nm WORLDS BPOOifWrniS, y ThAPI F'^ na 7/- THE WORLD'S EPOCH-MAKERS EDITED BY OLIPHANT SMEATON Cardinal Newman and His Influence on Religious Life and Thought By Charles Sarolea, D.Ph., D.Litt. Digitized by tlie Internet Arcliive in 2007 witli funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation littp://www.arcliive.org/details/cardinalnewmanliiOOsaroiala THE WORLD'S EPOCH-MAKERS ^ardinal Newman and His Influence on Religious Life and Thought By Charles Sarolea, D.Ph., D.Litt. Uni-versity of Edinburgh Edinburgh. T. & T. Clark 1908 Printed by Morrison & Gibb Limited, FOR T. & T. CLARK, EDINBURGH. LONDON: SIUPEIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT, AMD CO. LIMITED. NEW YORE : CHARLES SCRIBNER's SONS. PREFACE The present work is a modest attempt to deal dis- passionately and objectively with some of the funda- mental problems which are suggested by the writings of Newman and which have hitherto received a somewhat one-sided treatment even from those English critics who have made an exhaustive study of the great Cardinal. The volume forms part of a larger work on the philosophy of religion — which I expect to publish before long, if this first instalment be not thought too unworthy of a great subject. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my friend Professor Pringle Pattison, who during my absence on the Continent made a final revision of the proofs, and who has removed some of the more glaring " gallicisms " which would have unpleasantly reminded the reader of the nationality of the author. CHARLES SAROLEA. University of Edinburgh. CONTENTS CHAP. PAOB I. Introduction ...... 1 II. The Oxford Movement .... 10 III. Newman's Personality . . . .36 IV. Why was Newman converted to Roman Catholicism? .... "V. The Conflict between Newman and Manning VI. Newman's Apologetics VII. Pascal and Newman. VIII. Was Newman a Liberal Catholic? IX. Cardinal Newman and Modernism 60 80 93 124 136 151 CARDINAL NEWMAN CHAPTER I Introduction After the death of a great writer there always supervenes a critical period for his fame. The honours of apotheosis are succeeded by the inevitable reaction. Even the greatest must suffer a temporary eclipse before they can shine as fixed stars in the literary Empyrean. Victor Hugo in France, George Eliot in England, whom in our days it has been the fashion to depreciate, have been memorable instances of those vagaries of literary reputation. The great writer who is the subject of this book has not suffered from the same vicissitudes, and if we can measure the influence of an author by the number and the quality of his critics and by the spirit which animates them, never has Newman been a greater force than on the morrow of his death. Since 1891 one monograph follows another, and of writing books on Cardinal Newman there is no end. Like Pascal, he is a favourite alike with Catholics and Protestants, with believers and unbelievers. In England, J, B. Mozley,^ » J. B. Mozley, The Theory of Development. Rivington, 1878. I 2 CARDINAL NEWMAN T. Mozley,! Mr. Hutton,2 Dean Church,^ Dr. Abbott,-* James Anthony Froude,^ Sir Leslie Stephen,^ Principal Fairbairn/ Dr. Barry ,« W. Ph. Ward,» Dr. A. Whyte/o have examined Newman's apologetics from every aspect. But in France the influence of Newman is to-day perhaps even wider and deeper than it is in Great Britain; the Abbe Loisy,^^ Mme. Lucie Faure- Goyau/2 the Abb^ Dimnet/^ M. Thureau-Dangin,^* M. Raoul Gout/5 M. Grappe/« the Abb6 Br^mond," the undisputed leader of French " Newmanites," have published on Newman a series of studies, of which two or three at least are literary masterpieces. And thus there exists to-day on both sides of the Channel 1 T. Mozley, Reminiscences chiefly of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement, 2 vols. 1882. 2 E . H. Hutton, Cardinal Nevmian ; Contemporary Tliought and Thinkers, 2 vols. 1894. 2 Dean Church, The Oxford Movement; Occasional Essays, 2 vols. * E. A. Abbott, The Anglican Career of Cardinal Newman, 2 vols. ^ James Anthony Froude, Short Studies on Cfreat Subjects, vols. iii. andiv. ^ Sir Leslie Stephen, An Agnostic's Apology. ' Principal Fairbairn, Catholicism : Roman and Anglican, 1899. 8 Dr. Barry, Cardinal Newman, 1904. » "W. Ph. Ward, Problems and Persons, 1903. *" Dr. A. Whyte, Newman, " Abb6 Loisy. Important article on the Theory of Development under the pseudonym of Firmin in the Revue du Clergi frariQais, 1898. ^^ Lucie Felix Faure, Newman. Perrin, " Abb^ Dimnet, La Pensic Catholique dans VAngleterre Contemporaiv^, and several articles in the Revue du Clergi fran^is. Lecofire. ^* Thureau-Dangin, La Renaissance Catholique en Angleterre, 3 vols. The standard work and ojms magnum on the Oxford Movement. ^' Raoul Gout, Dv. Protestantisme au Catholicisme, J. IT. Newman. Anduze, Castagnan. ^* Grappe, Newman, Preface de Panl Bourget. Beduchaux. "" Abbe Bremond, Newman, Essai de biographic psychologique, Bloud, 1905. An English edition of the same work with Preface by Father Tyrrell has just appeared under the title, Tlie Mystery of Newman. INTRODUCTION 3 an ever-growing band of enthusiastic disciples, who are kept together, as in the early days of the Oxford Move- ment, by this one creed : Credo in Newmannum,} Nor are we confronted here with a mere accidental phenomenon, a literary fashion, a fit of acute " New- mania." It must be obvious that in the case of French "Newmanites" it cannot be the writer and the stylist who draws so many readers to his works — for the exquisite perfume of Newman's English style, so subtly analysed by Mr. Birrell,^ must needs evaporate in the French translation : what interests the French reader is mainly the thinker and the theologian. In other words, we are witnessing here a movement of thought of wliich Newman is the prime mover. The magnurri opus of religious revival which Newman initiated during his lifetime in the Anglican Church is being continued to-day in the Gallican Church. History repeats itself, and after seventy-five years the Tractarian Movement seems to be revived in France, only under far more favourable auspices. For whilst the English mind, ever partial to compromise, has stopped half-way and has adopted the via media, the French mind, more logical and more consistent, is following up the ideas of Newman to their ultimate results. That extraordinaiy fermentation which we may observe in the French Church, in the works of Loisy, Dimnet, Laberthonniere, Leroy, Houtin,^ and against which the present pope has just issued his memorable Encyclical, can be directly traced to the * Br^mond, I' Inquietude JRdigietise; Ames Beligieuses, ' Birrell, Res Judicatae, pp. 140-150. ' Houtin, La Question Biblique au 19' siicZe ; La Question Biblique au 20' siicle ; L'Americanisme ; La Crise dv, Clerge franfais. 4 CARDINAL NEWMAN influence of the great Cardinal. The prediction of the Anglo-Roman prelate Talbot, that Newman was the most dangerous man in England/ the judgment of Dr. Dollinger that Newman was a heretic, have proved strictly true.^ After producing a religious schism in his native Church, Newman is now producing a more epoch-making heresy in the Church of his adoption : a schism and a heresy which will have proved equally fertile and equally beneficent, and which will justify once more the ancient axiom : oportet hcereses esse} Considering the wonderful vitality of Newman's influence, it is hardly necessary to justify ourselves for adding one more book to an already voluminous literature. We feel all the less embarrassed because each of our predecessors, with the single exception of M. Br^mond, has only given us one particular aspect of Newman, and because no one can flatter himself with having given us the final portrait. Precisely because Newman continues to be a living force, every interpreter — Protestant, Catholic, Anglican, or sceptic — seeks in his works that interpretation which is most favourable to his own tendencies. And that is also the reason why few thinkers have appeared under so many and varied aspects and passed through so many changes. The man who had sacrificed everything to the cause of truth, whose ideas the Anglican Church was going to adopt at the very moment when she was driving him away, first appeared as a tortuous and subtle casuist, a traitor to his religion whom Dante would ^ Purcell's Life of Manning. ^ Friedrich, Ignaz von Dollinger : sein Leben, iii. 589. See also Newman's reply in the same work, iii, 706. ^ Most works of the French Newmanites are placed on the Index. INTRODUCTION $ have relegated to the lower circles of his Inferno ; as an emissary from Rome, who, when already a Roman priest, continued for ten years to remain in the Anglican Church to pursue the work of corruption. Then comes a reaction. After the Kingsley con- troversy and the publication of the Apologia (1864) the " doctor subtilis " is transformed into a " doctor angdicus." Newman became a modem saint with the halo of sweetness and light; he appears as the emaciated agcetic whose portrait — the famous idealised lithograph — adorns every Anglican vicarage, as an emblem of the change which has come over English ideas; a Newman full of weakness and tenderness, almost feminine, so different from the real Newman, manly, aggressive, and vindictive. Still later, during the height of the conflict between Science and Religion, there appears a third Newman, " with the intellect of a sceptic and the heart of a mystic " (Huxley, Leslie Stephen), a combination of Hamlet and Pascal, anxious and restless, who, like his brother Francis, would have been a freethinker if he had not become a Catholic, and who tried in vain to find in Catholicism an answer to his doubts and his perplexities.^ And again the ponderous volumes of Mr. Purcell came to reveal another aspect of Newman : the martyr of ultramontane intolerance, the adversary of Manning, of Ward, and of the Jesuits; the opponent of papal infallibility ; the author of the famous letter of protest to Bishop Ullathome; the man whom Mgr. Talbot denounced at Rome as the most dangerous man in England; the lonely monk forsaken and persecuted by the very Church which he had revived in England, ^ The motto of Dr. Abbott's book is taken from Eamlet. 6 CARDINAL NEWMAN and who only obtained the Roman purple at seventy- eight years of age, as a belated concession to the demands of Catholic laymen and to Protestant public opinion, scandalised by such persecution of the greatest Catholic genius of the nineteenth century. And finally, in our own day Newman appears still under a new guise, as the liberalising thinker, as a new Lamennais, the leader of " Modernists," the Darwin of theology, the author of the " Theory of Development," the only doctrine capable of breaking through the rigidity of Romanism. Father Bremond leaves the Society of Jesus ; Father Tyrrell is expelled from it : both are imbued with the spirit of Newman.^ Bruneti^re is converted to a qualified Catholicism : he props up his suspicious orthodoxy with the authority of Newman. The Abb^ Dimnet appeals to the " new spirit " in Catholicism : he places himself under the protection of Newman. The Abb^ Loisy evolves his bold inter- pretations of Scripture : he is only " developing " the principles of Newman, whom he proclaims the only Catholic theologian of the nineteenth century. Indeed, who would dare to foretell all the developments that will still follow from the Theory of Development ? That the same man should have appeared in succes- sion as a Jesuitic casuist, as an " angel of the school," as a sceptic, as a liberal and a heretic, that he should have assumed so many varied and contradictory aspects, this fact alone is sufficient to show the enigmatic nature of his personality. We might apply to Newman what Faguet says of Voltaire : each single sentence is luminously clear, but the forty volumes which ^ See the English edition of Br^mond's masterpiece with Preface by Father Tyrrell. INTRODUCTION 7 constitute his works leave us in utter darkness. And that fact also shows that the subject is very far from being exhausted, and that we are still very- far from possessing the final portrait of Newman. Shall we ever possess it ? I very seriously doubt whether we shall. I know full well that some " Newmanites " are found- ing great hopes on the biography of Mr. Ward, which is to appear shortly and which will give us Newman's correspondence with a mass of unpublished material. And no doubt their expectations would be justified if the brilliant gifts of the biographer could be a sufficient guarantee that we shall hear the whole truth. But it is obvious that if we have had to wait fifteen years for an authoritative life of Newman, the literary executors must have had very strong reasons for their delay ; and these reasons still subsist, and the work of Mr. Ward, however able, will only be an " official " and expurgated life, and the author will be very careful not to repeat the indiscretions of Mr. Purcell's Life of Manning?