Occasional Papers Part 13

NEWMAN'S "APOLOGIA"[30]

[30]

_Apologia pro Vita Sua_. By John Henry Newman, D.D. _Guardian_, 22nd June 1864.

We have not noticed before Dr. Newman's _Apologia_, which has been coming out lately in weekly numbers, because we wished, when we spoke of it, to speak of it as a whole. The special circ.u.mstances out of which it arose may have prescribed the mode of publication. It may have been thought more suitable, in point of form, to answer a pamphlet by a series of pamphlets rather than at once by a set octavo of several hundred pages. But the real subject which Dr. Newman has been led to handle is one which will continue to be of the deepest interest long after the controversy which suggested it is forgotten. The real subject is the part played in the great Church movement by him who was the leading mind in it; and it was unsatisfactory to speak of this till all was said, and we could look on the whole course described. Such a subject might have well excused a deliberate and leisurely volume to itself; perhaps in this way we should have gained, in the laying out and concentration of the narrative, and in what helps to bring it as a whole before our thoughts. But a man's account of himself is never so fresh and natural as when it is called out by the spur and pressure of an accidental and instant necessity, and is directed to a purpose and quickened by feelings which belong to immediate and pa.s.sing circ.u.mstances. The traces of hurried work are of light account when they are the guarantees that a man is not sitting down to draw a picture of himself, but stating his case in sad and deep earnest out of the very fulness of his heart.

The aim of the book is to give a minute and open account of the steps and changes by which Dr. Newman pa.s.sed from the English Church to the Roman. The history of a change of opinion has often been written from the most opposite points of view; but in one respect this book seems to stand alone. Let it be remembered what it is, the narrative and the justification of a great conversion; of a change involving an entire reversal of views, judgments, approvals, and condemnations; a change which, with all ordinary men, involves a reversal, at least as great, of their sympathies and aversions, of what they tolerate and speak kindly of. Let it be considered what changes of feeling most changes of religion compel and consecrate; how men, commonly and very naturally, look back on what they have left and think they have escaped from, with the aversion of a captive to his prison; how they usually exaggerate and make absolute their divergence from what they think has betrayed, fooled, and degraded them; how easily they are tempted to visit on it and on those who still cling to it their own mistakes and faults. Let it be remembered that there was here to be told not only the history of a change, but the history of a deep disappointment, of the failure of a great design, of the breakdown of hopes the most promising and the most absorbing; and this, not in the silence of a man's study, but in the fever and contention of a great struggle wrought up to the highest pitch of pa.s.sion and fierceness, bringing with it on all sides and leaving behind it, when over, the deep sense of wrong. It is no history of a mere intellectual movement, or of a pa.s.sage from strong belief to a weakened and impaired one, to uncertainty, or vagueness, or indifference; it is not the account of a change by a man who is half sorry for his change, and speaks less hostilely of what he has left because he feels less friendly towards what he has joined. There is no reserved thought to be discerned in the background of disappointment or a wish to go back again to where he once was. It is a book which describes how a man, zealous and impatient for truth, thought he had found it in one Church, then thought that his finding was a delusion, and sought for it and believed he had gained it in another. What it shows us is no serene readjustment of abstract doctrines, but the wreck and overturning of trust and conviction and the practical grounds of life, accompanied with everything to provoke, embitter, and exasperate.

It need not be said that what Dr. Newman holds he is ready to carry out to the end, or that he can speak severely of men and systems.

Let all this be remembered, and also that there is an opposition between what he was and what he is, which is usually viewed as irreconcilable, and which, on the ordinary a.s.sumptions about it, is so; and we venture to say that there is not another instance to be quoted, of the history of a conversion, in which he who tells his conversion has so retained his self-possession, his temper, his mastery over his own real judgment and thoughts, his ancient and legitimate sympathies, his superiority to the natural and inevitable temptations of so altered a position; which is so generous to what he feels to be strong and good in what he has nevertheless abandoned, so fearless about letting his whole case come out, so careless about putting himself in the right in detail; which is so calm, and kindly, and measured, with such a quiet effortless freedom from the stings of old conflicts, which bears so few traces of that bitterness and antipathy which generally--and we need hardly wonder at it--follows the decisive breaking with that on which a man's heart was stayed, and for which he would once have died.

There is another thing to be said, and we venture to say it out plainly, because Dr. Newman himself has shown that he knows quite well what he has been doing. While he has written what will command the sympathy and the reverence of every one, however irreconcilably opposed to him, to whom a great and n.o.ble aim and the trials of a desperate and self-sacrificing struggle to compa.s.s it are objects of admiration and honour, it is undeniable that ill-nature or vindictiveness or stupidity will find ample materials of his own providing to turn against him.

