The passage is from the prefatory notice the Cardinal prefixed to the
Rev. William Palmer's _Notes of a Visit to the Russian Church in the
Years 1840, 1841_. It is dated 1882, and is consequently the writing of
a man over eighty years of age: 'William Palmer was one of those
earnest-minded and devout men, forty years since, who, deeply convinced
of the great truth that our Lord had instituted, and still acknowledges
and protects, a Visible Church--one, individual, and integral; Catholic,
as spread over the earth, Apostolic, as coeval with the Apostles of
Christ, and Holy, as being the dispenser of His Word and
Sacraments--considered it at present to exist in three main branches, or
rather in a triple presence, the Latin, the Greek, and the Anglican,
these three being one and the same Church distinguishable from each
other by secondary, fortuitous, and local, though important
characteristics. And whereas the whole Church in its fulness was, as
they believed, at once and severally Anglican, Greek, and Latin, so in
turn each one of those three was the whole Church; whence it followed
that, whenever any one of the three was present, the other two, by the
nature of the case, was absent, and therefore the three could not have
direct relations with each other, as if they were three substantive
bodies, there being no real difference between them except the external
accident of place. Moreover, since, as has been said, on a given
territory there could not be more than one of the three, it followed
that Christians generally, wherever they were, were bound to recognise,
and had a claim to be recognised by that one; ceasing to belong to the
Anglican Church, as Anglican, when they were at Rome, and ignoring Rome,
as Rome, when they found themselves at Moscow. Lastly, not to
acknowledge this inevitable outcome of the initial idea of the Church,
viz., that it was both everywhere and one, was bad logic, and to act in
opposition to it was nothing short of setting up altar against altar,
that is, the hideous sin of schism, and a sacrilege. This I conceive to
be the formal teaching of Anglicanism.'
The most carefully considered judgments of Lord Westbury or Lord Cairns
may be searched in vain for finer examples of stern accuracy and
beautiful aptness of language.
For examples of what may be called Newman's oratorical rush, one has not
far to look--though when torn from their context and deprived of their
conclusion they are robbed of three-fourths of their power. Here is a
passage from his second lecture addressed to the Anglican Party of 1833.
It is on the Life of the National Church of England.
'Doubtless the National religion is alive. It is a great power in the
midst of us, it wields an enormous influence; it represses a hundred
foes; it conducts a hundred undertakings; it attracts men to it, uses
them, rewards them; it has thousands of beautiful homes up and down the
country where quiet men may do its work and benefit its people; it
collects vast sums in the shape of voluntary offerings, and with them it
builds Churches, prints and distributes innumerable Bibles, books, and
tracts, and sustains missionaries in all parts of the earth. In all
parts of the earth it opposes the Catholic Church, denounces her as
anti-christian, bribes the world against her, obstructs her influence,
apes her authority, and confuses her evidence. In all parts of the world
it is the religion of gentlemen, of scholars, of men of substance, and
men of no personal faith at all. If this be life, if it be life to
impart a tone to the Court and Houses of Parliament, to Ministers of
State, to law and literature, to universities and schools, and to
society, if it be life to be a principle of order in the population, and
an organ of benevolence and almsgiving towards the poor, if it be life
to make men decent, respectable, and sensible, to embellish and reform
the family circle, to deprive vice of its grossness and to shed a glow
over avarice and ambition; if, indeed, it is the life of religion to be
the first jewel in the Queen's crown, and the highest step of her
throne, then doubtless the National Church is replete, it overflows with
life; but the question has still to be answered: life of what kind?'
For a delightful example of Dr. Newman's humour, which is largely, if
not entirely, a playful humour, I will remind the reader of the
celebrated imaginary speech against the British Constitution attributed
to 'a member of the junior branch of the Potemkin family,' and supposed
to have been delivered at Moscow in the year 1850. It is too long for
quotation, but will be found in the first of the _Lectures on the
Present Position of Catholics in England_. The whole book is one of the
best humoured books in the English language.
