was to be published next year under the title of The Prophetical Office of the Church, viewed relatively to Romanism and Popular Protes tantism.
The confidence he felt at this time is described in a passage of the Apologia which records the beginning of the Library of the Fathers. It was a confidence not in anything that was, but in what was to be, in " thi event." He did not very well know what the Father:
PRESSING FORWARD 67
would be found to teach ; but he felt that the Church of England was substantially founded on them. There could come no harm from the project. If there was anything in the Fathers of a startling character, that would be only for a time ; it might be explained ; or it might be altogether on the Anglican side ; in any case " it could not lead to Rome." These views he ex pressed in the preface to the first volume, in which he bade his readers go forth hopefully and not indulge in criticism till they knew more about them ; they must "look forward steadily and hopefully to the event," when, as they trusted, all that was inharmonious in the details would at length be practically smoothed. It is this perfect confidence in the not-yet-existent, which led him to make the large concessions which we shall soon find him making to Romanism in the conflict which he was beginning to wage with it. // could not lead to Rome ; and the present condition of the English Church seemed to him so ultra-protestant that to Romanize it a little, or even a good deal, could not but do good. To use his own metaphor, " no harm could come of bending the crooked stick the other way in the process of straightening it ; it was impossible to break it."
§ 92. Rose asks for an explanation
Yet when Newman sat down quietly to review the grounds of his confidence — not for an enemy who might be lawfully answered u according to his folly ", but for ja perplexed friend — he lets us see the weaker side j of his operations. Already, we perceive, he had before his mind at least two " events," and his plans and tactics suffered a little from distraction between the two.
F 2
68 PRESSING FORWARD
He was contemplating two positions, one inside the Church of England, and one outside it ; and he wished to be ready for either.
Another obstacle prevented him from clearly realiz ing his views. Ever since, if not before, the beginning of the Tractarian Movement, he had used words "eco nomically " or tactically ; asking for example, more than he expected to get, in the hope of getting more than he would have otherwise got ; and sometimes choosing phrases rather to frighten adversaries than to express exactly his own meaning. Hence, of course, when he came to reconsider why he had said this or that, he could not always remember whether it was because he meant what he said, or for some other reason. All this appears in a letter of this date to Rose, the Editor of the British Magazine, who had expressed uneasiness about two papers of Newman's entitled " Home Thoughts Abroad," which had been published in that and the preceding month. No. 2 ha been sent to Rose for publication nine months before It was to appear— so Newman had informed Froud in September, 1835— " directly Rose finds room " fo it. This did not convey the truth ; which, in Froude illness, Newman perhaps desired to conceal from bin Rose had written in June, 1835 about No. 2, " As yo will certainly seem to good Protestants to leave our Church in an awkward position at the end of your present paper, would it not be well to give the answer which you are about to do to the difficulty, along with the difficulty itself— to give, in short, No. 3 with No, 2 ?" This was a polite way of declining No. 2 without No. 3 : and though Newman told Froude there wa " not much in" No. 2, we find Keble thinking th the Roman view of " development " in it was
PRESSING FORWARD
" plausible" that he proposed to " tackle " it in some Bampton Lectures.
At last, in 1836, the " difficulty " and the "answer" had appeared in consecutive numbers of the British Magazine; but apparently the Editor thought the Anglican, so much weaker than the Roman article, that he wrote* to Newman to ask for some explanation. Like Pusey, Rose seems to have regarded the Trac- tarian campaign as defensive — "stationary" Pusey called it — and he did not enter into, or understand, Newman's determination to go forward, he knew not exactly whither. He wanted to know Newman's definite goal. His contributor seemed to have abso lutely killed Protestantism, and to have raised up on the other side an imposing figure of a Church of Authority which many of his readers would identify with Rome : what did it all mean ? To take one instance, they had started with the understanding that the Anglican Liturgy was not to be altered ; yet Newman was proposing in " Home Thoughts " to re vive the Romanizing forms retained in King Edward's First Prayer-Book but subsequently discarded : how was this to be explained ?
Newman's reply (as set forth in rough notes) claims that he must not be thought inconsistent if at different times he gives different reasons for his published state ments. He seems to have before himself, he says, "vast and complicated truths," and "perhaps I have not realized to myself in the simplest form the end or object which I feel"-— a curious use of "feel" which however (no doubt) exactly expressed Newman's meaning, viz., that he was groping (or "feeling") not seeing. There were, he goes on to say, two pros pective dangers ; the first, from Rome, on the subject
7o PRESSING FORWARD
of Church authority, power, claims, &c. ; as to which, half-solutions would no longer suffice ; they must " fore stall objections and their answers.7'* On this point,— using language somewhat less confident than that quoted above, " it could not lead to Rome "• —he says, " There appears to be that in the Church of Rome, as it is at present, which seems utterly to preclude our return to her." (Let the reader note, by the way, these ominously cautious qualifications, " appears" "as it is at present," and " seems " — which are by no means neutralized by the " utterly.") The second danger he describes as a levelling " crash," i.e. disestablishment for which he would provide by causing the Church to attract the middle classes — and not merely the aris tocracy and the poor through the aristocracy. I neither of these dangers should occur, he points oul that his theory would be dismissed as a dream, anc could do no harm ; but if either fear were realised his sketch might at least suggest some remedy ; anc even though it might be ineffectual against the seconc danger, yet, as to the former, ' ' if something of the sort is not drawn out against the Romanist, surely he will puzzle us."
As to the alteration of the Liturgy which he hac suggested, he does not deny that this was inconsistent as Rose had pointed out, with the tone of the early Tracts ; but in one at least of these Tracts it had been stated that the reason for being contented with things as they were, was that every one had " crotchets o his own." Well, his object was, in a sense, to keep things as they were. The only way to stop the desire of the innovators to alter the Baptismal Service was " to talk of King Edward's First Book." By throwing out threats of this kind, they might be of use to men
PRESSING FORWARD 71
high in the Church. Already they had forced their enemies to take a lower tone, to drop their aggressive innovations, and to defend themselves. The great principle he would ever maintain, was, to remain satisfied with what they had, and to contend for that ; but, if once they were dislodged from their existing position, to try to get a better. In conclusion, he touches on " excitements." Rose absolutely dis believed in them and regarded them as a cause of "certain mischief" in propagating religion. Newman was far too much alive to the infirmities of human nature to accept a doctrine that would have been fatal to the Via Media, which he had sketched for himself as likely to compete successfully with Rome. But he rests his defence of them on Scripture. "As to ( excitements ' it is a very large subject : but I do not think the utter repression of these is the Gospel way of dealing with them. The Roman Catholic Church stops the safety-valve of excitement of Reason ; we that of the excitement of Feeling. In consequence Ro manists turn infidels, and Anglicans turn Wesleyans."
Perhaps the most interesting sentence in this long letter is one that is cancelled. It occurs immediately after the passage in which he protests that the Romanist "will assuredly puzzle" them, if something is not done of the kind which he has attempted in " Home Thoughts," to anticipate and answer the Roman objec tions. Then come these words : "\_Iconceive I suggest an answer, I feel myself to do so, to his strong point s~\ ".
