[From _The Quarterly Review_, October, 1864]
_Apologia pro Vita suâ_. By JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, D.D.
Few books have been published of late years which combine more distinct
elements of interest than the "Apologia" of Dr. Newman. As an
autobiography, in the highest sense of that word, as the portraiture,
that is, and record of what the man was, irrespective of those common
accidents of humanity which too often load the biographer's pages, it is
eminently dramatic. To produce such a portrait was the end which the
writer proposed to himself, and which he has achieved with a rare
fidelity and completeness. Hardly do the "Confessions of St. Augustine"
more vividly reproduce the old African Bishop before successive
generations in all the greatness and struggles of his life than do these
pages the very inner being of this remarkable man--"the living
intelligence," as he describes it, "by which I write, and argue, and
act" (p. 47). No wonder that when he first fully recognised what he had
to do, he
shrank from both the task and the exposure which it would entail. I
must, I said, give the true key to my whole life; I must show what I
am, that it may be seen what I am not, and that the phantom may be
extinguished which gibbers instead of me. I wish to be known as a
living man, and not as a scarecrow which is dressed up in my
clothes.... I will draw out, as far as may be, the history of my mind;
I will state the point at which I began, in what external suggestion
or accident each opinion had its rise, how far and how they were
developed from within, how they grew, were modified, were combined,
were in collision with each other, and were changed. Again, how I
conducted myself towards them; and how, and how far, and for how long
a time, I thought I could hold them consistently with the
ecclesiastical engagements which I had made, and with the position
which I filled.... It is not at all pleasant for me to be egotistical
nor to be criticised for being so. It is not pleasant to reveal to
high and low, young and old, what has gone on within me from my early
years. It is not pleasant to be giving to every shallow or flippant
disputant the advantage over me of knowing my most private thoughts, I
might even say the intercourse between myself and my Maker.
--pp. 47-51.
Here is the task he set himself, and the task which he has performed.
There is in these pages an absolute revealing of the hidden life in its
acting, and its processes, which at times is almost startling, which is
everywhere of the deepest interest. For the life thus revealed is well
worthy of the pen by which it is portrayed. Of all those who, in these
later years, have quitted the Church of England for the Roman communion
--esteemed, honoured, and beloved, as were many of them--no one, save
Dr. Newman, appears to us to possess the rare gift of undoubted genius.
That life, moreover, which anywhere and at any time must have marked its
own character on his fellows, was cast precisely at the time and place
most favourable for stamping upon others the impress of itself. The
plate was ready to receive and to retain every line of the image which
was thrown so vividly upon it. The history, therefore, of this life in
its shifting scenes of thought, feeling, and purpose, becomes in fact
the history of a school, a party, and a sect. From its effect on us,
who, from without, judge of it with critical calmness, we can form some
idea of what must be its power on those who were within the charmed
ring; who were actually under the wand of the enchanter, for whom there
was music in that voice, fascination in that eye, and habitual command
in that spare but lustrous countenance; and who can trace again in this
retrospect the colours and shadows which in those years which fixed
their destiny, passed, though in less distinct hues, into their own
lives, and made them what they are.
Again, in another aspect, the "Apologia" will have a special interest
for most of our readers. Almost every page of it will throw some light
upon the great controversy which has been maintained for these three
hundred years, and which now spreads itself throughout the world,
between the Anglican Church and her oldest and greatest antagonist, the
Papal See....
The first names to which it introduces us indicate the widely-differing
influences under which was formed that party within our Church which has
acted so powerfully and in such various directions upon its life and
teaching. They are those of Mr.--afterwards Archbishop--Whately and Dr.
Hawkins, afterwards and still the Provost of Oriel College. To
intercourse with both of whom Dr. Newman attributes great results in the
formation of his own character: the first emphatically opening his mind
and teaching him to use his reason, whilst in religious opinion he
taught him the existence of a church, and fixed in him Anti-Erastian
views of Church polity; the second being a man of most exact mind, who
through a course of severe snubbing taught him to weigh his words and be
cautious in his statements.
