History of My Religious Opinions
It may easily be conceived how great a trial it is to me to write the
following history of myself; but I must not shrink from the task. The
words, "Secretum meum mihi," keep ringing in my ears; but as men draw
towards their end, they care less for disclosures. Nor is it the
least part of my trial, to anticipate that my friends may, upon first
reading what I have written, consider much in it irrelevant to my
purpose; yet I cannot help thinking that, viewed as a whole, it will
effect what I wish it to do.
I was brought up from a child to take great delight in reading the
Bible; but I had no formed religious convictions till I was fifteen.
Of course I had perfect knowledge of my Catechism.
After I was grown up, I put on paper such recollections as I had of
my thoughts and feelings on religious subjects, at the time that I
was a child and a boy. Out of these I select two, which are at once
the most definite among them, and also have a bearing on my later
convictions.
In the paper to which I have referred, written either in the long
vacation of 1820, or in October, 1823, the following notices of my
school days were sufficiently prominent in my memory for me to
consider them worth recording:--"I used to wish the Arabian Tales
were true: my imagination ran on unknown influences, on magical
powers, and talismans ... I thought life might be a dream, or I an
Angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow-angels by a playful
device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the
semblance of a material world."
Again, "Reading in the Spring of 1816 a sentence from [Dr. Watts's]
'Remnants of Time,' entitled 'the Saints unknown to the world,' to
the effect, that 'there is nothing in their figure or countenance to
distinguish them,' etc. etc., I supposed he spoke of Angels who lived
in the world, as it were disguised."
The other remark is this: "I was very superstitious, and for some
time previous to my conversion" [when I was fifteen] "used constantly
to cross myself on going into the dark."
Of course I must have got this practice from some external source or
other; but I can make no sort of conjecture whence; and certainly no
one had ever spoken to me on the subject of the Catholic religion,
which I only knew by name. The French master was an _emigre_ priest,
but he was simply made a butt, as French masters too commonly were in
that day, and spoke English very imperfectly. There was a Catholic
family in the village, old maiden ladies we used to think; but I knew
nothing but their name. I have of late years heard that there were
one or two Catholic boys in the school; but either we were carefully
kept from knowing this, or the knowledge of it made simply no
impression on our minds. My brother will bear witness how free the
school was from Catholic ideas.
I had once been into Warwick Street Chapel, with my father, who, I
believe, wanted to hear some piece of music; all that I bore away
from it was the recollection of a pulpit and a preacher and a boy
swinging a censer.
When I was at Littlemore, I was looking over old copy-books of my
school days, and I found among them my first Latin verse-book; and in
the first page of it, there was a device which almost took my breath
away with surprise. I have the book before me now, and have just been
showing it to others. I have written in the first page, in my
school-boy hand, "John H. Newman, February 11th, 1811, Verse Book;"
then follow my first verses. Between "Verse" and "Book" I have drawn
the figure of a solid cross upright, and next to it is, what may
indeed be meant for a necklace, but what I cannot make out to be
anything else than a set of beads suspended, with a little cross
attached. At this time I was not quite ten years old. I suppose I got
the idea from some romance, Mrs. Radcliffe's or Miss Porter's; or
from some religious picture; but the strange thing is, how, among
the thousand objects which meet a boy's eyes, these in particular
should so have fixed themselves in my mind, that I made them thus
practically my own. I am certain there was nothing in the churches
I attended, or the prayer books I read, to suggest them. It must be
recollected that churches and prayer books were not decorated in
those days as I believe they are now.
When I was fourteen, I read Paine's tracts against the Old Testament,
and found pleasure in thinking of the objections which were contained
in them. Also, I read some of Hume's essays; and perhaps that on
Miracles. So at least I gave my father to understand; but perhaps it
was a brag. Also, I recollect copying out some French verses, perhaps
Voltaire's, against the immortality of the soul, and saying to myself
something like "How dreadful, but how plausible!"
When I was fifteen (in the autumn of 1816) a great change of thought
took place in me. I fell under the influences of a definite creed,
and received into my intellect impressions of dogma, which, through
God's mercy, have never been effaced or obscured. Above and beyond
the conversations and sermons of the excellent man, long dead, who
was the human means of this beginning of divine faith in me, was the
effect of the books which he put into my hands, all of the school
of Calvin. One of the first books I read was a work of Romaine's; I
neither recollect the title nor the contents, except one doctrine,
which of course I do not include among those which I believe to have
come from a divine source, viz. the doctrine of final perseverance. I
received it at once, and believed that the inward conversion of which
I was conscious (and of which I still am more certain than that I
have hands and feet) would last into the next life, and that I was
elected to eternal glory. I have no consciousness that this belief
had any tendency whatever to lead me to be careless about pleasing
God. I retained it till the age of twenty-one, when it gradually
faded away; but I believe that it had some influence on my opinions,
in the direction of those childish imaginations which I have already
mentioned, viz. in isolating me from the objects which surrounded me,
in confirming me in my mistrust of the reality of material phenomena,
and making me rest in the thought of two and two only supreme and
luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator;--for while I
considered myself predestined to salvation, I thought others simply
passed over, not predestined to eternal death. I only thought of the
mercy to myself.
The detestable doctrine last mentioned is simply denied and abjured,
unless my memory strangely deceives me, by the writer who made a
deeper impression on my mind than any other, and to whom (humanly
speaking) I almost owe my soul--Thomas Scott of Aston Sandford. I so
admired and delighted in his writings, that, when I was an
undergraduate, I thought of making a visit to his parsonage, in order
to see a man whom I so deeply revered. I hardly think I could have
given up the idea of this expedition, even after I had taken my
degree; for the news of his death in 1821 came upon me as a
disappointment as well as a sorrow. I hung upon the lips of Daniel
Wilson, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, as in two sermons at St.
John's Chapel he gave the history of Scott's life and death. I had
been possessed of his essays from a boy; his commentary I bought when
I was an undergraduate.
What, I suppose, will strike any reader of Scott's history and
writings, is his bold unworldliness and vigorous independence of
mind. He followed truth wherever it led him, beginning with
Unitarianism, and ending in a zealous faith in the Holy Trinity. It
was he who first planted deep in my mind that fundamental truth of
religion. With the assistance of Scott's essays, and the admirable
work of Jones of Nayland, I made a collection of Scripture texts in
proof of the doctrine, with remarks (I think) of my own upon them,
before I was sixteen; and a few months later I drew up a series of
texts in support of each verse of the Athanasian Creed. These papers
I have still.