" Conceive," "suggest," "feel," and then the can celling — how characteristic, this, of one who does not believe in words ! At this very time Newman was busy with the Roman controversy — finding it "hard head-work," we are told — writing, cancelling, and
72 PRESSING FORWARD
revising his Lectures on Romanism and Popular Protestantism, which he is said to have re-written some five times. For a man who feels that the reasons he puts before the public are not the rea sons that move him, so that their cogency or want of cogency, with himself, is no criterion at all as to their effect on others, it was dramatically fit and right that he should at first feel that he had crushed his Roman antagonist; then, that he should " conceive" that he had at least "suggested" an answer to his objections ; and finally, that he should feel quite un certain about the whole matter, and therefore cancel the sentence. Besides this general haze of uncertainty, the consciousness of two objects — the one, to contend for the present position, the other, to contend for a better — must have conduced to bewilderment, at times, both in himself, and in those who followed him and strove to understand him. For, in " talking of King Edward's First Book," if he had regard to the first object, he could say, " My object is only to frighten the Evangelicals ; I do not really aim at restoring the First Book " : but, next day, perhaps, in a different mood, anticipating the second object and the "better position," he would say " Yes, it expresses what I am really aiming at. I want to bend the stick backwards. Edward's First Book is just what I desire." This was scarcely a position where he could long stand still ; he was bound to be moving towards the "better position " ; and the death of Rose was destined, before long, to increase the rate of progress.
§ 93. "The Forgiveness of Sins"
Among the events of this " cardinal point of time," might very well have been included the circulation
PRESSIi\7G FORWARD 73
and discussion of Pusey's Tract, of which Newman's summary has been quoted above. " Nothing," he said in 1876, "had had greater weight than Pusey's Tract on Baptism."
Its effect is manifest in the first sermon preached by Newman after his mother's death, and entitled " Peace and Joy amid Chastisement." Gloom, logical and consistent, pervades almost the whole discourse. It declares that a man is not "to take up a notion that God has forgiven him," if he has repented of a sin and besought forgiveness, and made such amend ment as he can. "Who is to forgive him ? How is he to know it ? No, I see no certainty for him. . . . Memory tells him that he has had sins upon his con science ; he has no warrant that they are not there still ; and what has come, what is to come of them, what future consequences they imply, is unknown to him." If a man brings " penury" on himself by past extravagance he is to consider that —
"God has not absolutely forgiven the sin past ; here is a proof He has not,— He is punishing it. It will be said, He has forgiven it as to its eternal consequences. Where is the proof of this ? all we see is, that He is punishing it. If we argue from what we see, He has not forgiven it at all. Here a man will say, ' How can He be gracious to me in other ways, unless He has been gracious so as to forgive ? Is not forgiveness the first step in grace ?' "
To this — as one might have thought— irresistible objection, Newman replies, " It was, when we were baptized ; whether it is so since, must be decided from Scripture." And he urges that reason, as well as Scripture, is against the objection :
"Nothing is more compatible with reason, judging from our ex perience of life, than that we should have God's present favour and
74 PRESSING FORWARD
help without full pardon for the past. Supposing, for instance, a child has disobeyed us, and, in disobeying has met with an accident. Do we at once call him to account, and not wait awhile till he is in a fit state to be spoken to, and when we can better decide whether or no what has befallen him be a sufficient punishment ? "
The parallel is no parallel. The offender, in the former case, is supposed to have repented, to have expressed penitence, and to have made what amend ment is possible. In order to constitute a true parallel, we should have to suppose that the child had done the same thing : and then, what parent is there who would not at once say, " I forgive you. Put away all thought of my being any longer angry : I may have hereafter to do certain things for your good, to prevent your offending again ; and these things may be what the world calls punishment and may make the world think I am angry, but you must not think so. You are forgiven." But Newman seems incapable of seeing that perfect forgiveness is compatible with the infliction of punishment ; and that remission of punishment is merely a sign — and not a necessary sign at all, not a sign to the spiritual, but only to the worldly — of the remission of sin. In this confusion of thought, he naturally gives up the parallel, almost as soon as he has suggested it, by telling us that we know nothing about God's method of forgiveness, except as it is taught in Scripture :—
" No exact parallel can be found. We do not even know what is meant by saying that God, who sees the end from the beginning, par dons at one time rather than at another. We can but take divine truth as it is given us. We know there is one time at least when He pardons persons whom (sic) He foresees will afterwards fall away and perish ; I mean, the time of Baptism."
Then, step by step, he destroys the last hope that
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God will ever, in this life, fully forgive, or restore fully to the filial position, any child of His who ever com mits a sin after the unconscious period of babyhood, when the infant received "its first step in grace." First, he cuts away any hope that we might base upon repentance. Scripture, he admits, declares that those who repent shall be forgiven ; but he replies, what is repentance ? If we are distressed, that is the work of God's Spirit, but does not show that we have duly repented. Next, as to the efficacy of faith, it must be " living faith," and that can only be ascertained by works ; and what works can possibly bring the assur ance that our faith is able to do this great thing ? If men say that "they have an assurance," they are asked, where does Scripture tell them that such an " assurance " comes from God ? If they quote " Ask, and ye shall receive," the retort is, " Where is it said that we shall gain by once asking ? " Do we not say in the Church Service that " the remembrance of our sins is grievous, the burden of them is intolerable " ? and " is not this to confess that we are not sure of their pardon ? Else why are they a burden ? " So at last he brings us to this conclusion, that, as long as we live, we must bear a burden of sin which will increase to our life's end, and that we cannot but feel insecure as to the eternal issue. We are " at present most happily circumstanced, in the midst of God's choicest gifts,"- he means, by this, " church privileges " — " but with evil behind us — and that, through our guilt, ever in creasing — and a judgment before us." We say, " For give us all that is past" :—
"Does not that 'past' extend back through our whole life up to infancy ? If so, up to the day of our death, up to the last awful celebration of this Blessed Sacrament in our sick chamber, we con-
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fess that our sins all through our life are unforgiven, whatever be the effect — which, we know, cannot be little, of the grace of that1 ordi nance and the absolution therein pronounced over us. ... We are to be judged at the Last Day, and ' receive the things done in the body, whether they be good or bad.' Our sins will be then had in remembrance ; therefore they are not forgiven here."
To some extent, the letter of the Prayer Book jus tifies these views. Public worship must adapt itself to all sorts and conditions of men, and to all sorts of moods and thoughts as well. And the Anglican con fessions of sin do undoubtedly rather a little neglect the rest of the flock to suit themselves to the hundredth sheep which has strayed far away into the wilderness. Therein they follow the highest Example. And even the best of men are so far conscious of deviations from the path, that when they speak of their lapses, they must always feel, for the moment, a tingling of shame and a bitterness of regret. But — although far too sparingly — our Church teaches us also that throughout its services we are to be " unfeignedly thankful," and to feel conscious of, and grateful for, our " redemption." There is nothing, therefore, Pharisaic or arrogant in feeling (even at the moment when we speak of the " misery " of our sinful state and of the " intolerable" burden of our sins) that, thank God, the old misery is a thing of the past ; that Christ has healed our trouble and is bearing our burdens.
In such a mixture of sorrow and thankfulness there may well be many different shades of feeling. But assuredly none ought to feel that, because we are reaping the consequences of our sins, therefore God has not forgiven them. If poverty, or disease, or loss of influence, or disgrace, falls on us as the natural con sequence of our evil-doing, surely a Christian may
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await such penalties with more than resignation, and ought to feel that it is a dishonour to the loving-kind ness of God to suppose that His gracious infliction of these wholesome penalties is a " proof," or even in the least degree a suggestion (to one who believes in the Gospel), that He " has not absolutely forgiven the sin past," or that his sins " all through life are unforgiven." To those, on the other hand, who accept the conse quences of their sins, not as tokens of God's love, but as a " proof" that their offences are remembered vindic tively against them, it must be hard indeed to feel " peace and joy amid chastisement ;" and the perora tion of this sermon, in which the preacher seems to be trying to work his audience up to a feeling of joy, sounds somewhat hollow and contains an example (almost unique in Newman) of something approximat ing to bathos. He bids his hearers glorify the Lord God in the fires of chastisement : u They may circle us but they cannot really touch us ; they may threaten, but they are as yet restrained." First, cannot really touch, and then, as a climax, are as yet restrained ! What does this mean but, " they cannot hurt us ; or rather, I should say, they do not hurt us at present " with the obvious inference that they may not be " re strained," and may " hurt us " to-morrow ! No, in his heart, Newman could not but feel that this doctrine of the non-forgiveness of sins, Patristic and orthodox though it might be, brought a new terror into life, a new disgust at " half solutions," and made it all the more imperative to seek for that " better position " where at least might be ensured the most definite and efficacious means of respite and refreshment through sacramental grace. Hence the question of Church Authority comes to the front, and we see at once the
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full meaning of the passage in his last letter to Rose :-
" There is a probability of the whole subject of Church authority, power, claims, &c. &c., being opened. I am persuaded that the half solutions, which have hitherto really been enough, will not do in time to come."