Of his sarcasm, the following example, well-known as it is, must be
given. It occurs in the _Essay on the Prospects of the Anglican Church_,
which is reprinted from the _British Critic_ in the first volume of the
_Essays Critical and Historical_.
'In the present day mistiness is the mother of wisdom. A man who can set
down half a dozen general propositions, which escape from destroying one
another only by being diluted into truisms, who can hold the balance
between opposites so skilfully as to do without fulcrum or beam, who
never enunciates a truth without guarding himself from being supposed to
exclude the contradictory, who holds that Scripture is the only
authority--yet that the Church is to be deferred to, that faith only
justifies, yet that it does not justify without works, that grace does
not depend on the sacraments, yet is not given without them, that
bishops are a divine ordinance--yet those who have them not are in the
same religious condition as those who have--this is your safe man and
the hope of the Church; this is what the Church is said to want, not
party men, but sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging persons to guide
it through the channel of No-meaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis
of Aye and No. But, alas! reading sets men thinking. They will not keep
standing in that very attitude, which you please to call sound
Church-of-Englandism or orthodox Protestantism. It tires them, it is so
very awkward, and for the life of them--they cannot continue in it long
together, where there is neither article nor canon to lean against--they
cannot go on for ever standing on one leg, or sitting without a chair,
or walking with their legs tied, or grazing like Tityrus's stags on the
air. Promises imply conclusions--germs lead to developments; principles
have issues; doctrines lead to action.'
Of the personal note to which I have made reference--no examples need
or should be given. Such things must not be transplanted from their own
homes.
'The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearl to their enamel gave;
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam
And brought my sea-born treasures home:
But the poor, unsightly noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore,
With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.'
If I may suppose this paper read by someone who is not yet acquainted
with Newman's writings I would advise him, unless he is bent on
theology, to begin not with the _Sermons_, not even with the _Apologia_,
but with the _Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England_.
Then let him take up the _Lectures on the Idea of an University_, and on
_University Subjects_. These may be followed by _Discussions and
Arguments_, after which he will be well disposed to read the _Lectures
on the Difficulties felt by Anglicans_. If after he has despatched these
volumes he is not infected with what one of those charging Bishops
called 'Newmania,' he is possessed of a devil of obtuseness no wit of
man can expel.
Of the strength of Dr. Newman's philosophical position, which he has
explained in his _Grammar of Assent_, it would ill become me to speak.
He there strikes the shield of John Locke. _Non nostrum est tantas
componere lites._ But it is difficult for the most ignorant of us not to
have shy notions and lurking suspicions even about such big subjects and
great men. Locke maintained that a man's belief in a proposition really
depended upon and bore a relation to the weight of evidence forthcoming
in its favour. Dr. Newman asserts that certainty is a quality of
propositions, and he has discovered in man 'an illative sense' whereby
conclusions are converted into dogmas and a measured concurrence into an
unlimited and absolute assurance. This illative sense is hardly a thing
(if I may use an expression for ever associated with Lord Macaulay) to
be cocksure about. Wedges, said the mediæval mechanic to his pupils,
split wood by virtue of a wood-splitting quality in wedges--but now we
are indisposed to endow wedges with qualities, and if not wedges, why
propositions? But the _Grammar of Assent_ is a beautiful book, and with
a quotation from it I will close my quotations: 'Thus it is that
Christianity is the fulfilment of the promise made to Abraham and of the
Mosaic revelations; this is how it has been able from the first to
occupy the world, and gain a hold on every class of human society to
which its preachers reached; this is why the Roman power and the
multitude of religions which it embraced could not stand against it;
this is the secret of its sustained energy, and its never-flagging
martyrdoms; this is how at present it is so mysteriously potent, in
spite of the new and fearful adversaries which beset its path. It has
with it that gift of stanching and healing the one deep wound of human
nature, which avails more for its success than a full encyclopædia of
scientific knowledge and a whole library of controversy, and therefore
it must last while human nature lasts.'