Besides his unworldliness, what I also admired in Scott was his
resolute opposition to Antinomianism, and the minutely practical
character of his writings. They show him to be a true Englishman, and
I deeply felt his influence; and for years I used almost as proverbs
what I considered to be the scope and issue of his doctrine,
"Holiness before peace," and "Growth is the only evidence of life."
Calvinists make a sharp separation between the elect and the world;
there is much in this that is parallel or cognate to the Catholic
doctrine; but they go on to say, as I understand them, very
differently from Catholicism,--that the converted and the unconverted
can be discriminated by man, that the justified are conscious of
their state of justification, and that the regenerate cannot fall
away. Catholics on the other hand shade and soften the awful
antagonism between good and evil, which is one of their dogmas, by
holding that there are different degrees of justification, that there
is a great difference in point of gravity between sin and sin, that
there is the possibility and the danger of falling away, and that
there is no certain knowledge given to any one that he is simply in a
state of grace, and much less that he is to persevere to the end:--of
the Calvinistic tenets the only one which took root in my mind was
the fact of heaven and hell, divine favour and divine wrath, of the
justified and the unjustified. The notion that the regenerate and the
justified were one and the same, and that the regenerate, as such,
had the gift of perseverance, remained with me not many years, as I
have said already.
This main Catholic doctrine of the warfare between the city of God
and the powers of darkness was also deeply impressed upon my mind by
a work of a very opposite character, Law's "Serious Call."
From this time I have given a full inward assent and belief to the
doctrine of eternal punishment, as delivered by our Lord Himself, in
as true a sense as I hold that of eternal happiness; though I have
tried in various ways to make that truth less terrible to the reason.
Now I come to two other works, which produced a deep impression on me
in the same autumn of 1816, when I was fifteen years old, each
contrary to each, and planting in me the seeds of an intellectual
inconsistency which disabled me for a long course of years. I read
Joseph Milner's Church History, and was nothing short of enamoured
of the long extracts from St. Augustine and the other Fathers which
I found there. I read them as being the religion of the primitive
Christians: but simultaneously with Milner I read Newton on the
Prophecies, and in consequence became most firmly convinced that the
Pope was the Antichrist predicted by Daniel, St. Paul, and St. John.
My imagination was stained by the effects of this doctrine up to the
year 1843; it had been obliterated from my reason and judgment at an
earlier date; but the thought remained upon me as a sort of false
conscience. Hence came that conflict of mind, which so many have felt
besides myself;--leading some men to make a compromise between two
ideas, so inconsistent with each other--driving others to beat out
the one idea or the other from their minds--and ending in my own
case, after many years of intellectual unrest, in the gradual decay
and extinction of one of them--I do not say in its violent death, for
why should I not have murdered it sooner, if I murdered it at all?
I am obliged to mention, though I do it with great reluctance,
another deep imagination, which at this time, the autumn of 1816,
took possession of me--there can be no mistake about the fact;--viz.
that it was the will of God that I should lead a single life. This
anticipation, which has held its ground almost continuously ever
since--with the break of a month now and a month then, up to 1829,
and, after that date, without any break at all--was more or less
connected, in my mind, with the notion that my calling in life would
require such a sacrifice as celibacy involved; as, for instance,
missionary work among the heathen, to which I had a great drawing for
some years. It also strengthened my feeling of separation from the
visible world, of which I have spoken above.
In 1822 I came under very different influences from those to which I
had hitherto been subjected. At that time, Mr. Whately, as he was
then, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin, for the few months he remained
in Oxford, which he was leaving for good, showed great kindness to
me. He renewed it in 1825, when he became Principal of Alban Hall,
making me his vice-principal and tutor. Of Dr. Whately I will speak
presently, for from 1822 to 1825 I saw most of the present Provost of
Oriel, Dr. Hawkins, at that time Vicar of St. Mary's; and, when I
took orders in 1824 and had a curacy at Oxford, then, during the long
vacations, I was especially thrown into his company. I can say with a
full heart that I love him, and have never ceased to love him; and I
thus preface what otherwise might sound rude, that in the course of
the many years in which we were together afterwards, he provoked me
very much from time to time, though I am perfectly certain that I
have provoked him a great deal more. Moreover, in me such provocation
was unbecoming, both because he was the head of my college, and
because in the first years that I knew him, he had been in many ways
of great service to my mind.
He was the first who taught me to weigh my words, and to be cautious
in my statements. He led me to that mode of limiting and clearing my
sense in discussion and in controversy, and of distinguishing between
cognate ideas, and of obviating mistakes by anticipation, which to my
surprise has been since considered, even in quarters friendly to me,
to savour of the polemics of Rome. He is a man of most exact mind
himself, and he used to snub me severely, on reading, as he was kind
enough to do, the first sermons that I wrote, and other compositions
which I was engaged upon.
Then as to doctrine, he was the means of great additions to my
belief. As I have noticed elsewhere, he gave me the "Treatise on
Apostolical Preaching," by Sumner, afterwards Archbishop of
Canterbury, from which I learned to give up my remaining Calvinism,
and to receive the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration. In many other
ways too he was of use to me, on subjects semi-religious and
semi-scholastic.
It was Dr. Hawkins too who taught me to anticipate that, before many
years were over there would be an attack made upon the books and the
canon of Scripture. I was brought to the same belief by the
conversation of Mr. Blanco White, who also led me to have freer views
on the subject of inspiration than were usual in the Church of
England at the time.
There is one other principle, which I gained from Dr. Hawkins, more
directly bearing upon Catholicism, than any that I have mentioned;
and that is the doctrine of Tradition. When I was an undergraduate, I
heard him preach in the University pulpit his celebrated sermon on
the subject, and recollect how long it appeared to me, though he was
at that time a very striking preacher; but, when I read it and
studied it as his gift, it made a most serious impression upon me. He
does not go one step, I think, beyond the high Anglican doctrine, nay
he does not reach it; but he does his work thoroughly, and his view
was original with him, and his subject was a novel one at the time.
He lays down a proposition, self-evident as soon as stated, to those
who have at all examined the structure of Scripture, viz. that the
sacred text was never intended to teach doctrine, but only to prove
it, and that, if we would learn doctrine, we must have recourse to
the formularies of the Church; for instance to the Catechism, and
to the Creeds. He considers, that, after learning from them the
doctrines of Christianity, the inquirer must verify them by
Scripture. This view, most true in its outline, most fruitful in its
consequences, opened upon me a large field of thought. Dr. Whately
held it too. One of its effects was to strike at the root of the
principle on which the Bible Society was set up. I belonged to its
Oxford Association; it became a matter of time when I should withdraw
my name from its subscription-list, though I did not do so at once.
