sought, without leaving the old paths, to put before people a strong
and energetic religion based, not on feeling or custom, but on reason
and conscience, and answering, in the vastness of its range, to the
mysteries of human nature, and in its power to man's capacities and
aims. The Liberal religion of that day, with its ideas of natural
theology or of a cold critical Unitarianism, was a very shallow one;
the Evangelical, trusting to excitement, had worn out its excitement
and had reached the stage when its formulas, poor ones at the best, had
become words without meaning. Such views might do in quiet, easy-going
times, if religion were an exercise at will of imagination or thought,
an indulgence, an ornament, an understanding, a fashion; not if it
corresponded to such a state of things as is implied in the Bible, or
to man's many-sided nature as it is shown in Shakspeare. The sermons
reflect with merciless force the popular, superficial, comfortable
thing called religion which the writer saw before him wherever he
looked, and from which his mind recoiled. Such sermons as those on the
"Self-wise Enquirer" and the "Religion of the Day," with its famous
passage about the age not being sufficiently "gloomy and fierce in its
religion," have the one-sided and unmeasured exaggeration which seems
inseparable from all strong expressions of conviction, and from all
deep and vehement protests against general faults; but, qualify and
limit them as we may, their pictures were not imaginary ones, and there
was, and is, but too much to justify them. From all this trifling with
religion the sermons called on men to look into themselves. They
appealed to conscience; and they appealed equally to reason and
thought, to recognise what conscience is, and to deal honestly with it.
They viewed religion as if projected on a background of natural and
moral mystery, and surrounded by it--an infinite scene, in which our
knowledge is like the Andes and Himalayas in comparison with the mass
of the earth, and in which conscience is our final guide and arbiter.
No one ever brought out so impressively the sense of the impenetrable
and tremendous vastness of that amid which man plays his part. In such
sermons as those on the "Intermediate State," the "Invisible World,"
the "Greatness and Littleness of Human Life," the "Individuality of the
Soul," the "Mysteriousness of our Present Being," we may see
exemplified the enormous irruption into the world of modern thought of
the unknown and the unknowable, as much as in the writers who, with far
different objects, set against it the clearness and certainty of what
we do know. But, beyond all, the sermons appealed to men to go back
into their own thoughts and feelings, and there challenged them; were
not the preacher's words the echoes and interpreting images of their
own deepest, possibly most perplexing and baffling, experience? From
first to last this was his great engine and power; from first to last
he boldly used it. He claimed to read their hearts; and people felt
that he did read them, their follies and their aspirations, the blended
and tangled web of earnestness and dishonesty, of wishes for the best
and truest, and acquiescence in makeshifts; understating what ordinary
preachers make much of, bringing into prominence what they pass by
without being able to see or to speak of it; keeping before his hearers
the risk of mismanaging their hearts, of "all kinds of unlawful
treatment of the soul." What a contrast to ordinary ways of speaking on
a familiar theological doctrine is this way of bringing it into
immediate relation to real feeling:--
It is easy to speak of human nature as corrupt in the general, to
admit it in the general, and then get quit of the subject; as if,
the doctrine being once admitted, there was nothing more to be done
with it. But, in truth, we can have no real apprehension of the
doctrine of our corruption till we view the structure of our minds,
part by part; and dwell upon and draw out the signs of our
weakness, inconsistency, and ungodliness, which are such as can
arise from nothing but some strange original defect in our original
nature.... We are in the dark about ourselves. When we act, we are
groping in the dark, and may meet with a fall any moment. Here and
there, perhaps, we see a little; or in our attempts to influence
and move our minds, we are making experiments (as it were) with
some delicate and dangerous instrument, which works we do not know
how, and may produce unexpected and disastrous effects. The
management of our hearts is quite above us. Under these
circumstances it becomes our comfort to look up to God. "Thou, God,
seest me." Such was the consolation of the forlorn Hagar in the
wilderness. He knoweth whereof we are made, and He alone can uphold
us. He sees with most appalling distinctness all our sins, all the
windings and recesses of evil within us; yet it is our only comfort
to know this, and to trust Him for help against ourselves.--Vol. I.
Serm. XIII.
