of an unique creation. And, slight as it is, I believe it tells more
than, except in the school of British practice, is elsewhere to be
learned of a machine so subtly balanced, that it seems as though it were
moved by something not less delicate and slight than the mainspring of a
watch. It has not been the offspring of the thought of man. The Cabinet,
and all the present relations of the Constitutional powers in this
country, have grown into their present dimensions, and settled into
their present places, not as the fruit of a philosophy, not in the
effort to give effect to an abstract principle; but by the silent action
of forces, invisible and insensible, the structure has come up into the
view of all the world. It is, perhaps, the most conspicuous object on
the wide political horizon; but it has thus risen, without noise, like
the temple of Jerusalem.
"No workman steel, no ponderous hammers rung;
Like some tall palm the stately fabric sprung."[17]
When men repeat the proverb which teaches us that "marriages are made in
heaven," what they mean is that, in the most fundamental of all social
operations, the building up of the family, the issues involved in the
nuptial contract, lie beyond the best exercise of human thought, and
the unseen forces of providential government make good the defect in our
imperfect capacity. Even so would it seem to have been in that curious
marriage of competing influences and powers, which brings about the
composite harmony of the British Constitution. More, it must be
admitted, than any other, it leaves open doors which lead into blind
alleys; for it presumes, more boldly than any other, the good sense and
good faith of those who work it. If, unhappily, these personages meet
together, on the great arena of a nation's fortunes, as jockeys meet
upon a racecourse, each to urge to the uttermost, as against the others,
the power of the animal he rides; or as counsel in a court, each to
procure the victory of his client, without respect to any other interest
or right: then this boasted Constitution of ours is neither more nor
less than a heap of absurdities. The undoubted competency of each
reaches even to the paralysis or destruction of the rest. The House of
Commons is entitled to refuse every shilling of the supplies. That
House, and also the House of Lords, is entitled to refuse its assent to
every bill presented to it. The Crown is entitled to make a thousand
Peers to-day and as many to-morrow: it may dissolve all and every
Parliament before it proceeds to business; may pardon the most atrocious
crimes; may declare war against all the world; may conclude treaties
involving unlimited responsibilities, and even vast expenditure, without
the consent, nay, without the knowledge, of Parliament, and this not
merely in support or in development, but in reversal, of policy already
known to and sanctioned by the nation. But the assumption is that the
depositaries of power will all respect one another; will evince a
consciousness that they are working in a common interest for a common
end; that they will be possessed, together with not less than an average
intelligence, of not less than an average sense of equity and of the
public interest and rights. When these reasonable expectations fail,
then, it must be admitted, the British Constitution will be in danger.
Apart from such contingencies, the offspring only of folly or of crime,
this Constitution is peculiarly liable to subtle change. Not only in the
long run, as man changes between youth and age, but also, like the human
body, with a quotidian life, a periodical recurrence of ebbing and
flowing tides. Its old particles daily run to waste, and give place to
new. What is hoped among us is, that which has usually been found, that
evils will become palpable before they have grown to be intolerable.
There cannot, for example, be much doubt among careful observers that
the great conservator of liberty in all former times, namely, the
confinement of the power of the purse to the popular chamber, has been
lamentably weakened in its efficiency of late years; weakened in the
House of Commons, and weakened by the House of Commons. It might indeed
be contended that the House of Commons of the present epoch does far
more to increase the aggregate of public charge than to reduce it. It
might even be a question whether the public would take benefit if the
House were either intrusted annually with a great part of the
initiative, so as to be really responsible to the people for the
spending of their money; or else were excluded from part at least of its
direct action upon expenditure, intrusting to the executive the
application of given sums which that executive should have no legal
power to exceed.