§ 94. " The Prophetical Office "
The Tractarian Movement was now spreading everywhere, and Newman was in exultation ; almost as much over the attacks of enemies who were adver tising the Movement by attacking it, as over the adhesion of new friends or allies. He is delighted that the Edinburgh Review has attacked them in force ; he hopes to tease the Christian Observer to death or insanity, and he rejoices over the Editor's froth and fury because it arose " from witnessing the spread of apostolical opinions." But their friends seemed rapidly equalling their enemies. Even at Cambridge, there was " a flame," he hoped, " tiny, but true." The Qiiarterly Review was about to admit a Tractarian article, finding that it must have " an infusion of Oxford principles ; " they "took" so well. The Tracts too were selling. The one on the Breviary had come to a second edition in six months. The Lyra Apostolica was in circula tion. Froude's Remains were all but ready. The clever arrangement* of the Tractarians, to connect the Movement with Oxford, so that — as in the phrase quoted above from James Mozley — they could speak of " Oxford principles " and " the Oxford Tracts," was gradually leading the outside world to suppose — in the silence of the Oxford authorities — that the University itself was originating, or authorizing, what was in reality the action and utterance of a very small
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minority. Give them ten years more of progress at the present rate, unchecked by the Heads of Houses, and unreproved by the Bishops, and it seemed quite within the limits of probability that all England would identify the Movement with Oxford, and that a large (perhaps even the larger) portion of the clergy might be converts to the new Anglicanism.
Carrying out his policy of supplementing the old leaflet Tracts by larger treatises, Newman now pub lished early in 1837, his Lectures on Romanism and Popular Protestantism which was also known as " The Prophetical Office of the Church." It was dedicated to Routh, the President of Magdalen, now more than eighty years of age, noted for <; his learning," — so Newman wrote as an undergraduate — " his strange appearance, and his venerable age." But his character, though respectable, was not exactly venerable ; and Newman was nervous about the dedication *. Keble, who did not see it till the book was out, blamed him for it ; and Newman, in reply (14 April), assures him that it had been on his mind for a long time, and had made him " very anxious "; he would have sent the dedication to Keble, he adds, "had there been time." Considering that on 5 January, very little had passed through the press, and that on 7 January he sent Rogers the Dedication, and begged his opinion about it, with out any indication of haste, it would seem that New man's memory must be here (as so often) in fault. He knew that people were beginning to accuse him of Romanism. He knew that " The Prophetical Office " would intensify that accusation. He therefore wished to shelter his new work under a name associated with orthodox and solid learning. He dedicated it to Routh, as E. T. Mozley says, " for policy's sake," and he
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perhaps felt doubtful about Keble's approval. After wards, he may have felt that Keble— whom he con sulted on all cases of conscience— ought to have been consulted on this. That he could have been deterred from consulting him by anticipating his disapproval, he did not like to believe, and therefore contrived not to believe. This is only our conjecture. But it is possible, if not probable. His own theory, that he was prevented by want of time, seems quite inconsistent with the facts.
The book itself might excuse some "policy' in seeking the shelter of dedication to some authoritative person ; for he describes it as " hitting Protestantism a hard blow in the face " ; " Pusey," he says, " had de clared that it would put people out of breath " ; " Every thing else that I have yet said," he tells his sister, " is milk and water to it, and this makes me anxious." Its object was four-fold ; to attack Protestantism, to attack Romanism, to construct or re-construct the true Anglicanism, and to supply himself with " a basis in reason " for his belief in the latter. But the work itself will not detain us. We need only, for reasons that will soon be apparent, touch on the introduction, and the conclusion, both of which are given in the Apologia. The former, besides distinctly admitting that " the Via Media, viewed as an integral system, has scarcely had existence except on paper," and that it " remains to be tried whether" it "is capable of being professed, acted on, and maintained in a large sphere of action,"* practically admits that the task commenced by Anglican theologians is to be achieved by the selective faculty of a few Oxford men in the nineteenth century :-
" Primitive doctrine has been explored for us in every direction and the original principles of the Gospel and the Church patiently "brought to light. But one thing is still wanting ; our champions and
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teachers have lived in stormy times ; political and other influences have acted upon them variously in their day, and have since ob structed a careful consolidation of their judgments .... We have more than we know how to use ; stores of learning, but little that is precise and serviceable ; Catholic truth and individual opinion, first principles and the guesses of genius, all mingled in the same works, and requiring to be discriminated. We meet with truths overstated or misdirected, matters of detail variously taken, facts incompletely proved or applied, and rules inconsistently urged or discordantly interpreted. ..."
A moment's consideration will show that the posi tion, difficult for any Church Reformer, was absolutely hopeless for one whose whole nature already revolted against what he called in later days, " picking and choosing the contents of Christianity." Substitute "pick and choose" for "discriminate and select"; and we have Newman himself here gravely proposing that he and a group of Oxonian friends of his should set up that which he regarded as an abomination of desolation, that portentous impiety called " Private Judgment," by sitting in a Commission of Inquiry into the great Divines of the Anglican Church : " it remains for us to catalogue, sort, distribute, pick and choose, harmonize and complete " ; and again, " we have Catholic truth and individual opinion, first prin ciples and the guesses of genius .... requiring to be picked and chosen!' Summing up the requisites for the task, he continues :
" What we need at present for our Church's well-being, is, not in vention, nor originality, nor sagacity, nor even learning in our divines, at least not in the first place, though all gifts of God are in a measure needed, and never can be unseasonable when used reli giously, but we need peculiarly a sound judgment, patient thought, discrimination, a comprehensive mind, an abstinence from all private fancies and caprices, and personal tastes — in a word, Divine Wisdom.''
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Is there not some involuntary irony in these last two words ? We do not need this, or that, or the other, or "even learning "—such is the meaning the words might convey — we only need " Divine Wisdom." As though such " Wisdom " were a small thing, instead of being so truly " divine," that, for want of it, the Fathers' and theologians of eighteen centuries had been unable to accomplish the task now proposed to be entrusted to a little group of Oriel men in 1837 ! And yet, without such " divine wisdom," what availed the "vast inheritance," the treasures "in profusion," locked up in the Anglican divines, if Anglicans them selves could not agree as to what was bullion, and what was base metal ?