Those who know Dr. Newman's powers and are acquainted with his career, and know to what it led him, and yet persist in the charge of insincerity and dishonesty against one who probably has made the greatest sacrifice of our generation to his convictions of truth, will be able to pick up from his own narrative much that they would not otherwise have known, to confirm and point the old familiar views cherished by dislike or narrowness. This is inevitable when a man takes the resolution of laying himself open so unreservedly, and with so little care as to what his readers think of what he tells them, so that they will be persuaded that he was ever, even from his boyhood, deeply conscious of the part which he was performing in the sight of his Maker. Those who smile at the belief of a deep and religious mind in the mysterious interventions and indications of Providence in the guidance of human life, will open their eyes at the feeling which leads him to tell the story of his earliest recollections of Roman Catholic peculiarities, and of the cross imprinted on his exercise-book. Those who think that everything about religion and their own view of religion is such plain sailing, so palpable and manifest, that all who are not fools or knaves must be of their own opinion, will find plenty to wonder at in the confessions of awful perplexity which equally before and after his change Dr. Newman makes. Those who have never doubted, who can no more imagine the practical difficulties accompanying a great change of belief than they can imagine a change of belief itself, will meet with much that to them will seem beyond pardon, in the actual events of a change, involving such issues and such interests, made so deliberately and cautiously, with such hesitation and reluctance, and in so long a time; they will be able to point to many moments in it when it will be easy to say that more or less ought to have been said, more or less ought to have been done. Much more will those who are on the side of doubt, who acquiesce in, or who desire the overthrow of existing hopes and beliefs, rejoice in such a frank avowal of the difficulties of religion and the perplexities of so earnest a believer, and make much of their having driven such a man to an alternative so obnoxious and so monstrous to most Englishmen. It is a book full of minor premisses, to which many opposite majors will be fitted. But whatever may be thought of many details, the effect and lesson of the whole will not be lost on minds of any generosity, on whatever side they may be; they will be touched with the confiding n.o.bleness which has kept back nothing, which has stated its case with its weak points and its strong, and with full consciousness of what was weak as well as of what was strong, which has surrendered its whole course of conduct, just as it has been, to be scrutinised, canva.s.sed, and judged. What we carry away from following such a history is something far higher and more solemn than any controversial inferences; and it seems almost like a desecration to make, as we say, capital out of it, to strengthen mere argument, to confirm a theory, or to damage an opponent.

The truth, in fact, is, that the interest is personal much more than controversial. Those who read it as a whole, and try to grasp the effect of all its portions compared together and gathered into one, will, it seems to us, find it hard to bend into a decisive triumph for any of the great antagonist systems which appear in collision. There can be no doubt of the perfect conviction with which Dr. Newman has taken his side for good. But while he states the effect of arguments on his own mind, he leaves the arguments in themselves as they were, and touches on them, not for the sake of what they are worth, but to explain the movements and events of his own course. Not from any studied impartiality, which is foreign to his character, but from his strong and keen sense of what is real and his determined efforts to bring it out, he avoids the temptation--as it seems to us, who still believe that he was more right once than he is now--to do injustice to his former self and his former position. At any rate, the arguments to be drawn from this narrative, for or against England, or for or against Rome, seem to us very evenly balanced. Of course, such a history has its moral. But the moral is not the ordinary vulgar one of the history of a religious change. It is not the supplement or disguise of a polemical argument. It is the deep want and necessity in our age of the Church, even to the most intensely religious and devoted minds, of a sound and secure intellectual basis for the faith which they value more than life and all things. We hope that we are strong enough to afford to judge fairly of such a spectacle, and to lay to heart its warnings, even though the particular results seem to go against what we think most right. It is a mortification and a trial to the English Church to have seen her finest mind carried away and lost to her, but it is a mortification which more confident and peremptory systems than hers have had to undergo; the parting was not without its compensations if only that it brought home so keenly to many the awfulness and the seriousness of truth; and surely never did any man break so utterly with a Church, who left so many sympathies behind him and took so many with him, who continued to feel so kindly and with such large-hearted justice to those from whom his changed position separated him in this world for ever.

The _Apologia_ is the history of a great battle against Liberalism, understanding by Liberalism the tendencies of modern thought to destroy the basis of revealed religion, and ultimately of all that can be called religion at all. The question which he professedly addresses himself to set at rest, that of his honesty, is comparatively of slight concern to those who knew him, except so far that they must be interested that others, who did not know him, should not be led to do a revolting injustice. The real interest is to see how one who felt so keenly the claims both of what is new and what is old, who, with such deep and unusual love and trust for antiquity, took in with quick sympathy, and in its most subtle and most redoubtable shapes, the intellectual movement of modern times, could continue to feel the force of both, and how he would attempt to harmonise them. Two things are prominent in the whole history. One is the fact of religion, early and deeply implanted in the writer's mind, absorbing and governing it without rival throughout. He speaks of an "inward conversion" at the age of fifteen, "of which I was conscious, and of which I am still more certain than that I have hands and feet." It was the religion of dogma and of a definite creed which made him "rest in the thought of two, and two only, supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator"--which completed itself with the idea of a visible Church and its sacramental system. Religion, in this aspect of it, runs unchanged from end to end of the scene of change:--

I have changed in many things; in this I have not. From the age of fifteen dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion; I know no other religion. I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery. As well can there be filial love without the fact of a father, as devotion without the fact of a Supreme Being. What I held in 1816 I held in 1833, and I hold in 1864. Please G.o.d I shall hold it to the end. Even when I was under Dr. Whately's influence I had no temptation to be less zealous for the dogmas of the faith.