Meantime, we of this island are not great political philosophers; and we
contend with an earnest, but disproportioned, vehemence about changes
which are palpable, such as the extension of the suffrage, or the
redistribution of Parliamentary seats, neglecting wholly other
processes of change which work beneath the surface, and in the dark, but
which are even more fertile of great organic results. The modern English
character reflects the English Constitution in this, that it abounds in
paradox; that it possesses every strength; but holds it tainted with
every weakness; that it seems alternately both to rise above and to fall
below the standard of average humanity; that there is no allegation of
praise or blame which, in some one of the aspects of its many-sided
formation, it does not deserve; that only in the midst of much default,
and much transgression, the people of this United Kingdom either have
heretofore established, or will hereafter establish, their title to be
reckoned among the children of men, for the eldest born of an imperial
race.
In this imperfect survey, I have carefully avoided all reference to the
politics of the day and to particular topics, recently opened, which may
have undergone a great development even before these lines appear in
print on the other side of the Atlantic. Such reference would, without
any countervailing advantage, have lowered the strain of these remarks,
and would have complicated with painful considerations a statement
essentially impartial and general in its scope.
For the yet weightier reason of incompetency, I have avoided the topics
of chief present interest in America, including that proposal to tamper
with the true monetary creed which (as we should say) the Tempter lately
presented to the Nation in the Silver Bill. But I will not close this
paper without recording my conviction that the great acts, and the great
forbearances, which immediately followed the close of the Civil War form
a group which will ever be a noble object, in his political retrospect,
to the impartial historian; and that, proceeding as they did from the
free choice and conviction of the people, and founded as they were on
the very principles of which the multitude is supposed to be least
tolerant, they have, in doing honor to the United States, also rendered
a splendid service to the general cause of popular government throughout
the world.[18]
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN.
BORN 1801.
PRIVATE JUDGMENT.
BY JOHN HENRY NEWMAN.
There is this obvious, undeniable difficulty in the attempt to form a
theory of Private Judgment, in the choice of a religion, that Private
Judgment leads different minds in such different directions. If, indeed,
there be no religious truth, or at least no sufficient means of arriving
at it, then the difficulty vanishes: for where there is nothing to find,
there can be no rules for seeking, and contradiction in the result is
but a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the attempt. But such a conclusion is
intolerable to those who search, else they would not search; and
therefore on them the obligation lies to explain, if they can, how it
comes to pass, that Private Judgment is a duty, and an advantage, and a
success, considering it leads the way not only to their own faith,
whatever that may be, but to opinions which are diametrically opposite
to it; considering it not only leads them right, but leads others wrong,
landing them as it may be in the Church of Rome, or in the Wesleyan
Connection, or in the Society of Friends.
Are exercises of mind, which end so diversely, one and all pleasing to
the Divine Author of faith; or rather must they not contain some
inherent or some incidental defect, since they manifest such divergence?
Must private judgment in all cases be a good _per se_; or is it a good
under circumstances, and with limitations? Or is it a good, only when it
is not an evil? Or is it a good and evil at once, a good involving an
evil? Or is it an absolute and simple evil? Questions of this sort rise
in the mind on contemplating a principle which leads to more than the
thirty-two points of the compass, and, in consequence, whatever we may
here be able to do, in the way of giving plain rules for its exercise,
be it greater or less, will be so much gain.
1.
Now the first remark which occurs is an obvious one, and, we suppose,
will be suffered to pass without much opposition, that whatever be the
intrinsic merits of Private Judgment, yet, if it at all exerts itself in
the direction of proselytism and conversion, a certain _onus probandi_
lies upon it, and it must show cause why it should be tolerated, and
not rather treated as a breach of the peace, and silenced _instanter_ as
a mere disturber of the existing constitution of things. Of course it
may be safely exercised in defending what is established; and we are far
indeed from saying that it is never to advance in the direction of
change or revolution, else the Gospel itself could never have been
introduced; but we consider that serious religious changes have _primâ
facie_ case against them; they have something to get over, and have to
prove their admissibility, before it can reasonably be allowed; and
their agents may be called upon to suffer, in order to prove their
earnestness, and to pay the penalty of the trouble they are causing.