- Moreover, even supposing that Mr. Ward were to give us an exhaustive, " integral " biography, I do not think our position would be much improved. When an author of whom we possess some forty volumes, of which twenty at least are autobiographical, who for fifty years has lived in the blazing light of literary ^ What will be the effect of the pope's Encyclical against Modernity on Mr. Ward's biography ? I see that Mr. Kegan Paul in a most interesting advertisement apologises for the delay caused in the publication of several Catholic works by leading French theologians, because these works have had to be expurgated to bring them in harmony with the pope's Encyclical. Will not Mr. Ward's manuscript require to be similarly expurgated ! Arid is it not a fact that at least one impcrtarU letter of iWumtan has been deliberately destroyed f 8 CARDINAL NEWMAN fame, and who for fifteen years has been a party leader on the loud-sounding stage of Oxford, an author whose every word and deed have been scrutinised by contemporary witnesses called Gladstone, Froude, Church, Abbott, Hutton, — when such an author, notwithstanding all, remains a problem and a riddle, we have good reason to believe that the riddle will never be solved. I hasten to add that the fame of Newman will lose nothing thereby. The human mind is so constituted that it only takes a passionate interest in those problems which it cannot solve. In any case, we venture to think we have sufficiently shown that there is still room, after so many admirable critical studies, for yet another book which shall be neither Catholic, nor Anglican, nor Protestant, by a writer detached from theological controversies, though passion- ately interested in religious questions, who shall try to analyse a personality so complicated and so fascinating, who shall study Newman's works in their intrinsic meaning, in their historical influence, and in the various interpretations and transformations which cannot be separated from the works themselves, as they show their vitality and may be considered as their develop- ment — and who finally, by means of Newman's works, shall throw some light on that eternal conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism, which still remains the central question of our age. Indeed, it is this question which gives to the writ- ings of Newman their living and universal interest: Nostra res agitur. Most biographers and critics are so fascinated by Newman's personality or by his style that they only see in his books a psychological problem or a work of art. Such is the conclusion INTRODUCTION 9 of Mr. Birrell's witty and paradoxical Essay. Such is the leitmotiv of the admirable series of monographs which M. Br^mond has raised to the glory of the Cardinal. I confess that I do not share those judgments. As much as M. Br^mond do I feel the fascination of the personality which will ever attract even those who are repelled by his ideas. As much as Mr. Birrell do I admire the writer, one of the greatest who will bear testimony for the English language : at once orator and theologian, philosopher and journalist, novelist and poet. But however fascinating Newman may be as a man, however great as a writer, there is something greater in his works, and that is the religious problem which he incarnates and of which he has revealed to us all the diflBculties and all the perplexities. In a treatment of Newman, to give the first place to the personality of the man and of the artist is to subordinate the end to the means, is to depreciate the value and to distort the significance of his life, to belittle the sacred cause to which aU his wonderful gifts have been consecrated. And therefore I ought not to apologise for having been more concerned in this Essay with the theologian and the thinker than with the man and the artist. And if I have been able to clear up some aspects of the problem, if I have succeeded in extracting from the forty volumes of Newman's writings and from some hundred commentaries and discussions the funda- mental ideas and the main conclusions, this Kttle book will not have been written in vain. In any case, even if I have totally failed, the attempt is of sufficient interest to attract many more capable and more successful efibrts, it is sufficiently difficult to ensure to the writer the lenient judgment of his readers. CHAPTER II The Oxford Movement In the third decade of the nineteenth century there suddenly arose in the most ancient and the most famous of English Universities a religious movement which, starting from humble beginnings, and seeming originally only a " monks' quarrel " and an academic controversy, was destined to transform the spiritual life of England and to leave a deep impress upon her literature. Not one of those who originated the movement fore- saw either its importance, or its probable direction, or the contradictory results which were to ensue therefrom. Never will it have been said with more truth that the Spirit bloweth where it listeth. The Oxford Movement was originally directed against the Roman Church, against modern Babylon and Antichrist, and was intended to preserve the Established Church from the dangers with which it w^as threatened by the emancipation of Catholics and by a Government which had become indifferent or hostile to the national re- ligion. On the contrary, its final outcome was not only to revive Catholicism after an eclipse of three centuries, but, what was far more ominous, to introduce the old enemy into the stronghold, to assert the Catholic prin- ciple within the Anglican Church so completely that it THE OXFORD MOVEMENT ii is very difficult to-day for a non-initiated public to dis- tinguish the High Anglican Church from the Roman. And this invasion of " Romanism" with its monasteries, its sacraments, its ritual, seemed destined to bring about in a very brief space the disruption of the Establish- ment; it seemed like the infusion of a poison which the enfeebled constitution of the Church would be unable to resist. As a matter of fact, this introduc- tion of the old Romanist principle was to revive and rejuvenate the Anglican Church. What was to be a cause of death became a principle of life. For never has the English Establishment been more living, never has it had a more real influence on the nation, never has it shown more earnestness, more intensity of purpose, than in the second half of the nineteenth century; and it is almost impossible to recognise in the English bishops of our day, imbued with mysticism and socialism, the successors of those worldly prelates whom we meet with in eighteenth-century literature. And finally, the Oxford Movement seemed to be in- stinct with the spirit of reaction, to be directed against liberalism and rationalism, and to recall a long-forgotten bigotry and fanaticism. On the contrary, its outcome was to serve the cause of liberal ideas : by compelling two denominations which for centuries had fought each other to live together in harmony and peace, it indirectly introduced the spirit and the habit of toleration ; and therefore, whilst seeming only to serve the cause of Roman Catholicism, it indirectly served the cause of that wider Catholicism, in the original and broader meaning of the word, the cause of universal Christianity. Indeed, the more we consider this movement, the more it seems extraordinary and paradoxical. It is 12 CARDINAL NEWMAN like a stream going back to its source. It is the dead tree which puts forth new leaves. That there should have been a revival of Catholicism in the old Latin countries one might have understood by the force of inertia, by the power of habit and tradition, by the impossibility of replacing the old religion, by the instinctive human horror of the vacuum; but in the home of liberalism and in the stronghold of Pro- testantism, to see Catholicism resuming its triumphal march, to see England returning to its long-forgotten practices and beliefs, to see her covered again with convents and monasteries, to see the Established Church reject as an insult the very name of Protestant and claim the epithet of Catholic as a title of honour, to see the Church negotiating reunion with Rome : — and all this apparently as the result of theological controversies on the interpretation of dogma, on the meaning of sacraments and the validity of holy orders ; and all this happening in the age of Darwin, amidst the triumphs of materialism and Imperialism — there lies the paradox and there lies the problem. And therefore nothing could be more mistaken than to see in the Tractarian Movement a mere theological quarrel and an academic dispute on certain forms and formulas, or to see in the word " ritualism " a defini- tion which exhausts the significance of the phenomenon. No ! this movement has transformed the whole spiritual life of the people in the nineteenth century; and for that reason the history of the movement must ever constitute a most important chapter in the general history of England. And that chapter is far from being completed, for the movement still continues, the penetration and THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 13 permeation of the Catholic principle is still carried on, and the struggle itself between the Catholic and the Protestant principle in the Anglican Church is nothing else but the eternal conflict between authority and individualism, between the natural and the super- natural, between reason and mysticism, between the unity and universality of the ideal and the diversity of reality and life. The beginnings of a movement so far-reaching cannot be explained by the mere accident of a few men, however great, putting their ideas in common. The movement was in the logic of history ; it was not merely national and local, it was European and uni- versal, Newman himself, when twenty years after the secession he tried to write in the Apologia an objective history of tractarianism, traced it to the romantic reaction which, after the Revolution had spent its force, gradually conquered the whole of Europe: a reaction of feeling and imagination against intellect, of authority against individualism, of tradition against a Revolution destructive of the past. And tracing further the genealogy of the leaders of the movement, Newman emphasises the influence of Walter Scott, of Southey and Wordsworth, and especially of that amazing transcendentalist whom we find at the origin of most English new currents at the beginning of the nineteenth century. And tlie same causes which in Eng- land bring about romanticism and tractarianism also explain in France the renascence of ultramontanism, in Germany the philosophy of Schelling, the mediaeval reaction of Schlegel, Goerres, and Moehler, the pectoral theology of Schleiermacher and Neander; in America the transcendentalism of Emerson and Hawthorne, 14 CARDINAL NEWMAN in Scotland the disruption of the Established Church and the philosophy of Carlyle. But although the Oxford Movement only follows the general trend of European thought and only constitutes one chapter of the romantic reaction, yet it received its distinctive characteristics from the peculiar conditions of the Established Church, from the academic surround- ings where it arose, and from the genius of its leader. For indeed without the singular, insular character of the Anglican Church, which to an outsider must ever appear as one of the most extraordinary compromises recorded in ecclesiastical history, we could not under- stand the contradictory aspects of tractarianism, its tortuous course, its subtle fallacies, so unintelligible to the continental mind. Without Oxford, this home of lost causes, this living anachronism, this assemblage of lay monasteries, we could never understand the archaeo- logical character of the controversies, the insistence on historical precedent, on forms and formulae, the unreality of the arguments, the thinness and haziness of the atmosphere ; and finally, without Newman, without his transcendent genius and lofty character, without his magnetic personality, we could not understand the spirituality, the intensity of faith, the purity from all vulgar motive, the power of attraction which have insured the vitality of the movement and which explain its triumphs. But, above all, the Tractarian Movement was inevit- able. The Anglican Church had to be reformed if it was to survive and resist the rising tide of rationalism. The astonishing fact is, not that the Church should have been transformed, but that she should have been maintained for two hundred and fifty years as an THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 15 illogical and impossible compromise, the instrument of the ruling classes and the tool of the State. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the English Church was in a state of complete stagnation, A great Protestant historian, in an Essay on the Oxford Counter-Reformation, would like to persuade us that everything was for the best in the best of clerical worlds.^ But another historian, no less of a Protestant and less fond of a paradox, has given us a melancholy picture of clerical life and manners in the eighteenth century, and it is sufficient to read the novels of Jane Austen and of Anthony Trollope, and the writings of Sydney Smith, to convince us that those clerical manners had scarcely changed at the time of the Oxford Movement. In the sixteenth century the Anglican Church had been compelled to adapt her doctrines to the transitory needs of politics and to the whims of the royal will : anti-papal, whilst remaining Catholic, under Henry viil., Protestant under Ekiward VI., Roman Catholic under Mary Tudor, she settled under Elizabeth in a via media equally remote from Rome and from Geneva. In the seventeenth century, roused by a sense of the Spanish danger from which she had just escaped and by the consciousness of a providential mission, a protector of national independence and of freedom of thought in Europe, she had known a brief period of . greatness. This is the golden age of Anglican theology, of Jeremy Taylor and of Hooker. But once the external danger passed, and being protected by the State against the attacks of Nonconformists, the ^ Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects, "The Oxford Counter- Eefonnation." i6 CARDINAL NEWMAN Anglican Church soon exhibited the vices of her constitution and origin. The result of a compromise between two extreme doctrines, — Catholic in her ritual and in part of her dogma and organisation, Protestant in spirit and discipline, — she possessed neither the authority and strength which she would have derived from communion with Rome, nor the vitality or the moral and intellectual force which she would have derived from the consistent practice of Protestant principles. The alliance with the State, which at first had been a support, soon proved a servitude. As the State from the beginning of the eighteenth century is mainly represented, and political power is mainly wielded, by the great Whig families and exploited in their own interest, the Church herself was soon degraded into the tool of an oligarchy. Ecclesiastical dignities were conferred as a reward for political services. The ecclesiastical career became an outlet for the younger sons of the gentry. Simony and pluralism became universal. The English vocabulary openly expresses this degradation of the ministry. The most sacred and the most disinterested of all professions henceforth is nothing but a " living," i.e. a means of livelihood, less lucrative but easier than others. The morals of the Church become more and more worldly. The Christian ideal disappears and only survives in some solitary Churchmen, in the writings of Law and Butler. The Church has become one of the pillars of the Established order, supporting every iniquity, consecrating every abuse. Exposed to the onslaught of deists and freethinkers, the Church is powerless to defend herself, and is compelled gradually to retreat from her dogmatic THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 17 positions. The freethinkers triumph all along the line. Happily for the Church, the English mind has always been instinctively hostile to extremist solutions in religion as well as in politics. But Anglican theology in the eighteenth century ceases to be super- natural, it becomes the natural theology of Paley — i.e. supernaturalism administered in homceopathic doses. Theology is nothing but a series of intellectual problems solved by ratiocination and not by the authority of revealed truth or the categorical imperative of the religious conscience. But we ought to be careful not to ejcaggerate the shadows on the picture. After all, lukewarmness and barrenness are not only characteristic of the English Church; they are no less characteristic of the Catholic Church in France, with her court abb^s and her Pompadour bishops, with her Diamond Necklace cardinals, her Rohans and Talleyrands. Even in Puritan Scotland the Church had had to renounce her spiritual ambitions, scepticism reigned in philosophy, moderation and secularism prevailed in the General Assembly.