The other thing is the haunting necessity, in an age of thought and innovation, of a philosophy of religion, equally deep, equally comprehensive and thorough, with the invading powers which it was wanted to counteract; a philosophy, not on paper or in theory, but answering to and vouched for by the facts of real life. In the English Church he found, we think that we may venture to say, the religion which to him was life, but not the philosophy which he wanted. The _Apologia_ is the narrative of his search for it. Two strongly marked lines of thought are traceable all through, one modern in its scope and sphere, the other ancient. The leading subject of his modern thought is the contest with liberal unbelief; contrasted with this was his strong interest in Christian antiquity, his deep attachment to the creed, the history, and the moral temper of the early Church. The one line of thought made him, and even now makes him, sympathise with Anglicanism, which is in the same boat with him, holds the same principle of the unity and continuity of revealed truth, and is doing the same work, though, as he came to think in the end, feebly and hopelessly. The other, more and more, carried him away from Anglicanism; and the contrast and opposition between it and the ancient Church, in organisation, in usage, and in that general tone of feeling which quickens and gives significance and expression to forms, overpowered more and more the sense of affinity, derived from the ident.i.ty of creeds and sacraments and leading points of Church polity, and from the success with which the best and greatest Anglican writers had appropriated and a.s.similated the theology of the Fathers. But though he urges the force of ecclesiastical precedents in a startling way, as in the account which he gives of the effect of the history of the Monophysites on his view of the tenableness of the Anglican theory, absolutely putting out of consideration the enormous difference of circ.u.mstances between the cases which are compared, and giving the instance in question a force and importance which seem to be in singular contrast with the general breadth and largeness of his reasoning, it was not the halting of an ecclesiastical theory which dissatisfied him with the English Church.

Anglicanism was not daring enough for him. With his ideas of the coming dangers and conflicts, he wanted something bold and thoroughgoing, wide-reaching in its aims, resolute in its language, claiming and venturing much. Anglicanism was not that. It had given up as impracticable much that the Church had once attempted. It did not pretend to rise so high, to answer such great questions, to lay down such precise definitions. Wisely modest, or timidly uncertain--mindful of the unalterable limits of our human condition, _we_ say; forgetful, _he_ thought, or doubting, or distrustful, of the gifts and promises of a supernatural dispensation--it certainly gave no such complete and decisive account of the condition and difficulties of religion and the world, as had been done once, and as there were some who did still.

There were problems which it did not profess to solve; there were a.s.sertions which others boldly risked, and which it shrunk from making; there were demands which it ventured not to put forward. Again, it was not refined enough for him; it had little taste for the higher forms of the saintly ideal; it wanted the austere and high-strung-virtues; it was contented, for the most part, with the domestic type of excellence, in which goodness merged itself in the interests and business of the common world, and, working in them, took no care to disengage itself or mark itself off, as something distinct from them and above them. Above all, Anglicanism was too limited; it was local, insular, national; its theory was made for its special circ.u.mstances; and he describes in a remarkable pa.s.sage how, in contrast with this, there rung in his ears continually the proud self-a.s.sertion of the other side, _Securus judicat orbis terrarum_. What he wanted, what it was the aim of his life to find, was a great and effective engine against Liberalism; for years he tried, with eager but failing hope, to find it in the theology and working of the English Church; when he made up his mind that Anglicanism was not strong enough for the task, he left it for a system which had one strong power; which claimed to be able to shut up dangerous thought.

Very sorrowful, indeed, is the history, told so openly, so simply, so touchingly, of the once promising advance, of the great breakdown. And yet, to those who still cling to what he left, regret is not the only feeling. For he has the n.o.bleness and the generosity to say what he _did_ find in the English Church, as well as what he did not find. He has given her up for good, but he tells and he shows, with no grudging frankness, what are the fruits of her discipline. "So I went on for years, up to 1841. It was, in a human point of view, the happiest time of my life.... I did not suppose that such suns.h.i.+ne would last, though I knew not what would be its termination. It was the time of plenty, and during its seven years I tried to lay up as much as I could for the dearth which was to follow it." He explains and defends what to us seem the fatal marks against Rome; but he lets us see with what force, and for how long, they kept alive his own resistance to an attraction which to him was so overwhelming. And he is at no pains to conceal--it seems even to console him to show--what a pang and wrench it cost him to break from that home under whose shadow his spiritual growth had increased. He has condemned us unreservedly; but there must, at any rate, be some wonderful power and charm about that which he loved with a love which is not yet extinguished; else how could he write of the past as he does? He has shown that he can understand, though he is unable to approve, that others should feel that power still.