The preacher contemplates human nature, not in the stiff formal
language in which it had become conventional with divines to set out
its shortcomings and dangers, but as a great novelist contemplates and
tries to describe it; taking in all its real contradictions and
anomalies, its subtle and delicate shades; fixing upon the things which
strike us in ourselves or our neighbours as ways of acting and marks of
character; following it through its wide and varying range, its
diversified and hidden folds and subtle self-involving realities of
feeling and shiftiness; touching it in all its complex sensibilities,
anticipating its dim consciousnesses, half-raising veils which hide
what it instinctively shrinks from, sending through it unexpected
thrills and shocks; large-hearted in indulgence, yet exacting; most
tender, yet most severe. And against all this real play of nature he
sets in their full force and depth the great ideas of God, of sin, and
of the Cross; and, appealing not to the intelligence of an aristocracy
of choice natures, but to the needs and troubles and longings which
make all men one, he claimed men's common sympathy for the heroic in
purpose and standard. He warned them against being fastidious, where
they should be hardy. He spoke in a way that all could understand of
brave ventures, of resolutely committing themselves to truth and duty.
The most practical of sermons, the most real and natural in their way
of dealing with life and conduct, they are also intensely dogmatic. The
writer's whole teaching presupposes, as we all know, a dogmatic
religion; and these sermons are perhaps the best vindication of it
which our time, disposed to think of dogmas with suspicion, has seen.
For they show, on a large scale and in actual working instances, how
what is noblest, most elevated, most poetical, most free and searching
in a thinker's way of regarding the wonderful scene of life, falls in
naturally, and without strain, with a great dogmatic system like that
of the Church. Such an example does not prove that system to be true,
but it proves that a dogmatic system, as such, is not the cast-iron,
arbitrary, artificial thing which it is often assumed to be. It is,
indeed, the most shallow of all commonplaces, intelligible in ordinary
minds, but unaccountable in those of high power and range, whether they
believe or not, that a dogmatic religion is of course a hard, dry,
narrow, unreal religion, without any affinities to poetry or the truth
of things, or to the deeper and more sacred and powerful of human
thoughts. If dogmas are not true, that is another matter; but it is the
fashion to imply that dogmas are worthless, mere things of the past,
without sense or substance or interest, because they are dogmas. As if
Dante was not dogmatic in form and essence; as if the grandest and
worthiest religious prose in the English language was not that of
Hooker, nourished up amid the subtleties, but also amid the vast
horizons and solemn heights, of scholastic divinity. A dogmatic system
is hard in hard hands, and shallow in shallow minds, and barren in dull
ones, and unreal and empty to preoccupied and unsympathising ones; we
dwarf and distort ideas that we do not like, and when we have put them
in our own shapes and in our own connection, we call them unmeaning or
impossible. Dogmas are but expedients, common to all great departments
of human thought, and felt in all to be necessary, for representing
what are believed as truths, for exhibiting their order and
consequences, for expressing the meaning of terms, and the relations of
thought. If they are wrong, they are, like everything else in the
world, open to be proved wrong; if they are inadequate, they are open
to correction; but it is idle to sneer at them for being what they must
be, if religious facts and truths are to be followed out by the
thoughts and expressed by the language of man. And what dogmas are in
unfriendly and incapable hands is no proof of what they may be when
they are approached as things instinct with truth and life; it is no
measure of the way in which they may be inextricably interwoven with
the most unquestionably living thought and feeling, as in these
sermons. Jealous, too, as the preacher is for Church doctrines as the
springs of Christian life, no writer of our time perhaps has so
emphatically and impressively recalled the narrow limits within which
human language can represent Divine realities. No one that we know of
shows that he has before his mind with such intense force and
distinctness the idea of God; and in proportion as a mind takes in and
submits itself to the impression of that awful vision, the gulf widens
between all possible human words and that which they attempt to
express:--
When we have deduced what we deduce by our reason from the study of
visible nature, and then read what we read in His inspired word,
and find the two apparently discordant, _this_ is the feeling I
think we ought to have on our minds;--not an impatience to do what
is beyond our powers, to weigh evidence, sum up, balance, decide,
reconcile, to arbitrate between the two voices of God,--but a sense
of the utter nothingness of worms such as we are; of our plain and
absolute incapacity to contemplate things _as they really are_; a
perception of our emptiness before the great Vision of God; of our
"comeliness being turned into corruption, and our retaining no
strength"; a conviction that what is put before us, whether in
nature or in grace, is but an intimation, useful for particular
purposes, useful for practice, useful in its department, "until the
day break and the shadows flee away"; useful in such a way that
both the one and the other representation may at once be used, as
two languages, as two separate approximations towards the Awful
Unknown Truth, such as will not mislead us in their respective
provinces.--Vol. II. Serm. XVIII.