To an almost unknown degree, Oriel had at that time monopolised the
active speculative intellect of Oxford. Her fellowships being open,
whilst those of other Colleges were closed, drew to her the ablest men
of the University: whilst the nature of the examination for her
fellowships, which took no note of ordinary University honours, and
stretched boldly out beyond inquiries as to classical and mathematical
attainments in everything which could test the dormant powers of the
candidates, had already impressed upon the Society a distinctive
character of intellectual excellence. The late Lord Grenville used at
this time to term an Oriel Fellowship the Blue Ribbon of the University;
and, undoubtedly, the results of those examinations have been
marvellously confirmed by the event, if we think to what an extent the
mind, and opinions, and thoughts of England have been moulded by them
who form the list of those "Orielenses," of whom it was said in an
academic squib of the time, with some truth, flavoured perhaps with a
spice of envy, that they were wont to enter the academic circle "under a
flourish of trumpets." Such a "flourish" certainly has often preceded
the entry of far lesser men than E. Coplestone, E. Hawkins, J. Davison,
J. Keble, R. Whately, T. Arnold, E.B. Pusey, J. H. Newman, H. Froude, R.
J. Wilberforce, S. Wilberforce, G. A. Denison, &c., &c.
Into a Society leavened with such intellectual influences as these, Dr.
Newman, soon after taking his degree, was ushered. It could at this time
have borne no distinctively devout character in its religious aspect.
Rather must it have been marked by the opposite of this. Whately, whose
powerful and somewhat rude intellect must almost have overawed the
common room when the might of Davison had been taken from it, was, with
all his varied excellences, never by any means an eminently devout,
scarcely perhaps an orthodox man. All his earlier writings bristle with
paradoxes, which affronted the instincts of simpler and more believing
minds. Whately, accordingly, appears in these pages as "generous and
warmhearted--particularly loyal to his friends" (p. 68); as teaching
his pupil "to see with my own eyes and to walk with my own feet"; yet as
exercising an influence over him (p. 69) which, "in a higher respect
than intellectual advance, had not been satisfactory," under which he
"was beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral, was drifting
in the direction of liberalism"; a "dream" out of which he was "rudely
awakened at the end of 1827, by two great blows--illness and
bereavement" (p. 72).
Though this change in his views is traced by Dr. Newman to the action of
these strictly personal causes of illness and bereavement, yet other
influences, we suspect, were working strongly in the same direction. It
is plain that, so far as regards early permanent impression on the
character of his religious opinions, the influence of Whately was
calculated rather to stir up reaction than to win a convert. "Whately's
mind," he says himself (p. 68), "was too different from mine for us to
remain long on one line." The course of events round him impelled him in
the same direction, and furnished him with new comrades, on whom
henceforth he was to act, and who were to react most powerfully on him.
The torrent of reform was beginning its full rush through the land; and
its turbulent waters threatened not only to drown the old political
landmarks of the Constitution, but also to sweep away the Church of the
nation. Abhorrence of these so-called liberal opinions was the electric
current which bound together the several minds which speedily appeared
as instituting and directing the great Oxford Church movement. Not that
it was in any sense the offspring of the old cry of "the Church in
danger." The meaning of that alarm was the apprehension of danger to the
emoluments or position of the Church as the established religion in the
land. From the very first the Oxford movement pointed more to the
maintenance of the Church as a spiritual society, divinely incorporated
to teach certain doctrines, and do certain acts which none other could
do, than to the preservation of those temporal advantages which had been
conferred by the State. From the first there was a tendency to
undervalue these external aids, which made the movement an object of
suspicion to thorough Church-and-State men. This suspicion was repaid by
the members of the new school with a return of contempt. They believed
that in struggling for the temporal advantages of the Establishment, men
had forgotten the essential characteristics of the Church, and had been
led to barter their divine birthright for the mess of pottage which Acts
of Parliament secured them. Thus we find Dr. Newman remembering his
early Oxford dislike of "the bigoted two-bottle orthodox." He records
(p. 73) the characteristic mode in which on the appearance of the first
symptoms of his "leaving the clientela" of Dr. Whately he was punished
by that rough humorist. "Whately was considerably annoyed at me; and he
took a humorous revenge, of which he had given me due notice
beforehand.... He asked a set of the least intellectual men in Oxford to
dinner, and men most fond of port; he made me one of the party; placed
me between Provost this and Principal that, and then asked me if I was
proud of my friends" (p. 73). It is easy to conceive how he liked them.