Dr. Newman has stated, with his accustomed force and philosophical refinement, what he considers the true idea of that infallibility, which he looks upon as the only power in the world which can make head against and balance Liberalism--which "can withstand and baffle the fierce energy of pa.s.sion, and the all-corroding, all-dissolving scepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries;" which he considers "as a provision, adapted by the mercy of the Creator, to preserve religion in the world, and to restrain that freedom of thought which is one of the greatest of our natural gifts, from its own suicidal excesses." He says, as indeed is true, that it is "a tremendous power,"

though he argues that, in fact, its use is most wisely and beneficially limited. And doubtless, whatever the difficulty of its proof may be, and to us this proof seems simply beyond possibility, it is no mere power upon paper. It acts and leaves its mark; it binds fast and overthrows for good. But when, put at its highest, it is confronted with the "giant evil" which it is supposed to be sent into the world to repel, we can only say that, to a looker-on, its failure seems as manifest as the existence of the claim to use it. It no more does its work, in the sense of _succeeding_ and triumphing, than the less magnificent "Establishments" do. It keeps _some_ check--it fails on a large scale and against the real strain and pinch of the mischief; and they, too, keep _some_ check, and are not more fairly beaten than it is, in "making a stand against the wild living intellect of man."

Without infallibility, it is said, men will turn freethinkers and heretics; but don't they, _with_ it? and what is the good of the engine if it will not do its work? And if it is said that this is the fault of human nature, which resists what provokes and checks it, still that very thing, which infallibility was intended to counteract, goes on equally, whether it comes into play or not. Meanwhile, truth does stay in the world, the truth that there has been among us a Divine Person, of whom the Church throughout Christendom is the representative, memorial, and the repeater of His message; doubtless, the means of knowledge are really guarded; yet we seem to receive that message as we receive the witness of moral truth; and it would not be contrary to the a.n.a.logy of things here if we had often got to it at last through mistakes. But when it is reached, there it is, strong in its own power; and it is difficult to think that if it is not strong enough in itself to stand, it can be protected by a claim of infallibility. A future, of which infallibility is the only hope and safeguard, seems to us indeed a prospect of the deepest gloom.

Dr. Newman, in a very remarkable pa.s.sage, describes the look and att.i.tude of invading Liberalism, and tells us why he is not forward in the conflict. "It seemed to be a time of all others in which Christians had a call to be patient, in which they had no other way of helping those who were alarmed than that of exhorting them to have a little faith and fort.i.tude, and 'to beware,' as the poet says, 'of dangerous steps.'" And he interprets "recent acts of the highest Catholic authority" as meaning that there is nothing to do just now but to sit still and trust. Well; but the _Christian Year_ will do that much for us, just as well.

People who talk glibly of the fearless pursuit of truth may here see a real example of a life given to it--an example all the more solemn and impressive if they think that the pursuit was in vain. It is easy to declaim about it, and to be eloquent about lies and sophistries; but it is shallow to forget that truth has its difficulties. To hear some people talk, it might be thought that truth was a thing to be made out and expressed at will, under any circ.u.mstances, at any time, amid any complexities of facts or principles, by half an hour's choosing to be attentive, candid, logical, and resolute; as if there was not a chance of losing what perhaps you have, as well as of gaining what you think you need. If they would look about them, if they would look into themselves, they would recognise that Truth is an awful and formidable G.o.ddess to all men and to all systems; that all have their weak points where virtually, more or less consciously, more or less dexterously, they shrink from meeting her eye; that even when we make sacrifice of everything for her sake, we find that she still encounters us with claims, seemingly inconsistent with all that she has forced us to embrace--with appearances which not only convict us of mistake, but seem to oblige us to be tolerant of what we cannot really a.s.sent to.

She gives herself freely to the earnest and true-hearted inquirer; but to those who presume on the easiness of her service, she has a side of strong irony. You common-sense men, she seems to say, who see no difficulties in the world, you little know on what shaky ground you stand, and how easily you might be reduced to absurdity. You critical and logical intellects, who silence all comers and cannot be answered, and can show everybody to be in the wrong--into what monstrous and manifest paradoxes are you not betrayed, blind to the humble facts which upset your generalisations, not even seeing that dulness itself can p.r.o.nounce you mistaken!

In the presence of such a narrative as this, sober men will think more seriously than ever about charging their most extreme opponents with dishonesty and disregard to truth.

As we said before, this history seems to us to leave the theological question just where it was. The objections to Rome, which Dr. Newman felt so strongly once, but which yielded to other considerations, we feel as strongly still. The substantial points of the English theory, which broke down to his mind, seem to us as substantial and trustworthy as before. He failed, but we believe that, in spite of everything, England is the better for his having made his trial. Even Liberalism owes to the movement of which he was the soul much of what makes it now such a contrast, in largeness of mind and warmth, to the dry, repulsive, narrow, material Liberalism of the Reform era. He, and he mainly, has been the source, often unrecognised and unsuspected, of depth and richness and beauty, and the strong pa.s.sion for what is genuine and real, in our religious teaching. Other men, other preachers, have taken up his thoughts and decked them out, and had the credit of being greater than their master.