"I cannot persuade myself," he says, commenting on a mysterious
text of Scripture, "thus to dismiss so solemn a passage" (i.e. by
saying that it is "all figurative"). "It seems a presumption to say
of dim notices about the unseen world, 'they only mean this or
that,' as if one had ascended into the third heaven, or had stood
before the throne of God. No; I see herein a deep mystery, a hidden
truth, which I cannot handle or define, shining 'as jewels at the
bottom of the great deep,' darkly and tremulously, yet really
there. And for this very reason, while it is neither pious nor
thankful to explain away the words which convey it, while it is a
duty to use them, not less a duty is it to use them humbly,
diffidently, and teachably, with the thought of God before us, and
of our own nothingness."--Vol. III. Serm. XXV.
There are two great requisites for treating properly the momentous
questions and issues which have been brought before our generation. The
first is accuracy--accuracy of facts, of terms, of reasoning; plain
close dealing with questions in their real and actual conditions;
clear, simple, honest, measured statements about things as we find
them. The other is elevation, breadth, range of thought; a due sense of
what these questions mean and involve; a power of looking at things
from a height; a sufficient taking into account of possibilities, of
our ignorance, of the real proportions of things. We have plenty of the
first; we are for the most part lamentably deficient in the second. And
of this, these sermons are, to those who have studied them, almost
unequalled examples. Many people, no doubt, would rise from their
perusal profoundly disagreeing with their teaching; but no one, it
seems to us, could rise from them--with their strong effortless
freedom, their lofty purpose, their generous standard, their deep and
governing appreciation of divine things, their thoroughness, their
unselfishness, their purity, their austere yet piercing sympathy--and
not feel his whole ways of thinking about religion permanently enlarged
and raised. He will feel that he has been with one who "told him what
he knew about himself and what he did not know; has read to him his
wants or feelings, and comforted him by the very reading; has made him
feel that there was a higher life than this life, and a brighter world
than we can see; has encouraged him, or sobered him, or opened a way to
the inquiring, or soothed the perplexed." They show a man who saw very
deeply into the thought of his time, and who, if he partly recoiled
from it and put it back, at least equally shared it. Dr. Newman has
been accused of being out of sympathy with his age, and of disparaging
it. In reality, no one has proved himself more keenly sensitive to its
greatness and its wonders; only he believed that he saw something
greater still. We are not of those who can accept the solution which he
has accepted of the great problems which haunt our society; but he saw
better than most men what those problems demand, and the variety of
their often conflicting conditions. Other men, perhaps, have succeeded
better in what they aimed at; but no one has attempted more, with
powers and disinterestedness which justified him in attempting it. The
movement which he led, and of which these sermons are the
characteristic monument, is said to be a failure; but there are
failures, and even mistakes, which are worth many successes of other
sorts, and which are more fruitful and permanent in their effects.
XXIX
CARDINAL NEWMAN[33]
[33]
_Guardian_, 21st May 1879.
It is not wonderful that people should be impressed by the vicissitudes
and surprises and dramatic completeness of Cardinal Newman's career.