Under these circumstances it was not strange that, even in the moment of completing his long and weary task, the author himself was seized with a misgiving that all his labour might be in vain. "This circum stance,'' he says, "that after all we must use private judgment upon Antiquity, created a sort of distrust in my theory altogether." It is not often that a religious Reformer concludes a great work by avowing his "distrust" in it, and a disposition to feel "that what has been said is but a dream, the wanton exercise, rather than the practical conclusions of the intellect." But Newman, besides making this avowal, actually proceeds to surrender the whole object of his struggle in his parting words. They are as follows: "After all, the Church is ever invisible in its day, and faith only [i.e. alone] apprehends it." On which his com ment (in 1864) is, "What was this, but to give up the Notes of a visible Church altogether, whether the Catholic Note or the Apostolic?" What indeed? But why publish a book in which the last paragraph
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" gives up " all for which the previous paragraphs had contended ? It is all very well in this fashion to " relate oneself to paper," as Bacon used to do, when a man wishes to think out his own problems for his single self. The words are honest, transparently honest ; but ought not the responsibilities of a Guide and Leader to have prohibited such published and inconsistent soliloquies ? This work need occupy us no further. It is a Book of Oscillation, and should prepare the reader for oscillating utterances which will shortly follow.
§ 95. "Justification by Faith "
The Essay on Justification by P^aith (published early in 1838) was aimed, as Newman tells us, at the Lutheran dictum that justification by faith only was the cardinal doctrine of Christianity. He consid ered that the doctrine was either a paradox or a truism — a paradox in Luther's mouth, a truism in Melanchthon's ; that the Anglican Church followed Melanchthon ; and that, in consequence, between Rome and Anglicanism, high Church and low Church, there was no real intellectual difference on the point.
The truth of " a truism " would not — we might suppose — be very difficult to demonstrate : yet this 'treatise seems to have perplexed and mystified some 'of Newman's admirers who were far from being dull. In answer to his sister Harriett, who complained of its lifficulty, he says that "the great difficulty was to tvoid being difficult ; it is so entangled and mystified >y irrelevant and refined questions " ; to others he >nfesses that he has been " a good deal fussed with it " ; and the reason he gives is, that in this matter he >uld not follow authorities, but had to think for
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himself; it is a terra incognita, he says, to the Anglican divines ; and, hence, it took him incredible time and he was "quite worn out with correcting it." One of the ablest and most sympathetic of his bio- oraphers thinks it was intended to show that in certain points " The Lutheran and Anglican theology is right " and that it was an " elaborate effort to reconcile the Lutheran view of this subject with the Catholic view," whereas Newman himself tells us that he intended to attack the Lutheran view, and maintains that the Anglican theology did not follow Luther but Melanch- thon. This would indicate, that if the writer found the subject a terra incognita, he left it— for many of his readers — what he found it.
If it is indeed a terra incognita, and if men are to be driven to thinking for themselves about it, an intrepid layman might suggest that, even in common, non-theological life, there is such a thing as helping a man to become honest by treating him as honest, and making him righteous by calling him so. Bacon tells us that even a dog puts on a kind of "generosity" " when he finds himself maintained by a man, who to him is instead of a god or melior natural If this be so, a simple person, not versed in theology, might find no great difficulty in conceiving that, when a man has been once so impressed by,— others may use other metaphors and say " possessed by," or " taken into "• the character, or spirit, of the incarnate Son of God, as to feel a perfect trust in this Melior Natura, he, too, may put on a more than common "generosity" and may be, sometimes even in a moment, made capable of new moral greatness. If he feels the burden of his sins falling from his shoulders (as John Bunyan felt it standing at the foot of the Cross), or if he hears
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a Voice saying, " Thou art righteous/' followed by a sense that he is righteous, he may asseverate that this is no " economy," but the simple truth : the Voice at once proclaims and thereby makes him righteous. But, of course, all this is far too simple. It is only Shakespeare, and Bacon, and common sense, terra incognita indeed to genuine "scribes" : who — in their impotent use of unmeaning words that may carry con viction to others but not to themselves ; in their neglect of the healing and helpful processes of human nature ordained by the Eternal Word since human nature was ; and in their disparagement of the natural canons of human law as compared with ecclesiastical rules and theological fictions — find a fitting condemna tion in the words of one of our older poets :—
" We study Speech, but others we persuade ;
We Leech-craft learn, but others cure with it ; We interpret Laws, which other men have made, But read not those which in our hearts are writ."
The biographer whom I quoted above confesses that he has found this treatise of Newman's "some what straw-chopping and dry." Perhaps he has not sufficiently entered into Newman's materialistic feeling about sin as an indelible stain, so that a person who has once sinned can never be really righteous, although, of course, if it pleases the inscrutable God to call him righteous, we must accept the fact, on authority. Bishop Thirlwall, also, speaks of Newman's discussion as dealing mainly with " questions of words."
Neither this, nor the charge of " dryness," seems iquite adequate criticism. Forgiveness, surely, is not a question of words ; nor is that process above de- iscribed, of making people righteous by treating them
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as righteous, a question of words : they are both realities. The forgiveness of children, for example, by parents, is a sublime spiritual fact : it is not a mere forgetting ; it is an uplifting, not to be achieved without some parental faith, sympathy, and sorrow, nor without some spark of trust, as well as regret, on the part of the child. But to what does Newman reduce this "law which in our hearts is writ" ? To a mere sham forgetting : " When a parent forgives a child, it is on the same principle. He says, ' I will think no more of it this time ; I will forget what has happened ; I will give you one more trial.' In this sense it is all one to say that he forgives the child, or that he counts him to have been, and to be, a good child *. . . .* Now when a theological treatise reduces parental forgiveness to an imposture, and this by way of justi fying a still more gross imposture imputed to the Father in heaven, it is no sufficient condemnation to call it "dry," though, in a sense, that is true : for it is the "dryness" of a skeleton substituted for the living form. Yet Newman is at least consistent. Once more does his all pervading " economy " come into play :
" Justification is ' the glorious voice of the Lord ' declaring us to be righteous. That it is a declaration, not a making, is sufficiently clear from this one argument, that it is the justification of a sinner, of one who has been a sinner ; and the past cannot be reversed except by accounting it reversed. Nothing can bring back time bygone ; nothing can undo what is done. God treats us as if that had not been which has been ; that is, by a merciful economy or representa tion, He says of us as to the past, what in fact is otherwise than what He says it is."
It is hard to see how asserting that " God says as to the past what, in fact, is othenvise than what He says it is:" differs from imputing an untruth to God. In
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some this would be blasphemy. In Newman it is only the result of a consistent abjectness, a resolute deter mination to believe that the "Almighty" is what He is called ; that, as His justice differs from ours, so does His truth ; and that He can make what would be false in us true in Himself.
Another treatise, published in 1838 as Tract No. 85, deserves a word or two, as showing, a further progress —we may almost call it a sceptical advance — from " Bible Christianity." It consisted of some lectures on " Holy Scripture in relation to the Catholic Creed." We have seen that Newman in his correspondence with Froude, seems to have admitted that the special Tractarian doctrines could not easily be found in Scripture ; they could be deduced from Scripture with the aid of Tradition, but not otherwise. He now make this admission publicly ; he does not deny that it had caused him uneasiness : but he meets the diffi culty by what he sometimes called the kill-or-cure method. He urged on his Protestant objectors that if they rejected these Tractarian doctrines, they ought, on the same principle, to go further and reject some of what they themselves regarded as fundamental truths of Christianity.