In looking back on the various turns and vicissitudes of his English course, we, who inherit the fruits of that glorious failure, should speak respectfully and considerately where we do not agree with him, and with deep grat.i.tude--all the more that now so much lies between us--where we do. But the review makes us feel more than ever that the English Church, whose st.u.r.dy strength he underrated, and whose irregular theories provoked him, was fully worthy of the interest and the labours of the leader who despaired of her. Anglicanism has so far outlived its revolutions, early and late ones, has marched on in a distinct path, has developed a theology, has consolidated an organisation, has formed a character and tone, has been the organ of a living spirit. The "magnetic storms" of thought which sweep over the world may be destructive and dangerous to it, as much as, but not more than, to other bodies which claim to be Churches and to represent the message of G.o.d. But there is nothing to make us think that, in the trials which may be in store, the English Church will fail while others hold their own.

XXVII

DR. NEWMAN ON THE "EIRENICON"[31]

[31]

_The Times_, 31st March 1866.

Dr. Pusey's Appeal has received more than one answer. These answers, from the Roman Catholic side, are--what it was plain that they would be--a.s.surances to him that he looks at the question from an entirely mistaken point of view; that it is, of course, very right and good of him to wish for peace and union, but that there is only one way of peace and union--unconditional submission. He may have peace and union for himself at any moment, if he will; so may the English Church, or the Greek Church, or any other religious body, organised or unorganised.

The way is always open; there is no need to write long books or make elaborate proposals about union. Union means becoming Catholic; becoming Catholic means acknowledging the exclusive claims of the Pope or the Roman Church. In the long controversy one party has never for an instant wavered in the a.s.sertion that it could not, and never would, be in the wrong. The way to close the controversy, and the only one, is to admit that Dr. Pusey shall have any amount of a.s.surance and proof that the Roman position and Roman doctrine and practice are the right ones.

His misapprehensions shall be corrected; his ignorance of what is Roman theology fully, and at any length, enlightened. There is no desire to shrink from the fullest and most patient argument in its favour, and he may call it, if he likes, explanation. But there is only one practical issue to what he has proposed--not to stand bargaining for impossible conditions, but thankfully and humbly to join himself to the true Church while he may. It is only the way in which the answer is given that varies. Here characteristic differences appear. The authorities of the Roman Catholic Church swell out to increased magnificence, and nothing can exceed the suavity and the compa.s.sionate scorn with which they point out the transparent absurdity and the audacity of such proposals. The Holy Office at Rome has not, it may be, yet heard of Dr.

Pusey; it may regret, perhaps, that it did not wait for so distinguished a mark for its censure; but its attention has been drawn to some smaller offenders of the same way of thinking, and it has been induced to open all the floodgates of its sonorous and antiquated verbiage to sweep away and annihilate a poor little London periodical--"_ephemeridem cui t.i.tulus, 'The Union Review_.'" The Archbishop of Westminster, not deigning to name Dr. Pusey, has seized the opportunity to reiterate emphatically, in stately periods and with a polished sarcasm, his boundless contempt for the foolish people who dare to come "with swords wreathed in myrtle" between the Catholic Church and "her mission to the great people of England." On the other hand, there have been not a few Roman Catholics who have listened with interest and sympathy to what Dr. Pusey had to say, and, though obviously they had but one answer to give, have given it with a sense of the real condition and history of the Christian world, and with the respect due to a serious attempt to look evils in the face. But there is only one person on the Roman Catholic side whose reflections on the subject English readers in general would much care to know. Anybody could tell beforehand what Archbishop Manning would say; but people could not feel so certain what Dr. Newman might say.

Dr. Newman has given his answer; and his answer is, of course, in effect the same as that of the rest of his co-religionists. He offers not the faintest encouragement to Dr. Pusey's sanguine hopes. If it is possible to conceive that one side could move in the matter, it is absolutely certain that the other would be inflexible. Any such dealing on equal terms with the heresy and schism of centuries is not to be thought of; no one need affect surprise at the refusal. What Dr. Pusey asks is, in fact, to pull the foundation out from under the whole structure of Roman Catholic pretensions. Dr. Newman does not waste words to show that the plan of the _Eirenicon_ is impossible. He evidently a.s.sumes that it is so, and we agree with him. But there are different ways of dispelling a generous dream, and telling a serious man who is in earnest that he is mistaken. Dr. Newman does justice, as he ought to do, to feelings and views which none can enter into better than he, whatever he may think of them now. He does justice to the understanding and honesty, as well as the high aims, of an old friend, once his comrade in difficult and trying times, though now long parted from him by profound differences, and to the motives which prompted so venturous an attempt as the _Eirenicon_ to provoke public discussion on the reunion of Christendom. He is capable of measuring the real state of the facts, and the mischiefs and evils for which a remedy is wanted, by a more living rule than the suppositions and consequences of a cut-and-dried theory. Rightly or wrongly he argues--at least, he gives us something to think of. Perhaps not the least of his merit is that he writes simply and easily in choice and varied English, instead of pompously ringing the changes on a set of _formulae_ which beg the question, and dinning into our ears the most extravagant a.s.sertions of foreign ecclesiastical arrogance. We may not always think him fair, or a sound reasoner, but he is conciliatory, temperate, and often fearlessly candid. He addresses readers who will challenge and examine what he says, not those whose minds are cowed and beaten down before audacity in proportion to its coolness, and whom paradox, the more extreme the better, fascinates and drags captive. To his old friend he is courteous, respectful, sympathetic; where the occasion makes it fitting, affectionate, even playful, as men are who can afford to let their real feelings come out, and have not to keep up appearances.