It is with pleasure that I pay here a tribute to the memory of the
Rev. William James, then Fellow of Oriel; who, about the year 1823,
taught me the doctrine of Apostolical Succession, in the course of a
walk, I think, round Christ Church meadow: I recollect being somewhat
impatient on the subject at the time.
It was at about this date, I suppose, that I read Bishop Butler's
Analogy; the study of which has been to so many, as it was to me, an
era in their religious opinions. Its inculcation of a visible Church,
the oracle of truth and a pattern of sanctity, of the duties of
external religion, and of the historical character of revelation, are
characteristics of this great work which strike the reader at once;
for myself, if I may attempt to determine what I most gained from it,
it lay in two points, which I shall have an opportunity of dwelling
on in the sequel; they are the underlying principles of a great
portion of my teaching. First, the very idea of an analogy between
the separate works of God leads to the conclusion that the system
which is of less importance is economically or sacramentally
connected with the more momentous system, and of this conclusion the
theory, to which I was inclined as a boy, viz. the unreality of
material phenomena, is an ultimate resolution. At this time I did not
make the distinction between matter itself and its phenomena, which
is so necessary and so obvious in discussing the subject. Secondly,
Butler's doctrine that probability is the guide of life, led me, at
least under the teaching to which a few years later I was introduced,
to the question of the logical cogency of faith, on which I have
written so much. Thus to Butler I trace those two principles of my
teaching, which have led to a charge against me both of fancifulness
and of scepticism.
And now as to Dr. Whately. I owe him a great deal. He was a man of
generous and warm heart. He was particularly loyal to his friends,
and to use the common phrase, "all his geese were swans." While I
was still awkward and timid in 1822, he took me by the hand, and
acted the part to me of a gentle and encouraging instructor. He,
emphatically, opened my mind, and taught me to think and to use my
reason. After being first noticed by him in 1822, I became very
intimate with him in 1825, when I was his Vice-Principal at Alban
Hall. I gave up that office in 1826, when I became tutor of my
College, and his hold upon me gradually relaxed. He had done his work
towards me or nearly so, when he had taught me to see with my own
eyes and to walk with my own feet. Not that I had not a good deal to
learn from others still, but I influenced them as well as they me,
and co-operated rather than merely concurred with them. As to Dr.
Whately, his mind was too different from mine for us to remain long
on one line. I recollect how dissatisfied he was with an article of
mine in the _London Review_, which Blanco White, good-humouredly,
only called platonic. When I was diverging from him (which he did not
like), I thought of dedicating my first book to him, in words to the
effect that he had not only taught me to think, but to think for
myself. He left Oxford in 1831; after that, as far as I can
recollect, I never saw him but twice--when he visited the University;
once in the street, once in a room. From the time that he left, I
have always felt a real affection for what I must call his memory;
for thenceforward he made himself dead to me. My reason told me that
it was impossible that we could have got on together longer; yet I
loved him too much to bid him farewell without pain. After a few
years had passed, I began to believe that his influence on me in a
higher respect than intellectual advance (I will not say through his
fault) had not been satisfactory. I believe that he has inserted
sharp things in his later works about me. They have never come in my
way, and I have not thought it necessary to seek out what would pain
me so much in the reading.
What he did for me in point of religious opinion, was first to teach
me the existence of the Church, as a substantive body or corporation;
next to fix in me those anti-Erastian views of Church polity, which
were one of the most prominent features of the Tractarian movement.
On this point, and, as far as I know, on this point alone, he and
Hurrell Froude intimately sympathised, though Froude's development of
opinion here was of a later date. In the year 1826, in the course of
a walk he said much to me about a work then just published, called
"Letters on the Church by an Episcopalian." He said that it would
make my blood boil. It was certainly a most powerful composition. One
of our common friends told me, that, after reading it, he could not
keep still, but went on walking up and down his room. It was ascribed
at once to Whately; I gave eager expression to the contrary opinion;
but I found the belief of Oxford in the affirmative to be too strong
for me; rightly or wrongly I yielded to the general voice; and I have
never heard, then or since, of any disclaimer of authorship on the
part of Dr. Whately.
The main positions of this able essay are these; first that Church
and State should be independent of each other:--he speaks of the duty
of protesting "against the profanation of Christ's kingdom, by that
_double usurpation_, the interference of the Church in temporals, of
the State in spirituals," (p. 191); and, secondly, that the Church
may justly and by right retain its property, though separated from
the State. "The clergy," he says p. 133, "though they ought not to be
the hired servants of the Civil Magistrate, may justly retain their
revenues; and the State, though it has no right of interference in
spiritual concerns, not only is justly entitled to support from the
ministers of religion, and from all other Christians, but would,
under the system I am recommending, obtain it much more effectually."
The author of this work, whoever he may be, argues out both these
points with great force and ingenuity, and with a thorough-going
vehemence, which perhaps we may refer to the circumstance, that he
wrote, not _in propria persona_, but in the professed character of a
Scotch Episcopalian. His work had a gradual, but a deep effect on my
mind.
I am not aware of any other religious opinion which I owe to Dr.
Whately. For his special theological tenets I had no sympathy. In the
next year, 1827, he told me he considered that I was Arianising. The
case was this: though at that time I had not read Bishop Bull's
_Defensio_ nor the Fathers, I was just then very strong for that
ante-Nicene view of the Trinitarian doctrine, which some writers,
both Catholic and non-Catholic, have accused of wearing a sort of
Arian exterior. This is the meaning of a passage in Froude's Remains,
in which he seems to accuse me of speaking against the Athanasian
Creed. I had contrasted the two aspects of the Trinitarian doctrine,
which are respectively presented by the Athanasian Creed and the
Nicene. My criticisms were to the effect that some of the verses of
the former Creed were unnecessarily scientific. This is a specimen of
a certain disdain for antiquity which had been growing on me now for
several years. It showed itself in some flippant language against the
Fathers in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, about whom I knew little
at the time, except what I had learnt as a boy from Joseph Milner. In
writing on the Scripture Miracles in 1825-6, I had read Middleton on
the Miracles of the early Church, and had imbibed a portion of his
spirit.