Considering the special countenance given in Scripture to quiet,
unanimity, and contentedness, and the warnings directed against
disorder, insubordination, changeableness, discord, and division;
considering the emphatic words of the Apostle, laid down by him as a
general principle, and illustrated in detail, "Let every man abide in
the same calling wherein he was called"; considering, in a word, that
change is really the characteristic of error, and unalterableness the
attribute of truth, of holiness, of Almighty God Him self, we consider
that when Private Judgment moves in the direction of innovation, it may
well be regarded at first with suspicion and treated with severity. Nay,
we confess even a satisfaction, when a penalty is attached to the
expression of new doctrines, or to a change of communion. We repeat it,
if any men have strong feelings, they should pay for them; if they think
it a duty to unsettle things established, they show their earnestness by
being willing to suffer. We shall be the last to complain of this kind
of persecution, even though directed against what we consider the cause
of truth. Such disadvantages do no harm to that cause in the event, but
they bring home to a man's mind his own responsibility; they are a
memento to him of a great moral law, and warn him that his private
judgment, if not a duty, is a sin.
An act of private judgment is, in its very idea, an act of individual
responsibility; this is a consideration which will come with especial
force on a conscientious mind, when it is to have so fearful an issue as
a change of religion. A religious man will say to himself, "If I am in
error at present, I am in error by a disposition of Providence, which
has placed me where I am; if I change into an error, this is my own
act. It is much less fearful to be born at disadvantage, than to place
myself at disadvantage."
And if the voice of men in general is to weigh at all in a matter of
this kind, it does but corroborate these instinctive feelings. A convert
is undeniably in favor with no party; he is looked at with distrust,
contempt, and aversion by all. His former friends think him a good
riddance, and his new friends are cold and strange; and as to the
impartial public, their very first impulse is to impute the change to
some eccentricity of character, or fickleness of mind, or tender
attachment, or private interest. Their utmost praise is the reluctant
confession that "doubtless he is very sincere." Churchmen and
Dissenters, men of Rome and men of the Kirk, are equally subject to this
remark. Not on extraordinary occasions only, but as a matter of course,
whenever the news of a conversion to Romanism, or to Irvingism, or to
the Plymouth Sect, or to Unitarianism, is brought to us, we say, one and
all of us: "No wonder, such a one has lived so long abroad"; or, "he is
of such a very imaginative turn"; or, "he is so excitable and odd"; or,
"what could he do? all his family turned"; or, "it was a reaction in
consequence of an injudicious education"; or, "trade makes men cold," or
"a little learning makes them shallow in their religion." If, then, the
common voice of mankind goes for any thing, must we not consider it to
be the _rule_ that men change their religion, not on reason, but for
some extra-rational feeling or motive? else, the world would not so
speak.
Now, for ourselves, we are not quarrelling with this testimony,--we are
willing to resign ourselves to it; but we think there are parties whom
it concerns much to ponder it. Surely it is a strong, and, as they ought
to feel, an alarming proof, that, for all the haranguing and protesting
which goes on in Exeter and other halls, this great people is not such a
conscientious supporter of the sacred right of Private Judgment as a
good Protestant would desire. Why should we go out of our way, one and
all of us, to impute personal motives in explanation of the conversion
of every individual convert, as he comes before us, if there were in us,
the public, an adhesion to that absolute, and universal, and unalienable
principle, as its titles are set forth in heraldic style, high and
broad, sacred and awful, the right, and the duty, and the possibility of
Private Judgment? Why should we confess it in the general, yet promptly
and pointedly deny it in every particular, if our hearts retained more
than the "magni nominis umbra," when we preached up the Protestant
principle? Is it not sheer wantonness and cruelty in Baptist,
Independent, Irvingite, Wesleyan, Establishment-man, Jumper, and
Mormonite, to delight in trampling on and crushing these manifestations
of their own pure and precious charter, instead of dutifully and
reverently exalting, at Bethel, or at Dan, each instance of it, as it