It is fitting that our last quotation should be one which leaves the
Cardinal face to face with his faith.
Dr. Newman's poetry cannot be passed over without a word, though I am
ill-fitted to do it justice. _Lead, Kindly Light_ has forced its way
into every hymn-book and heart. Those who go, and those who do not go to
church, the fervent believer and the tired-out sceptic here meet on
common ground. The language of the verses in their intense sincerity
seems to reduce all human feelings, whether fed on dogmas and holy rites
or on man's own sad heart, to a common denominator.
'The night is dark, and I am far from home,
Lead Thou me on.'
The believer can often say no more. The unbeliever will never willingly
say less.
Amongst Dr. Newman's _Verses on Various Occasions_--though in some cases
the earlier versions to be met with in the _Lyra Apostolica_ are to be
preferred to the later--poems will be found by those who seek, conveying
sure and certain evidence of the possession by the poet of the true
lyrical gift--though almost cruelly controlled by the course of the
poet's thoughts and the nature of his subjects. One is sometimes
constrained to cry, 'Oh, if he could only get out into the wild blowing
airs, how his pinions would sweep the skies!' but such thoughts are
unlicensed and unseemly. That we have two such religious poets as
Cardinal Newman and Miss Christina Rossetti is or ought to be matter for
sincere rejoicing.
II
To the inveterate truth-hunter there has been much of melancholy in the
very numerous estimates, hasty estimates no doubt, but all manifestly
sincere, which the death of Cardinal Newman has occasioned.
The nobility of the pursuit after truth wherever the pursuit may lead
has been abundantly recognised. Nobody has been base enough or cynical
enough to venture upon a sneer. It has been marvellous to notice what a
hold an unpopular thinker, dwelling very far apart from the trodden
paths of English life and thought, had obtained upon men's imaginations.
The 'man in the street' was to be heard declaring that the dead Cardinal
was a fine fellow. The newspaper-makers were astonished at the interest
displayed by their readers. How many of these honest mourners, asked the
_Globe_, have read a page of Newman's writings? It is a vain inquiry.
Newman's books have long had a large and increasing sale. They stand on
all sorts of shelves, and wherever they go a still, small voice
accompanies them. They are speaking books; an air breathes from their
pages.
'Again I saw and I confess'd
Thy speech was rare and high,
And yet it vex'd my burden'd breast,
And scared I knew not why.'
It is a strange criticism that recently declared Newman's style to lack
individuality. Oddity it lacked, and mannerisms, but not, so it seems to
me, individuality.
But this wide recognition of Newman's charm both of character and style
cannot conceal from the anxious truth-hunter that there has been an
almost equally wide recognition of the futility of Newman's method and
position.
Method and position? These were sacred words with the Cardinal. But a
few days ago he seemed securely posed before the world. It cannot
surely have been his unrivalled dialectics only that made men keep civil
tongues in their heads or hesitate to try conclusions with him. It was
rather, we presume, that there was no especial occasion to speak of him
otherwise than with the respect and affection due to honoured age. But
when he is dead--it is different. It is necessary then to gauge his
method and to estimate his influence, not as a living man, but as a dead
one.
And what has that estimate been? The saintly life, the mysterious
presence, are admitted, and well-nigh nothing else. All sorts of reasons
are named, some plausible, all cunningly contrived, to account for
Newman's quarrel with the Church of his baptism. A writer in the
_Guardian_ suggests one, a writer in the _Times_ another, a writer in
the _Saturday Review_ a third, and so on.
However much these reasons may differ one from another, they all agree
in this, that of necessity they have ceased to operate. They were
personal reasons, and perished with the man whose faith and actions they
controlled. Nobody else, it has been throughout assumed, will become a
Romanist for the same reasons as John Henry Newman. If he had not been
brought up an Evangelical, if he had learnt German, if he had married,
if he had been made an archdeacon, all would have been different.