The truth is, I was beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to
moral; I was drifting in the direction of liberalism. I was rudely
awakened from my dream at the end of 1827 by two great blows--illness
and bereavement.
In the beginning of 1829, came the formal break between Dr. Whately
and me; Mr. Peel's attempted re-election was the occasion of it.
I think in 1828 or 1827 I had voted in the minority, when the
petition to Parliament against the Catholic claims was brought into
Convocation. I did so mainly on the views suggested to me by the
theory of the Letters of an Episcopalian. Also I disliked the
bigoted "two bottle orthodox," as they were invidiously called.
I took part against Mr. Peel, on a simple academical, not at all
an ecclesiastical or a political ground; and this I professed at
the time. I considered that Mr. Peel had taken the University by
surprise, that he had no right to call upon us to turn round on a
sudden, and to expose ourselves to the imputation of time-serving,
and that a great University ought not to be bullied even by a great
Duke of Wellington. Also by this time I was under the influence of
Keble and Froude; who, in addition to the reasons I have given,
disliked the Duke's change of policy as dictated by liberalism.
Whately was considerably annoyed at me, and he took a humourous
revenge, of which he had given me due notice beforehand. As head of a
house, he had duties of hospitality to men of all parties; 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. However, he had a serious meaning in his act; he saw, more
clearly than I could do, that I was separating from his own friends
for good and all.
Dr. Whately attributed my leaving his _clientela_ to a wish on my
part to be the head of a party myself. I do not think that it was
deserved. My habitual feeling then and since has been, that it was
not I who sought friends, but friends who sought me. Never man had
kinder or more indulgent friends than I have had, but I expressed my
own feeling as to the mode in which I gained them, in this very year
1829, in the course of a copy of verses. Speaking of my blessings, I
said, "Blessings of friends, which to my door, _unasked, unhoped_,
have come." They have come, they have gone; they came to my great
joy, they went to my great grief. He who gave, took away. Dr.
Whately's impression about me, however, admits of this explanation:--
During the first years of my residence at Oriel, though proud of my
college, I was not at home there. I was very much alone, and I used
often to take my daily walk by myself. I recollect once meeting Dr.
Copleston, then provost, with one of the fellows. He turned round,
and with the kind courteousness which sat so well on him, made me a
bow and said, "Nunquam minus solus, quam cum solus." At that time
indeed (from 1823) I had the intimacy of my dear and true friend Dr.
Pusey, and could not fail to admire and revere a soul so devoted to
the cause of religion, so full of good works, so faithful in his
affections; but he left residence when I was getting to know him
well. As to Dr. Whately himself, he was too much my superior to allow
of my being at my ease with him; and to no one in Oxford at this time
did I open my heart fully and familiarly. But things changed in 1826.
At that time I became one of the tutors of my college, and this gave
me position; besides, I had written one or two essays which had been
well received. I began to be known. I preached my first University
Sermon. Next year I was one of the Public Examiners for the B.A.
degree. It was to me like the feeling of spring weather after winter;
and, if I may so speak, I came out of my shell; I remained out of it
till 1841.
The two persons who knew me best at that time are still alive,
beneficed clergymen, no longer my friends. They could tell better
than any one else what I was in those years. From this time my tongue
was, as it were, loosened, and I spoke spontaneously and without
effort. A shrewd man, who knew me at this time, said, "Here is a man
who, when he is silent, will never begin to speak; and when he once
begins to speak, will never stop." It was at this time that I began
to have influence, which steadily increased for a course of years.
I gained upon my pupils, and was in particular intimate and
affectionate with two of our probationer fellows, Robert I.
Wilberforce (afterwards archdeacon) and Richard Hurrell Froude.
Whately then, an acute man, perhaps saw around me the signs of an
incipient party of which I was not conscious myself. And thus we
discern the first elements of that movement afterwards called
Tractarian.
The true and primary author of it, however, as is usual with great
motive-powers, was out of sight. Having carried off as a mere boy
the highest honours of the University, he had turned from the
admiration which haunted his steps, and sought for a better and
holier satisfaction in pastoral work in the country. Need I say that
I am speaking of John Keble? The first time that I was in a room with
him was on occasion of my election to a fellowship at Oriel, when I
was sent for into the Tower, to shake hands with the provost and
fellows. How is that hour fixed in my memory after the changes of
forty-two years, forty-two this very day on which I write! I have
lately had a letter in my hands, which I sent at the time to my
great friend, John Bowden, with whom I passed almost exclusively my
Undergraduate years. "I had to hasten to the tower," I say to him,
"to receive the congratulations of all the fellows. I bore it till
Keble took my hand, and then felt so abashed and unworthy of the
honour done me, that I seemed desirous of quite sinking into the
ground." His had been the first name which I had heard spoken of,
with reverence rather than admiration, when I came up to Oxford. When
one day I was walking in High Street with my dear earliest friend
just mentioned, with what eagerness did he cry out, "There's Keble!"
and with what awe did I look at him! Then at another time I heard a
master of arts of my college give an account how he had just then had
occasion to introduce himself on some business to Keble, and how
gentle, courteous, and unaffected Keble had been, so as almost to put
him out of countenance. Then too it was reported, truly or falsely,
how a rising man of brilliant reputation, the present Dean of St.
Paul's, Dr. Milman, admired and loved him, adding, that somehow he
was unlike any one else. However, at the time when I was elected
Fellow of Oriel he was not in residence, and he was shy of me for
years in consequence of the marks which I bore upon me of the
evangelical and liberal schools. At least so I have ever thought.
Hurrell Froude brought us together about 1828: it is one of the
sayings preserved in his "Remains,"--"Do you know the story of the
murderer who had done one good thing in his life? Well; if I was ever
asked what good deed I had ever done, I should say that I had brought
Keble and Newman to understand each other."
The Christian Year made its appearance in 1827. It is not necessary,
and scarcely becoming, to praise a book which has already become one
of the classics of the language. When the general tone of religious
literature was so nerveless and impotent, as it was at that time,
Keble struck an original note and woke up in the hearts of thousands
a new music, the music of a school, long unknown in England. Nor can
I pretend to analyse, in my own instance, the effect of religious
teaching so deep, so pure, so beautiful. I have never till now tried
to do so; yet I think I am not wrong in saying, that the two main
intellectual truths which it brought home to me, were the same two,
which I had learned from Butler, though recast in the creative mind
of my new master. The first of these was what may be called, in a
large sense of the word, the sacramental system; that is, the
doctrine that material phenomena are both the types and the
instruments of real things unseen,--a doctrine, which embraces, not
only what Anglicans, as well as Catholics, believe about sacraments
properly so called; but also the article of "the Communion of Saints"
in its fulness; and likewise the mysteries of the faith. The
connection of this philosophy of religion with what is sometimes
called "Berkeleyism" has been mentioned above; I knew little of
Berkeley at this time except by name; nor have I ever studied him.
