of the life, society, and principles of action presented in the New
Testament? To this New Testament life he saw, opposed and in contrast,
the ways and assumptions of English life, religious as well as secular.
He saw that the organisation of society had been carried, and was still
being carried, to great and wonderful perfection; only it was the
perfection of a society and way of life adapted to the present world,
and having its ends here; only it was as different as anything can be
from the picture which the writers of the New Testament, consciously
and unconsciously, give of themselves and their friends. Here was a
Church, a religion, a "Christian nation," professing to be identical in
spirit and rules of faith and conduct with the Church and religion of
the Gospels and Epistles; and what was the identity, beyond certain
phrases and conventional suppositions? He could not see a trace in
English society of that simple and severe hold of the unseen and the
future which is the colour and breath, as well as the outward form, of
the New Testament life. Nothing could be more perfect, nothing grander
and nobler, than all the current arrangements for this life; its
justice and order and increasing gentleness, its widening sympathies
between men; but it was all for the perfection and improvement of this
life; it would all go on, if what we experience now was our only scene
and destiny. This perpetual antithesis haunted him, when he knew it, or
when he did not. Against it the Church ought to be the perpetual
protest, and the fearless challenge, as it was in the days of the New
Testament. But the English Church had drunk in, he held, too deeply the
temper, ideas, and laws of an ambitious and advancing civilisation; so
much so as to be unfaithful to its special charge and mission. The
prophet had ceased to rebuke, warn, and suffer; he had thrown in his
lot with those who had ceased to be cruel and inhuman, but who thought
only of making their dwelling-place as secure and happy as they could.
The Church had become respectable, comfortable, sensible, temperate,
liberal; jealous about the forms of its creeds, equally jealous of its
secular rights, interested in the discussion of subordinate questions,
and becoming more and more tolerant of differences; ready for works of
benevolence and large charity, in sympathy with the agricultural poor,
open-handed in its gifts; a willing fellow-worker with society in
kindly deeds, and its accomplice in secularity. All this was admirable,
but it was not the life of the New Testament, and it was _that_ which
filled his thoughts. The English Church had exchanged religion for
civilisation, the first century for the nineteenth, the New Testament
as it is written, for a counterfeit of it interpreted by Paley or Mr.
Simeon; and it seemed to have betrayed its trust.
Form after form was tried by him, the Christianity of Evangelicalism,
the Christianity of Whately, the Christianity of Hawkins, the
Christianity of Keble and Pusey; it was all very well, but it was not
the Christianity of the New Testament and of the first ages. He wrote
the _Church of the Fathers_ to show they were not merely evidences of
religion, but really living men; that they could and did live as they
taught, and what was there like the New Testament or even the first
ages now? Alas! there was nothing completely like them; but of all
unlike things, the Church of England with its "smug parsons," and
pony-carriages for their wives and daughters, seemed to him the most
unlike: more unlike than the great unreformed Roman Church, with its
strange, unscriptural doctrines and its undeniable crimes, and its
alliance, wherever it could, with the world. But at least the Roman
Church had not only preserved, but maintained at full strength through
the centuries to our day two things of which the New Testament was
full, and which are characteristic of it--devotion and self-sacrifice.
The crowds at a pilgrimage, a shrine, or a "pardon" were much more like
the multitudes who followed our Lord about the hills of Galilee--like
them probably in that imperfect faith which we call superstition--than
anything that could be seen in the English Church, even if the
Salvation Army were one of its instruments. And the spirit which
governed the Roman Church had prevailed on men to make the sacrifice of
celibacy a matter of course, as a condition of ministering in a regular
and systematic way not only to the souls, but to the bodies of men, not
only for the Priesthood, but for educational Brotherhoods, and Sisters
of the poor and of hospitals. Devotion and sacrifice, prayer and
self-denying charity, in one word sanctity, are at once on the surface
of the New Testament and interwoven with all its substance. He recoiled
from a representation of the religion of the New Testament which to his
eye was without them. He turned to where, in spite of every other
disadvantage, he thought he found them. In S. Filippo Neri he could
find a link between the New Testament and progressive civilisation. He
could find no S. Filippo--so modern and yet so Scriptural--when he
sought at home.