occurs, to the gaze of its professing votaries? If a staunch
Protestant's daughter turns Roman, and betakes herself to a convent, why
does he not exult in the occurrence? Why does he not give a public
breakfast, or hold a meeting, or erect a memorial, or write a pamphlet
in honor of her, and of the great undying principle she has so
gloriously vindicated? Why is he in this base, disloyal style, muttering
about priests, and Jesuits, and the horrors of nunneries, in solution of
the phenomenon, when he has the fair and ample form of Private Judgment
rising before his eyes, and pleading with him, and bidding him impute
good motives, not bad, and in very charity ascribe to the influence of
a high and holy principle, to a right and a duty of every member of the
family of man, what his poor human instincts are fain to set down as a
folly or a sin. All this would lead us to suspect that the doctrine of
private judgment, in its simplicity, purity, and integrity,--private
judgment, all private judgment, and nothing but private judgment,--is
held by very few persons indeed; and that the great mass of the
population are either stark unbelievers in it, or deplorably dark about
it; and that even the minority who are in a manner faithful to it, have
glossed and corrupted the true sense of it by a miserably faulty
reading, and hold, not the right of private judgment, but the private
right of judgment; in other words, their own private right, and no one's
else. To us it seems as clear as day, that they consider that they
themselves, indeed, individually can and do act on reason, and on
nothing but reason; that they have the gift of advancing, without bias
or unsteadiness, throughout their search, from premise to conclusion,
from text to doctrine; that they have sought aright, and no one else,
who does not agree with them; that they alone have found out the art of
putting the salt upon the bird's tail, and have rescued themselves from
being the slaves of circumstance and the creatures of impulse. It is
undeniable, then, if the popular feeling is to be our guide, that, high
and mighty as the principle of private judgment is in religious
inquiries, as we most fully grant it is, still it bears some similarity
to Saul's armor which David rejected, or to edged tools which have a bad
trick of chopping at our fingers, when we are but simply and innocently
meaning them to make a dash forward at truth.
Any tolerably serious man will feel this in his own case more vividly
than in that of any one else. Who can know ever so little of himself
without suspecting all kinds of imperfect and wrong motives in
everything he attempts? And then there is the bias of education and of
habit; and, added to the difficulties thence resulting, those which
arise from weakness of the reasoning faculty; ignorance or imperfect
knowledge of the original languages of Scripture, and again, of history
and antiquity. These things being considered, we lay it down as a truth,
about which, we think, few ought to doubt, that Divine aid alone can
carry any one safely and successfully through an inquiry after
religious truth. That there are certain very broad contrasts between one
religion and another, in which no one would be at fault what to think
and what to choose, is very certain; but the problem proposed to private
judgment at this day, is of a rather more complicated nature. Taking
things as they are, we all seem to be in Solomon's case, when he said,
"I am but a little child; I know not how to go out or come in; and Thy
servant is in the midst of a great people, that cannot be numbered nor
counted for multitude. Give, therefore, Thy servant an understanding
heart, that I may discern between good and bad." It is useless, surely,
attempting to inquire or judge, unless a Divine command enjoin the work
upon us, and a Divine promise sustain us through it. Supposing, indeed,
such a command and promise be given, then, of course, there is no
difficulty in the matter. Whatever be our personal infirmities, He whom
we serve can overrule or supersede them. An act of duty must always be
right; and will be accepted, whatever be its success, because done in
obedience to His will. And he can bless the most unpromising
circumstances; He can even lead us forward by means of our mistakes; He
can turn our mistakes into a revelation; He can convert us, if He will,
through the very obstinacy, or self-will, or superstition, which mixes
itself up with our better feelings, and defiles, yet is sanctified by
our sincerity. And much more can He shed upon our path supernatural
light, if He so will, and give us an insight into the meaning of
Scripture, and a hold of the sense of Antiquity, to which our own
unaided powers never could have attained.
