present institutions of deposit. To what extent this would be the
case, it is, of course, impossible to say. For all ordinary purposes,
and for the needs of the average business man, their advantages could
not fail to be great. Their effect would probably be to withdraw from
the market large sums now available for speculative purposes, and
divert them to legitimate uses. The speculative tendency would,
therefore, be likely to be discouraged by so much. Necessary
limitations might make the postal banks unavailable for those whose
financial transactions are conducted on a great scale, and their wants
would continue to be met by private institutions, which would offer
special inducements to large depositors, just as the trust companies
now offer special inducements over the present national banks by
paying interest on deposits.
ANOTHER VIEW OF NEWMAN.
BY WM. M. SALTER.
I suppose I should never have felt toward Cardinal John Henry Newman
as I do, had I not been once in a certain state of mind. It was my
lot, as a divinity student, to feel under the necessity of examining
into the grounds of my religious belief. I could not accept what my
teachers gave me, simply because it was taught, much as I revered some
of them. I had to test, examine, and conclude for myself. I evidently
felt the difficulties of belief, as most of my fellow-students did
not. At New Haven the main outlines of evangelical orthodoxy, at
Cambridge the fundamental ideas of theism, were accepted, as a rule,
without serious question. I envied my fellows their assurance; I, too,
craved assurance, but I had to get it in my own way, and I was plunged
into investigations, and beset by doubts that did not seem to occupy
or perplex them. The question was, where could I find a point to start
from; not what was the whole truth, but what was the truth I could be
immediately sure of,--what was light that I could not question (or, at
least, reasonably question)? For, once in possession of that, other
things might naturally and logically follow. It seemed to me, that if
there was any sure ground for the Christian believer, it was to be
found in Christ himself; that if ever a voice from another world had
spoken to this, it had been through him. The fundamental problem was,
Was his consciousness to be trusted? It was after three years of
examination into the origin and trustworthiness of the gospel records,
of effort to form a faithful picture of Jesus' mind, of weighing of
probabilities as to whether he could have been mistaken, and a
decision that he could not have been, and that he was, under God, my
appointed Lord, and Saviour, and Judge, as he was that of all men,--it
was at this time that I fell in with the writings of Newman, and that
he began to exercise a charm over me, which, amid all my subsequent
changes of thought, I have never been willing to disown.
I felt in the first place that he had a profound sense of the
difficulties of faith. There was no evidence that certain questions
had ever been open questions to him (such as the being of God and the
reality of a revelation), but he seemed to be as keenly aware of the
difficulties attending them as if they had been. He believed and yet
he knew the other side. Few are the apologists who have dared to say
what he has said; few are the unbelievers who could state their case
more strongly than he has stated it for them. It was this width of
imagination that, for one thing, separated him from the ordinary
theologian. One of his precepts to a zealous follower was, "Be sure
you grasp fully any view which you seek to combat." Let me illustrate.
Newman admitted in so many words that it was a great question whether
atheism was not as philosophically consistent with the phenomena of
the physical world as the doctrine of a creative and governing power.
He allowed Hume's argument against miracles to be valid from a purely
scientific aspect of things, and doubted the conclusiveness of the
design argument (though not the argument from order) for the being of
God. He knew to the full how hard it was to hold one's faith in God in
face of all that seems amiss and awry, purposeless, blind, and cruel
in the world. He held this faith, he believed there were reasons for
it (chiefly in man's conscience), it was the starting-point of his
religious system, and yet when he looked out of himself into the world
of men, the lie seemed to be given to it and the effect was as
confusing, he said, as if it were denied that he was in existence
himself. "If I looked into a mirror [these are his words] and did not
see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes
upon me when I look into this living, busy world and see no reflex of
its Creator.... Were it not for the voice speaking so clearly in my
conscience and my heart, I should be an Atheist, or a Pantheist, or a
Polytheist.... To consider the world in its length and breadth, its
various history, the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes,
their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits,
governments, forms of worship, their enterprises, their aimless
courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent
conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of
a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be
great powers or truths; the progress of things, as if from unreasoning
elements, not towards final causes; the greatness and littleness of
man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over
his futurity; the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the
success of evil, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the
dreary, hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race so
fearfully yet exactly described in the apostle's words, 'Having no
hope and without God in this world'; all this is a vision to dizzy and
appall, and inflicts upon the mind a sense of profound mystery which
is absolutely beyond human solution." To have one's doubts, one's
misgivings, one's own blank confusion portrayed with such appreciation
and in such vivid detail by another--how could it fail to powerfully
affect me? Surely, I said to myself, whether this man's faith was true
or not, he did not hold it because the tremendous obstacles in the way
of it had not been brought home to him. Similarly he appreciated the
difficulties in connection with revelation itself, as when he said
that God "has given us doctrines which are but obscurely gathered from
scripture, and a scripture which is but obscurely gathered from
history," as when he admitted the real obstacles in the way of the
Jews admitting that Jesus was their Messiah.