He had, indeed, though formerly a supporter of Catholic Emancipation,
"acted with them in opposing Mr. Peel's re-election in 1829, on 'simple
academical grounds,' because he thought that a great University ought
not to be bullied even by a great Duke of Wellington" (p. 172); but he
soon parted with his friends of "two-bottle orthodoxy," and joined the
gathering knot of men of an utterly different temper, who "disliked the
Duke's change of policy as dictated by liberalism" (p. 72).
This whole company shared the feelings which even yet, after so many
years and in such altered circumstances, break forth from Dr. Newman
like the rumblings and smoke of a long extinct volcano, in such
utterances as this: "The new Bill for the suppression of the Irish Sees
was in prospect, and had filled my mind. I had fierce thoughts against
the Liberals. It was the success of the Liberal cause which fretted me
inwardly. I became fierce against its instruments and its
manifestations. A French vessel was at Algiers; I would not even look at
the tricolor" (97). This was the temper of the whole band. Most of these
men appear in Dr. Newman's pages; and from their common earnestness and
various endowments a mighty band they were.
* * * * *
Here then was the band which have accomplished so much; which have
failed in so much; which have added a new party-name to our vocabulary;
which have furnished materials for every scribbling or declaiming
political Protestant, from the writer of the Durham Letter down to Mr.
Whalley and Mr. Harper; which aided so greatly in reawakening the
dormant energies of the English Church; which carried over to the ranks
of her most deadly opponent some of the ablest and most devoted of her
sons. The language of these pages has never varied concerning this
movement. We have always admitted its many excellences--we have always
lamented its evils. As long ago as in 1839, whilst we protested openly
and fully against what we termed at the time the "strange and
lamentable" publication of Mr. Froude's "Remains,"[1] we declared our
hope that "the publication of the Oxford Tracts was a very seasonable
and valuable contribution to the cause both of the Church and the
State." And in 1846, even after so many of our hopes had faded away, we
yet spoke in the same tone of "this religious movement in our Church,"
as one "from which, however clouded be the present aspect, we doubt not
that great blessings have resulted and will result, unless we forfeit
them by neglect or wilful abuse."[2]
[1] "Quarterly Review," vol. lxiii, p. 551.
[2] Ibid., vol. lxxviii, p. 24.
The history of the progress of the movement lies scattered through these
pages. All that we can collect concerning its first intention confirms
absolutely Mr. Perceval's Statements, 1843, that it was begun for two
leading objects: "first, the firm and practical maintenance of the
doctrine of the apostolical succession.... secondly, the preservation in
its integrity of the Christian doctrine in our Prayerbooks."[1] Its
unity of action was shaken by the first entrance of doubts into its
leader's mind. His retirement from it tended directly to break it up as
an actual party. But it would be a monstrous error to suppose that the
influence of this movement was extinguished when its conductors were
dispersed as a party. So far from it, the system of the Church of
England took in all the more freely the elements of truth which it had
all along been diffusing, because they were no longer scattered abroad
by the direct action of an organised party under ostensible chiefs.
Where, we may ask, is not at this moment the effect of that movement
perfectly appreciable within our body? Look at the new-built and
restored churches of the land; look at the multiplication of schools;
the greater exactness of ritual observance; the higher standard of
clerical life, service, and devotion; the more frequent celebrations;
the cathedrals open; the loving sisterhoods labouring, under episcopal
sanction, with the meek, active saintliness of the Church's purest time;
look--above all, perhaps--at the raised tone of devotion and doctrine
amongst us, and see in all these that the movement did not die, but
rather flourished with a new vigour when the party of the movement was
so greatly broken up. It is surely one of the strangest objections which
can be urged against a living spiritual body, that the loss of many of
its foremost sons still left its vital strength unimpaired. Yet this was
Dr. Newman's objection, and his witness, fourteen years ago, when he
complained of the Church of England, that though it had given "a hundred
educated men to the Catholic Church, yet the huge creature from which
they went forth showed no consciousness of its loss, but shook itself,
and went about its work as of old time."[2]
[1] "Collection of Papers connected with the Theological Movement of
1833." By the Hon. and Rev. A.P. Perceval. 1843. Second Edition.