All this is certain: He continually leads us forward in the midst of
darkness; and we live, not by bread only, but by His Word converting the
hard rock or salt sea into nourishment. The simple question is, _has_
He, in this particular case, commanded? has He promised? and how far? If
He has, and as far as He has, all is easy; if He has not, all is, we
will not say, impossible, but what is worse, undutiful or presumptuous.
Our business is to ask with St. Paul, when arrested in the midst of his
frenzy, "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?" This is the simple
question. He can bless our present state; He can bless our change;
_which_ is it His will to bless? If Wesleyan or Independent has come
over to us apart from this spirit, we do not much pride ourselves in our
convert. If he joins us because he thinks he has a right to judge for
himself, or because forms are of no consequence, or merely because
sectarianism has its errors and inconveniences, or because an
Established Church is an efficacious means of spreading religion, he
plainly thinks that the choice of a communion is not a more serious
matter than the choice of a neighborhood or of an insurance office. In
like manner, if members of our communion have left it for Rome, because
of the _æsthetic_ beauty of the latter, and the grandeur of its
pretensions, we are grieved, but, good luck to them, we can spare them.
And if Roman Catholics join us or our "Dissenting brethren," because
their own Church is behind the age, insists on Aristotelic dogmas, and
interferes with liberty of thought, such a conversion is no triumph over
popery, but over St. Peter and St. Paul. Our only safety lies in
obedience; our only comfort in keeping it in view.
If this be so, we have arrived at the following conclusion: that it is
our duty to betake ourselves to Scripture, and to observe how far the
private search of a religion is there sanctioned, and under what
circumstances. This then is the next point which comes under
consideration.
2.
Now the first and most ordinary kind of Private Judgment, if it deserves
the name, which is recognized in Scripture, is that in which we engage
without conscious or deliberate purpose. While Lydia heard St. Paul
preach, her heart was opened. She had it not in mind to exercise any
supposed sacred right, she was not setting about the choice of a
religion, but she was drawn on to accept the Gospel by a moral
persuasion. "To him that hath more shall be given," not in the way of
judging or choosing, but by an inward development met by external
disclosures. Lydia's instance is the type of a multitude of cases,
differing very much from each other, some divinely ordered, others
merely human, some which would commonly be called cases of private
judgment, and others which certainly would not, but all agreeing in
this, that the judgment exercised is not recognized and realized by the
party exercising it, as the subject-matter of command, promise, duty,
privilege, or any thing else. It is but the spontaneous stirring of the
affections within, or the passive acceptance of what is offered from
without. St. Paul baptized Lydia's household also; it would seem then
that he baptized servants or slaves, who had very little power of
judging between a true religion and a false; shall we say that they,
like their mistress, accepted the Gospel on private judgment or not? Did
the thousands baptized in national conversions exercise their private
judgment or not? Do children when taught their catechism? Most persons
will reply in the negative: yet it will be difficult to separate their
case in principle from what Lydia's may have been; that is, the case of
religious persons who are advancing forward into the truth--how, they
know not. Neither the one class nor the other have undertaken to inquire
and judge, or have set about being converted, or have got their reasons
all before them and together, to discharge at an enemy or passer-by on
fit occasions. The difference between these two classes is in the state
of their hearts; the one party consist of unformed minds, or senseless
and dead, or minds under temporary excitement, who are brought over by
external or accidental influences, without any real sympathy for the
religion, which is taught them _in order_ that they may _learn_ sympathy
with it, and who, as time goes on, fall away again if they are not happy
enough to become imbued with it; and in the other party there is already
a sympathy between the external Word and the heart within. The one are
proselytized by force, authority, or their mere feelings, the others
through their habitual and abiding frame of mind and cast of opinion.
But neither can be said, in the ordinary sense of the word, to inquire,
reason, and decide about religion. And yet in a great number of these
cases,--certainly where the persons in question are come to years of
discretion and show themselves consistent in their religious profession
afterward,--they would be commonly set forth by Protestant minds as
instances of the due exercise of the right of private judgment.