But I will not linger over this point, and pass on to say that Newman
impressed me as one of those few men, in any age, who have an
intellectual life of their own. His was no hereditary belief; he had
faced the problems of religion for himself. What looks like faith in
many cases, he himself said, was a mere hereditary persuasion, not a
personal principle, a habit learned in the nursery, which is scattered
and disappears like a mist before the light of reason. His own
admiration went out evidently to the "bold unworldliness and vigorous
independence of mind" shown by one of his early teachers, Thos. Scott;
to the type of mind illustrated by an Oxford associate, who had an
intellect, he says, "as critical and logical as it was speculative and
bold." Whately, he records, had taught him to see with his own eyes
and to walk with his own feet; he thought of dedicating his first book
to him, in words to the effect that he had not only taught him to
think, but to think for himself. It was a first hand dealing with
almost all the problems he took up, that I had the sense of in
reading Newman's pages, however far ahead he was of me in the line of
(what seemed then) religious advance.
And because he had thought, he had moved, he had had a history. He
started with certain truths (as he supposed them to be), but instead
of accepting them mechanically, he thought them out; he studied to see
what they implied, what other truths were consistent with them and
what were not; in other words, he gradually worked his way out to
something like a system, and therein consisted his history. The
ordinary idea of Newman (leaving the past tense for the moment) seems
to be that he sacrificed his intellect, that out of weariness he threw
himself into the Catholic fold. Such may be a true account of some
conversions, but it is a pitiable travesty of the facts in the case of
Newman. Newman went into the Church because it seemed rational to him
to do so; and it is still the great question, whether once assuming
certain fundamental ideas held by Protestant and Catholic alike, any
other course is rational. The "trouble" with Newman, as with his
brother Francis (in some ways also a remarkable man), was simply that,
as the London _Truth_ banteringly said, neither was able to swallow
the Athanasian creed in a comfortable and prosaic way, as good Britons
should; or, as the _Saturday Review_ in all seriousness urged, that he
did not hold as his supreme principle pride in the Church of England
as such, determination to stand shoulder to shoulder with others "in
resisting the foreigner, whether he came from Rome or from Geneva,
from Tuebingen or from Saint Sulpice"; in other words, that he opened
the windows of his mind, instead of keeping them shut; that he set out
on living a life of reason instead of one of prejudice; that he
determined to seek out and follow the truth on whatever shores that
quest should land him.
"Most men in this country," Newman once wrote, "like opinions to be
brought to them, rather than to be at the pains to go out and seek for
them." But Newman himself was cast in another mould; rationality,
consistency, were an imperative craving with him; and feeling that the
popular religious creed lacked these things, he went in search of them
and started, as it were, on a journey. A memorandum, written down at
the age of twenty-eight, speaks of himself as "now in my room in Orell
College, slowly advancing, etc., and led on by God's hand blindly,
not knowing whither He is taking me." His touching verses, beginning
"Lead, kindly Light," betray the same feeling. Gloom did encircle him,
but in the midst of it there was a light, which he strove and craved
to follow. Though mystical, in a certain sense, by temperament, he
resolved, he tells us, to be guided, not by his imagination, but by
his reason. He had once a strange emotional experience, but when it
was over he wished that it should not unduly influence him. "I had to
determine its logical value," he says, "and its bearing on my duty."
"What are we doing all through life, both as a necessity and as a
duty," he wrote many years afterwards, "but unlearning the world's
poetry and attaining to its prose? This is our education as boys and
as men, in the action of life and in the closet or library; in our
affections, in our aims, in our hopes, and in our memories. And in
like manner it is the education of our intellect." This is little more
than saying that the supreme rule of life is reason, that it is our
life-task to bring all the varied motions of our minds into harmony
with this ideal. The fact is that he became ultimately persuaded that
the Catholic creed was that rational and consistent creed of which he
was in search--rational and consistent that is, in the sense of being
in harmony with, and an outgrowth of, those fundamental ideas of a God
and of a revelation with which he started; and in addressing others
after he became a Catholic, he said, "Be convinced in your reason that
the Catholic Church is a teacher sent to you from God, and it is
enough. I do not wish you to join her till you are."