His mind, naturally alive to all greatness, had early been impressed
with the greatness of the Church of Rome. But in his early days it was
the greatness of Anti-Christ. Then came the change, and his sense of
greatness was satisfied by the commanding and undoubting attitude of
the Roman system, by the completeness of its theory, by the sweep of
its claims and its rule, by the even march of its vast administration.
It could not and it did not escape him, that the Roman Church, with all
the good things which it had, was, as a whole, as unlike the Church of
the New Testament and of the first ages as the English. He recognised
it frankly, and built up a great theory to account for the fact,
incorporating and modernising great portions of the received Roman
explanations of the fact. But what won his heart and his enthusiasm was
one thing; what justified itself to his intellect was another. And it
was the reproduction, partial, as it might be, yet real and
characteristic, in the Roman Church of the life and ways of the New
Testament, which was the irresistible attraction that tore him from the
associations and the affections of half a lifetime.
The final break with the English Church was with much heat and
bitterness; and both sides knew too much each of the other to warrant
the language used on each side. The English Church had received too
much loyal and invaluable service from him in teaching and example to
have insulted him, as many of its chief authorities did, with the
charges of dishonesty and bad faith; his persecutors forgot that a
little effort on his part might, if he had been what they called him,
and had really been a traitor, have formed a large and compact party,
whose secession might have caused fatal damage. And he, too, knew too
much of the better side of English religious life to justify the fierce
invective and sarcasm with which he assailed for a time the English
Church as a mere system of comfortable and self-deceiving worldliness.
But as time went over him in his new position two things made
themselves felt. One was, that though there was a New Testament life,
lived in the Roman Church with conspicuous truth and reality, yet the
Roman Church, like the English, was administered and governed by
men--men with passions and faults, men of mixed characters--who had,
like their English contemporaries and rivals, ends and rules of action
not exactly like those of the New Testament. The Roman Church had to
accept, as much as the English, the modern conditions of social and
political life, however different in outward look from those of the
Sermon on the Mount. The other was the increasing sense that the
civilisation of the West was as a whole, and notwithstanding grievous
drawbacks, part of God's providential government, a noble and
beneficent thing, ministering graciously to man's peace and order,
which Christians ought to recognise as a blessing of their times such
as their fathers had not, for which they ought to be thankful, and
which, if they were wise, they would put to what, in his phrase, was an
"Apostolical" use. In one of the angelical hymns in the _Dream of
Gerontius_, he dwells on the Divine goodness which led men to found "a
household and a fatherland, a city and a state" with an earnestness of
sympathy, recalling the enumeration of the achievements of human
thought and hand, and the arts of civil and social life--[Greek: kai
phthegma kai aenemoen phronaema kai astynomous orgas]--dwelt on so
fondly by Aeschylus and Sophocles.
The force with which these two things made themselves felt as age came
on--the disappointments attending his service to the Church, and the
grandeur of the physical and social order of the world and its Divine
sanction in spite of all that is evil and all that is so shortlived in
it--produced a softening in his ways of thought and speech. Never for a
moment did his loyalty and obedience to his Church, even when most
tried, waver and falter. The thing is inconceivable to any one who ever
knew him, and the mere suggestion would be enough to make him blaze
forth in all his old fierceness and power. But perfectly satisfied of
his position, and with his duties clearly defined, he could allow large
and increasing play, in the leisure of advancing age, to his natural
sympathies, and to the effect of the wonderful spectacle of the world
around him. He was, after all, an Englishman; and with all his
quickness to detect and denounce what was selfish and poor in English
ideas and action, and with all the strength of his deep antipathies,
his chief interests were for things English--English literature,
English social life, English politics, English religion. He liked to
identify himself, as far as it was possible, with things English, even
with things that belonged to his own first days. He republished his
Oxford sermons and treatises. He prized his honorary fellowship at
Trinity; he enjoyed his visit to Oxford, and the welcome which he met
there. He discerned how much the English Church counted for in the
fight going on in England for the faith in Christ. There was in all
that he said and did a gentleness, a forbearance, a kindly
friendliness, a warm recognition of the honour paid him by his
countrymen, ever since the _Apologia_ had broken down the prejudices
which had prevented Englishmen from doing him justice. As with his
chief antagonist at Oxford, Dr. Hawkins, advancing years brought with
them increasing gentleness, and generosity, and courtesy. But through
all this there was perceptible to those who watched a pathetic yearning
for something which was not to be had: a sense, resigned--for so it was
ordered--but deep and piercing, how far, not some of us, but all of us,
are from the life of the New Testament: how much there is for religion
to do, and how little there seems to be to do it.