It is not wonderful that he should be impressed by this himself. That
he who left us in despair and indignation in 1845 should have passed
through a course of things which has made him, Roman Catholic as he
is, a man of whom Englishmen are so proud in 1879, is even more
extraordinary than that the former Fellow of Oriel should now be
surrounded with the pomp and state of a Cardinal. There is only one
other career in our time which, with the greatest possible contrasts in
other points, suggests in its strangeness and antecedent improbabilities
something of a parallel. It is the train of events which has made
"Disraeli the Younger" the most powerful Minister whom England has seen
in recent years. But Lord Beaconsfield has aimed at what he has
attained to, and has fought his way to it through the chances and
struggles of a stirring public life. Cardinal Newman's life has been
from first to last the life of the student and recluse. He has lived in
the shade. He has sought nothing for himself. He has shrunk from the
thought of advancement. The steps to the high places of the world have
not offered themselves to him, and he has been content to be let alone.
Early in his course his rare gifts of mind, his force of character, his
power over hearts and sympathies, made him for a while a prominent
person. Then came a series of events which seemed to throw him out of
harmony with the great mass of his countrymen. He appeared to be, if not
forgotten, yet not thought of, except by a small number of friends--old
friends who had known him too well and too closely ever to forget, and
new friends gathered round him by the later circumstances of his life
and work. People spoke of him as a man who had made a great mistake and
failed; who had thrown up influence and usefulness here, and had not
found it there; too subtle, too imaginative for England, too
independent for Rome. He seemed to have so sunk out of interest and
account that off-hand critics, in the easy gaiety of their heart, might
take liberties with his name.
Then came the first surprise. The _Apologia_ was read with the keenest
interest by those who most differed from the writer's practical
conclusions; twenty years had elapsed since he had taken the unpopular
step which seemed to condemn him to obscurity; and now he emerged from
it, challenging not in vain the sympathy of his countrymen. They
awoke, it may be said--at least the younger generation of them--to
what he really was; the old jars and bitternesses had passed out of
remembrance; they only felt that they had one among them who could
write--for few of them ever heard his wonderful voice--in a way which
made English hearts respond quickly and warmly. And the strange thing
was that the professed, the persistent denouncer of Liberalism, was
welcomed back to his rightful place among Englishmen by none more
warmly than by many Liberals. Still, though his name was growing more
familiar year by year, the world did not see much more of him. The
head of a religious company, of an educational institution at
Birmingham, he lived in unpretending and quiet simplicity, occupied
with the daily business of his house, with his books, with his
correspondence, with finishing off his many literary and theological
undertakings. Except in some chance reference in a book or newspaper
which implied how considerable a person the world thought him, he was
not heard of. People asked about him, but there was nothing to tell.
Then at last, neglected by Pius IX., he was remembered by Leo XIII.
The Pope offered him the Cardinalship, he said, because he thought it
would be "grateful to the Catholics of England, and to England
itself." And he was not mistaken. Probably there is not a single thing
that the Pope could do which would be so heartily welcomed.
After breaking with England and all things English in wrath and sorrow,
nearly thirty-five years ago, after a long life of modest retirement,
unmarked by any public honours, at length before he dies Dr. Newman is
recognised by Protestant England as one of its greatest men. It watches
with interest his journey to Rome, his proceedings at Rome. In a crowd
of new Cardinals--men of eminence in their own communion--he is the
only one about whom Englishmen know or care anything. His words, when
he speaks, pass _verbatim_ along the telegraph wires, like the words of
the men who sway the world. We read of the quiet Oxford scholar's arms
emblazoned on vestment and furniture as those of a Prince of the
Church, and of his motto--_Cor ad cor loquitur_. In that motto is the
secret of all that he is to his countrymen. For that skill of which he
is such a master, in the use of his and their "sweet mother tongue," is
something much more than literary accomplishment and power. It means
that he has the key to what is deepest in their nature and most
characteristic in them of feeling and conviction--to what is deeper
than opinions and theories and party divisions; to what in their most
solemn moments they most value and most believe in.
His profound sympathy with the religiousness which still, with all the
variations and all the immense shortcomings of English religion, marks
England above all cultivated Christian nations, is really the bond
between him and his countrymen, who yet for the most part think so
differently from him, both about the speculative grounds and many of
the practical details of religion. But it was natural for him, on an
occasion like this, reviewing the past and connecting it with the
present, to dwell on these differences. He repeated once more, and
made it the keynote of his address, his old protest against
"Liberalism in religion," the "doctrine that there is no positive
truth in religion, but one creed is as good as another." He lamented
the decay of the power of authority, the disappearance of religion
from the sphere of political influence, from education, from
legislation. He deplored the increasing impossibility of getting men
to work together on a common religious basis. He pointed out the
increasing seriousness and earnestness of the attempts to "supersede,
to block out religion," by an imposing and high morality, claiming to
dispense with it.