Yet while he was in search of the truth, while he was on the journey,
he excited no little suspicion and distrust. The very thing that lends
him charm to those who love to see intellectual movement and
development allowed apostles of prejudice and good, but narrow-minded,
men to think of him as insidious, leading his disciples on to
conclusions to which he designed to bring them, while his purpose was
veiled. But, says Froude, who tells us this, and was himself at Oxford
in those early days, he was on the contrary "the most transparent of
men. He told us what he believed to be true. He did not know where it
would carry him. No one who has ever risen to any great height in the
world refuses to move till he knows whither he is going." Such are the
words of one who, though he felt the spell of Newman, soon struck on
a different intellectual path. Matthew Arnold, too, experienced the
spell. "Who could resist," he says in a lecture on Emerson, "the charm
of that spiritual apparition, 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 and
thoughts which were a religious music--subtile, sweet, mournful." To
Arnold, he was a man "never to be named by a son of Oxford without
sympathy;" and this, though Arnold, too, regarded his solution for the
doubts and difficulties which beset men's minds to-day as impossible.
Once Charles Kingsley brought against him a charge of intellectual
dishonesty and falsity; but, as Mr. Conway remarks, Kingsley's sword
broke in his hands and on all sides the demolition which he received
in Newman's reply (the _Apologia pro Vita Sua_) has been regarded as
complete. Even the _Saturday Review_ says, "His conversion was
transparently honest; no one, save the most contemptible of party
scribes, can ever hint a doubt of that." "He deliberately shut his
eyes," an "intellectual suicide," "his sympathies and sensibilities
were always his ultimate test of right thought and action." Such are
the comments of a recent reviewer; but on the morning of the day in
which Newman was received into the Catholic Church, he wrote to a
friend, "May I have only one tenth part as much faith as _I have
intellectual conviction_ where the truth lies! I do not suppose any
one can have had such combined reasons pouring in upon him that he is
doing right."
But how can Newman have had _reasons_ for his course? we may
incredulously ask. And here I revert to my particular state of mind
years ago. The question for me was, holding as I did that in Jesus,
God had spoken to the world, and that under God he was the Lord, and
Saviour, and Judge of men, could I remain standing in such a position?
It was a starting-point, but did it not lead somewhere? Holding so
much, despite the difficulties, was it not possible that consistently
therewith, I must hold more, despite further difficulties? Looking
about me among Unitarians, with whom I was then associated, I felt
that even this faith had scant acceptance among them. For example,
taking a country church for a year, I found that not in a decade or
more had there been any additions to the church membership, or even
efforts in that direction; the church was, practically, simply an
assemblage of pew-holders. My own efforts to induce persons to confess
Jesus as their Lord, to take his name, to become his avowed follower
before the world (i. e. to join his church), were something novel; yet
a church, an assembly of followers, was essential to my idea of
Christianity,--Jesus having said, "Whoever will confess me before men,
him will I confess before my Father who is in heaven," and a king
without a kingdom (or right to a kingdom) being in itself absurd. I
could not help the foreboding that Unitarianism was not a finality or
more than a camp for a night; nay, the question was whether
Unitarianism was not doing more to dissipate Christianity, than to
build it up in any historical sense of the term.
Moreover, Protestant orthodoxy did not have any firm hold on some
fundamental parts and evident implications of the faith I already
held, and was struggling to keep. The idea of the Church itself was
weak in most Protestant mind; they "spiritualized" it, as they said;
but when Jesus spoke of confessing him _before men_, he evidently laid
the foundations of a visible Church. Again, Jesus felt that he spoke
with Divine authority, and as he was commissioned, so he commissioned
others to stand for him before the world, and to speak in his name. He
left them to be his witnesses, to continue his message and his work
after he should be gone. He had the power to forgive sins, for
example, and he conveyed it to others, solemnly saying that whatever
was bound or loosed on earth, should be bound or loosed in heaven. Was
it exactly natural, I asked myself, that divine light and guidance and
forgiveness should be thus present, as it were, on earth for a few
years, and then become entirely a matter of history and antiquarian
research? If there was reason for Jesus' commissioning the apostles,
was there not equal reason for the apostles commissioning others who
should take their places? Protestants said the revelation was in a
book; but Jesus never spoke of a book. If something else was
authoritative in the apostolic days, what absurdity was there in
supposing that something else might be authoritative in later days?