On the second intellectual principle which I gained from Mr. Keble, I
could say a great deal; if this were the place for it. It runs
through very much that I have written, and has gained for me many
hard names. Butler teaches us that probability is the guide of life.
The danger of this doctrine, in the case of many minds, is, its
tendency to destroy in them absolute certainty, leading them to
consider every conclusion as doubtful, and resolving truth into an
opinion, which it is safe to obey or to profess, but not possible to
embrace with full internal assent. If this were to be allowed, then
the celebrated saying, "O God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I
have a soul!" would be the highest measure of devotion:--but who can
really pray to a being, about whose existence he is seriously in
doubt?
I considered that Mr. Keble met this difficulty by ascribing the
firmness of assent which we give to religious doctrine, not to the
probabilities which introduced it, but to the living power of faith
and love which accepted it. In matters of religion, he seemed to say,
it is not merely probability which makes us intellectually certain,
but probability as it is put to account by faith and love. It is
faith and love which give to probability a force which it has not in
itself. Faith and love are directed towards an object; in the vision
of that object they live; it is that object, received in faith and
love, which renders it reasonable to take probability as sufficient
for internal conviction. Thus the argument about probability, in the
matter of religion, became an argument from personality, which in
fact is one form of the argument from authority.
In illustration, Mr. Keble used to quote the words of the psalm: "I
will guide thee with mine _eye_. Be ye not like to horse and mule,
which have no understanding; whose mouths must be held with bit and
bridle, lest they fall upon thee." This is the very difference, he
used to say, between slaves, and friends or children. Friends do not
ask for literal commands; but, from their knowledge of the speaker,
they understand his half-words, and from love of him they anticipate
his wishes. Hence it is, that in his poem for St. Bartholomew's Day,
he speaks of the "Eye of God's word;" and in the note quotes Mr.
Miller, of Worcester College, who remarks, in his Bampton Lectures,
on the special power of Scripture, as having "this eye, like that of
a portrait, uniformly fixed upon us, turn where we will." The view
thus suggested by Mr. Keble, is brought forward in one of the
earliest of the "Tracts for the Times." In No. 8 I say, "The Gospel
is a Law of Liberty. We are treated as sons, not as servants; not
subjected to a code of formal commandments, but addressed as those
who love God, and wish to please Him."
I did not at all dispute this view of the matter, for I made use of
it myself; but I was dissatisfied, because it did not go to the root
of the difficulty. It was beautiful and religious, but it did not
even profess to be logical; and accordingly I tried to complete it by
considerations of my own, which are implied in my University sermons,
Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles, and Essay on Development of
Doctrine. My argument is in outline as follows: that that absolute
certitude which we were able to possess, whether as to the truths of
natural theology, or as to the fact of a revelation, was the result
of an _assemblage_ of concurring and converging probabilities, and
that, both according to the constitution of the human mind and the
will of its Maker; that certitude was a habit of mind, that certainty
was a quality of propositions; that probabilities which did not reach
to logical certainty, might create a mental certitude; that the
certitude thus created might equal in measure and strength the
certitude which was created by the strictest scientific
demonstration; and that to have such certitude might in given cases
and to given individuals be a plain duty, though not to others in
other circumstances:--
Moreover, that as there were probabilities which sufficed to create
certitude, so there were other probabilities which were legitimately
adapted to create opinion; that it might be quite as much a matter of
duty in given cases and to given persons to have about a fact an
opinion of a definite strength and consistency, as in the case of
greater or of more numerous probabilities it was a duty to have a
certitude; that accordingly we were bound to be more or less sure, on
a sort of (as it were) graduated scale of assent, viz. according as
the probabilities attaching to a professed fact were brought home to
us, and, as the case might be, to entertain about it a pious belief,
or a pious opinion, or a religious conjecture, or at least, a
tolerance of such belief, or opinion, or conjecture in others; that
on the other hand, as it was a duty to have a belief, of more or less
strong texture, in given cases, so in other cases it was a duty not
to believe, not to opine, not to conjecture, not even to tolerate the
notion that a professed fact was true, inasmuch as it would be
credulity or superstition, or some other moral fault, to do so. This
was the region of private judgment in religion; that is, of a private
judgment, not formed arbitrarily and according to one's fancy or
liking, but conscientiously, and under a sense of duty.
Considerations such as these throw a new light on the subject of
Miracles, and they seem to have led me to re-consider the view which
I took of them in my Essay in 1825-6. I do not know what was the date
of this change in me, nor of the train of ideas on which it was
founded. That there had been already great miracles, as those of
Scripture, as the Resurrection, was a fact establishing the principle
that the laws of nature had sometimes been suspended by their Divine
Author; and since what had happened once might happen again, a
certain probability, at least no kind of improbability, was attached
to the idea, taken in itself, of miraculous intervention in later
times, and miraculous accounts were to be regarded in connection with
the verisimilitude, scope, instrument, character, testimony, and
circumstances, with which they presented themselves to us; and,
according to the final result of those various considerations, it was
our duty to be sure, or to believe, or to opine, or to surmise, or to
tolerate, or to reject, or to denounce. The main difference between
my essay on Miracles in 1826 and my essay in 1842 is this: that
in 1826 I considered that miracles were sharply divided into two
classes, those which were to be received, and those which were to
be rejected; whereas in 1842 I saw that they were to be regarded
according to their greater or less probability, which was in some
cases sufficient to create certitude about them, in other cases only
belief or opinion.