He dwelt on the mischief and dangers; he expressed, as any Christian
would, his fearlessness and faith in spite of them; but do we gather,
even from such a speaker, and on such an occasion, anything of the
remedy? The principle of authority is shaken, he tells us; what can he
suggest to restore it? He under-estimates, probably, the part which
authority plays, implicitly yet very really, in English popular
religion, much more in English Church religion; and authority, even in
Rome, is not everything, and does not reach to every subject. But
authority in our days can be nothing without real confidence in it;
and where confidence in authority has been lost, it is idle to attempt
to restore it by telling men that authority is a good and necessary
thing. It must be won back, not simply claimed. It must be regained,
when forfeited, by the means by which it was originally gained. And
the strange phenomenon was obviously present to his clear and candid
mind, though he treated it as one which is disappearing, and must at
length pass away, that precisely here in England, where the only
religious authority he recognises has been thrown off, the hold of
religion on public interest is most effective and most obstinately
tenacious.
What is the history of this? What is the explanation of it? Why is it
that where "authority," as he understands it, has been longest
paramount and undisputed, the public place and public force of
religion have most disappeared; and that a "dozen men taken at random
in the streets" of London find it easier, with all their various
sects, to work together on a religious basis than a dozen men taken at
random from the streets of Catholic Paris or Rome? Indeed, the public
feeling towards himself, expressed in so many ways in the last few
weeks, might suggest a question not undeserving of his thoughts. The
mass of Englishmen are notoriously anti-Popish and anti-Roman. Their
antipathies on this subject are profound, and not always reasonable.
They certainly do not here halt between two opinions, or think that
one creed is as good as another. What is it which has made so many of
them, still retaining all their intense dislike to the system which
Cardinal Newman has accepted, yet welcome so heartily his honours in
it, notwithstanding that he has passed from England to Rome, and that
he owes so much of what he is to England? Is it that they think it
does not matter what a man believes, and whether a man turns Papist?
Or is it not that, in spite of all that would repel and estrange, in
spite of the oppositions of argument and the inconsistencies of
speculation, they can afford to recognise in him, as in a high
example, what they most sincerely believe in and most deeply prize,
and can pay him the tribute of their gratitude and honour, even when
unconvinced by his controversial reasonings, and unsatisfied by the
theories which he has proposed to explain the perplexing and
refractory anomalies of Church history? Is it not that with history,
inexorable and unalterable behind them, condemning and justifying,
supporting and warning all sides in turn, thoughtful men feel how much
easier it is to point out and deplore our disasters than to see a way
now to set them right? Is it not also that there are in the Christian
Church bonds of affinity, subtler, more real and more prevailing than
even the fatal legacies of the great schisms? Is it not that the
sympathies which unite the author of the _Parochial Sermons_ and the
interpreter of St. Athanasius with the disciples of Andrewes, and Ken,
and Bull, of Butler and Wilson, are as strong and natural as the
barriers which outwardly keep them asunder are to human eyes
hopelessly insurmountable?
XXX
CARDINAL NEWMAN'S COURSE[34]
[34]
_Guardian_, 13th August 1890.
The long life is closed. And men, according to their knowledge and
intelligence, turn to seek for some governing idea or aspect of things,
by which to interpret the movements and changes of a course which, in
spite of its great changes, is felt at bottom to have been a uniform
and consistent one. For it seems that, at starting, he is at once
intolerant, even to harshness, to the Roman Church, and tolerant,
though not sympathetic, to the English; then the parts are reversed,
and he is intolerant to the English and tolerant to the Roman; and then
at last, when he finally anchored in the Roman Church, he is seen
as--not tolerant, for that would involve dogmatic points on which he
was most jealous, but--sympathetic in all that was of interest to
England, and ready to recognise what was good and high in the English
Church.