This is perhaps the first clear manifestation of the strategical device, so to speak, of breaking down the bridges behind his advancing army so as to make it impossible to retire. He had once manifested a desire to believe that all fundamental Christian doctrine must be either in Scripture or at least capable of fair logical deduction from Scripture. But henceforth he is committed to Tradition. Give up Tradition, and the Tractarians must be driven back into the deep waters of Atheism. There was nothing for it but to go
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forward. These lectures also illustrate his indifference, just now pointed out, to the moral and spiritual revela tions of Scripture, as compared with the revelation of a definite ecclesiastical scheme for the salvation of souls by sacramental grace. For he now suggests that, without the interpretation of Tradition, Scripture cannot really be of any practical use to us ; it tells us nothing of importance. In behalf of those who find God's will revealed in Tradition, he suggests that " there is no antecedent improbability in His revealing it elsewhere than in an inspired volume." But against " Bible- Christians " he urges that their position is absurd : for " there is an overpowering improbability in Almighty God's announcing that He has revealed something, and revealing nothing."^ I do not see what this can mean but that, to a " Bible-Christian," rejecting what Newman called the interpretation of the Church, the Bible reveals " nothing." Yet that he should have meant this seems almost impossible. The character of God, as revealed in Christ ; the working of the Spirit of Christ as seen in the life of St. Paul ; the resurrec tion of Christ — even, though it be accepted on, and interpreted by, the testimony of St. Paul alone^ — all this, nothing ! Grant that he means, nothing to the p^lrpose ; nothing that adequately teaches the applica tion of the Sacraments to the diseased soul, nothing that could make a man feel safe : still it is an astounding statement.
§ 96. " Hippoclcides doesrit care "
Disappointed in, or at least doubtful about, his prospect of piecing together a New Anglicanism, with paste and scissors, out of the Anglican divines,
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Newman was naturally led to ask himself whether there might not be some less tedious and more spiritual path towards the attainment of the truth. As a child, he had believed that the elements were " fellow-angels " deceiving him with the semblance of a material world ; as a man, instead of putting away childish things, he developed them. He considered, so he tells us in the Apologia, that there was a middle race of demons or spirits, neither in heaven nor in hell ; partially fallen, capricious, wayward ; noble or crafty, benevolent or malicious, which gave a sort of inspiration or intelligence to races, nations, and classes of men.
Now, if he had contented himself with saying that in the supreme review of things hereafter, we may look back and trace a kind of personal identity and human growth in nations ; so that it is not wholly imaginative or poetic, but philosophically suggestive, to regard them as organic growths — as Plato personified his " Republic," and St. Paul his " Church "—there would have been much to say for this, though it would hardly deserve to be called a "theory." But Newman raises his "theory" into the position, not of an illus tration, but of a cause : " Hence" he says, " the action of bodies politic and associations, which is often so different from that of the individuals who compose them." A man who seriously means this, is almost necessarily led to reject lessons of history. For how can history teach us anything except through recognition of cause and effect ? and how can we recognize, and why should we care to study, cause and effect, in the French Revolution, for example, if it was brought about, not by the old regime and other causes, but by "the Spirit of Jacques Bonhomme " ? Or the Re-
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formation and the Revolution, in our own country— what can they teach us, according to this " theory," except that " the Spirit of John Bull" rebelled against 'k the Spirit of Rome " or laid prostrate " the Angel of Monarchy " ? It is so difficult to speak temperately about this part of Newman's teaching and yet to give an adequate notion of its extreme puerility, that it will be best to quote his own account of it from the Apologia : —
"In 1837 I made a further development of this doctrine. I said to an intimate and dear friend, Samuel Francis Wood, in a letter which came into my hands on his death, ' I have an idea. The mass of the Fathers (Justin, Athenagoras, Irenaeus, Clement, Tertul- lian, Origen, Lactantius, Sulpicius, Ambrose, Nazianzen), hold that, though Satan fell from the beginning, the Angels fell before the de luge, falling in love with the daughters of men. This has lately come across me as a remarkable solution of a notion which I cannot help holding. Daniel speaks as if each nation had its guardian Angel. I cannot but think that there are beings with a great deal of good in them, yet with great defects, who are the animating principles of cer tain institutions, &c. &c. . . . Take England, with many high virtues, and yet a low Catholicism. It seems to me that John Bull is a spirit neither of heaven nor hell. . . . Has not the Christian Church, in its parts, surrendered itself to one or other of these simulations of the truth ? . . . . How are we to avoid Scylla and Charybdis and go straight on to the very image of Christ?" &c. &c.
To this extraordinary extract Newman appends a word or two, not of apology, but of defiance. He is aware, he says, that all this will, with many men, do credit to his imagination at the expense of his judg ment : " ' Hippocleides doesn't care ' : I am not setting myself up as a pattern of good sense or of anything else : I am but giving a history of my opinions, and that, with the view of showing that I have come by them through intelligible processes of thought and
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honest means." This is not an ambitious object : but he does not attain even this. The " processes of thought" are not "intelligible" as they are here ex hibited : nor are they intellectually ''honest." In describing the reasons that led him to these wild " theories," he has wholly omitted one most important factor— t&e desire to arrive at orthodox conclusions by short methods.
He had been confronted with the problem of Scrip ture interpretation, and had been forced to confess to himself that he knew very little about it, and could not at present grapple with the " neologians." To do it, even hereafter, would involve a long, close, and accu rate study, largely dealing with details, for which he was, and felt himself to be, wholly unfit. But on the other hand he was, and felt himself to be, admirably fitted to take broad and picturesque views, not of things, but of the aspects of things ; of possibilities ; of things as they looked to the world ; and also of things •as they might turn out to be hereafter. A mere babe in dealing with facts, he was a giant in wielding the two-handed sword of "It-may-be-that," or " What-is- to-prevent-our-believing-that ? " This he could do well. This therefore he liked to do. And by doing this, he could, as it were, take Reason in the flank ; push Understanding, parenthetically, out of the field ; discard (instead of discussing) evidence ; and bear onward the ensign of " Faith " in an unimpeded and triumphant advance. Add this factor, and then, and not till then, his "processes of thought" become perfectly "intelligible," but not so perfectly "honest." Intellectually, they are dishonest.
One word on " Hippocleides " -a nobleman of Greek antiquity who took "doesn't care" as his motto,
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and bequeathed it as a legacy to a limited posterity amono- whom Newman has here enrolled himself.
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The story goes that this worthy went to woo a lady of noble birth with every prospect of being accepted, because of his wealth and noble birth. But whereas other Greeks were wealthy and noble, he excelled them all in an art of which he was specially proud : he danced on his head to perfection. This therefore he liked to do, and sometimes unseasonably. So it came to pass that he spoilt all his chances by practising this accomplishment on the dining-table of his pro posed father-in-law. Naturally he lost his bride. With equal naturalness — being an intrinsic buffoon- he replied, " Hippocleides doesn't care." Whether his friends cared or not, Herodotus does not tell us. Not Newman's friends alone, but even those who feel themselves to be, from an intellectual and theological point of view, his implacable enemies, must feel some touch of regret, to see a man of so many and such choice faculties, one who was specially bound to the honourable wooing and wedding of Truth, thus disporting himself in her presence, and thus ensuring failure. For, in him at all events — however it might have been with others — such views meant failure. They could not but result in a still further develop ment of an already monstrous imagination and the still further subordination of the starved and almost ex tinguished faculty of judgment. Patient students of fact, careful observers, calm and judicial writers, might hold notions of this kind, perhaps, at arm's length, sporting with them in the sphere of possibilities, without being influenced by them in the region of material cause and effect ; but this was not possible for the author of the Elucidations.
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Yet. after all, beneath this exasperating defiance of common sense, there is latent a motive very different indeed from that of Hippocleides. " A man's per fection," taught St. Philip Neri, " lies in the space of three lines," and, so saying, he placed his finger on his forehead, indicating " mental asceticism," what the Italians bluntly call " the sacrifice of the intellect." Newman did not as yet know much about St. Philip (who was hereafter to be his patron in the Oratory at Birmingham) : but he was preparing to know him by acting in his spirit. This it was that supported and prompted him — the feeling that in sacrificing the under standing he was propitiating God. His fear of the Creator and his abject anxiety to please Him were even stronger than his hostility to the world. Soon we shall find him openly avowing the need of such a ''sacrifice," and thus making a twilight in his mind. Then, when the twilight has given place to night, the " doctrine " of angels will do its work ; spirits will appear, and there will be war in the mind of the dreamer, the spirit of England, " John Bull," contending against the spirit of Rome, the City that sits in sackcloth bearing the sins of men. Which will prevail, is it difficult to predict ?