XXXI
CARDINAL NEWMAN'S NATURALNESS[35]
[35]
_Guardian_, 20th August 1890.
Every one feels what is meant when we speak of a person's ways being
"natural," in contrast to being artificial, or overstrained, or
studied, or affected. But it is easier to feel what is meant than to
explain and define it. We sometimes speak as if it were a mere quality
of manner; as if it belonged to the outside show of things, and denoted
the atmosphere, clear and transparent, through which they are viewed.
It corresponds to what is lucid in talk and style, and what ethically
is straightforward and unpretentious. But it is something much more
than a mere surface quality. When it is real and part of the whole
character, and not put on from time to time for effect, it reaches a
long way down to what is deepest and most significant in a man's moral
nature. It is connected with the sense of truth, with honest
self-judgment, with habits of self-discipline, with the repression of
vanity, pride, egotism. It has no doubt to do with good taste and good
manners, but it has as much to do with good morals--with the resolute
habit of veracity with oneself--with the obstinate preference for
reality over show, however tempting--with the wholesome power of being
able to think little about oneself.
It is common to speak of the naturalness and ease of Cardinal Newman's
style in writing. It is, of course, the first thing that attracts
notice when we open one of his books; and there are people who think it
bald and thin and dry. They look out for longer words, and grander
phrases, and more involved constructions, and neater epigrams. They
expect a great theme to be treated with more pomp and majesty, and they
are disappointed. But the majority of English readers seem to be agreed
in recognising the beauty and transparent flow of his language, which
matches the best French writing in rendering with sureness and without
effort the thought of the writer. But what is more interesting than
even the formation of such a style--a work, we may be sure, not
accomplished without much labour--is the man behind the style. For the
man and the style are one in this perfect naturalness and ease. Any one
who has watched at all carefully the Cardinal's career, whether in old
days or later, must have been struck with this feature of his
character, his naturalness, the freshness and freedom with which he
addressed a friend or expressed an opinion, the absence of all
mannerism and formality; and, where he had to keep his dignity, both
his loyal obedience to the authority which enjoined it and the
half-amused, half-bored impatience that he should be the person round
whom all these grand doings centred. It made the greatest difference in
his friendships whether his friends met him on equal terms, or whether
they brought with them too great conventional deference or solemnity of
manner. "So and so is a very good fellow, but he is not a man to talk
to in your shirt sleeves," was his phrase about an over-logical and
over-literal friend. Quite aware of what he was to his friends and to
the things with which he was connected, and ready with a certain
quickness of temper which marked him in old days to resent anything
unbecoming done to his cause or those connected with it, he would not
allow any homage to be paid to himself. He was by no means disposed to
allow liberties to be taken or to put up with impertinence; for all
that bordered on the unreal, for all that was pompous, conceited,
affected, he had little patience; but almost beyond all these was his
disgust at being made the object of foolish admiration. He protested
with whimsical fierceness against being made a hero or a sage; he was
what he was, he said, and nothing more; and he was inclined to be rude
when people tried to force him into an eminence which he refused. With
his profound sense of the incomplete and the ridiculous in this world,
and with a humour in which the grotesque and the pathetic sides of life
were together recognised at every moment, he never hesitated to admit
his own mistakes--his "floors" as he called them. All this ease and
frankness with those whom he trusted, which was one of the lessons
which he learnt from Hurrell Froude, an intercourse which implied a
good deal of give and take--all this satisfied his love of freedom, his
sense of the real. It was his delight to give himself free play with
those whom he could trust; to feel that he could talk with "open
heart," understood without explaining, appealing for a response which
would not fail, though it was not heard. He could be stiff enough with
those who he thought were acting a part, or pretending to more than
they could perform. But he believed--what was not very easy to believe
beforehand--that he could win the sympathy of his countrymen, though
not their agreement with him; and so, with characteristic naturalness
and freshness, he wrote the _Apologia_.