^ Indeed the Anglican Church was the first Church in Europe which shook off the shackles of Erastianism and rationalism, and tried to put her house in order. Apostles like Wesley and Whitefield try to restore the Christian ideal and to revive spiritual life. Methodism wields an enormous influence not merely in religion, but in politics and social life. Methodists with Howard and Fry bring about a reform of the prison system. ^ In Edinburgh, on one occasion the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland adjourned to enable its members to hear Mrs. Siddons. Cf. the Autobiography of Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inreresk. 2 1 8 CARDINAL NEWMAN Evangelicalism with Wilberforce and Zachary Macaulay bring about the suppression of the slave trade. But the religious revival, although it originated in the Church, did not affect her inner life. It only- reached the new strata of population which had been constituted by the introduction of the great industrial inventions. In the country, peasants, farmers, and gentry were not touched by the movement; they remained loyal to the "National" Church, and con- tinued in the old ways. Besides, Methodism scarcely possessed sufficient vitality and organising power to transform the mass of the population. A purely sentimental and sensa- tional, hysterical and sectarian religion, it ignored both dogma and discipline. It acted on the heart rather than on the reasoning faculties, and on the nerves rather than on the emotions. It operated individual conversions ; it was not a social force. It was content with stimulating religiosity ; it did not restore religion. It was a new sect; it was not a reformation of the Church. And therefore, after the first wave of Methodist enthusiasm had spent its force, the English clergy gradually returned to their old ways. They continued to attend to their temporalities, to collect their tithes and their rents, to indulge in fox-hunting, and to resist all innovations. And nowhere was the spirit of conservatism stronger than in the old metropolis of learning which for centuries had been the seminary and the stronghold of Anglicanism. We all know the famous passage where Adam Smith condemns the monstrous abuses of the academic monopoly. Historians have quoted a hundred times that other passage where Gibbon sums THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 19 up his melancholy experiences of the intellectual and spiritual life of his Alma Mater. The abuses were so universal and so deep-seated that even the French Revolution did not effect a change. No doubt its trumpet blast awakened the Alma Mater from her dogmatic slumber, but only to plunge her in a hopeless reaction. The political mysticism of Burke became the gospel of the new generation. To' outward appear- ance this reaction gave the Church an enormous increase of power and influence such as she had not known since the Middle Ages. If hitherto the Church had had to lean for support on the State, henceforth the State sought in the Church a refuge and an authority and a sanction against destructive ideas. If in the past the Church had not understood her spiritual mission, she threw herself with all the more energy into her new political part. For twenty- five years, between 1789 and Waterloo, she fought the battles of the State and resisted the forces of revolution ; and after the crisis was over she nourished the fond illusion that she had emerged stronger and firmer than ever from the hurricane, which in every other country had shaken to their foundations altars and thrones. The illusion was to be of short duration. As soon as the great national crisis is passed, liberalism awakens. Discontent and rebellion spread in the ranks of the Church, and one of the most brilliant champions of liberalism is a minister of the Establishment,^ Catholics and Nonconformists demand civil and political ^ Sydney Smith. See the admirable monograph of M. Cheyrillon, which, like most recent French works on English thought and litera- ture, has been ignored in England. 20 CARDINAL NEWMAN equality, and the Liberal party conclude with them a triple alliance, which has survived until our own day and which gives its original physiognomy to the struggle of parties during the nineteenth century. And this triple coalition of Liberals, of Catholics, and Nonconformists does not conceal that the first use they will make of their conquered rights will be to deprive the English Church of her privileges and monopoly. Liberalism is anxious to avenge itself for the insults and persecutions of twenty-five years and to punish the clergy for having made common cause with reaction and oppression. Already before the Reform Bill the Church felt herself in imminent danger. The days of the Gordon Riots were passed. It was no more against the Catholics that the people vented their rage, but against the Establishment. The Anglican bishops were insulted in the streets. At Bristol the palace of the bishop was burnt. And worse times were impending. What would happen on the inevitable day when with the triumph of the Reformers all political power would pass over to the most bitter enemies of the Church, and when the Whigs and Radicals would put their creatures in the highest dignities of the hierarchy ? It was natural that the University of Oxford should be the first to seize the alarm: Oxford for centuries the centre of every reaction, the home of every lost cause, the seminary of clergymen and squires, the " Hotel des Invalides " of valetudinarian thought.^ And the alarm was all the more legitimate because ^ The uncompromising conservatism of British Universities remains until this day the despair of reformers and the most characteristic phenomenon in the intellectual history of Europe. THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 21 the University monopoly would be first attacked. The Government was on the eve of voting the emancipation of Catholics, And this measure, which was prompted as much by contempt for superstition as by the spirit of toleration, was to be the prelude to more drastic reforms, which were to strike at the root of Oxford privileges and traditions. Tests and the subscription of the Thirty-nine Articles were to be abolished. A hostile Government was soon to impose upon an orthodox University a heretical scholar as Professor of Theology and to raise this heretic to the bench of bishops.^ The very magnitude of the danger roused the spirit of the Church and raised the Defenders of the Faith. From a college hitherto obscure arose the men who were to be the champions of the Church against liberalism and revolution. The party of resistance was represented by three young Fellows of Oriel College who understood the signs of the times and of the place, and who foresaw the march of events : the first, John Keble, a sensitive and tender-hearted nature, a highly gifted poetic temperament, whose Christian Year marked a new epoch in sacred poetry, was bringing to the Tractarian Movement the prestige of a name surrounded with the halo of genius and sanctity; the second, Hurrell Froude, an enthusiastic spirit, an acute thinker and an impetuous man of action, all the more ardent because he knew that he was destined to a premature death, brought a new conception of the Church, of tradition, and a new attitude to Catholicism, The third, John Henry Newman, receiving the first impulse from his two friends, was soon to become the soul of the movement, and was to direct it to an issue which ^ Frofesaor Hampden. 22 CARDINAL NEWMAN neither Keble nor Froude had anticipated. He was to transform a mere attempt at resistance to liberalism into a counter-reformation, so powerful, so irresistible, that after three-quarters of a century its effects are not yet exhausted. All three understood that the weakness of the Anglican Church was in herself ; that if she wanted to withstand her enemies, she would have to reform her doctrine and her organisation ; that she had to shake off the yoke of the State and of the world, revive the source of spiritual life, eliminate rationalism, and return to a clearer comprehension of her dignity and of her mission. And they also understood that isolated efforts did not suffice ; that it was not enough to remain on the defensive; that the Church must assume a vigorous offensive ; that she had to appeal to public opinion ; and that she had to attack her opponents, both with the written and with the spoken word, with the sermon ; with the pamphlet and the tract which would reach the many, and with the doctrinal treatise which would reach the ^lite. In the narrative which Newman has left us of the beginnings of the Tractarian Movement, he gives by far the largest share to his fellow-workers. From a sense of humility and natural generosity, he attributes to them all the initiative. But the unanimous judg- ment and testimony of his contemporaries affirms that from the beginning Newman bore the whole weight of responsibility. To use an expression of the historian Froude, he was the cipher, his friends were the zero. For fifteen years he spent himself in a prodigious activity, performing all the parts of THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 23 theologian and preacher, of organiser, journalist, and party leader. Keble, of a shy and solitary disposition, very soon withdrew from the struggle. Hurrell Froude was slowly dying from the disease which was consuming his fiery soul and wearing out his frail frame. Others no doubt at once took their place : Ward, the metaphysician of the party, the future ultramontane thinker, in whom Stuart Mill met the only foe worthy of his steel, and the condemnation of whose book on the Ideal of the Church was to hurry on the crisis ; Palmer, whose treatise was one of the events of the period ; Gladstone, whose thesis on the union between Church and State was to be both brilliantly opposed and popularised by Macaulay, and who for fifty years was to defend tractarian ideals in the political arena ; Mark Pattison and James Anthony Froude, the future opponents and renegades of the movement, but who in the meantime were writing Lives of Saints and translating the Library of the Fathers ; the three brothers Wilberforce, who brought to the movement the power of a name already famous in philanthropy and politics ; last, not least, Pusey, a mediocre intellect but a lofty character, the Amerigo Vespucci of the new Anglicanism, and of whom Pius IX. was to say that he was like a church bell which was calling all the faithful into the Church, whilst remaining itself outside. What insured to Newman the superiority over all his fellow-workers, and what forced the leadership of the party upon him, was not only his absolute devotion to the ideal, his devouring activity and his genius, but still more the magnetic and mysterious fascination of a unique personality which was attracting every heart. 24 CARDINAL NEWMAN Of all those minds so diverse in their tendencies and idiosyncrasies, although brought together by a common ideal, Newman was the centre and bond of unity. Froude the historian, the future author of the Nemesis of Faith and the future Malleus Romanorum, who cannot be suspected of favouring Newman, tells us, probably thinking of himself, that even those whose confidence in the cause had been shaken continued to serve it from loyalty to Newman. Credo in New- mannum was for a long time the credo of all those who had no other creed. In his Apologia Newman indicates the sermon of Keble on Natural Apostasy (14th July 1833) as the starting-point of tractarianism. And it is quite true that the first tracts were published very soon after this date, and that it was also Keble who gave the first idea of the publication. But, as a matter of fact, at that date the new sect was already formed, and it was the preaching of Newman at the University Church of St. Mary's which for five years had already con- stituted it. All contemporary witnesses, both friends and opponents, agree in their testimony as to the indelible impression left by those extraordinary sermons, probably unique in the annals of sacred oratory : an impression explained by the beauty of the language, lucid and direct, pure and simple, and devoid of all rhetoric ; by the lofty ideals and the wonderful psychological insight into the most hidden recesses of the human soul; by the external advantages of the orator and the mysterious charm emanating from his whole personality — a musical voice, quivering with re- strained emotion, a manner in turn sweet and imperious, an appearance slender and graceful, emaciated and THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 25 ascetic, as of a messenger from that invisible world of which he was ever speaking to his hearers. And to- gether with the revelation of a great spiritual force there was a revolution in the doctrine. That doctrine was rather suggested than explicitly stated ; but, whilst being asserted without dogmatism, the dogma was none the less novel; the orator restored the supernatural life, the Sacraments, the Visible Church, the Communion of Sainta He dwelt on the opposition between the City of God and the world, between faith and reason. For five years, every week he went on insinuating the same ideas ; and in the twenty volumes which contain his collected Anglican sermons, there is not a single one which is not inspired by the new spirit. After five years of incessant preaching, when Newman had gathered around him an enthusiastic band of admirers and disciples, when he had worked out his theological system, and when he had tried upon his followers and upon himself its efficacy and solidity, he began to think of reaching a wider public, and, after influencing Oxford, of converting England. Then began the Tractarian period properly so called, which is the second phase, and not, as is generally supposed, the beginning of the movement. And then only began, after the intensive apostolate of preaching, the expansive apostolate of the written propaganda. Week after week the tracts succeeded each other, the first tracts short and more controver- sial, the later ones longer and more constructive ; but all of them expounding the same doctrine and the same ideal ; all of them — from the first to the last, the famous Tract 90 — written under the inspiration of Newman.