[2] "Lectures on Anglican Difficulties," p. 9.
As the unity of the party was broken up, the fire which had burned
hitherto in but a single beacon was scattered upon a thousand hills.
Nevertheless, the first breaking up of the party was eminently
disheartening to its living members. But it was not by external violence
that it was broken, but by the development within itself of a
distinctive Romeward bias. Dr. Newman lays his hand upon a particular
epoch in its progress, at which, he says, it was crossed by a new set of
men, who imparted to it that leaning to Romanism which ever after
perceptibly beset it. "A new school of thought was rising, as is usual
in such movements, and was sweeping the original party of the movement
aside, and was taking its place" (p. 277). This is a curious instance of
self-delusion. He was, as we maintain, throughout, the Romanising
element in the whole movement. But for him it might have continued, as
its other great chiefs still continue, the ornament and strength of the
English Church. These younger men, to whom he attributes the change,
were, in fact, the minds whom he had consciously or unconsciously
fashioned and biassed. Some of them, as is ever the case, had outrun
their leader. Some of them were now, in their sensitive spiritual
organism, catching the varying outline of the great leader whom they
almost worshipped, and beginning at once to give back his own altering
image. Instead of seeing in their changing minds this reflection of
himself, he dwelt upon it as an original element, and read in its
presence an indication of its being the will of God that the stream
should turn its flow towards the gulf to which he himself had unawares,
it may be, directed its waters. Those who remember how at this time he
was followed will know how easily such a result might follow his own
incipient change. Those who can still remember how many often
involuntarily caught his peculiar intonation--so distinctively singular,
and therefore so attractive in himself and so repulsive in his copyists
--will understand how the altering fashion of the leader's thoughts was
appropriated with the same unconscious fidelity.
One other cause acted powerfully on him and on them to give this bias to
the movement, and that was the bitterness and invectives of the Liberal
party. Dr. Newman repeatedly reminds us that it was the Liberals who
drove him from Oxford. The four tutors--the after course of one of whom,
at least, was destined to display so remarkable a Nemesis--and the pack
who followed them turned by their ceaseless baying the noble hart who
led the rest towards this evil covert. He and they heard incessantly
that they were Papists in disguise: men dishonoured by professing one
thing and holding another; until they began to doubt their own fidelity,
and in that doubt was death. Nor was this all. The Liberals ever (as is
their wont), most illiberal to those who differ from them, began to use
direct academic persecution; until, in self-distrust and very weariness,
the great soul began to abandon the warfare it had waged inwardly
against its own inclinations and the fascinations of its enemy, and to
yield the first defences to the foe. It will remain written, as Dr.
Newman's deliberate judgment, that it was the Liberals who forced him
from Oxford. How far, if he had not taken that step, he might have again
shaken off the errors which were growing on him--how far therefore in
driving him from Oxford they drove him finally to Rome--man can never
know.
In the new light thrown upon it from the pages of the "Apologia," we see
with more distinctness than was ever shown before, how greatly this
tendency to Rome, which at last led astray so many of the masters of the
party, was infused into it by the single influence of Dr. Newman
himself. We do not believe that, in spite of his startling speeches, the
bias towards Rome was at all as strong even in H. Froude himself. Let
his last letter witness for him:--"If," he says, "I was to assign my
reasons for belonging to the Church of England in preference to any
other religious community, it would be simply this, that she has
retained an apostolical clergy, and enacts no sinful terms of communion;
whereas, on the other hand, the Romanists, though retaining an
apostolical clergy, do exact sinful terms of communion."[1] This was the
tone of the movement until it was changed in Dr. Newman. We believe that
in tracing this out we shall be using these pages entirely as their
author intended them to be used. They were meant to exhibit to his
countrymen the whole secret of his moral and spiritual anatomy; they
were intended to prove that he was altogether free from that foul and
disgraceful taint of innate dishonesty, the unspoken suspicion of which
in so many quarters had so long troubled him; the open utterance of
which, from the lips of a popular and respectable writer, was so
absolutely intolerable to him. From that imputation it is but bare
justice to say he does thoroughly clear himself. The post-mortem
examination of his life is complete; the hand which guided the
dissecting-knife has trembled nowhere, nor shrunk from any incision. All
lies perfectly open, and the foul taint is nowhere. And yet, looking
back with the writer on the changes which this strange narrative
records, from his subscribing, in 1828, towards the first start of the
"Record" newspaper to his receiving on the 9th of October, 1845, at
Littlemore, the "remarkable-looking man, evidently a foreigner, shabbily
dressed in black,"[2] who received him into the Papal Communion, we see
abundant reason, even without the action of that prevalent suspicion of
secret dishonesty somewhere, which in English minds inevitably connects
itself with the spread of Popery, for the widely-diffused impression of
that being true which it is so pleasant to find unfounded.