XXXII
LORD BLACHFORD[36]
[36]
_Guardian_, 27th Nov. 1889.
Lord Blachford, whose death was announced last week, belonged to a
generation of Oxford men of whom few now survive, and who, of very
different characters and with very different careers and histories, had
more in common than any set of contemporaries at Oxford since their
time. Speaking roughly, they were almost the last product of the old
training at public school and at college, before the new reforms set
in; of a training confessedly imperfect and in some ways deplorably
defective, but with considerable elements in it of strength and
manliness, with keen instincts of contempt for all that savoured of
affectation and hollowness, and with a sort of largeness and freedom
about it, both in its outlook and its discipline, which suited vigorous
and self-reliant natures in an exciting time, when debate ran high and
the gravest issues seemed to be presenting themselves to English
society. The reformed system which has taken its place at Oxford
criticises, not without some justice, the limitations of the older one;
the narrow range of its interests, the few books which men read, and
the minuteness with which they were "got up." But if these men did not
learn all that a University ought to teach its students, they at least
learned two things. They learned to work hard, and they learned to make
full use of what they knew. They framed an ideal of practical life,
which was very variously acted upon, but which at any rate aimed at
breadth of grasp and generosity of purpose, and at being thorough. This
knot of men, who lived a good deal together, were recognised at the
time as young men of much promise, and they looked forward to life with
eagerness and high aspiration. They have fulfilled their promise; their
names are mixed up with all the recent history of England; they have
filled its great places and governed its policy during a large part of
the Queen's long reign. Their names are now for the most part things of
the past--Sidney Herbert, Lord Canning, Lord Dalhousie, Lord Elgin,
Lord Cardwell, the Wilberforces, Mr. Hope Scott, Archbishop Tait. But
they still have their representatives among us--Mr. Gladstone, Lord
Selborne, Lord Sherbrooke, Sir Thomas Acland, Cardinal Manning. It is
not often that a University generation or two can produce such a list
of names of statesmen and rulers; and the list might easily be
enlarged.
To this generation Frederic Rogers belonged, not the least
distinguished among his contemporaries; and he was early brought under
an influence likely to stimulate in a high degree whatever powers a man
possessed, and to impress a strong character with elevated and enduring
ideas of life and duty. Mr. Newman, with Mr. Hurrell Froude and Mr.
Robert Wilberforce, had recently been appointed tutors of their college
by Dr. Copleston. They were in the first eagerness of their enthusiasm
to do great things with the college, and the story goes that Mr.
Newman, on the look-out for promising pupils, wrote to an Eton friend,
asking him to recommend some good Eton men for admission at Oriel.