Moreover, the argument from analogy, on which this view of the
question was founded, suggested to me something besides, in
recommendation of the ecclesiastical miracles. It fastened itself
upon the theory of church history which I had learned as a boy from
Joseph Milner. It is Milner's doctrine, that upon the visible Church
come down from above, from time to time, large and temporary
_Effusions_ of divine grace. This is the leading idea of his work. He
begins by speaking of the Day of Pentecost, as marking "the first of
those _Effusions_ of the Spirit of God, which from age to age have
visited the earth since the coming of Christ" (vol. i. p. 3). In a
note he adds that "in the term 'Effusion' there is not here included
the idea of the miraculous or extraordinary operations of the Spirit
of God;" but still it was natural for me, admitting Milner's general
theory, and applying to it the principle of analogy, not to stop
short at his abrupt _ipse dixit_, but boldly to pass forward to the
conclusion, on other grounds plausible, that, as miracles accompanied
the first effusion of grace, so they might accompany the later. It
is surely a natural and on the whole, a true anticipation (though
of course there are exceptions in particular cases), that gifts and
graces go together; now, according to the ancient Catholic doctrine,
the gift of miracles was viewed as the attendant and shadow of
transcendent sanctity: and moreover, as such sanctity was not of
every day's occurrence, nay further, as one period of Church history
differed widely from another, and, as Joseph Milner would say, there
have been generations or centuries of degeneracy or disorder, and
times of revival, and as one region might be in the mid-day of
religious fervour, and another in twilight or gloom, there was no
force in the popular argument, that, because we did not see miracles
with our own eyes, miracles had not happened in former times, or were
not now at this very time taking place in distant places:--but I must
not dwell longer on a subject, to which in a few words it is
impossible to do justice.
Hurrell Froude was a pupil of Keble's, formed by him, and in turn
reacting upon him. I knew him first in 1826, and was in the closest
and most affectionate friendship with him from about 1829 till his
death in 1836. He was a man of the highest gifts--so truly
many-sided, that it would be presumptuous in me to attempt to
describe him, except under those aspects, in which he came before me.
Nor have I here to speak of the gentleness and tenderness of nature,
the playfulness, the free elastic force and graceful versatility of
mind, and the patient winning considerateness in discussion, which
endeared him to those to whom he opened his heart; for I am all along
engaged upon matters of belief and opinion, and am introducing others
into my narrative, not for their own sake, or because I love and have
loved them, so much as because, and so far as, they have influenced
my theological views. In this respect then, I speak of Hurrell
Froude--in his intellectual aspect--as a man of high genius, brimful
and overflowing with ideas and views, in him original, which were too
many and strong even for his bodily strength, and which crowded and
jostled against each other in their effort after distinct shape and
expression. And he had an intellect as critical and logical as it was
speculative and bold. Dying prematurely, as he did, and in the
conflict and transition-state of opinion, his religious views never
reached their ultimate conclusion, by the very reason of their
multitude and their depth. His opinions arrested and influenced me,
even when they did not gain my assent. He professed openly his
admiration of the Church of Rome, and his hatred of the reformers.
He delighted in the notion of an hierarchical system, or sacerdotal
power and of full ecclesiastical liberty. He felt scorn of the maxim,
"The Bible and the Bible only is the religion of Protestants;" and he
gloried in accepting Tradition as a main instrument of religious
teaching. He had a high severe idea of the intrinsic excellence of
virginity; and he considered the Blessed Virgin its great pattern.
He delighted in thinking of the saints; he had a keen appreciation
of the idea of sanctity, its possibility and its heights; and he
was more than inclined to believe a large amount of miraculous
interference as occurring in the early and middle ages. He embraced
the principle of penance and mortification. He had a deep devotion to
the Real Presence, in which he had a firm faith. He was powerfully
drawn to the medieval church, but not to the primitive.
He had a keen insight into abstract truth; but he was an Englishman
to the backbone in his severe adherence to the real and the concrete.
He had a most classical taste, and a genius for philosophy and art;
and he was fond of historical inquiry, and the politics of religion.
He had no turn for theology as such. He had no appreciation of the
writings of the Fathers, of the detail or development of doctrine, of
the definite traditions of the Church viewed in their matter, of the
teaching of the ecumenical councils, or of the controversies out of
which they arose. He took an eager, courageous view of things on the
whole. I should say that his power of entering into the minds of
others did not equal his other gifts; he could not believe, for
instance, that I really held the Roman Church to be Antichristian. On
many points he would not believe but that I agreed with him, when I
did not. He seemed not to understand my difficulties. His were of a
different kind, the contrariety between theory and fact. He was a
high Tory of the cavalier stamp, and was disgusted with the Toryism
of the opponents of the Reform Bill. He was smitten with the love of
the theocratic church; he went abroad and was shocked by the
degeneracy which he thought he saw in the Catholics of Italy.
It is difficult to enumerate the precise additions to my theological
creed which I derived from a friend to whom I owe so much. He made me
look with admiration towards the Church of Rome, and in the same
degree to dislike the Reformation. He fixed deep in me the idea of
devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and he led me gradually to believe in
the Real Presence.
There is one remaining source of my opinions to be mentioned, and
that far from the least important. In proportion as I moved out of
the shadow of liberalism which had hung over my course, my early
devotion towards the fathers returned; and in the long vacation of
1828 I set about to read them chronologically, beginning with St.
Ignatius and St. Justin. About 1830 a proposal was made to me by Mr.
Hugh Rose, who with Mr. Lyall (afterwards Dean of Canterbury) was
providing writers for a theological library, to furnish them with a
history of the principal councils. I accepted it, and at once set to
work on the Council of Nicaea. It was launching myself on an ocean
with currents innumerable; and I was drifted back first to the
ante-Nicene history, and then to the Church of Alexandria. The work
at last appeared under the title of "The Arians of the Fourth
Century;" and of its 422 pages, the first 117 consisted of
introductory matter, and the Council of Nicaea did not appear till the
254th, and then occupied at most twenty pages.
I do not know when I first learnt to consider that antiquity was the
true exponent of the doctrines of Christianity and the basis of the
Church of England; but I take it for granted that Bishop Bull, whose
works at this time I read, was my chief introduction to this
principle. The course of reading which I pursued in the composition
of my work was directly adapted to develop it in my mind. What
principally attracted me in the ante-Nicene period was the great
Church of Alexandria, the historical centre of teaching in those
times. Of Rome for some centuries comparatively little is known. The
battle of Arianism was first fought in Alexandria; Athanasius, the
champion of the truth, was Bishop of Alexandria; and in his writings
he refers to the great religious names of an earlier date, to Origen,
Dionysius, and others who were the glory of its see, or of its
school. The broad philosophy of Clement and Origen carried me away;
the philosophy, not the theological doctrine; and I have drawn out
some features of it in my volume, with the zeal and freshness, but
with the partiality of a neophyte. Some portions of their teaching,
magnificent in themselves, came like music to my inward ear, as if
the response to ideas, which, with little external to encourage
them, I had cherished so long. These were based on the mystical
or sacramental principle, and spoke of the various economies or
dispensations of the eternal. I understood them to mean that the
exterior world, physical and historical, was but the outward
manifestation of realities greater than itself. Nature was a
parable:[1] Scripture was an allegory: pagan literature, philosophy,
and mythology, properly understood, were but a preparation for the
Gospel. The Greek poets and sages were in a certain sense prophets;
for "thoughts beyond their thought to those high bards were given."