[1] "Collection of Papers, &c." p. 16.
[2] "Historical Notes of the Tractarian Movement," by Canon Oakley.
Dublin Review, No. v, p. 190.
From first to last these pages exhibit the habit of Dr. Newman's mind as
eminently subjective. It might almost be described as the exact opposite
of that of S. Athanasius: with a like all-engrossing love for truth;
with ecclesiastical habits often strangely similar; with cognate gifts
of the imperishable inheritance of genius, the contradiction here is
almost absolute. The abstract proposition, the rightly-balanced
proposition, is everything to the Eastern, it is well-nigh nothing to
the English Divine. When led by circumstances to embark in the close
examination of Dogma, as in his "History of the Arians," his Nazarite
locks of strength appear to have been shorn, and the giant, at whose
might we have been marvelling, becomes as any other man. The dogmatic
portion of this work is poor and tame; it is only when the writer
escapes from dogma into the dramatic representation of the actors in the
strife that his powers reappear. For abstract truth it is true to us
that he has no engrossing affection: his strength lay in his own
apprehension of it, in his power of defending it when once it had been
so apprehended and had become engrafted into him; and it is to this as
made one with himself, and to his own inward life as fed and nourished
by it, that he perpetually reverts.
All this is the more remarkable because he conceives himself to have
been, even from early youth, peculiarly devoted to dogma in the
abstract; he returns continually to this idea, confounding, as we
venture to conceive, his estimate of the effect of truth when he
received it, on himself, with truth as it exists in the abstract. And as
this affected him in regard to dogma, so it reached to his relations to
every part of the Church around him. It led him to gather up in a
dangerous degree, into the person of his "own Bishop," the deference due
to the whole order. "I did not care much for the Bench of Bishops, nor
should I have cared much for a Provincial Council.... All these matters
seemed to me to be jure ecclesiastico; but what to me was jure divino
was the voice of my Bishop in his own person. My own Bishop was my
Pope."--(p. 123.) His intense individuality had substituted the personal
bond to the individual for the general bond to the collective holders of
the office: and so when the strain became violent it snapped at once.
This doubtless natural disposition seems to have been developed, and
perhaps permanently fixed, as the law of his intellectual and spiritual
being, by the peculiarities of his early religious training. Educated in
what is called the "Evangelical" school, early and consciously
converted, and deriving his first religious tone, in great measure, from
the vehement but misled Calvinism, of which Thomas Scott, of Aston
Sandford, was one of the ablest and most robust specimens, he was early
taught to appreciate, and even to judge of, all external truth mainly in
its ascertainable bearings on his own religious experience. In many a
man the effect of this teaching is to fix him for life in a hard,
narrow, and exclusive school of religious thought and feeling, in which
he lives and dies profoundly satisfied with himself and his
co-religionists, and quite hopeless of salvation for any beyond the
immediate pale in which his own Shibboleth is pronounced with the
exactest nicety of articulation. But Dr. Newman's mind was framed upon a
wholly different idea, and the results were proportionally dissimilar.
With the introvertive tendency which we have ascribed to him, was joined
a most subtle and speculative intellect, and an ambitious temper. The
"Apologia" is the history of the practical working out of those various
conditions. His hold upon any truth external to and separate from
himself, was so feeble when placed in comparison with his perception of
what was passing within himself, that the external truth was always
liable to corrections which would make its essential elements harmonize
with what was occurring within his own intellectual or spiritual being.