Unflinching he is in maintaining his present position as the upholder of the exclusive claims of the Roman Church to represent the Catholic Church of the Creeds; but he has the good sense and good feeling to remember that he once shared the views of those whom he now controverts, and that their present feelings about the divisions of Christendom were once his own. Such language as the following is plain, intelligible, and manly. Of course, he has his own position, and must see things according to it. But he recognises the right of conscience in those who, having gone a long way with him, find that they can go no further, and he pays a compliment, becoming as from himself, and not without foundation in fact, to the singular influence which, from whatever cause, Dr. Pusey's position gives him, and which, we may add, imposes on him, in more ways than one, very grave responsibilities:--

You, more than any one else alive, have been the present and untiring agent by whom a great work has been effected in it; and, far more than is usual, you have received in your lifetime, as well as merited, the confidence of your brethren. You cannot speak merely for yourself; your antecedents, your existing influence, are a pledge to us that what you may determine will be the determination of a mult.i.tude. Numbers, too, for whom you cannot properly be said to speak, will be moved by your authority or your arguments; and numbers, again, who are of a school more recent than your own, and who are only not your followers because they have outstripped you in their free speeches and demonstrative acts in our behalf, will, for the occasion, accept you as their spokesman. There is no one anywhere--among ourselves, in your own body, or, I suppose, in the Greek Church--who can affect so vast a circle of men, so virtuous, so able, so learned, so zealous, as come, more or less, under your influence; and I cannot pay them all a greater compliment than to tell them they ought all to be Catholics, nor do them a more affectionate service than to pray that they may one day become such....

I recollect well what an outcast I seemed to myself when I took down from the shelves of my library the volumes of St. Athanasius or St. Basil, and set myself to study them; and how, on the contrary, when at length I was brought into Catholicism, I kissed them with delight, with a feeling that in them I had more than all that I had lost, and, as though I were directly addressing the glorious saints who bequeathed them to the Church, I said to the inanimate pages, "You are now mine, and I am now yours, beyond any mistake." Such, I conceive, would be the joy of the persons I speak of if they could wake up one morning and find themselves possessed by right of Catholic traditions and hopes, without violence to their own sense of duty; and certainly I am the last man to say that such violence is in any case lawful, that the claims of conscience are not paramount, or that any one may overleap what he deliberately holds to be G.o.d's command, in order to make his path easier for him or his heart lighter.

I am the last man to quarrel with this jealous deference to the voice of our conscience, whatever judgment others may form of us in consequence, for this reason, because their case, as it at present stands, has as you know been my own. You recollect well what hard things were said against us twenty-five years ago which we knew in our hearts we did not deserve. Hence, I am now in the position of the fugitive Queen in the well-known pa.s.sage, who, "_haud ignara mali_" herself, had learned to sympathise with those who were inheritors of her past wanderings.

Dr. Newman's hopes, and what most of his countrymen consider the hopes of truth and religion, are not the same. His wish is, of course, that his friend should follow him; a wish in which there is not the slightest reason to think that he will be gratified. But differently as we must feel as to the result, we cannot help sharing the evident amus.e.m.e.nt with which Dr. Newman recalls a few of the compliments which were lavished on him by some of his present co-religionists when he was trying to do them justice, and was even on the way to join them. He reprints with sly and mischievous exactness a string of those glib phrases of controversial dislike and suspicion which are common to all parties, and which were applied to him by "priests, good men, whose zeal outstripped their knowledge, and who in consequence spoke confidently, when they would have been wiser had they suspended their adverse judgment of those whom they were soon to welcome as brothers in communion." It is a trifle, but it strikes us as characteristic. Dr.

Newman is one of the very few who have carried into his present communion, to a certain degree at least, an English habit of not letting off the blunders and follies of his own side, and of daring to think that a cause is better served by outspoken independence of judgment than by fulsome, unmitigated puffing. It might be well if even in him there were a little more of this habit. But, so far as it goes, it is the difference between him and most of those who are leaders on his side. Indirectly he warns eager controversialists that they are not always the wisest and the most judicious and far-seeing of men; and we cannot quarrel with him, however little we may like the occasion, for the entertainment which he feels in inflicting on his present brethren what they once judged and said of him, and in reminding them that their proficiency in polemical rhetoric did not save them from betraying the shallowness of their estimate and the shortness of their foresight.