There had been a divine dispensation granted to the Jews; there had
been in some sense a dispensation carried on in favour of the
Gentiles. He who had taken the seed of Jacob for His elect people,
had not therefore cast the rest of mankind out of His sight. In the
fulness of time both Judaism and Paganism had come to nought; the
outward framework, which concealed yet suggested the living truth,
had never been intended to last, and it was dissolving under the
beams of the sun of justice behind it and through it. The process of
change had been slow; it had been done not rashly, but by rule and
measure, "at sundry times and in divers manners," first one
disclosure and then another, till the whole was brought into full
manifestation. And thus room was made for the anticipation of further
and deeper disclosures, of truths still under the veil of the letter,
and in their season to be revealed. The visible world still remains
without its divine interpretation; Holy Church in her sacraments and
her hierarchical appointments, will remain even to the end of the
world, only a symbol of those heavenly facts which fill eternity. Her
mysteries are but the expressions in human language of truths to
which the human mind is unequal. It is evident how much there was in
all this in correspondence with the thoughts which had attracted me
when I was young, and with the doctrine which I have already
connected with the Analogy and the Christian Year.
I suppose it was to the Alexandrian school and to the early church
that I owe in particular what I definitely held about the angels. I
viewed them, not only as the ministers employed by the Creator in the
Jewish and Christian dispensations, as we find on the face of
Scripture, but as carrying on, as Scripture also implies, the economy
of the visible world. I considered them as the real causes of motion,
light, and life, and of those elementary principles of the physical
universe, which, when offered in their developments to our senses,
suggest to us the notion of cause and effect, and of what are called
the laws of nature. I have drawn out this doctrine in my sermon for
Michaelmas day, written not later than 1834. I say of the angels,
"Every breath of air and ray of light and heat, every beautiful
prospect, is, as it were, the skirts of their garments, the waving of
the robes of those whose faces see God." Again, I ask what would be
the thoughts of a man who, "when examining a flower, or a herb, or a
pebble, or a ray of light, which he treats as something so beneath
him in the scale of existence, suddenly discovered that he was in the
presence of some powerful being who was hidden behind the visible
things he was inspecting, who, though concealing his wise hand, was
giving them their beauty, grace, and perfection, as being God's
instrument for the purpose, nay, whose robe and ornaments those
objects were, which he was so eager to analyse?" and I therefore
remark that "we may say with grateful and simple hearts with the
Three Holy Children, 'O all ye works of the Lord, etc., etc., bless
ye the Lord, praise Him, and magnify Him for ever.'"
Also, besides the hosts of evil spirits, I considered there was a
middle race, [greek: daimonia], neither in heaven, nor in hell;
partially fallen, capricious, wayward; noble or crafty, benevolent or
malicious, as the case might be. They gave a sort of inspiration or
intelligence to races, nations, and classes of men. Hence the action
of bodies politic and associations, which is so different often from
that of the individuals who compose them. Hence the character and
the instinct of states and governments, of religious communities and
communions. I thought they were inhabited by unseen intelligences. My
preference of the Personal to the Abstract would naturally lead me to
this view. I thought it countenanced by the mention of "the Prince
of Persia" in the Prophet Daniel; and I think I considered that it
was of such intermediate beings that the Apocalypse spoke, when it
introduced "the Angels of the Seven Churches."
In 1837 I made a further development of this doctrine. I said to my
great 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, Tertullian, Origen, Lactantius,
Sulpicius, Ambrose, Nazianzen), hold that, though Satan fell from the
beginning, the Angels fell before the deluge, 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 certain institutions, etc., etc....
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?"
etc., etc.
I am aware that what I have been saying will, with many men, be doing
credit to my imagination at the expense of my judgment--"Hippoclides
doesn't care;" I am not setting myself up as a pattern of good sense
or of anything else: I am but vindicating myself from the charge of
dishonesty.--There is indeed another view of the economy brought out,
in the course of the same dissertation on the subject, in my History
of the Arians, which has afforded matter for the latter imputation;
but I reserve it for the concluding portion of my reply.
While I was engaged in writing my work upon the Arians, great events
were happening at home and abroad, which brought out into form and
passionate expression the various beliefs which had so gradually been
winning their way into my mind. Shortly before, there had been a
revolution in France; the Bourbons had been dismissed: and I believed
that it was unchristian for nations to cast off their governors, and,
much more, sovereigns who had the divine right of inheritance. Again,
the great Reform agitation was going on around me as I wrote. The
Whigs had come into power; Lord Grey had told the Bishops to set
their house in order, and some of the prelates had been insulted and
threatened in the streets of London. The vital question was how were
we to keep the Church from being liberalised? there was such apathy
on the subject in some quarters, such imbecile alarm in others; the
true principles of Churchmanship seemed so radically decayed, and
there was such distraction in the councils of the clergy. The Bishop
of London of the day, an active and open-hearted man, had been for
years engaged in diluting the high orthodoxy of the Church by the
introduction of the Evangelical body into places of influence and
trust. He had deeply offended men who agreed with myself, by an
off-hand saying (as it was reported) to the effect that belief in the
apostolical succession had gone out with the non-jurors. "We can
count you," he said to some of the gravest and most venerated persons
of the old school. And the Evangelical party itself seemed, with
their late successes, to have lost that simplicity and unworldliness
which I admired so much in Milner and Scott. It was not that I did
not venerate such men as the then Bishop of Lichfield, and others of
similar sentiments, who were not yet promoted out of the ranks of
the clergy, but I thought little of them as a class. I thought they
played into the hands of the Liberals. With the Establishment thus
divided and threatened, thus ignorant of its true strength, I
compared that fresh vigorous power of which I was reading in the
first centuries. In her triumphant zeal on behalf of that Primeval
Mystery, to which I had had so great a devotion from my youth, I
recognised the movement of my Spiritual Mother. "Incessu patuit Dea."