^ '.The Oxford Tracts have been collected in six compact volumea. 26 CARDINAL NEWMAN And those tracts all achieved their purpose. Dis- tributed by enthusiastic missionaries, they spread the new gospel in the most remote villages. And that new doctrine was nothing but a return to the old ; and, by an irony of fate, this return to the Middle Ages and to the primitive Church was taking advantage of the most modern methods of journalism. And finally, when public opinion was sufl&ciently prepared and half won over, and after the attempt had succeeded beyond their wildest expectations, Newman and his followers could henceforth think of establishing their doctrines on a scientific basis and support them by a systematic study of the theology of the Fathers. This is the third phase of the movement, the doctrinal phase, the publication of dogmatic treatises, the working out of the via media. But here at once arose theoretical difficulties, which were inevitably to transform those reactionaries and conservatives of the Old Church into revolutionists and schismatics. As long as they had restricted themselves to reviving devotion and spirituality, to insisting in more or less general terms on a more real and more living religion, to attacking Erastianism and latitudinarianism, they were meeting a need too universal and too deeply felt not to rally the younger generation, and not to overcome the opposition of the older. But when it came to. defining the new spirit, to developing it into a system, it was inevitable that Newman should rouse an irreconcilable opposition. The human race are so constituted that in matters of religion they can always unite on the spirit of a dogma, they only begin to separate on the letter, presumably on the assumption that words the most vague conceal the deepest realities. THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 27 But what was far more serious for the Tractarians, not only did they rouse a strong opposition and inflame the odium theologicum — the most implacable of all hatreds — but they were confronted with insoluble theoretical difficulties. They wanted to strengthen the foundations of the Anglican Church, and they discovered that these foundations were crumbling away. They wanted to define the principles on which the Church rested, and they discovered that these principles did not exist. They wanted to prove the identity of the National Church with the Universal Church, and they perceived that merely to state the problem was to state a contradiction in terms ; that the English Church was equally disowned by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, and by the Noncon- formist Churches; that she was only a local, insular body, a historical product. As long as she was merely looked upon as such, she might be accepted as a fact consecrated by usage and adapted to the national character, as a State institution justified by three centuries of services rendered to the people, and which might still maintain her claim as long and in so far as she continued to render those services. But when Newman and his followers began to establish her claims, not on any historical necessity, nor on any social or moral usefulness, but on logical and eternal principles, they were reopening old controversies, and they were met at the outset by insuperable obstacles. Newman had begun his inquiry with an entire confidence in the truth and strength of Anglicanism, and with the conviction that the pope was Antichrist. This very confidence and conviction imposed upon him {ujd allowed him an absolute good faith in the 2 8 CARDINAL NEWMAN investigation of the evidence. The bad faith with which later on he has been reproached was only an excess of candour, and truthfulness, and trustfulness, which was looking the enemy full in the face. He did not and could not suspect as yet either the weak- ness of his position or the strength of his opponents. Years of anxious study were gradually to unfold to him that the primitive Christian Church, in which he saw the source of all truth, bore witness not in favour of Protestantism but in favour of the Roman Church ; that those ancient dogmas which he considered as the keystone of religion had fallen into disuse in his own Church, or had only been maintained through the agency of Roman Catholicism ; that those heresies, which in the course of the early centuries had been the occasion of the definition of dogma, presented a most suspicious analogy with the Reformation ; — in one word, that the whole of mediaeval and modern history seemed to be on the side of the Roman Church : Protestantism had aimed at upsetting the Roman pyramid established on the three corner-stones of Scripture, Tradition, and Authority, and had tried to make it stand on its point, on the one principle of individualism.^ Once convinced of this conformity between Catholi- cism and primitive Christianity, Newman was logically driven to restore within the Anglican Church, not indeed Roman Catholicism itself, but the Catholic principle. For at first he believed that it was possible to distinguish, on the one hand, in the Roman Catholic Church between the ancient and legitimate principles and the corruption introduced by centuries; and, on the other hand, in the Anglican Church, between those * See the opeuing chapters of the Theory of Development, THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 29 same ancient principles common to Romanism and Anglicanism, and the Protestant errors which had been introduced since the sixteenth century. The very condition, therefore, of a return to Christian life was to eliminate that Protestant principle — liberal, negative, rationalistic — and to restore Catholic beliefs, institutions, and practices. Newman did not yet raise the question, what would be the relations between a regenerated Anglo-Catholic Church and the Roman Catholic Church. That was a purely subordinate question, a question of fact and not a question of principle, and its solution would entirely depend on the eventual attitude of the two churches. In the meantime the duty of every loyal Anglican was clear : only to consider the sole truth, to eliminate the Pro- testant heresy, and to restore the ancient faith in its purity and integrity. We have summed up, in a few lines, the slow and painful result of fifteen years of internal struggles which were to lead Newman to his memorable thesis on the interpretation of the Thirty - nine Articles, contained in Tract 90. We feel great difficulty to-day in understanding the scandal and the storm of indignation roused by that famous document. To a dispassionate student, both logic and history seem on the side of Newman. For logically the ideas contained in Tract 90 were only the outcome of those contained in the previous eighty-nine tracts; historically the Catholic interpretation was perfectly justified. The Anglican Confession of Faith, contained in the Thirty-nine Articles, had been drawn up by the theologians of Queen Elizabeth with an express view to conciliation. They had purposely left vague and 30 CARDINAL NEWMAN undecided those points in dispute between the rival Confessions in order to enable Catholics to subscribe the Articles. But, as a matter of fact and policy, Newman was obviously wrong. The question was not to know which was the interpretation that had been given to the Thirty -nine Articles by logic and by the dead past, the question was to know the interpretation which the contemporaries of Newman were willing to accept. Now the Anglican Church had become not less Pro- testant but 7nore Protestant than in the sixteenth century. And even admitting that the subjects of Queen Elizabeth remained in the majority Catholics, the subjects of Queen Victoria had become in an over- whelming majority Protestants. The Anglican Church had viewed with satisfaction the proposed agreement with the Lutheran Church for the establishment of a Lutheran- Anglican bishopric at Jerusalem ; ^ they, on the contrary, viewed with horror the movement towards Rome. The old anti-Catholic spirit was roused again. The suspicions which had accumulated for ten years against Newman and the Tractarians were let loose. England did not want a universal religion, it had remained loyal to the national religion. For two years there was a life - and - death struggle between the two principles. The bishops, who hitherto had remained disinterested spectators in the controversy, were compelled to declare themselves, and they declared against Newman. One after the other they thundered against the papist heresy. The position had ceased to be tenable. Newman resigned his fellowship, and left the pulpit of St. ^ The great scheme of the irrepressible Bunsen. THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 31 Mary's, which he had made famous. He withdrew with some faithful disciples to the cells of Littlemore, a modest hermitage which he had built in the neigh- bourhood of Oxford. There for two more years he went through all the anguish of uncertainty, and prepared in solitude and meditation the supreme decision. Finally, in 1845, he abjured Anglicanism, leaving a Church of which he was the shining light, and in which he was destined to the highest honours. Thirty years after, Disraeli and Gladstone could still assert that the Anglican Church had not re- covered from the effect of the secession. Newman has been accused of untruthfulness in that gradual change of opinion which continued over a period of more than fifteen years. He has been accused of remaining in the Anglican Church long after he had already become a Catholic, and of remaining with the sole purpose of creating a party for himself and drawing them after him in his apostasy. The accusation must be obviously absurd to any unprejudiced mind. At most may we accuse Newman of having been lacking in clear-sightedness. He saw too late that the logic of ideas as well as the logic of his temperament were to lead him to Rome.^ Like Balaam, he had started to curse ; he ended with a blessing. He resisted heroically, tragically, in order to maintain himself in the via m^dia. He equivocated, he "jesuitised," he practised subtlety and "economy," not in order to join the Roman Church, but to remain loyal to his Church and to be saved the final wrench. It was not Newman who was false and insincere, it was the very position of Anglicanism which was equivocal. ^ See Chapter IV., " Why was Newman converted I " 32 CARDINAL NEWMAN And we must not forget that he was not a free man. He did not speak and act for himself alone. He had a cure of souls. He was the leader of a great party. Reserve, and reticence, and caution, and "economy" were imperative. The very future of the Church might depend on one indiscreet word, on one hasty step. Again and again he had to remonstrate against those co-religionists who wanted to precipitate events, against those who, like W. Ward, were in a hurry to draw their conclusions from his premises. The duplicity with which he has been reproached was therefore only a signal instance of conscientious scruples and of self-control. And so far from blaming Newman, we miist admire him for this wonderful comhinution of subtlety and 'pliability in the means and of inflexibility in the principles. To us, in the light of later events, it certainly seems extraordinary that Newman should have maintained himself for so many years in what appears to us as an impossible position; and the slowness and uncertainty of his evolution, partly explained by the necessities of the leadership forced upon him, throw a most vivid light on his temperament. He obviously, to all intents and purposes, was a Catholic from the end of his Italian journey in 1833, and he never afterwards concealed his horror of Protestantism ; but until the eleventh hour he was convinced that the Catholic principle was compatible with Anglicanism. For the last seventy-five years the High Church has shared this conviction and acted upon it. Therefore, if Newman was mistaken, three genera- tions of Anglican leaders have come to share his errors. If Newman himself was defeated in 1845, the cause which he represented was destined to a most startling THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 33 triumph. No doubt his secession temporarily dis- organised and discredited those amongst his followers who refused to take the final step. And at first the reaction against tractarianism and sacerdotalism was so violent and so sweeping that Neimnan may he considered as the indirect and unwilling cause of the modem liberal mover)ient in the University of Oxford. Some of his disciples — Mark Pattison, James Anthony Froude — lapsed into complete scepticism. Others divided their allegiance between the transcendentalism of Carlyle, the pre-raphaelitism of Ruskin, and the utili- tarianisin of Mill. Amongst theologians, some of the leading men espoused the latitudinarian liberalism of Whately, of Milman, and Thomas Arnold. For forty years the leaders of rationalism and humanism were recruited from the University — Jowett, Dean Stanley, Matthew Arnold; whilst at the same time, at Cambridge, the famous triumvirate of Lightfoot, Westcott, and Hort were introducing into the inter- pretation of the Bible the most advanced methods of German Higher Criticism. But this powerful wave of liberalism and rationalism only delayed, it did not prevent, the ultimate triumph of " Newmanism." Indeed, the tractarians had never relied on the Oxford intellectuals or on the official Church. Whilst uphold- ing the principle of authority, they were themselves prepared to defy authority, probably unconscious of any inconsistency. In publishing their tracts, like many reformers before them, the Oxford counter-reformers had appealed to the higher tribunal of public opinion. And public opinion had been profoundly stirred. A phantom had been called up which all the charges of bishops were 3 34 CARDINAL NEWMAN to be powerless to exorcise. The faith which had been shaken had to be re-established, and this could only be achieved through the Catholic principle. The mustard seed which Newman had sown did not fall on the barren rock, it germinated and grew into a mighty tree. His doctrines were put into practice by friends like Pusey and Dean Church, and even by opponents like Bishop Wilberf orce. To-day ritualism has triumphed all along the line. Ancient ceremonies and devotions, the sacra- ments. Mass, and confession have been restored. Notwith- standing the veto of the hierarchy, notwithstanding public opinion, notwithstanding parliamentary commissions, monasteries and convents are being multiplied, the celi- bacy of the priests is more and more brought into honour. On the eve of his secession from the Anglican Church, Newman had just completed his Essay on Development, which has been variously considered as his last Anglican or as his first Catholic production. It may be asserted that since 1845 the whole history of the Anglican Church is but the vindication of the prin- ciples contained in that epoch-making treatise. During the last years of the nineteenth century Catholic ideas were so supreme in the higher spheres of Anglicanism that Lord Halifax, the President of the Church Union, a powerful and representative association of clergymen and laymen, was allowed, with the tacit approval of the hierarchy, to carry on a systematic crusade in favour of the Roman Church. The pope, Leo xiii., at first seemed to respond to the advances of the Anglicans. Negotiations were entered upon. The uncompromising attitude of the Roman Curia soon deceived the expectations of the High Church. Rome refused to recognise the validity of the Anglican orders, and THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 35 opposed to all the controversial points a consistent non possumiis. With Pius x. and the Encyclical on Modernity union seems more remote than ever. But although thrown into the background, union neverthe- less remains within the region of practical politics.