Frederic Rogers, so the story goes, was one of those mentioned; at any
rate, he entered at Oriel, and became acquainted with Mr. Newman as a
tutor, and the admiration and attachment of the undergraduate ripened
into the most unreserved and affectionate friendship of the grown
man--a friendship which has lasted through all storms and difficulties,
and through strong differences of opinion, till death only has ended
it. From Mr. Newman his pupil caught that earnest devotion to the cause
of the Church which was supreme with him through life. He entered
heartily into Mr. Newman's purpose to lift the level of the English
Church and its clergy. While Mr. Newman at Oxford was fighting the
battle of the English Church, there was no one who was a closer friend
than Rogers, no one in whom Mr. Newman had such trust, none whose
judgment he so valued, no one in whose companionship he so delighted;
and the master's friendship was returned by the disciple with a noble
and tender, and yet manly honesty. There came, as we know, times which
strained even that friendship; when the disciple, just at the moment
when the master most needed and longed for sympathy and counsel, had to
choose between his duty to his Church and the claims and ties of
friendship. He could not follow in the course which his master and
friend had found inevitable; and that deepest and most delightful
friendship had to be given up. But it was given up, not indeed without
great suffering on both sides, but without bitterness or unworthy
thoughts. The friend had seen too closely the greatness and purity of
his master's character to fail in tenderness and loyalty, even when he
thought his master going most wrong. He recognised that the error,
deplorable as he thought it, was the mistake of a lofty and unselfish
soul; and in the height of the popular outcry against him he came
forward, with a distant and touching reverence, to take his old
friend's part and rebuke the clamour. And at length the time came when
disagreements were left long behind and each person had finally taken
his recognised place; and then the old ties were knit up again. It
could not be the former friendship of every day and of absolute and
unreserved confidence. But it was the old friendship of affection and
respect renewed, and pleasure in the interchange of thoughts. It was a
friendship of the antique type, more common, perhaps, even in the last
century than with us, but enriched with Christian hopes and Christian
convictions.
Lord Blachford, in spite of his brilliant Oxford reputation, and though
he was a singularly vigorous writer, with wide interests and very
independent thought, has left nothing behind him in the way of
literature. This was partly because he very early became a man of
affairs; partly that his health interfered with habits of study. It
used to be told at Oxford that when he was working for his Double First
he could scarcely use his eyes, and had to learn much of his work by
being read to. The result was that he was not a great reader; and a man
ought to be a reader who is to be a writer. But, besides this, there
was a strongly marked feature in his character which told in the same
direction. There was a curious modesty about him which formed a
contrast with other points; with a readiness and even eagerness to put
forth and develop his thoughts on matters that interested him, with a
perfect consciousness of his remarkable powers of statement and
argument, with a constitutional impetuosity blended with caution which
showed itself when anything appealed to his deeper feelings or called
for his help; yet with all these impelling elements, his instinct was
always to shrink from putting himself forward, except when it was a
matter of duty. He accepted recognition when it came, but he never
claimed it. And this reserve, which marked his social life, kept him
back from saying in a permanent form much that he had to say, and that
was really worth saying. Like many of the distinguished men of his day,
he was occasionally a journalist. We have been reminded by the _Times_
that he at one time wrote for that paper. And he was one of the men to
whose confidence and hope in the English Church the _Guardian_ owes its
existence.
His life was the uneventful one of a diligent and laborious public
servant, and then of a landlord keenly alive to the responsibilities of
his position. He passed through various subordinate public employments,
and finally succeeded Mr. Herman Merivale as permanent Under-Secretary
for the Colonies. It is a great post, but one of which the work is done
for the most part out of sight. Colonial Secretaries in Parliament come
and go, and have the credit, often quite justly, of this or that
policy. But the public know little of the permanent official who keeps
the traditions and experience of the department, whose judgment is
always an element, often a preponderating element, in eventful
decisions, and whose pen drafts the despatches which go forth in the
name of the Government. Sir Frederic Rogers, as he became in time, had
to deal with some of the most serious colonial questions which arose
and were settled while he was at the Colonial Office. He took great
pains, among other things, to remove, or at least diminish, the
difficulties which beset the _status_ of the Colonial Church and
clergy, and to put its relations to the Church at home on a just and
reasonable footing. There is a general agreement as to the industry and
conspicuous ability with which his part of the work was done. Mr.
Gladstone set an admirable example in recognising in an unexpected way
faithful but unnoticed services, and at the same time paid a merited
honour to the permanent staff of the public offices, when he named Sir
Frederic Rogers for a peerage.