We think that we can distinctly trace in these pages a twofold
consequence from all this: first, an inexhaustible mutability in his
views on all subjects; and secondly, a continually recurring temptation
to entire scepticism as to everything external to himself. Every page
gives illustrations of the first of these. He votes for what was called
Catholic Emancipation, and is drifting into the ranks of liberalism. But
the external idea of liberty is very soon metamorphosed, in his view,
from the figure of an angel of light into that of a spirit of darkness;
first, by his academical feeling that a great University ought not to be
bullied even by a great Duke, and then by the altered temper of his own
feelings, as they are played upon by the alternate vibrations of the
gibes of "Hurrell Froude," and the deep tones of Mr. Keble's
ministrelsy.
The history of his religious alternations is in exact keeping with all
this. At every separate stage of his course, he constructs for himself a
tabernacle in which for a while he rests. This process he repeats with
an incessant simplicity of renewed commencements, which is almost like
the blind acting of instinct leading the insect, which is conscious of
its coming change, to spin afresh and afresh its ever-broken cocoon. He
is at one time an Anglo-Catholic, and sees Antichrist in Rome; he falls
back upon the Via Media--that breaks down, and left him, he says (p.
211), "very nearly a pure Protestant"; and again he has a "new theory
made expressly for the occasion, and is pleased with his new view" (p.
269); he then rests in "Samaria" before he finds his way over to Rome.
For the time every one of these transient tabernacles seems to
accomplish its purpose. He finds certain repose for his spirit. Whilst
sheltered by it, all the great unutterable phenomena of the external
world are viewed by him in relation to himself and to his home of
present rest. The gourd has grown up in a night, and shelters him by its
short-lived shadow from the tyrannous rays of the sunshine. But some
sudden irresistible change in his own inward preceptions alters
everything. The idea shoots across his mind that the English Church is
in the position of the Monophysite heretics of the fifth century (p.
209). At once all his views of truth are changed. He moves on to a new
position; pitches anew his tent; builds himself up a new theory; and
finds the altitudes of the stars above him, and the very forms of the
heavenly constellations, change with the change of his earthly
habitation.
* * * * *
In October the final step is taken, and in the succeeding January the
mournful history is closed in the following most touching words:--
Jan. 20, 1846.--You may think how lonely I am. _Obliviscere populum
tuum et domum patris tui_, has been in my ears for the last twelve
hours. I realize more that we are leaving Littlemore, and it is like
going on the open sea.
I left Oxford for good on Monday, February 23, 1846. On the Saturday
and Sunday before, I was in my house at Littlemore simply by myself,
as I had been for the first day or two when I had originally taken
possession of it. I slept on Sunday night at my dear friend's, Mr.
Johnson's, at the Observatory. Various friends came to see the last of
me--Mr. Copeland, Mr. Church, Mr. Buckle, Mr. Pattison, and Mr. Lewis.
Dr. Pusey, too, came up to take leave of me; and I called on Dr. Ogle,
one of my very oldest friends, for he was my private tutor when I was
an undergraduate. In him I took leave of my first College, Trinity,
which was so dear to me, and which held on its foundation so many who
have been kind to me, both when I was a boy and all through my Oxford
life. Trinity had never been unkind to me. There used to be much
snapdragon growing on the walls opposite my freshman's rooms there,
and I had for years taken it as the emblem of my own perpetual
residence, even unto death, in my University.
On the morning of the 23rd I left the Observatory. I have never seen
Oxford since, excepting its spires, as they are seen from the railway.
What an exceeding sadness is gathered up in these words! And yet the
impress of this time left upon some of Dr. Newman's writings seems, like
the ruin which records what was the violence of the throes of the
long-passed earthquake, even still more indicative of the terrible
character of the struggle through which at this time he passed. We have
seen how keenly he felt the suspicious intrusions upon his privacy which
haunted his last years in the Church of England. But in "Loss and Gain"
there is a yet more expressive exhibition of the extremity of that
suffering. He denies as "utterly untrue" the common belief that he
"introduced friends or partisans into the tale"; and of course he is to
be implicitly believed. And yet ONE there is whom no one who reads the
pages can for a moment doubt is there, and that is Dr. Newman himself.
The weary, unresting, hunted condition of the leading figure in the
tale, with all its accompaniment of keen, flashing wit, always seemed to
us the history of those days when a well-meant but impertinent series of
religious intrusions was well-nigh driving the wise man mad.