* And the fact remains that the Anglican Church repudiates as an insult the appellation of Protestant, and claims the appellation of Catholic as a title of honour. That is a momentous achievement, which must always be taken into account. Whatever may be the vicissitudes of the struggle between science and the supernatural, whatever may be the fate reserved to the writings of Newman, even though both his writings and his personality were to be one day only the shadow of a great name, — magni nominis umbra, — the historian of the future would still be in a position to appreciate the genius of that extraordinary man and to measure his greatness by this one fact — that his influ- ence was suflBcient to bring the most Protestant nation of Europe to a repudiation of Protestantism and to an assertion of Catholicism, amidst the triumphs of physical science and the claims of positive philosophy. * The whole religious position of Europe and the balance of spiritual power may bo entirely modified by the probable advance of Roman Catholicism in the Russian Empire. CHAPTER III Newman's Personality It is obviously in Newman's life and in his personality that we must seek the key to his religion. We shall attempt to prove in the following chapter that the great crisis of his life, his conversion, is essentially a psychological problem, Newman himself has made psychology the foundation of religious science. It is the "illative sense," i.e. the personal equation, which gives the casting vote. As in the Imitation of Christ, so in Newman's writings, religion is above all a dialogue between God and Conscience. All through his life Newman has been given to analysis and introspection. Never has any religion been more personal and more subjective. A French Protestant clergyman, M. Raoul Goiit, in an ingenious book has even gone so far as to see a morbid pheno- menon in this hyper-analytical tendency. His conten- tion is that the abuse of introspection has developed in Newman the hereditary germs of melancholia. If nothing could be more complicated than the personality of Newman, nothing could be simpler and more uniform than his life. It is entirely dominated by the religious idea. God is his first and his last thought. The material universe hardly 36 NEWMAN'S PERSONALITY 37 exists for him. He lives in the world without being of the world. And therefore the external history of this noble existence, which fills almost the whole of the nineteenth century (1801-91) and which for sixty years has been given over to the discussion of men, may be summed up in a few lines. The Italian journey may be said to be almost the only external incident of his biography. And its only dates are the publication of his works. His origin and heredity deserve to arrest our attention. It has often been said — and with a great deal of truth — in reply to those fanatics who asserted that there was in his Romanism something un-English, that Newman was an Englishman to the backbone. His tastes, his predilections, his antipathies have always been English. In his Apologia he breaks the thread of his narrative to make a patriotic profession. He was always curiously ignorant of things foreign. After his conversion he never could get accustomed to certain Italian practices, and that was one of the reasons why he was always distrusted at Rome. At thirty years he had never left the English shores, and during his eventful Mediterranean voyage he felt so miserable and so homesick that he never had the courage to undertake another journey until his appoint- ment as Cardinal. Now it is all the more interesting to notice that this insular and patriotic Englishman had almost nothing but foreign blood in his veins. His mother, Jemima Foudrinier, is of Huguenot and French extraction. His father comes of a family of Dutch Jews. The original patronymic name was Newmann or Neumann, which was anglicised into Newman ; and the Hebrew ancestry left such indelible traces that Dr. 38 CARDINAL NEWMAN Barry, with a confidence which I cannot wholly share, would make us believe that it is visible in all the portraits of Newman, especially the latest. If physical heredity were so obvious, there ought to be little more difficulty in tracing the influence of moral heredity and in explaining the contradictions of New- man's temperament by the contradictions of his origin. Biographers might show us the Jewish influence in the pliability and subtlety of his intellect and in the obsession of religious ideas; they might with equal plausibility show us the influence of his Calvinistic ancestry in his inflexible puritanism, in the rigidity of his logic and the lucidity of his style. But even those who attach no importance to those pseudo-scientific speculations would find no less piquancy in the obser- vation that the future restorer of Catholicism in England was the descendant of Jews and Huguenots. The ways of the Lord are unfathomable ! The father of Newman was a banker in the City of London, and this fact reminds us of another most curious coincidence ; and I wonder that Newman, who attributed the slightest incidents of his life to a special interposition of Providence, should not have thought of this coincidence and of the mysterious connection between finance and the Catholic revival. The three great counter-reformers of English Catholicism in the nineteenth century — Newman, Manning, and Ward — were all of them sons of London bankers ; the parents of Manning and of Ward were directors of the Bank of England and Members of Parliament. In other words, the three eminent men who all their lives preached and practised absolute renunciation and detachment from worldly things were the children of wealthy financiers. NEWMAN'S PERSONALITY 39 It is true indeed — and this is another coincidence no less strange — that the three parents all became bankrupt or failed before the sons became converted ; that is to say, that the ruin of the parents paved the way to the conversion of the children. Once more the ways of the Lord are unfathomable ! Newman's family was obviously endowed with un- common vitality and presents us with an extraordinary case of longevity : two of his sisters became octo- genarians; Newman himself and his brother Francis became nonagenarians. Nor were the intellectual gifts of the family less remarkable. One of Newman's sisters was his con- fidante and trusted adviser in the hours of doubt and perplexity. Francis Newman had at Oxford an even more brilliant academic career than his brother. A missionary in Persia, a professor of Latin at University College, a prolific writer, he dispersed his universal curiosity over the most diverse matters. It is one of Newman's controversial commonplaces that there is no alternative between Catholicism and atheism. His brother seems to prove the truth of the paradox. Francis Newman in a few years passed from the most exclusive religion to unbelief. Finally, there is one other fact which ought to be noticed with regard to Newman's family and which cer- tainly points to extraordinary strength of character. In the Wilberf orce family, three out of four brothers became Roman Catholic converts, and the fourth became the leader of the Anglo-Catholic party. In the case of Newman, he was followed neither by his mother nor by any of his brothers or sisters, and this isolation in his own family is all the more astonishing when we 40 CARDINAL NEWMAN remember the almost miraculous power of attraction and fascination which Newman had even over entire strangers. John Henry was a serious and precocious child ; and if thoughtlessness and light - heartedness are the characteristic of childhood, it might be said that he never was a child. From his earliest years he shows his taste for solitude and self-examination. He is reserved and reticent and almost unsociable, not only with his companions at school, but with his brothers and sisters. Brought up by a very pious mother and a very intellectual father, he very soon reveals his double literary and religious vocation. He shows a strong disposition for mathematics and for music — which one day will be his sole diversion from more serious pursuits. He knows the Bible by heart. At the age of fourteen he publishes a newspaper. He studies the great writers. One of his critics, Mr. R. H. Hutton, would make us believe that Newman became a stylist against his own will, that he never took any care of his form, that it was an innate gif t.^ As a matter of fact, if Newman became one of the classics of English literature, it is largely because from his adolescence he served his apprenticeship as an artist in words. ^ Mr. Hutton develops through three pages this statement, which is absolutely contrary to fact. It is a beautiful instance of the fascina- tion wielded by the Cardinal even over Protestant writers, a fascination which entirely paralyses the critical faculty. Another statement by the same author also gives us the proof how difficult it was to agree on the subject of Newman, even for most competent judges and for Protestants. According to Mr. Hutton, it was after his conversion that Newman wrote his finest books ; according to Gladstone, he never wrote anything as a Catholic, equal to his Parochial Sermons or his History of the Arians {sic). I must add that between Hutton and Gladstone, I would rather follow the critic than the statesman. NEWMAN'S PERSONALITY 41 He tells us himself that from a very early date he would imitate in turn the style and phraseology of one particular writer. And if he had felt the same scruples about studying the pagan writers of Rome and Greece, which were so painfully felt by the early fathers, Newman might well have applied to himself the self-reproach of St. Jerome : thou art not a Christian, thou art a Ciceronian ! Irony of mundane things ! It was mainly on pagans like Cicero, heretics like Addison and Johnson, and unbelievers like Gibbon, that Newman formed and moulded his own style. At fifteen years of age takes place his first conver- sion. According to M. Br^mond, this is the decisive crisis of his inner life, more important even than his second conversion. From this moment he dedicates himself to the service of God. He makes a vow of celibacy, a strange vow on the part of a Protestant youth ! The Italian patriot and Dante-scholar Rossetti, the famous parent of more famous children, tells us in his ingenious commentary on the Divine Comedy that in the conception of Dante the Roman imperial power has two aspects : Roma means rohur, strength inspiring terror. Read the word backwards, and Roma becomes Amxyr, the city of love, the bond of unity amongst nations. In the religious conception of Newman the God of Catholic Rome presents the same two aspects — he is a God of love and terror; but he has always dwelt far more on the idea of religion of wrath and retribution than on the idea of mercy and forgiveness. And this insistence on the dark and awful side of religion is attributed by M. Br^mond to the lasting efiect of Newman's first conversion and of his evan- gelical upbringing. And M. Br^mond's opinion, which 42 CARDINAL NEWMAN is always weighty, is confirmed by another critic belonging to an opposite school of theological thought. According to Dr. Whyte, Newman always remained under the influence of the Mosaic Law ; he never sur- rendered himself to the influence of the New Testament. He never quite shook off the shackles of Calvinism. He himself confesses in his Apologia that, after God, he almost owed his soul to the study of Thomas Scott. The money difficulties in which his father became involved cast a gloom over Newman's adolescent years, and compelled him to hurry on his studies and to put himself in a position to assist his family instead of being a burden upon their scanty resources. In his sixteenth year he is matriculated in the ancient University with which his name and his work remain indissolubly associated. At Oxford he first becomes conscious of his powers. At Oxford he spends the thirty decisive years of his life. And during those thirty years only once will he leave his beloved University ; and in the midst of the enchantments of Sicily and Greece he will only think of his college, firmly resolved never again to suffer such a terrible wrench. And even after his conversion he will always yearn to return to the scene of his first labours and plan the establishment of a Roman Catholic College at Oxford. When, after the publication of the Apologia, Protestant opinion came over to his side, Newman eagerly renewed his connection with his Oxford colleagues, and he became a frequent and revered guest of his old friend, the Dean of St. Paul. And in this connection it is interesting to compare New- man's feeling towards Oxford with Manning's feeling towards Rome. Manning is ever travelling between NEWMAN'S PERSONALITY 43 London and Rome. Newman as a Catholic only once visited the City of the Apostles as an old man and on his appointment as Cardinal, though it would have been so important for him by personal explana- tions to remove the suspicions of the Vatican. Rome only appealed to his intellect, as the centre of Catholic unity ; Oxford was the home of his heart. As a student at Oxford Newman went through the traditional courses, which are still substantially the same in our own day. Seventy-five years count for very little in the life of a British Alma Mater. We must never forget that the original equipment of Newman was very meagre, and his intellectual horizon very limited : a modicum of philology and of mathematics, and an intensive rather than an extensive study of the classics. Living in the ancient world, the modern world does not interest him. For one moment