There is something positively terrible in this natural history of
opinion. All the passion and the pleading of a life, the thought, and
the labour, the sustained argument, the library of books, reduced to
what?--a series of accidents!
Newman himself well knew this aspect of affairs. No one's plummet since
Pascal's had taken deeper soundings of the infirmity--the oceanic
infirmity--of the intellect. What actuary, he asks contemptuously, can
appraise the value of a man's opinions? In how many a superb passage
does he exhibit the absurd, the haphazard fashion in which men and women
collect the odds and ends, the bits and scraps they are pleased to place
in the museum of their minds, and label, in all good faith, their
convictions! Newman almost revels in such subjects. The solemn pomposity
which so frequently dignifies with the name of research or inquiry
feeble scratchings amongst heaps of verbosity had no more determined foe
than the Cardinal.
But now the same measure is being meted out to him, and we are told of a
thinker's life--it is nought.
He thought he had constructed a way of escape from the City of
Destruction for himself and his followers across the bridge of that
illative sense which turns conclusions into assents, and opinions into
faiths--but the bridge seems no longer standing.
The writer in the _Guardian_, who attributes Newman's restlessness in
the English Church to the smug and comfortable life of many of its
clergy rather than to any especial craving after authority, no doubt
wrote with knowledge.
A married clergy seemed always to annoy Newman. Readers of _Loss and
Gain_ are not likely to forget the famous 'pork chop' passage, which
describes a young parson and his bride bustling into a stationer's shop
to buy hymnals and tracts. What was once only annoyance at some of the
ways of John Bull on his knees, soon ripened into something not very
unlike hatred. Never was any invention less _ben trovato_ than that
which used to describe Newman as pining after the 'incomparable liturgy'
or the 'cultured society' of the Church of England. He hated _ex animo_
all those aspects of Anglicanism which best recommend it to Erastian
minds. A church of which sanctity is _not_ a note is sure to have many
friends.
The _Saturday Review_ struck up a fine national tune:
'An intense but narrow conception of personal holiness, and personal
satisfaction with dogma, ate him (Newman) up--the natural legacy of the
Evangelical school in which he had been nursed, the great tradition of
Tory churchmanship, _of pride in the Church of England, as such_, of
determination to stand shoulder to shoulder in resisting the foreigner,
whether he came from Rome or from Geneva, from Tübingen, or from Saint
Sulpice, of the union of all social and intellectual culture with
theological learning--the idea which, alone of all such ideas, has made
education patriotic, and orthodoxy generous, made insufficient appeal to
him, and for want of it he himself made shipwreck.'
Here is John Bullism, bold and erect. If the Ark of Peter won't hoist
the Union Jack, John Bull must have an Ark of his own, with patriotic
clergy of his own manufacture tugging at the oar, and with nothing
foreign in the hold save some sound old port. 'It will always be
remembered to Newman's credit,' says this same reviewer, 'that he knew
good wine if he did not drink much.' Mark the 'If'; there is much virtue
in it.
We are now provided with two causes of Newman's discomfort in the Church
of England--its too comfortable clergy, and its too frequent
introduction of the lion and the unicorn amongst the symbols of
religion--both effective causes, as may be proved by many passages; but
to say that either or both availed to drive him out, and compelled him
to seek shelter at the hands of one whom he had long regarded as a foe,
is to go very far indeed.
It should not be overlooked that these minimisers of Newman's influence
are all firmly attached for different reasons to the institution Newman
left. Their judgments therefore cannot be allowed to pass unchallenged.
What Disraeli meant when he said that Newman's secession had dealt the
Church of England a blow under which it still reeled, was that by this
act Newman expressed before the whole world his profound conviction that
our so-called National Church was not a branch of the Church Catholic.
And this really is the point of weakness upon which Newman hurled
himself. This is the damage he did to the Church of this island.
Throughout all his writings, in a hundred places, in jests and sarcasms
as well as in papers and arguments, there crops up this settled
conviction that England is not a Catholic country, and that John Bull is
not a member of the Catholic Church.