The self-conquest of her ascetics, the patience of her martyrs, the
irresistible determination of her bishops, the joyous swing of her
advance, both exalted and abashed me. I said to myself, "Look on this
picture and on that;" I felt affection for my own Church, but not
tenderness; I felt dismay at her prospects, anger and scorn at her
do-nothing perplexity. I thought that if Liberalism once got a
footing within her, it was sure of the victory in the event. I saw
that Reformation principles were powerless to rescue her. As to
leaving her, the thought never crossed my imagination; still I ever
kept before me that there was something greater than the Established
Church, and that that was the Church Catholic and Apostolic, set up
from the beginning, of which she was but the local presence and
organ. She was nothing, unless she was this. She must be dealt with
strongly, or she would be lost. There was need of a second
Reformation.
At this time I was disengaged from college duties, and my health had
suffered from the labour involved in the composition of my volume. It
was ready for the press in July, 1832, though not published till the
end of 1833. I was easily persuaded to join Hurrell Froude and his
Father, who were going to the south of Europe for the health of the
former.
We set out in December, 1832. It was during this expedition that my
Verses which are in the Lyra Apostolica were written;--a few indeed
before it, but not more than one or two of them after it. Exchanging,
as I was, definite tutorial labours, and the literary quiet and
pleasant friendships of the last six years, for foreign countries and
an unknown future, I naturally was led to think that some inward
changes, as well as some larger course of action, was coming upon me.
At Whitchurch, while waiting for the down mail to Falmouth, I wrote
the verses about my Guardian Angel, which begin with these words:
"Are these the tracks of some unearthly Friend?" and go on to speak
of "the vision" which haunted me:--that vision is more or less
brought out in the whole series of these compositions.
I went to various coasts of the Mediterranean, parted with my friends
at Rome; went down for the second time to Sicily, at the end of
April, and got back to England by Palermo in the early part of July.
The strangeness of foreign life threw me back into myself; I found
pleasure in historical sites and beautiful scenes, not in men and
manners. We kept clear of Catholics throughout our tour. I had a
conversation with the Dean of Malta, a most pleasant man, lately
dead; but it was about the Fathers, and the Library of the great
church. I knew the Abbate Santini, at Rome, who did no more than copy
for me the Gregorian tones. Froude and I made two calls upon
Monsignore (now Cardinal) Wiseman at the Collegio Inglese, shortly
before we left Rome. I do not recollect being in a room with any
other ecclesiastics, except a Priest at Castro-Giovanni in Sicily,
who called on me when I was ill, and with whom I wished to hold a
controversy. As to Church Services, we attended the Tenebrae, at the
Sestine, for the sake of the Miserere; and that was all. My general
feeling was, "All, save the spirit of man, is divine." I saw nothing
but what was external; of the hidden life of Catholics I knew
nothing. I was still more driven back into myself, and felt my
isolation. England was in my thoughts solely, and the news from
England came rarely and imperfectly. The Bill for the Suppression of
the Irish Sees was in progress, and 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 tricolour.
On my return, though forced to stop a day at Paris, I kept indoors
the whole time, and all that I saw of that beautiful city, was what I
saw from the Diligence. The Bishop of London had already sounded me
as to my filling one of the Whitehall preacherships, which he had
just then put on a new footing; but I was indignant at the line which
he was taking, and from my steamer I had sent home a letter declining
the appointment by anticipation, should it be offered to me. At this
time I was specially annoyed with Dr. Arnold, though it did not last
into later years. Some one, I think, asked in conversation at Rome,
whether a certain interpretation of Scripture was Christian? it was
answered that Dr. Arnold took it; I interposed, "But is _he_ a
Christian?" The subject went out of my head at once; when afterwards
I was taxed with it I could say no more in explanation, than that I
thought I must have been alluding to some free views of Dr. Arnold
about the Old Testament:--I thought I must have meant, "But who is to
answer for Arnold?" It was at Rome too that we began the Lyra
Apostolica which appeared monthly in the _British Magazine_. The
motto shows the feeling of both Froude and myself at the time: we
borrowed from M. Bunsen a Homer, and Froude chose the words in which
Achilles, on returning to the battle, says, "You shall know the
difference, now that I am back again."
Especially when I was left by myself, the thought came upon me that
deliverance is wrought, not by the many but by the few, not by bodies
but by persons. Now it was, I think, that I repeated to myself the
words, which had ever been dear to me from my school days, "Exoriare
aliquis!"--now too, that Southey's beautiful poem of Thalaba, for
which I had an immense liking, came forcibly to my mind. I began to
think that I had a mission. There are sentences of my letters to my
friends to this effect, if they are not destroyed. When we took leave
of Monsignore Wiseman, he had courteously expressed a wish that we
might make a second visit to Rome; I said with great gravity, "We
have a work to do in England." I went down at once to Sicily, and the
presentiment grew stronger. I struck into the middle of the island,
and fell ill of a fever at Leonforte. My servant thought that I was
dying, and begged for my last directions. I gave them, as he wished;
but I said, "I shall not die." I repeated, "I shall not die, for I
have not sinned against light, I have not sinned against light." I
never have been able to make out at all what I meant.
I got to Castro-Giovanni, and was laid up there for nearly three
weeks. Towards the end of May I set off for Palermo, taking three
days for the journey. Before starting from my inn in the morning of
May 26th or 27th, I sat down on my bed, and began to sob bitterly. My
servant, who had acted as my nurse, asked what ailed me. I could only
answer, "I have a work to do in England."
I was aching to get home; yet for want of a vessel I was kept at
Palermo for three weeks. I began to visit the Churches, and they
calmed my impatience, though I did not attend any services. I knew
nothing of the presence of the Blessed Sacrament there. At last I got
off in an orange boat, bound for Marseilles. We were becalmed a whole
week in the Straits of Bonifacio. Then it was that I wrote the lines,
"Lead, kindly light," which have since become well known. I was
writing verses the whole time of my passage. At length I got to
Marseilles, and set off for England. The fatigue of travelling was
too much for me, and I was laid up for several days at Lyons. At last
I got off again and did not stop night or day till I reached England,
and my mother's house. My brother had arrived from Persia only a few
hours before. This was on the Tuesday. The following Sunday, July
14th, Mr. Keble preached the assize Sermon in the University Pulpit.
It was published under the title of "National Apostasy." I have ever
considered and kept the day, as the start of the religious movement
of 1833.
Footnote
[1] _Vid_. Mr. Morris's beautiful poem with this title.