he thought of studying German literature, but he soon gave up the project. In this connection Dean Stanley — somewhat inaptly, in my opinion — remarks how difierent would have been the fate of Newman and of the Anglican Church if he could have found the leisure to assimilate German thought. The beginnings of Newman at Oxford, like those of many great men, did not announce what he was to be one day. Indeed, he made a far less brilliant career than his younger brother ; and it is interesting to notice that as late as 1833, during his Italian journey, he is referred to as the brother of that distinguished scholar Francis Newman. John Henry's final trial for First- Class Honours was a lamentable failure, partly attri- butable to a nervous breakdown, and partly to his absorption in theological studies. That this failure did 44 CARDINAL NEWMAN not prevent him from being elected soon after as a Fellow of Oriel College is a convincing proof that his personality had already impressed itself upon his con- temporaries. This fellowship gave him both moral influence and material independence, and Newman has always considered the 22nd of April 1822 as one of the epochs of his life. From this day his public life may be said to begin. Already, before his election, Newman had decided for a clerical career. For one brief moment his father had destined him to the bar, and had entered his name at Lincoln's Inn. But this was only a passing thought. Never was there a religious vocation more spontaneous and more certain. He understood that he had a cure of souls as soon as he became conscious of his power to influence others. And that power he soon exhibited to an extraordinary degree. There are fifty points in Newman's life and work which have given rise to ardent controversies. But there has always been absolute unanimity on his magnetic gift in drawing to himself those with whom he came in contact. And the faculty appears all the more marvellous when we remember that it was combined with a shy and reserved disposition. He was never happier than when he was alone with his books. He had a reputation for unsociableness. The head of his college, once meeting him on one of his solitary walks, said to him, smiling : " Nunquam minus solus quam cum solus ! " He abhorred being considered as a party leader. He was always shrinking from honours and dignities. He was only willing to accept responsibilities which were unpleasant and painful, and which the course of events would thrust upon him. Never was there any man more NEWMAN'S PERSONALITY 45 devoid of all worldly ambition. And it was in the fitness of things that the greatest religious genius of his century, the man of whom even opponents like Gladstone only spoke in a whisper of awe and ad- miration, should live to the age of seventy-eight, as a humble and solitary monk. He was a devoted friend, an affectionate son and brother, ready for every sacrifice, and for many years the Providence of his family. Cor ad cor loqidtMr was one of his favourite mottoes. He was always ready to give in when he alone was concerned. He was only firm and obstinate when he thought that the interests of religion were at stake. Then he became unbending, uncompromising, and even relentless, vindictive, never hesitating to sacrifice his dearest and nearest friends. At an early age we hear of painful scenes with his father for not observing the Sabbath. Later on he broke with his friend and patron Archbishop Whately, as he broke with his brother Francis and with Cardinal Manning. I know of few pages which are more painful reading than his correspondence with Whately, imless it be the scathing attack on Kingsley in the Introduction to the Apologia} Honours and responsibilities soon came to him unsought and against his will. A tutor of his college, vice-principal of St. Alban's Hall, vicar of St. Mary's, and University Preacher, he spends his activity in every direction. He reformed the teaching and the discipline of his college. He gave his time and his pains unsparingly to his pupils. In order to add to the slender resources of his family, he became a * Tlie attack on Kingsley has been suppressed in the later editions of the Aj)ologia. 46 CARDINAL NEWMAN frequent contributor to reviews. His health suffered severely under the mental strain of these early years, and for a long time after he felt its evil effects. Once he fainted at a public meeting. During his Italian •journey a long and anxious illness nearly proved fatal to his shattered constitution. We have referred to the magnetism of Newman's personality. But we ought not to forget that if Newman profoundly influenced others, he was himself highly receptive and impressionable. An essentially sympathetic intellect, he could enter into the ideas of others. This is indeed part of his power. He has always read the human soul as in an open book. During these first Oxford years Newman was mainly under the influence of Whately, the future Archbishop of Dublin, the leader of the liberal and rationalising school and one of the most remarkable men of his generation, now only known as the author of an ingenious jeu d'esprit on Napoleon,^ then universally known as the author of a treatise on Logic, which was the classical text-book in every British University until it was superseded by Stuart Mill. Newman himself has told us in his Apologia the extent and the nature of Whately's influence. When Whately was appointed Principal of St. Alban's Hall, he chose Newman as his Vice-Principal. He at the same time secured the services of Newman for several of his publications, and it is interesting to note that the future author of the Grammar of Assent contributed some of the chapters of Whately's Logic. Whately felt all the less diflficulty in influencing Newman because the latter's intellectual and rationalist ten- ^ Historic Dovibts on Napoleon Bonaparte. NEWMAN'S PERSONALITY 47 dencies were naturally highly developed. The in- tellectual and dogmatic aspect of religion always had the greatest attraction for Newman. He had an innate gift for theological controversy, and from the outset of his literary career he announced himself as the " doctor subtilis " he was to become in later years. Under the influence of Whately the religious beliefs of Newman were gradually being undermined. One of the most important passages in the Apologia leaves us no doubt on this point,^ But the vitality of his religious and mystical temperament, quickened by illness and bereavement, was soon to conquer this intellectualism. Already in 1829 he had broken with Whately. Outside influences were to assist him in his emancipation : the poetry of Keble, the learning and saintliness of Pusey, whom Newman used to call the great man, (Jbiyag; but above all the strong and original personality of Hurrell Froude. As we saw in the preceding chapter, he owed to Froude the total change in his ideas on Catholicism, his conception of tradition, of authority and dogma. Without underrating these personal influences, I am convinced that it was mainly his own preaching at St. Mary's which gradually developed his religious system, which opened a new horizon and gave him his wonderful spiritual experience : docendo didicit And therefore, whoever wishes to understand the slow growth of his ideas must study chronologically, as Dr. Abbott has done, the ten volumes of sermons preached during Newman's Anglican period. For five years he went on trying the solidity and the resisting power of every new ^ See passage quoted, p. 70. 48 CARDINAL NEWMAN argument, the efficacy and vitality of every new theory. And we can witness how from year to year he moves farther and farther away from rationalistic Protestant- ism ; how his conception of religion becomes more and more intense, ascetic, and mystic ; how he lays more and more stress upon the opposition between the world and the Church, between the City of God and the corrupt city of men, between the natural and the supernatural. And even for those who are unable to sympathise with such a conception of Christianity, nothing could be of more surpassing interest than to observe this internal growth of a great mind, this anxious search for religious truth. An absence of six months came to interrupt this memorable apostolate. His dearest friend, Hurrell Froude, who was already entering on the last stages of a fatal disease, asked Newman to accompany him on a cruise in the Mediterranean. Newman accepted all the more eagerly as his own health was breaking down under the stress of overwork, and as he was going through one of those painful internal crises which marked the successive stages of his conversion. He was hoping that a complete change of surroundings might bring him back both health and peace of mind. Newman's biographers have perhaps not dwelt enough on the enormous importance of the Italian journey on the development of his genius. I am inclined to think that it had in Newman's life the same importance which the journey to Italy had in Goethe's. In the first place, that vision of a new world, those marvels of southern climes, that diversity of races, those great scenes of the world's history widen his mental horizon, quicken his- imagination, NEWMAN'S PERSONALITY 49 produce an expansion of his whole being. The daemon of poetry seizes hold of him with irresistible force. Every stage of his voyage is marked by a succession of poems which alone would have suflBced to immor- talise his name. When we consider this sudden and spontaneous outburst of poetry, and when we remember how relentlessly the poetical impulse was repressed and suppressed in later years, we cannot help thinking, with a pang of regret, what a great poet was lost in the theologian, that but for this self-suppression we might have had many a masterpiece equal to the Dream of Oerontius, and that the controversial writings, however powerful, can be no adequate compensation for the loss of the poetry. But the Mediterranean journey also produced mental and spiritual results of a very different character. Having lived hitherto in his narrow Oxford world, he had no confidence in liimself . He did not know whether his ideas were not the idols of his own little cave, the reflection of his own limited experience, and whether a larger experience might not shake his first conclusion. Now, here he found himself on the scene of the greatest events in the world's history, here it was given to him to contemplate the most enchanting visions of this world; yet all those memories and all those visions, 80 far from taking him away from his inner world, only threw him back upon himself, only deepened his conviction that the invisible world is the only reality, and that life is but a dream. Speaking of the Italian journey, we mentioned the name of Goethe. It is difficult to imagine two tem- peraments more diverse or a more striking contrast. They bring to the same objects absolutely difierent 4 50 CARDINAL NEWMAN dispositions and carry away absolutely different impressions. The poet of the Roman Elegies gives himself up with rapture to this world of joy and beauty and to the daemon of poetry; he lives in a state of per- petual ecstasy. Newman, equally sensitive to external beauty, a poet and an artist like Goethe, also feels at first the divine afflatus, and is carried into the upper regions. But from this state of rapture he is soon plunged into the depths of depression. Those enchantments are to him, in their etymological sense, incantations. The charm that acts upon him is a " Carmen," a temptation of the evil spirit. He lives in terror lest this external world may take him away from his spiritual centre, and lest nature may receive some of the homage and the rapture which belongs only to God. He longs to return to his student's cell. He is determined never to expose himself in the future to such temptations. He shuts his windows to the light of day. The light which he seeks is the nocturnal light which reveals to him the infinite expanse of the starry heaven. And amidst those sublime surroundings, all he writes is touched with sadness. Amongst seventy poems, there is not one which is not in a minor key. Whereas Goethe is always serene and objective, Newman is always distracted and subjective. He loses his internal balance. He is in the slough of despond. At Malta, detained in quarantine, he remains in the Lazaretto, voluntarily separated from his intimate friend, and he indulges the most morbid feelings. He has exacted from his travelling companions that they should leave him to himself, and yet he feels miserable to be taken at his word. He becomes restless. Four times he travels backwards and forwards between Rome and Naples. NEWMAN'S PERSONALITY 51 He goes to Sicily, and back again to Rome, then back again to Sicily. All the contradictory emotions of those six months very nearly proved fatal to his ex- hausted frame. Laid up several times in the course of the voyage, in Sicily he is within sight of death. From the above remarks it will appear that the importance of the Italian journey cannot easily be oveiTated. It was a new man that returned to Oxford, apparently weakened by illness, but morally strengthened and fully armed for the impending struggle. Newman himself was conscious of the change, as is shown by the motto he adopted for the Lyra Apostolica, a collection of religious poems which he published in collaboration with his friends. And if the beginning of the Tractarian Movement has been fixed in 1833, after Newman's return, it is not because on a certain day of July in that year the Reverend John Keble preached a sermon on National Apostasy, but because from that date Newman has become fully conscious of his mission and has been delivered of his doubts. Henceforth he becomes a man of action. His former depression is succeeded by a feeling of serenity and happiness. These first years after 1833 are years of joyous and ceaseless activity. They aflford the best reply to the thesis of Monsieur Gout that Newman was a sufferer from melancholia, a Hamlet tortured by religious doubt. He is everywhere, and plays every part: preacher, journalist, theologian, and last, not least, organiser and party leader. I have described in a previous chapter the varied aspects and the results of the activity of those prolific years. In a succeeding chapter I shall attempt to discover the deep-seated causes of his conversion. We 52 CARDINAL NEWMAN may therefore come at once to the state of mind of the convert on the morrow of the crisis. We know from the Apologia that after fifteen years of incessant strife there succeeded an unbroken era of profound peace. This statement requires some interpretation and some qualification. If it only means that Newman had found a final solution to all his doubts, the fact is obvious. He had no more to speak for himself. Rome