When he comes to discuss the _Eirenicon_, Dr. Newman begins with a complaint which seems to us altogether unreasonable. He seems to think it hard that Dr. Pusey should talk of peace and reunion, and yet speak so strongly of what he considers the great corruptions of the Roman Church. In ordinary controversy, says Dr. Newman, we know what we are about and what to expect; "'_Caedimur, et totidem plagis consumimus hostem_.' We give you a sharp cut and you return it.... But we at least have not professed to be composing an _Eirenicon_, when we treated you as foes." Like Archbishop Manning, Dr. Newman is reminded "of the sword wreathed in myrtle;" but Dr. Pusey, he says, has improved on the ancient device,--"Excuse me, you discharge your olive-branch as if from a catapult."

This is, no doubt, exactly what Dr. Pusey has done. Going much further than the great majority of his countrymen will go with him in admissions in favour of the Roman Catholic Church, he has pointed out with a distinctness and force, never, perhaps, exceeded, what is the impa.s.sable barrier which, as long as it lasts, makes every hope of union idle. The practical argument against Rome is stated by him in a shape which comes home to the consciences of all, whatever their theological training and leanings, who have been brought up in English ways and ideas of religion. But why should he not? He is desirous of union--the reunion of the whole of Christendom. He gives full credit to the Roman communion--much more credit than most of his brethren think him justified in giving--for what is either defensible or excellent in it. Dr. Newman must be perfectly aware that Dr. Pusey has gone to the very outside of what our public feeling in England will bear in favour of efforts for reconciliation, and he nowhere shows any sign that he is thinking of unconditional submission. How, then, can he be expected to mince matters and speak smoothly when he comes to what he regards as the real knot of the difficulty, the real and fatal bar to all possibility of a mutual understanding? If his charges are untrue or exaggerated in detail or colouring, that is another matter; but the whole of his pleading for peace presupposes that there are great and serious obstacles to it in what is practically taught and authorised in the Roman Church; and it is rather hard to blame him for "not making the best of things," and raising difficulties in the way of the very object which he seeks, because he states the truth about these obstacles. We are afraid that we must be of Dr. Newman's opinion that the _Eirenicon_ is not calculated to lead, in our time at least, to what it aims at--the reunion of Christendom; but this arises from the real obstacles themselves, not from Dr. Pusey's way of stating them.

There may be no way to peace, but surely if there is, though it implies giving full weight to your sympathies, and to the points on which you may give way, it also involves the possibility of speaking out plainly, and also of being listened to, on the points on which you really disagree. Does Dr. Newman think that all Dr. Pusey felt he had to do was to conciliate Roman Catholics? Does it follow, because objections are intemperately and unfairly urged on the Protestant side, that therefore they are not felt quite as much in earnest by sober and tolerant people, and that they may not be stated in their real force without giving occasion for the remark that this is reviving the old cruel war against Rome, and rekindling a fierce style of polemics which is now out of date? And how is Dr. Pusey to state these objections if, when he goes into them, not in a vague declamatory way, but showing his respect and seriousness by his guarded and full and definite manner of proof, he is to be met by the charge that he does not show sufficient consideration? All this may be a reason for thinking it vain to write an Eirenicon at all. But if one is to be attempted, it certainly will not do to make it a book of compliments. Its first condition is that if it makes light of lesser difficulties it should speak plainly about greater ones.

But this is, after all, a matter of feeling. No doubt, as Dr. Newman says, people are not pleased or conciliated by elaborate proofs that they are guilty of something very wrong or foolish. What is of more interest is to know the effect on a man like Dr. Newman of such a display of the prevailing tendency of religious thought and devotion in his communion as Dr. Pusey has given from Roman Catholic writers. And it is plain that, whoever else is satisfied with them, these tendencies are not entirely satisfactory to Dr. Newman. That rage for foreign ideas and foreign usages which has come over a section of his friends, the loudest and perhaps the ablest section of them, has no charms for him. He a.s.serts resolutely and rather sternly his right to have an opinion of his own, and declines to commit himself, or to allow that his cause is committed, to a school of teaching which happens for the moment to have the talk to itself; and he endeavours at great length to present a view of the teaching of his Church which shall be free, if not from all Dr. Pusey's objections, yet from a certain number of them, which to Dr. Newman himself appear grave. After disclaiming or correcting certain alleged admissions of his own, on which Dr. Pusey had placed a construction too favourable to the Anglican Church, Dr.

Newman comes to a pa.s.sage which seems to rouse him. A convert, says Dr.

Pusey, must take things as he finds them in his new communion, and it would be unbecoming in him to criticise. This statement gives Dr.

Newman the opportunity of saying that, except with large qualifications, he does not accept it for himself. Of course, he says, there are considerations of modesty, of becomingness, of regard to the feelings of others with equal or greater claims than himself, which bind a convert as they bind any one who has just gained admission into a society of his fellow men. He has no business "to pick and choose," and to set himself up as a judge of everything in his new position. But though every man of sense who thought he had reason for so great a change would be generous and loyal in accepting his new religion as a whole, in time he comes "to have a right to speak as well as to hear;"

and for this right, both generally and in his own case, he stands up very resolutely:--

Also, in course of time a new generation rises round him, and there is no reason why he should not know as much, and decide questions with as true an instinct, as those who perhaps number fewer years than he does Easter communions. He has mastered the fact and the nature of the differences of theologian from theologian, school from school, nation from nation, era from era.