This may not matter much to the British electorate; but to those who
care about such things, who rely upon the validity of orders and the
efficacy of sacraments, who need a pedigree for their faith, who do not
agree with Emerson that if a man would be great he must be a
Nonconformist--over these people it would be rash to assume that
Newman's influence is spent. The general effect of his writings, the
demands they awaken, the spirit they breathe, are all hostile to
Anglicanism. They create a profound dissatisfaction with, a distaste
for, the Church of England as by law established. Those who are affected
by this spirit will no longer be able comfortably to enjoy the maimed
rites and practices of their Church. They will feel their place is
elsewhere, and sooner or later they will pack up and go. It is far too
early in the day to leave Newman out of sight.
But to end where we began. There has been scant recognition in the
Cardinal's case of the usefulness of devoting life to anxious inquiries
after truth. It is very noble to do so, and when you come to die, the
newspapers, from the _Times_ to the _Sporting Life_, will first point
out, after their superior fashion, how much better was this pure-minded
and unworldly thinker than the soiled politician, full of opportunism
and inconsistency, trying hard to drown the echoes of his past with his
loud vociferations, and then proceed in a few short sentences to
establish how out of date is this Thinker's thought, how false his
reasoning, how impossible his conclusions, and lastly, how dead his
influence.
It is very puzzling and difficult, and drives some men to collect
butterflies and beetles. Thinkers are not, however, to be disposed of by
scratches of the pen. A Cardinal of the Roman Church is not, to say the
least of it, more obviously a shipwreck than a dean or even a bishop of
the English establishment. Character, too, counts for something. Of
Newman it may be said:
'Fate gave what chance shall not control,
His sad lucidity of soul.'
But the truth-hunter is still unsatisfied.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
I
The news of Mr. Arnold's sudden death at Liverpool struck a chill into
many hearts, for although a somewhat constrained writer (despite his
playfulness) and certainly the least boisterous of men, he was yet most
distinctly on the side of human enjoyment. He conspired and contrived to
make things pleasant. Pedantry he abhorred. He was a man of this life
and this world. A severe critic of the world he indeed was, but finding
himself in it and not precisely knowing what is beyond it, like a brave
and true-hearted man he set himself to make the best of it. Its sight
and sounds were dear to him. The 'uncrumpling fern,' the eternal
moon-lit snow, 'Sweet William with its homely cottage-smell,' 'the red
grouse springing at our sound,' the tinkling bells of the
'high-pasturing kine,' the vagaries of men, women, and dogs, their odd
ways and tricks, whether of mind or manner, all delighted, amused,
tickled him. Human loves, joys, sorrows, human relationships, ordinary
ties interested him:
'The help in strife,
The thousand sweet still joys of such
As hand in hand face earthly life.'
In a sense of the words which is noble and blessed, he was of the Earth
Earthy.
In his earlier days Mr. Arnold was much misunderstood. That rowdy
Philistine the _Daily Telegraph_ called him 'a prophet of the kid-glove
persuasion,' and his own too frequent iteration of the somewhat
dandiacal phrase 'sweetness and light' helped to promote the notion that
he was a fanciful, finikin Oxonian,
'A fine puss gentleman that's all perfume,'
quite unfit for the most ordinary wear and tear of life. He was in
reality nothing of the kind, though his literary style was a little in
keeping with this false conception. His mind was based on the plainest
possible things. What he hated most was the fantastic--the far-fetched,
all elaborated fancies, and strained interpretations. He stuck to the
beaten track of human experience, and the broader the better. He was a
plain-sailing man. This is his true note. In his much criticised, but as
I think admirable introduction to the selection he made from
Wordsworth's poems, he admits that the famous _Ode on Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections in Early Childhood_ is not one of his
prime favourites, and in that connection he quotes from Thucydides the
following judgment on the early exploits of the Greek Race and applies
it to these intimations of immortality in babies. 'It is impossible to
speak with certainty of what is so remote, but from all that we can
really investigate I should say that they were no very great things.'