henceforth would reply to all his difficulties. Roma locuta est. He could impose silence to all his uncertainties: ubi silentiv/m faciunt, pacem appellant But, on the other hand, whatever may have been the internal peace of the convert, which seems con- tradicted by the painful expression of several of the later portraits,^ his aggressive temperament, his rest- less mind, ever in quest of the Holy Grail, were not to know the blessing of perfect tranquillity : controversy and strife were to fill his existence after as well as before the conversion. After the fifteen years of open struggle with the Protestant section in the Anglican Church, there came the silent struggle with his new co-religionists. He brought to the Catholic Church his personal ideas, his audacities, the habit of command, an unwearied intellectual activity. Having reached "il mezzo del cammin di nostra vita" it was too late to put off the old man. He tells us himself that on joining the Roman Church he was not conscious of any internal change. And his temperament and his habits were necessarily to come into conflict with the conservative ^ See the most interesting collection of portraits in Canon Barry's book. NEWMAN'S PERSONALITY 53 and ultramontane sections of the Church. As long as Cardinal Wiseman remained at the helm, his tact, his liberal mind were able to forestall or to diminish the causes of friction. Besides, during his first years Newman found ample scope for his activity. Even before he had had time to complete his theological education, he had been intrusted by Pius ix. with the task of restoring in England the Oratory of St. Philip of Neri. The establishment of his Institute, settled in one of the poorest districts of Birmingham, the foundation of a school annexed to it, absorbed all his organising powers. Then came the great crisis of 1850, the restoration of the hierarchy, the anti-papal agitation, the Achilli trial. Newman threw himself into the struggle with his whole heart and soul. In defending his co-religionists, it was his own cause which he was pleading before the tribunal of public opinion. In the appreciation of an excellent judge, his discourse on the Position of Catholics contains perhaps the most admirable models of irony and polemical power which are to be found in his writings.^ The advent of Manning brought with it a new orientation in the policy of the Catholic Church in England and a complete change in the position of Newman. Manning felt the urgent need of tightening the bond with Rome. He was more a papist than the pope. He adopted towards Protestants an uncompro- mising, aggressive attitude. Newman was in favour of a conciliatory policy. The conflict, which at that moment divided all the Catholic Churches of Europe between the ultramontane section and the moderate section, which in France called forth the duel between Veuillot * Birrell, Set Judicata^ 54 CARDINAL NEWMAN and Montalembert, proved no leas acute in England, Some of Newman's old Oxford friends — W. Ward, Father Faber — attached themselves to the party of Manning, and the Dublin Review, of which Ward became the editor, was almost as ultramontane as the Univers. Newman fell into disfavour in high quarters. His ideas became suspicious. At Rome he was considered as being more English than the Anglicans.^ Monsignor Talbot proclaimed him the most dangerous man of the Church in England. He is accused of minimising dogma.^ Manning repeats the old accusation that Newman is at heart a sceptic.^ All his schemes are thwarted. He is anxious to realise a plan dear to English Catholics and establish a Catholic University at Dublin, He becomes its first rector. The undertaking fails from lack of funds and in the face of the indifference and hostility of some of the bishops.* When this dream vanished Newman offered to found a Catholic College at Oxford, in the very stronghold held by the enemy. This project, which in our days has been realised by the Jesuits and the Benedictines, was strenuously opposed by Manning. There was not sufficient confi- dence in the orthodoxy of Newman, and it was feared that Catholic youth under a guide suspected of liberal tendencies might be corrupted by the contagious atmosphere of Oxford. It is difficult for outsiders to understand those suspicions towards a man who had sacrificed everything to the Catholic Church. And it is even more difficult to become reconciled to the decision * Purcell, Id/e of Manning, ii. 318. 2 Ibid. ii. 326. » Ibid, ii, 330. * See Newman, My Campaign in Ireland. NEWMAN'S PERSONALITY 55 of the authorities when we consider how much the religious life of England would have been stimulated by a Catholic College at Oxford guided and inspired by the genius of Newman. In face of the attitude of ultramontanes, Newman withdrew more and more from the world. He gave up direct action. He divided himself between his humble teaching duties and his apologetical and controversial writings. Like St. Jerome in his Her- mitage of Bethlehem, Newman from his Edgbaston Oratory issues incessantly his treatises and pamphlets, his replies to attacks on the Church. Not that he loved controversy for its own sake, but controversy brought into play his most brilliant gifts aiid was to him, a disguised form of action. Amongst all his controversies, the most important was the one with Kingsley. Poor honest Kingsley, the most kind-hearted and broad-minded of theologians, carried away by the old anti-Roman prejudice and unconsciously influenced by the fanaticism of his brother-in-law, James Anthony Froude, had indulged in a few unfortunate lines incriminating the veracity of Catholics in general and of Newman in particular. Newman eagerly seized the opportunity, which he had long sought, of replying to the insinuation of his opponents and of justifying his policy and his personal conduct. The innuendo of Kingsley was as clumsy as it was unfair. The reply of Newman was a merciless execution. The first fifty pages of the Apologia are one of the most virulent assaults extant in any literature. TantcBne anirais ccelestihus ircB ! Newman was quite justified in suppressing them in the subsequent editions ; for if they were unsurpassed models of irony they 56 CARDINAL NEWMAN certainly did not breathe the spirit of Christian charity.^ And even apart from reasons of Christian charity, a purely artistic motive of literary taste would have compelled him to suppress the assault on Kingsley. For this abuse and vituperation would have produced a most jarring effect in a religious autobiography, the history of a soul in quest of the Absolute, where the style is always simple and the tone always serene, and where the emotion is kept under control all through the volume until it bursts out in the last page in that pathetic dedication to Ambrose St. John. The publication of the Apologia brought back Protestant opinion to Newman's side and called forth a general movement of sympathy. But he did not regain the confidence of the Catholic hierarchy. The ultramontanes remained hostile to him and did not forgive him the independence of his attitude. Whilst Manning becomes at the Vatican the undisputed leader of the " Infallibilist " party, Newman ranges himself on the side of the " Opportunists." He belongs to that illustrious minority which includes all the great names of the Church : Dollinger, Dupanloup, Gratry, Stross- mayer, Montalembert. In a famous letter to Bishop Ullathome, he denounces the " insolent faction " which would like to convert the world by insults and excommunications.^ After the promulgation of the dogma, in vain does Newman accept the accomplished fact. His submission is not complete and is accompanied with too many reservations to please the ultramontane party. His letter to the Duke of Norfolk in reply to the attacks of ^ Cf. the interesting remarks of Hort {Life and Letters). a See Chapter VIII. NEWMAN'S PERSONALITY 57 Gladstone is no doubt a powerful vindication of the Roman position and of the legitimacy of papal in- fallibility ; but, whilst justifying the dogma, Newman interprets it, qualifies it, reduces it to a minimum, and above the authority of the pope he asserts the authority of the moral and religious conscience. The indirect result of the controversy with Gladstone on Vaticanism was to reveal to the Roman Curia the immense prestige of Newman with English Protestants. The great statesman again and again interrupts his argument to do homage to the great Oratorian. He proclaims that the secession of Newman is the most terrible blow struck at the Anglican Church since the sixteenth century. Yet the most illustrious convert whom Roman Catholicism had gained in England since the days of Luther was living under a cloud, in dis- favour, the object of unjust suspicions. And for twenty-five years he had submitted to these suspicions without a word of protest. The leaders of the Catholic laity realised that it was urgent to make an end of such a scandal. The enemies of Rome were beginning to assert that there was no room in the Roman Church for this great intellect and this great heart, and that therefore the Roman Church had no right to claim him as one of her own children. On the accession of Leo XIII., on the initiative of the great Catholic noblemen, and notwithstanding the difficulties raised by Manning, Newman was raised to the Cardinalate. It was one of the first acts of the new reign, and was hailed by the unanimous approval of the Protestant as well as of the Catholic world. The year before his promotion he had been elected an Honorary Fellow of Merton. 58 CARDINAL NEWMAN From this moment the Great Oratorian, if his spirit had still dwelt in the world, might have witnessed the gradual building up of his "Legend." He saw death approaching slowly in the distance, like the dawn of that invisible reality to which he had so ardently aspired. For twelve more years he sur- vived the official consecration of his life-work, the last witness of a great religious revolution. His death at the age of eighty-nine was a euthanasia. The homage of the world on the morrow of his death was an apotheosis. If we attempt to gather the scattered traits of Newman's physiognomy, we are at once stopped by the bewildering complexity of the man. Dr. Barry gives us in his book twelve different portraits taken at different periods of his life. No one is like any other. Each one presents us with a "development" of the previous portrait and reveals to us a new aspect. His face appears to us in turn gentle and hard, manly and feminine, smiling and stern, kindly and contemptuous, cheerful and sad, pathetically and tragically sad. And what is true of the physical portrait is equally true of the moral portrait. The character of F^nelon which St. Simon gives us in his Memoires is scarcely more contradictory than the one which a scrupulous psychologist would have to give us of Newman. Manning was right: that man was an enigma. If he was misunderstood, it was because he could not be understood. His orbit could not be calculated. Newman is an ascetic, and at the same time he is an artist, a literary epicure, appreciating beauty of style, NEWMAN'S PERSONALITY 59 even as in his youth he would be asked to taste and to select the vintages of his college. He is affectionate and reserved. He has the imagination of a mystic and the corrosive intellect of a sceptic. He delights in intellectual difficulties and yearns for certainty. He is sincerity incarnate, and possessed of a subtlety which the greatest casuist might have envied. He is disinterested to the verge of self-abdication, he has sacrificed everything to enter the Roman Church, and, having once entered it, he accepts twenty-five years of disgrace and suppression with admirable resignation ; and at the same time he is egotistic, introspective, of an almost morbid subjectivity. He is timid and aggressive. He loves solitude, and yet no man in this century has drawn to himself so many hearts. Indeed, after having striven for ten years to solve the riddle of the sphinx, I am inclined to admit that the riddle is insoluble, and that the safest attitude with regard to Newman is to admire without trying to understand. CHAPTER IV Why was Newman Converted to Roman Catholicism? There is one definite question to which whoever studies Newman is obliged to reply, but which most biographers are anxious to evade, or which they are careful not to look full in the face : Why was Newman converted to Roman Catholicism ? Why should he have sacrificed everything — his position, his reputation, his influence, his life-work, natural affections the most sacred — in order to join a Church despised and abhorred by the immense majority of his countrymen ? No doubt the study of Newman's personality, of the writer, of the thinker, suggests a great number of questions of surpassing interest ; but, after all, the study of those questions is secondary compared to the interest of the central problem of his conversion. And I am not thinking here of the theoretic or dramatic interest of those crises of the religious conscience, or of the moral beauty of sacrifice, of an uncompro- mising idealism ; I am thinking only of the practical and 'personal interest presented by Newman's conver- sion. For, ae I pointed out at the outset of this volume, this spiritual crisis is our own: nostra res agiturf The same struggles which once agitated Newman are 60 WHY WAS NEWMAN CONVERTED? 6i being repeated in thousands of souls. The same arguments which actuated Newman have brought tens of thousands within the Roman fold. And for that reason Newman remains both one of the representative men and one of the living forces of our time. To the question just stated two contradictory answers have generally been given, answers equally vague and therefore equally unsatisfactory. The first answer is the one of the Protestant or of the freethinker: Newman has delivered up his soul to a debasing superstition. He has accepted the servitude of an external authority. He has not been strong enough to bear the burden of freedom. He has voluntarily extin- guished the divine light of reason and of conscience. The second reply is that of Catholics. Newman has become converted because he has been touched by Divine grace ; because, having anxiously searched after truth in obedience to the behests of conscience, he has been able to find the truth which he was seeking, and which he loved even before knowing it — only in the bosom of the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church. If it were impossible to give any other explanations of Newman's conversion, I would have avoided, like most of my predecessors, examining the question — having neither the desire nor the authority to conduct a purely theological controversy. I therefore do not venture to discuss or to refute either of those explanations. I would merely suggest that, alongside of them, there may be a third explanation. NewTtian became a convert because Catholicism was adapted to his tem- perament, because there was a pre-established hai^mony between his character and the Catholic system, because his soul was natv/raliter catholica. In one word, the 62 CARDINAL NEWMAN conversion of Newman is a 'psychological much more than a theological problem. I am inclined to think that we are on the eve of an epoch-making change, of a widening and deepening of our conceptions of religion. Hitherto we have looked upon religion as a matter of controversy, as an intel- lectual and dogmatic problem, or as a moral and political problem. The philosopher of the future will see in religion a disposition of the mind, a psychological phenomenon, the psychological phenomenon.