And yet, no Protestant church or synod or council ever claimed to be
such a living witness of God on the earth. The most zealous
Protestants were careful to say that they gave only their human,
fallible interpretations of the distant revelation; that it was even
blasphemous for a man to claim to forgive sins; that the Bible, and
the Bible only, was their religion. And yet, the Bible, it was
severally claimed, gave the basis to the Presbyterian creed, to the
Methodist creed, to, one might say, a hundred creeds, even including
the slender one of Unitarians. How certain words of Newman came home
to me in the midst of such reflections! "There is an overpowering
antecedent improbability in Almighty God's announcing that He has
revealed something, and then revealing nothing; there is no antecedent
improbability in His revealing it elsewhere than in an inspired
volume." I do not mean to say that I was converted by Newman; but I
was open to light on that side. I did not shut my mind, as most
Protestants seemed to, and I dimly felt, I had a sort of foreboding
that, if what I already held was true, reason might be on his side.
And it was reason--the demand for a set of views that should be
harmonious and consistent--that made me dissatisfied; and so I could
give credit to the idea that Newman in his changes, and in his final
act, was influenced by reason.
To Newman, the main difficulty of all lay in the being of God. If
there was a God, it seemed rational to him that there should be a
revelation, taking into account the actual condition of men. If there
was a revelation, the Catholic Church presented more signs of being
its bearer and custodian than any other body or institution of men. I
think if we are disposed to question the rationality of his course, we
shall find, if we examine the matter carefully, that it is because we
question his postulates, not his reasoning or results. Granted that
there is a God, as men ordinarily understand that term, and I think
that a revelation is antecedently probable; granted that a revelation
has been made, as Protestants (save Unitarians) are agreed, and I
think it but reasonable to suppose that some such body as the Catholic
Church claims to be should be its bearer and unerring interpreter to
men. We are mistaken if we think that Newman devised any short-cut to
mental peace, or used any other instrument or method for arriving at
his results than we ordinarily employ in sound reasonings of every
day. He claimed no intuitions, no vision of theological truth, and he
was less arbitrary and fanciful in defending Catholic dogma than I
have known "philosophers" to be in defending the being of God and the
immortality of the soul. He tells us in his _Apologia_ that he
believed in a God on a ground of probability, that he believed in
Christianity on a probability, and that he believed in Catholicism on
a probability, and that these three grounds of probability, distinct
from each other in subject-matter, were still, all of them, one and
the same in nature of proof, as being probabilities--probabilities of
a special kind, a cumulative, a transcendent probability, but still
probability.
But did he not by some magical metamorphosis turn these probabilities
into a certainty? No; he simply claimed that they were sufficient to
produce certitude, which is a different matter. Certitude, he held,
was a quality or habit of mind; certainty, a quality of propositions;
and probabilities that did not reach to logical certainty might
suffice for a mental certitude. We are mentally sure almost every day
of many things which could not be demonstratively proved; we are
practically as sure of them as if they could be proved; we are ready
to act on the basis of them, and that is the test of practical
certitude. The word of a friend on a matter of which we are ignorant
is an example; we may be as sure of what he tells us as if we had seen
it ourselves; yet he may be mistaken; strictly speaking, his word is
only probable evidence. But did not Newman substitute faith for
reason? Yes, in a sense; but not in a sense in which it is of itself
irrational to do so. How much could the reason of any of us tell us of
Central Africa? We know of it by testimony, do we not? not by reason.
From our own notions alone we could not tell whether it was a desert
or a forest; whether it was inhabited or uninhabited; whether
full-grown human beings or dwarfs lived there; but a Livingstone, a Du
Chaillu, a Stanley, tell us, and we accept their word. The fact is,
that trust in testimony is what we daily practise. We learn of what is
going on in a neighboring town, of much in our own town, of much in
our own house (unless we are there all the time, and in every part of
it at the same time) not by reasoning about it, any more than by
sight, but by faith in what others tell us. "Why should we be
unwilling to go by faith?" asks Newman. "We do all things in this
world by faith in the word of others. By faith only we know our
positions in the world, our circumstances, our rights and privileges,
our fortunes, our parents, our brothers and sisters, our age, our
mortality; why should religion be an exception? Why should we be
willing to use for heavenly objects what we daily use for earthly?"
There is really nothing mystical about faith; it is not peculiarly a
religious principle, nor is it the ideal way of getting knowledge. As
Newman says, "The word of another is in itself a faint evidence
compared with that of sight or reason. It is influential only when we
cannot do without it."