CHAPTER XXIV
DIVIDED COUNSELS
§ 97. The first check
THE spring of 1838 indicates the high-water mark of the Tractarian tide at Oxford. Once more Newman rejoices in the flood of literature which was irrigat ing England with " right principles." He himself, in default of anyone else, was on the point of taking the Editorship of the British Critic. His only fear was as to the younger Oxonians : " One must not exult too much. What I fear is the now rising generation at Oxford, Arnold's youths. Much depends on how they turn out." But these too, or some of them, Newman was influencing. On the whole everything was going well.
But at this point came the first check to the ad vance. In his episcopal charge (August 1838) the Bishop of Oxford expressed disapproval of certain expressions in the Tracts for the Times. He feared more, he said, for the disciples than for the masters ; but he warned and conjured those who were respon sible lest they should mislead others. For this, New man ought to have been prepared. He had recently avowed his intention to use extreme language with the view of "frightening" people. Even in 1833 he expected to be " denounced " for this : " I expect to
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be called a Papist when my opinions are known. But (please God) I shall lead persons on a little way, while they fancy they are only taking the mean, and de nounce me as the extreme." This being the case, he ought not to have been surprised that his Bishop, no less than Rickards, objected to some of his language. How could the young men and women who read Newman's Tracts, know that the author would be well pleased, even if they did not accept all that he said, but were led on only "a little way"? When, for example, he " talked of the First Book of Edward VI.," how could they know that he only " talked " hypothetically, meaning that he would like it if the Church was disestablished, or z/ the Tractarians were expelled from her pale ? In truth, the Bishop was extremely lenient in his expostulation. But Newman, who ought to have been prepared for much worse things, winced when the time came, under a censure so mild that the Bishop himself protested it was not a censure, but only a warning.
This inconsistency we shall witness repeatedly here after. It was one of Newman's sayings to his Oriel pupils that "a man cannot eat his cake and keep it " ; yet he is constantly attempting this incompatibility. He wishes to use extreme language, which will, he knows, make many call him a Papist ; yet he is angry with the people who call him so. He trades on the chance that the silence of the Bishops may imply a sanction of his principles ; yet he is irritated when they refuse to give this tacit sanction. He makes much of the name of the University,* and of the deference paid to Oxford, and of the consequent authority reflected on the "Oxford" Tracts and " Oxford " principles; and yet we shall find him aggrieved at an attempt on
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the part of the University authorities to dissipate this popular delusion. Finally, before he quits the English Church, he will be seen avowing that he is attempting an enterprise of no less hazard than " proving a cannon," yet the explosion will shock him as much as if he had been innocently trying to do no more than fire an ordinary shot.
But to return to the episcopal charge. For one who held, as Newman did, the strong views of Ignatius about the unquestioning obedience due from the clergy to their Bishop, even a warning was a rebuff. A true Ignatian might well take it for something even more serious. What if it was a " sign " that he was on the wrong track ? Newman, on this occasion, acted con sistently. He at once offered to suppress any of the Tracts of which he had the literary ownership. The offer was not accepted. The Bishop declared re peatedly he had not meant to censure, but only to warn ; and the kindness of his assurances helped to dissipate Newman's alarm. But, though he and Keble were satisfied, others of the party were not. Thomas Keble (Keble's brother) spoke of it in a way Newman "did not like," and both Pusey and Bowden were "annoyed." It seems that Thomas Keble blamed Newman for being too impulsive, hasty, and contro versial. Like Rickards, he seems to have thought (and even Pusey and Bowden were partly of his mind) that Newman's language was sometimes " irritating and irritated," or else extreme, bringing discredit on the cause. Whatever may have been the cause of Thomas Keble's dissatisfaction, it was not dispelled by the Bishop of Oxford's assurances of goodwill, but soon broke out more violently than ever, in conse quence of another incident.
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§ 98. Quarrel between the Leaders
We have seen that Froude's legacy to Newman was " the Breviary." Newman was now purposing to publish it as one of the Tracts. However revised, such a publication was, at any time, likely to renew the accusation of Romanizing against the Tractarians ; and just now, immediately after the Bishop's remon strance, followed by his kindly assurances of goodwill, such a project seemed peculiarly unseasonable. Ac cordingly Prevost, an old friend of Froude's, sent Newman a letter of remonstrance declaring that he, Thomas Keble, and another, were greatly distressed by the project ; he also spoke of those who " used " to sympathize with the Movement (implying that New man's advanced views had alienated them) and he offered to pay the expenses of the printing, if it was stopped at once. Newman then consulted a friend (Wood) who agreed with Newman's own suggestion, that he ought not to continue the publication without Keble's "leave." To obtain this, it would have been necessary to mention to the latter the quarrel between himself and Thomas Keble, which Newman felt to be " awkward." Meanwhile Keble, who seems to have been informed of the affair by others, wrote to New man, who replied as follows :—
" Your letter has saved me the awkwardness of writing to you on the subject. What I proposed to Wood was to correct the ' Breviary ' by some standard. I confess I much dislike correcting it by my private judgment, or by the vague opinions of the day, or by what people will think. I mentioned to him the Thirty-nine Articles, en titling it ' The Breviary reformed according to the Thirty-nine Articles,' but the Thirty-nine Articles will not cut out the legends. Then I thought of the preface to the Prayer Book. What would
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you say to both together ? After all, is there any one of our standards which would keep out such as ' May St. Mary and all saints intercede for us to the Lord,' &c. ? Are we bound to cut out what is of un known antiquity and not forbidden by our Church ? I do not think it will do to attempt to correct it by history. None of the parties concerned are strong enough in facts to do so.
" The sooner I have your answer the better. They go printing on, but this at present will involve very little cancelling."
The abruptness in this letter speaks for itself. In the recent episcopal trouble, Keble alone, said New man, had encouraged him : but now even Keble was against him. So strong an opposition made him un usually obstinate, the more, perhaps, because he asso ciated his purpose with the memory of his friend Froude. Rogers, who sided with the moderates, felt, for a full fortnight, what he humorously calls the " flintiness " which, on occasion, the Leader knew well how to assume. " Cerebral excitement " and nothing else, can explain the extraordinary imprudence— to say nothing more — of committing the Tractarian Cause to an Anglican Invocation of Saints which differed from the Roman merely by substituting the Optative for the Imperative Mood ! Somewhere in a letter to Rogers, Newman suggests a treatise on the Subjunc tive Mood, apparently with some reference to theology. A great many such treatises, specially illustrating the force of " may," would be needed to show ordinary Anglicans (especially in those days) the difference between " May St. Mary intercede " and " St. Mary, intercede." The former was in use a few years after wards in Newman's Monastic House at Littlemore. But things had moved on then ; and, besides, a formula for the private use of oneself and one's friends was one thing ; published to the world with the sanction of the whole of the Tractarian Party, it was quite another.
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By degrees Newman calmed down. But he had been made not only angry but uneasy. He could forget mere interference or even opposition ; but he had been wounded in a more vital part. The old wound of self-distrust had been opened and would not so readily heal. What with the charge of the Bishop and the opposition of his best friends, he began once more to suspect himself, to fear that he had no right to meddle, that he was not in his place as a leader, and that he might be misleading himself and others. He tells Keble that he is sorry he has annoyed Prevost by his sharp reply, and he hopes Prevost has got over it, as, he trusts, he himself has got over the annoyance of Prevost's letter ; he is ready to do anything he can to smooth matters ; but he implores the other side to recollect the effect of their suspicions on one who " soon begins so to suspect everything he does as to have no heart, and little power, to do anything at all."