We have followed out these steps thus in detail, not only because of
their intense interest as an autobiography, but also because the
narrative itself seems to throw the strongest possible light on the
mainly-important question how far this defection of one of her greatest
sons does really tend to weaken the argumentative position of the
English Church in her strife with Rome. What has been said already will
suffice to prove that in our opinion no such consequence can justly
follow from it. We acknowledge freely the greatness of the individual
loss. But the causes of that defection are, we think, clearly shown to
have been the peculiarities of the individual, not the weakness of the
side which he abandoned. His steps mark no path to any other. He sprang
clear over the guarding walls of the sheepfold, and opened no way
through them for other wanderers. Men may have left the Church of
England because their leader left it; but they could not leave it as he
left it, or because of his reasons for leaving it. In truth, he appears
never to have occupied a thoroughly real Church-of-England position. He
was at first, by education and private judgment, a Calvinistic Puritan;
he became dissatisfied with the coldness and barrenness of this theory,
and set about finding a new position for himself, and in so doing he
skipped over true, sound English Churchmanship into a course of feeling
and thought allied with and leading on to Rome. Even the hindrances
which so long held him back can scarcely be said to have been indeed the
logical force of the unanswerable credentials of the English Church. On
the contrary they were rather personal impressions, feelings, and
difficulties. His faithful, loving nature made him cling desperately to
early hopes, friendships, and affections. Even to the end Thomas Scott
never loses his hold upon him. His narrative is not the history of the
normal progress of a mind from England to Rome; it is so thoroughly
exceptional that it does not seem calculated to seduce to Rome men
governed in such high matters by argument and reason rather than by
impulse and feeling. We do not therefore think that the mere fact of
this secession tells with any force against that communion whose claims
satisfied to their dying day such men as Hooker and Andrewes, and Ussher
and Hammond, and Bramhall and Butler.
But, beyond this, his present view of the English Church appears to be
incompatible with that fierce and internecine hostility to the claim
upon the loyalty of her children which is really essential to clear the
act of perverting others from her ranks from the plainest guilt of
schism. It is not merely that the nobleness and tenderness of his nature
make his tone so unlike that of many of those who have taken the same
step with himself. It is not that every provocation--and how many they
have been!--every misunderstanding--and they have been all but
universal; every unworthy charge or insinuation--down to those of
Professor Kingsley, failed to embitter his feelings against the
communion he has deserted and the friends whom he has left. It is not
this to which we refer, for this is personal to himself, and the fruit
of his own generosity and true greatness of soul. But we refer to his
calm, deliberate estimate of the forsaken Church. He says, indeed, that
since his change he has "had no changes to record, no anxiety of heart
whatever. I have been in perfect peace and contentment. I never had one
doubt" (p. 373). But, as we have seen already, this was always the
temporary condition in which every new phase of opinion landed him. He
was always able to build up these tabernacles of rest. The difference
between this and those former resting-places is clear. In those he was
still a searcher after truth: he needed and required conviction, and a
new conviction might shake the old comfort. But his present
resting-place is built upon the denial of all further enquiry. "I have,"
he says (p. 374), "no further history of religious opinions to narrate":
and some following words show how entirely it is this abandonment of the
idea of the actual conviction of truth for the blind admission of the
dictates of a despotic external authority on which he rests.
* * * * *
There is another deeply interesting question raised by Dr. Newman's
work, on which, if our limits did not absolutely prevent, we should be
glad to enter. We mean the present position of the Church of Rome with
that great rationalistic movement with which we, too, are called to
contend. Everywhere in Europe this contest is proceeding, and the
relations of the Church of Rome towards it are becoming daily more and
more embarrassed. Mr. Ffoulkes tells us that "the 'Home and Foreign
Review' is the _only_ publication professing to emanate from Roman
Catholics in this country that can be named in the same breath with the
leading Protestant Reviews."[1] Since he wrote these words its course
has been closed by Pontifical authority. M. Montalembert has barely
escaped censure with the payment of the penalty--so heavy to his
co-religionists--of an enforced silence; and Dr. Newman "interprets recent
acts of authority as tying the hands of a controversialist such as I
should be,"[2] and so is prevented completing the great work which has
occupied so much of his thoughts, and which promised, more than any
other work this country is likely to see, to set some limiting boundary
line between the provinces of a humble faith in Revelation and an ardent
love of advancing science. This is an evil inflicted by Rome on this
whole generation. But in truth, whenever the mind of Christendom is
active, the attitude of the Papal communion before this new enemy is
that of a startled, trembling minaciousness, which invites the deadly
combat it can so ill maintain.