He knows that there is much of what may be called fas.h.i.+on in opinions and practices, according to the circ.u.mstances of time and place, according to current politics, the character of the Pope of the day, or the chief Prelates of a particular country; and that fas.h.i.+ons change. His experience tells him that sometimes what is denounced in one place as a great offence, or preached up as a first principle, has in another nation been immemorially regarded in just a contrary sense, or has made no sensation at all, one way or the other, when brought before public opinion; and that loud talkers, in the Church as elsewhere, are apt to carry all before them, while quiet and conscientious persons commonly have to give way. He perceives that, in matters which happen to be in debate, ecclesiastical authority watches the state of opinion and the direction and course of controversy, and decides accordingly; so that in certain cases to keep back his own judgment on a point is to be disloyal to his superiors.

So far generally; now in particular as to myself. After twenty years of Catholic life, I feel no delicacy in giving my opinion on any point when there is a call for me,--and the only reason why I have not done so sooner or more often than I have, is that there has been no call. I have now reluctantly come to the conclusion that your Volume _is_ a call. Certainly, in many instances in which theologian differs from theologian, and country from country, I have a definite judgment of my own; I can say so without offence to any one, for the very reason that from the nature of the case it is impossible to agree with all of them. I prefer English habits of belief and devotion to foreign, from the same causes, and by the same right, which justifies foreigners in preferring their own. In following those of my people, I show less singularity, and create less disturbance than if I made a flourish with what is novel and exotic. And in this line of conduct I am but availing myself of the teaching which I fell in with on becoming a Catholic; and it is a pleasure to me to think that what I hold now, and would transmit after me if I could, is only what I received then.

He observes that when he first joined the Roman Catholic Church the utmost delicacy was observed in giving him advice; and the only warning which he can recollect was from the Vicar-General of the London district, who cautioned him against books of devotion of the Italian school, which were then just coming into England, and recommended him to get, as safe guides, the works of Bishop Hay. Bishop Hay's name is thus, probably for the first time, introduced to the general English public. It is difficult to forbear a smile at the great Oxford teacher, the master of religious thought and feeling to thousands, being gravely set to learn his lesson of a more perfect devotion, how to meditate and how to pray, from "the works of Bishop Hay"; it is hardly more easy to forbear a smile at his recording it. But Bishop Hay was a sort of symbol, and represents, he says, English as opposed to foreign habits of thought; and to these English habits he not only gives his preference, but he maintains that they are more truly those of the whole Roman Catholic body in England than the more showy and extreme doctrines of a newer school. Dr. Pusey does wrong, he says, in taking this new school as the true exponent of Roman Catholic ideas. That it is popular he admits, but its popularity is to be accounted for by personal qualifications in its leaders for gaining the ear of the world, without supposing that they speak for their body.

Though I am a convert, then, I think I have a right to speak out; and that the more because other converts have spoken for a long time, while I have not spoken; and with still more reason may I speak without offence in the case of your present criticisms of us, considering that in the charges you bring the only two English writers you quote in evidence are both of them converts, younger in age than myself. I put aside the Archbishop of course, because of his office. These two authors are worthy of all consideration, at once from their character and from their ability. In their respective lines they are perhaps without equals at this particular time; and they deserve the influence they possess. One is still in the vigour of his powers; the other has departed amid the tears of hundreds. It is pleasant to praise them for their real qualifications; but why do you rest on them as authorities?

Because the one was "a popular writer"; but is there not sufficient reason for this in the fact of his remarkable gifts, of his poetical fancy, his engaging frankness, his playful wit, his affectionateness, his sensitive piety, without supposing that the wide diffusion of his works arises out of his particular sentiments about the Blessed Virgin? And as to our other friend, do not his energy, acuteness, and theological reading, displayed on the vantage ground of the historic _Dublin Review_, fully account for the sensation he has produced, without supposing that any great number of our body go his lengths in their view of the Pope's infallibility? Our silence as regards their writings is very intelligible; it is not agreeable to protest, in the sight of the world, against the writings of men in our own communion whom we love and respect. But the plain fact is this--they came to the Church, and have thereby saved their souls; but they are in no sense spokesmen for English Catholics, and they must not stand in the place of those who have a real t.i.tle to such an office.

And he appeals from them, as authorities, to a list of much more sober and modest writers, though, it may be, the names of all of them are not familiar to the public. He enumerates as the "chief authors of the pa.s.sing generation," "Cardinal Wiseman, Dr. Ullathorne, Dr. Lingard, Mr. Tierney, Dr. Oliver, Dr. Rock, Dr. Waterworth, Dr. Husenbeth, Mr.

Flanagan." If these well-practised and circ.u.mspect veterans in the ancient controversy are not original and brilliant, at least they are safe; and Dr. Newman will not allow the flighty intellectualism which takes more hold of modern readers to usurp their place, and for himself he st.u.r.dily and bluffly declines to give up his old standing-ground for any one:--