In this state of mind, jealously scrutinizing his own motives, and dreading lest he may be unawares guilty of the unpardonable sin of wilfulness, he places himself unreservedly, and almost abjectly, at Keble's disposal : "If you tell me to make any submission to
any one, I will do it If you will tell me what
not to do, I will not do it Is it to stop writing ?
I will stop anything you advise. Is it to show what I write to others before publishing it ? It is my rule already. Is it to stop my weekly parties ? I will gladly do so." A " Decemvirate of Revision " is suggested. He foresees the difficulties, the impracti cability ; " it is virtually," he says, " enjoining silence." Still, he accepts it. Even to Bowden, his second self, the most affectionate of all his friends, he writes, not indeed without a certain vestige of the " flinty''
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humour, but with still more self-distrust. Bowden. who sided with the moderates, had asked him whether the Invocation of Saints had not led to great corrup tions. " I do not like," replies Newman, " to give my
opinion It seems to me, if I must speak, that
saint-worship, as it practically prevailed in the middle ages, is a very great corruption ; but how far the formal acts of the Church involve such worship, and what are its limits, I cannot say : and I am so bothered and attacked on all sides by friends and foes that I had much rather say nothing, and had I my own wish, I certainly should say nothing and write nothing more. I mean I distrust my judgment, and am getting afraid to speak."
What it was precisely that made him " afraid to speak" Newman himself probably hardly knew. In the earlier stage of the quarrel he wrote as if, though perfectly willing to be silent, he still retained his con victions unchanged. He was resolved, he said, that people should not blame him for stubbornness, nor for anything except being himself — that is, " having certain opinions and a certain way of expressing them." But to Bowden, above, he confesses that he distrusts his own judgment. In two later letters to Keble, he goes beyond that. The first of these brings clearly before us a fact hitherto hidden, which largely explains both the quarrel and Newman's perplexity.
*
§ 99. Newman feels " a sort of bad conscience "
The Leader had been gathering around him a circle of younger friends. In Oxford and Cambridge, three or four years make a generation ; and, after half a dozen years, an M.A. going round his old college will
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read fresh names on every staircase and find himself in a new world. Even among the graduates, waves of thought succeed each other more rapidly than else where ; and the younger men come sooner to the front — at least in any movement of innovation and enter prise, which has no charms for older men of solid reputation supported by substantial endowments. It was not surprising, then, that a younger and advanced school of Tractarian thought was now assuming im portance. Newman in his " weekly parties " would see and fascinate these men. They, in turn, would hear, and be fascinated, and be receptive, and ask such questions as friendly admirers might ask, and put interrogative inferences, and imperceptibly lead New man onward. Not having faith in the teaching of ex perience, Newman admired youth at the expense of age. But besides, every one likes, and he liked, fresh ness and unworldliness. These young men's ignorance of cautious, prudent, and temporizing arts, he might sometimes take as a rebuke to himself for his want of vigour in following out the course which in his heart he felt to be Froude's and the true one. Here is the passage in which, for the first time, Newman describes to Keble this young progressive party, contrasting them with the country clergy, and pointing out that his work lies with the former :
"... Your brother knows the country clergy, and makes their feelings his standard. I do not deny, though I have no means of knowing, that it is as he says, but I do not write for them. Of course, as is natural, I write for those I do see : namely, the generation lay or clerical rising into active life, particularly at Oxford. That I am useful to them by the very things that may be injudicious in view of the clergy, I am certain, whatever ultimately comes of it. I do not consider that for them I am going too fast. The character of a place of this kind must be considered before men can fairly undertake to
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judge about what is best or not best. One cannot stop still. Shrewd minds anticipate conclusions, anticipate objections, oblige one to say yes or no, to defend oneself, to anticipate the objection. What your brother calls unsettling is not my work, but of others here, who must be met and treated lest they do harm. It is better surely to refute objections than to let others be the prey of them. In fact, in a place of this kind if one is to speak (which is another matter) one must be prepared to pursue questions and to admit or deny inferences."
Yet he does not put this forward as a sufficient reason for continuing his present course. On the contrary, he doubts whether he ought thus to speak out to these young Oxford men M at the expense of the country clergy." He has " no call" he says, he is not " in station." When, therefore, a man like Thomas Keble virtually says to him, " What business is it of yours, and are you doing it in the best way ? " he puts, says Newman, the very question that his own conscience puts to him. Why not, then, be silent ? Why not do other work, read the Fathers, for example, and prepare for writing on them, and, with this view, give up the Tracts, the British Critic, and St. Mary's ? This he repeats in a second letter. Keble, it seems, had ex plained Newman's constant "fidgetiness" as arising from a desire to " see things clearly and to get others to see them." Newman thinks it is not so : it arises, he thinks, from a general dependence on "external things " — in other words, on what he accepts as 11 signs" of divine guidance. When, therefore, men of his own party protest against him, he feels bereft of this guidance, and is attacked by " a sort of bad con science and disgust " with what he has done. Hence, what would give him " most peace of conscience" would be to give up the Tracts.
" My constant feeling, when I write, is, that I do not realize things, but am merely drawing out intellectual conclusions, which,
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I need not say, is very uncomfortable [vide a passage in my account of Sicilian illness]."
The "passage" is the one (see above i. 283) in which he called himself " nearly hollow " and condemned himself as " not possessing the truth." To this add that "realise"^ and "uncomfortable,"* in the Tract- arian vocabulary, have a technical and religious signi ficance quite different from that which is implied by the common use of the words. The reader will then perceive that this is a very serious and distressing kind of self-distrust, penetrating far more deeply than a mere doubt as to whether one has expressed one's convictions in the most suitable and seasonable way.
§ TOO. "Conscience"
Four days after writing (5 December) to Keble about the " sort of bad conscience " which distressed him, and about what would give him most " peace of conscience" he preached a sermon on conscience in its bearing on faith. At this time, there were many reasons why faith, and the inner tests of faith, and the reconciliation of faith and reason, should claim his consideration. Success was beginning to bring its dangers to " the Apostolical Movement." Tractarian- ism was now fashionable at Oxford, and its young zealots were beginning to become formal and manner- istic. Even in 1837 their leader had expressed a fear that their " fasting &c., may get ostentatious."
Besides this, the controversy between Anglicanism and Romanism was turning on the question of the Faith and its relation to the Church. In 1838 Newman illustrated it by the contrast between the Madonna and Child, and a Calvary. The peculiarity, he said, of the
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Anglican theology was this — that it " supposed the Truth to be entirely objective and detached, not lying hid in the bosom of the Church as if one with her, clinging to and (as it were) lost in her embrace, but as being sole and unapproachable, as on the Cross or at the Resurrection, with the Church close by, but in the background." This beautiful illustration must have gone far to attract towards Rome such a mind as Newman's. If, as he tells us, he was naturally led to his theory of the Angels of nations by his " pre ference " of the Personal to the Abstract, the fascinat ing representation of the Church as the Mother with the growing babe of truth in her arms might be well "preferred" in choosing between two Personalities. As a deliverance from religious fears, the Roman "view" is infinitely superior to the Anglican, as Newman conceived it. But time would be needed for this thought to work. Meanwhile, it clearly shows us how prominently there stood before his mind at this time the question of faith, and of the means by which it is to be received, retained, developed, and tested. We have now to see how, in the testing of faith, the part played by conscience might claim his attention.