[1] "Union Review," ix, 294.
[2] "Apol." 405.
These facts are patent to every one who knows anything whatever of the
present state of religious thought throughout Roman Catholic Europe.
Almost every one knows further that the struggle between those who would
subject all science and all the actings of the human mind to the
authority of the Church, and those who would limit the exercise of that
authority more or less to the proper subject-matter of theology, is rife
and increasing. The words of, perhaps, the ablest living member of the
Roman Catholic communion have rung through Europe, and many a heart in
all religious communions has been saddened by the thought of Dr.
Döllinger's virtual censure. And yet it is at such a time as this that
Dr. Manning ventures to put forth his "Letters to a Friend," painting
all as peace, unanimity, and obedient faith within the Roman Church; all
dissension, unbelief, and letting slip of the ancient faith within our
own communion. Surely such are not the weapons by which the cause of
God's truth can be advanced!
But we must bring our remarks on the "Apologia" to a close.
Some lessons there are, and those great ones, which this book is
calculated to instil into members of our own communion. Pre-eminently it
shows the rottenness of that mere Act-of-Parliament foundation on which
some, now-a-days, would rest our Church. Dr. Newman suggests, more than
once, that such a course must rob us of all our present strength. Dr.
Manning sings his paean with wild and premature delight, as if the evil
was already accomplished. In his first letter he triumphed in the
silence of Convocation, but that silence has since been broken. A solemn
synodical judgment, couched in the most explicit language, has condemned
the false teaching which had been our Church's scandal. But because a
"very exalted person in the House of Lords"[1] (p. 4), with an ignorance
or an ignoring of law, as was shown in the debate, which was simply
astonishing, chose, in a manner which even Dr. Manning condemns, to
assert, without a particle of real evidence, that the Convocation had
exceeded its legitimate powers, Dr. Manning is in ecstasies. The "very
exalted person" becomes "a righteous judge, a learned judge, a Daniel
come to judgment--yea, a Daniel." These shouts of joy ought to be enough
to show men where the real danger lies. Our present position is
impregnable. But if we abandon it for the new one proposed to us by the
Rationalist party, how shall we be able to stand? How could a national
religious Establishment which should seek to rest its foundations--not
on God's Word; on the ancient Creeds; on a true Apostolic ministry; on
valid Sacraments; on a living, even though it be an obscured, unity with
the Universal Church, and so on the presence with her of her Lord, and
on the gifts of His Spirit--but upon the critical reason of individuals,
and the support of Acts of Parliament--ever stand in the coming
struggle? How could it meet Rationalism on the one hand? How could it
withstand Popery on the other? After such a fatal change its career
might be easily foreshadowed. Under the assaults of Rationalism, it
would year by year lose some parts of the great deposit of the Catholic
faith. Under the attacks of Rome, it would lose many of those whom it
can ill spare, because they believe most firmly in the verities for
which she is ready to witness. Thus it might continue until our ministry
were filled with the time-serving, the ignorant, and the unbelieving;
and, when this has come to pass, the day of final doom cannot be far
distant. How such evils are to be averted is the anxious question of the
present day. The great practical question seems to us to be that to
which we have before this alluded,[2]--How the Supreme Court of Appeal
can be made fitter for the due discharge of its momentous functions? We
cannot enter here upon that great question. But solved it must be, and
solved upon the principles of the great Reformation statutes of our
land, which maintain, in the supremacy of the Crown, our undoubted
nationality; which, besides maintaining this great principle of national
life, save us from all the terrible practical evils of appeals to Rome,
and yet which maintain the spirituality of the land, as the guardians
under God of the great deposit of the Faith, in the very terms in which
the Catholic Church of Christ has from the beginning received, and to
this day handed down in its completeness, the inestimable gift.
[1] Hansard's "House of Lord's Debates," July 15, 1864
[2] "Quarterly Review," vol. cxv. p. 560