The sermons of the autumn and winter of 1838 reflect the incidents of the time and the varying moods of the writer. While the " Breviary " quarrel was still pending, they are on the old lines, inculcating fear with the usual vehemence, and teaching that Faith must expect to have the world arrayed against it, because the world is in itself, and not by accident, evil. Later, he urges that, as some kind of "poor return " for the mercies of God, we ought to trust the Scriptures —by which he means, accept all Scriptural statements whether as to science, history, or morality — even
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against the evidence submitted to our understanding : <l when these two informants, the one natural, the other revealed, oppose each other, we should trust for a little while," i.e. till death, " the latter."
But the sermon on " The Testimony of Conscience " (9 December) introduces a different phase of thought. He had, in his past sermons, laid great stress upon works as the test of faith, and especially on such definite works as fasting and church-going. But for some time he had been alarmed lest his followers, practising these works in a formal, pompous, way, might remain hollow at heart. Was it — he might ask — perhaps his fault ? Had he omitted to lay sufficient stress on inner tests, such as peace and the sense of a good conscience ? Certainly during his own wretched conflict of the preceding month, he had felt that he had not known peace, and that he had been harassed with " a sort of bad conscience." Would it not be well, then, that he should teach both himself and his younger disciples that peace was one of the notes of a true Christian, and that a good conscience bore witness to a genuine faith ?
Accordingly, he puts the question, " What is the test of true faith ? " Works, he says, are its evidence ; but they cannot be thus used till after the lapse of some time. Even then, they are evidence to others, rather than to oneself. They can scarcely be con sidered an evidence, definite or available for a man's comfort, at any moment when he seeks for one. Finally, he exhorts his readers, to aim at that which, " though it can claim nothing, can beg everything : —an honest purpose, an unreserved, entire, submis sion of ourselves to our Maker, Redeemer and Judge.' Here we have the explanation why Newman so un-
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reservedly, so almost abjectly, submitted his action in the matter of the Breviary to Keble's dictation. 1 1 was in o^der that he might submit — to somebody, at all events. " I do so fear lest I may be wilful " — he had written to Froude a few years before when he was resisting the suppression of the Tracts. That was what he also feared now — wilfulness ; "the sin of Saul." It seldom occurred to him that it may be a duty to judge for oneself, and that an even greater sin than wilfulness may sometimes be will-less- ness. He wanted to submit, to God. Not able to trust the voice of God in his own heart, he took Keble instead as his spiritual director. Having submitted to him, he had done all he could ; and for the present, his fears were quieted and he was at peace. The same is the tenour of the next sermon on "Sincerity and Hypocrisy" which describes "an honest and unaffected desire of doing right," as "the test of God's true servants."
But with this phase of thought he could not long rest satisfied. For was he not "going by his own feel ings " ? Was there not a danger that he might relapse into his old Evangelical state, a mere subjective religion ? No proposition, in .Newman's mind, was really " objective." Even Scriptural statements about God might be " economies." All human statements about Him must be therefore, in some sense, hypo thetical. God is in every place if a Spirit can have relation with Space ; loving, z/ we may consider Him other than simple Unity ; One, e/ the idea of Him falls under earthly number. And so on. Yet still, there was a medium between the "objective" and the " subjective." There was the " external " ; there was " authority." There was- " the Church."
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It happened that just at this time a friend returned from Cambridge, bringing doleful accounts which suggested this very danger of making religion a mere matter of "one's own feelings." The "tiny flame" was not burning well — it had not air enough, or perhaps it had too much air — in that home of scientific industry. Maurice, it seemed, was " the great doctor" there, and Merivale was going to publish four apparently " Maurician " sermons, which " seemed to make subjective religion all in all " : " What a set they are ! They cannot make religion a reality ;
nothing more than a literature An external
bond is what they want "[i.e. need], "and what they shrink from. Are they not like Greeks, and we like Romans?" ' Grai ingenium'. &c., ' Tu, Romane, memento parcere subjectis et debellare super- bos.' ' There is a good deal of truth in this condem nation of the sister University. Newman and his Oxford friends were probably far superior to anyone at Cambridge in their knowledge of the world, and of the arts needed for making rapid conquests of the minds of men, and for binding them together, at all events for a time, in chains that seem indissoluble. Yet the Oxford Leader, perhaps, ^ardly sufficiently realised that, in the end, Nature, whether material or spiritual, can only be permanently subdued by those who have the patience to study and obey her laws ; and that in theology, as in science, the lot of those great conquerors who would take short cuts to success, is ultimate failure. Internal, not external, must be the bond that is to produce real union ; and this takes time to forge.
It was like a poet, and almost like a "Greek," to feel on 5 December that he had a " sort of bad con-
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science," could "realize" nothing, and guide no one ; and then, on 28 December, that he and his followers were of the true Roman breed, fitted to subdue and organize a world! But Newman was just now suffer ing from one of his fits of reactionary exultation. Having endured the depression caused, first, by his Bishop's apparent disapproval, and then by his quarrel with his own friends and fellow-workers ; he was now enduring the rebound. In old days, during one of these spasms of complacency, he had avowed himself able to il root up St. Mary's spire and kick down the Radcliffe " : now he felt himself capable of similar achievements in the sphere of religious philosophy : " I really do think," he writes to Rogers (14 January), " I have defined Reason." He had been preaching two sermons which, he says, had greatly enlightened himself, perplexed his hearers, and opened a very large subject which he only wishes he could treat.
These must now engage our attention. They were written by one still suffering from the recent shock to his faith in himself — his faith, so to speak, in his own faith — and desiring at the same time to satisfy the " shrewd minds " of the young advanced Tractarians, who " anticipated conclusions/' and obliged him to defend himself. They show him, accordingly, on the defensive, marking out, as it were, entrenchments, and fortifying a camp for a halt. His method of fortifi cation will be short and simple — not the tedious pro cess of alleging new or forgotten facts, or combining old and well-known facts in new relations. His ram parts will simply be new arrangements of words. He will so define Reason as to include Faith ; he will then urge that faith is consequently reasonable ; and he will thus lead us to the implied inference that it does not
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much matter on what grounds we believe ; for Faith must be in accordance with Reason, even when it believes on very little evidence and almost on no evidence at all. This done, his forces are safe from present attack, and prepared to advance, on the morrow, toward the full Tractarian doctrine — and possibly on the next day, towards something beyond that.
CHAPTER XXV
ENTRENCHING A CAMP
§ 10 1. What is Faith ?
IN Tract 85, published in 1838, Newman had admitted that many require "more explicit Scripture proof" of this or that doctrine ; " this," he said, was " one of the main difficulties, and (as I think) one of the intended difficulties, which God's providence puts at this day in the path of those who seek Him, t for purposes known or unknown, ascertainable or not " : and he exhorted his readers not to be deterred from believing, even though the evidence, &c., " might be given more explicitly and fully, and (if I may say so) more consistently." This thought he works out more fully in the sermons we shall now consider. Amplify ing and emphasizing the assertion that God intended this " difficulty," he will lead us to the conclusion that Faith is just this : — believing without proof, or with very little proof, out of love for God.
This last proposition is all the more misleading because, with certain qualifications, it is true. Nothing external can prove God's Fatherhood to a cynic or a sensualist ; for, first, he has formed no conception of it ; and, secondly, even though the dogma were written in the sky, he might say it was written by an
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evil spirit, who took a pleasure in fooling men ; or that it came there by accident. Nothing external can disprove it to a Christian ; not martyrdom, not earth quakes, not wars, not the human phenomena of our crowded cities, nor even the quarrels and corruptions and fictions with which the Churches have polluted sacred things. Here, then, is one large province in the region of right Faith, where we may believe, on what we should call — if we