^ The apo- logist of religion will seek his arguments not in metaphysics, nor in archaeology, nor in philology, but in the depths of the human soul. No doubt he will accept the intellectual, moral, political, and aesthetic elements of religion, but he will discover that intellectual dogmas, ethical judgments, political institutions, aesthetic rites and symbols correspond to certain spiritual conditions, to certain needs, to certain desires, and that those needs and desires vary according to race and climate and surroundings, that they vary with the individual, and even in the same individual according to the atmosphere he finds himself in for the time being. In other words, there exist in mankind temperaments naturally Christian or Mohammedan or Buddhist; and amongst Christians there are tem- peraments naturally Catholic or Protestant or sceptical. For instance, why have the French people and generally Latin nations been so strangely non-receptive to Protes- tantism ? Why has Protestantism for three centuries made no progress in the south of Europe ? On the ^This new tendency is reflected in "William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. See also Professor Boutroux's new work on the relations between science and religion. WHY WAS NEWMAN CONVERTED? 63 contrary, why have the Teutonic nations generally, and especially the Scandinavian people, been non-receptive to Catholicism? For instance, why is Catholicism practically extinct in Norway and in Sweden ? ^ Or again, why has Buddhism converted hundreds of millions of Asiatics, whilst Christianity, notwithstanding the heroic apostolate of thousands of missionaries, has not moved one step forward ? Why in Africa is it rather Mohammedanism that has conquered the savage tribes of the Dark Continent — not, be it remembered, by the sword, but by persuasion ? Or again, why in the United States are negroes generally repelled by Angli- canism and Roman Catholicism, and why are they attracted by Methodism ? The geographical distribution of religion presents us with a definite collection of facts which cannot be ignored and which must be explained. And is not the only explanation that between certain nations and certain religions there are elective aflSnities ? The believer will at once object that this is the explanation of a sceptic or a fatalist or an indifferentist, but the objection does not hold, because our explanation does not exclude the explanation of the believer. Even to the believer, unless he shuts his eyes to the light, there must be degrees in the scale of truth, there must be qualitative differences ; there are religions more or less false, there is a more or less imperfect apprehension of the one revealed truth. No doubt the believer holds by this one absolute, objective, dogmatic truth, but alongside of this absolute truth and standard there is ' The same psychological reason would explain the Greek schism. According to Hamack ( fFesen des Chrisienthums) the Greek Church is not Christianity permeated with Hellenism, bat Hellenism permeated with Christianity. 64 CARDINAL NEWMAN a relative, psychological truth : there must be a human, historical explanation of the different perceptions of truth. And the explanation is this: Catholicism and Protestantism, Mohammedanism and Buddhism, succeed and spread because they are adapted, and in proportion as they are adapted, to the needs and desires of definite individuals and definite nations. If an additional proof were wanted that religion is above all a subjective phenomenon, is it not a fact that the very same religion assumes infinitely diverse forms according to the dispositions of the believer ? Even the Roman Catholic religion, which boasts of being invari- able, varies only somewhat less than other religions. Nobody has proved more clearly than Newman himself that Catholicisvi is subject to continuous deveUypments, and that these developments are legitimate and inevit- able, because they only obey the laws of life.^ For instance, what a vast difference there is between the intellectual Catholicism of the Frenchman and the materialistic Catholicism of the Andalusian or Portuguese, or even between Belgian Catholicism, which proscribes the reading of the gospel, and English Catholicism, which prescribes it.^ There is a famous saying of Gibbon which is con- stantly quoted and constantly misunderstood: "All religions are equally true to the believer, equally false to the philosopher, and equally useful to the statesman." Gibbon himself has only attached to these words a super- ^ I am quite conscious that I am straining the meaning which Newman attached to "development" (see Chapter IX.). ^ Brought up in Belgium as a Catholic, before going to the University I had read an infinite number of books of Catholic devotion, but I had never been given an opportunity of reading the New Testament, much less the Old Testament. WHY WAS NEWMAN CONVERTED? 65 ficial and literal sense. But there is another and a deeper sense in which this assertion can be accepted even by the believer,and which enables us to distinguish the different aspects under which religion must be considered. " All religions are equuiUy true to the believer." This is a mere statement of fact. Buddhists, Mohammedans, Christians are equally convinced of the truth of their beliefs, and if there be a difference between the Mo- hammedan and the Christian, it is this, that the faith of the Mohammedan is more absorbing and more fanatical than the faith of the Christian. "All religions are equally false to the philosopher*' This is again a mere fact of experience. The history of religious philosophy shows us that it is impossible to demonstrate religious truth by a ratiocinative process. Natural theology has seen its day and done its work, and we have given up demanding or expecting philo- sophers to build up our religious creed. And finally, " aU religions are equally useful to the statesman " — that is to say, that the statesman and the sociologist recognise that religion is an element of social preservation, that it is one of the foundations of the political order, that no human community has ever subsisted or could ever subsist without a communion of ideals, without a religious discipline and sanction, without a capital of virtues and beliefs. Break up that communion, do away with that discipline, squander that capital, and social dissolution must follow the bankruptcy of religion. I am only here indicating and suggesting this new philosophy of religion, and I do not intend to go down to the foundation of this tremendous problem. If I have thought it necessary to state it at the outset of 5 66 CARDINAL NEWMAN our inquiry, it is simply because, whatever may be its intrinsic value, it is this new philosophy and this new method which alone can give us the explanation of Newman's conversion. What strikes us first of all in his conversion is that it is not the result of some sudden crisis, of some external catastrophe. It is the result of a development, gradual, internal, inevitable. And nothing strikes us more when we read the Apologia than this very in- evitableness. In becoming a Catholic, and in order to become a Catholic, Newman did not need to change his nature ; there was pre-established harmony between his character and Catholicism : Newman's soul is naturally Catholic, as Carlyle's is naturally Protest- ant, as Goethe's and Montaigne's is naturally pagan. In that rich and complex personality, I distinguish three fundamental needs, three activities, three highly developed organs, which in other men are generally mutually exclusive, but which in Newman complete each other : the intellectual and logical need of a dia- lectician, the metaphysical and mystical imagination of an idealist, the practical sense and the indomitable will of a man of action. Such seems to me to be the complete formula of his genius, if such a genius can ever be expressed in a formula. Now an incomplete, one-sided, mutilated religion like the historical forms of modern Protestantism, a religion which is a principle, necessary no doubt, and which will assert itself as long as the dignity of human nature, but which can be nothing more than a principle, and which cannot be a philosophical synthesis and a political system, such a religion could not possibly satisfy the needs of a temperament such as Newman's. Only an WHY WAS NEWMAN CONVERTED? 67 integral religion, complex and contradictory like his own personality, could meet the demands and harmonise the oppositions of his nature. 1. Let us first consider the intellectual side of Newman. It is obvious that Newman has brought to the study of the religious problem the ratiocinative tem- perament, and that he has always taken a constitutional delight in dialectical methods, in dogmatic controversies, in the purely intellectual aspect of religion. He is pre-eminently the ^'doctor subtilis." From his ado- lescence we have seen him show a predilection for pure logic, for abstract ideas ; we have seen him co-operate with Archbishop Whately in the composition of a treatise of Logic. As he writes very well, and as he possesses one of the most lucid intellects of modem times, professional theologians have never consented to recognise him as one of their own; he nevertheless remains, in the words of Abb^ Loisy, almost the only great theologian the Catholic Church has produced in the nineteenth century. He reminds us of that golden age of theological controversy which he had studied during the best part of his life. M, Br^mond notwithstanding, if in his style Newman is a pure Atticist, he is an Alexandrian Greek by the peculiar turn of his intellect ; and his training, like that'of the Alexandrians, has been a mixture of Hellenism, Judaism, and Christianity. Newman has never understood a purely affective religion, the pectoral theology of a Schleiermacher or a Neander. He has always insisted on the importance of dogma. A considerable part of his writings is purely dogmatic and doctrinal : his book on the Arians, his Essay on Miracles, hiB University Ser7non8,hia Essay on Justification, his Essay on Development, his Grammar 68 CARDINAL NEWMAN of Assent. And from this point of view I am astonished that nobody^ should have observed how Newman's conversion was reflective, self-conscious, methodical, I might almost say artificial and bookish. I am not sure whether this conversion is not unique in religious history. I confess I do not see a parallel to it. Most great conversions have been determined by an emotional crisis, by sufferings or deceptions or bereavement ; they have been more or less sudden, produced by a cat- astrophe, an illumination, a stroke of the Divine grace. The classical type of a religious conversion is that of St. Augustine : I have sinned, I have suffered, I have believed ; or that of Pauline in Corneille's masterpiece — " Je vols, je sais, je crois, je suis ddsabusee, Je suis chr^tienne enfin ! " There is no such catastrophe in Newman. He ad- vances step by step, methodically. His conversion is a series of logical processes and syllogisms, and it takes him fifteen years to develop them. He was transformed not by certain personal influences, not by certain events, but by certain principles and certain books, and in that precise meaning I think we are almost justified in calling his conversion bookish and artificial .2 Remember the opening of the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius and the enumeration of his intellectual and moral debts. The first chapter of the Apologia makes us think of the Roman Emperor, always with this important difference, that Marcus Aurelius was ^ Except Dr. Whyte, who does not press the point. * I am quite aware of the passage in the Apologia which I am quoting p. 70 ; but that passage does not refute my main contention. WHY WAS NEWMAN CONVERTED? 69 influenced by persons, whilst Newman was influenced by his reasonings and his readings : to Bishop Butler he owes the principle that probability is the guide of life ; to Whately he owes his belief in the independ- ence of the Church ; to Froude he owes his belief in tradition and ecclesiastical hierarchy ; to Thomas Scott he owes his belief in the Holy Trinity and he " almost owes his soul." This intellectual temperament gives us the key to many of the peculiarities of his writings, of his style, and of his method. He feels an irresistible need of clearness and certainty. At the same time he is very exacting with regard to the evidence which produces that certainty, and he is implacable towards a rhetoric which would make him accept vague declamations or an appeal to sentiment or imagination instead of definite reasons. An honest and sincere thinker, he takes the reader into the confidence of his doubts and diflficulties. He believes that the first duty of a thinker is to find the truth, and to express it without afterthought or reserve, and to do justice to an opponent when a line of argu- ment seems to favour the opponent rather than himself. He does not believe that in theology the end justifies the means, and that it is permitted, even with a view to edification, to suggest to the reader a certainty which one does not possess oneself. Never has any apologist of religion stated objections or diflBculties with more force, and courage, and sympathy. And precisely be- cause he is scrupulous and honest, he leaves upon us the impression of a restless mind ; for, being both anxious to possess certitude and exacting with regard to the proofs which establish it — and as nowhere else Is it more 70 CARDINAL NEWMAN difficult to establish those proofs than in the province of religion — he seems to condemn himself to perpetual motion and to a hopeless quest of the Holy Grail. And all those qualities of the thinker have left their impress upon his style ; hence that transparency, and sobriety, and austerity of expression which dreads the metaphor ; that slow and cautious advance, which some- times degenerates into prolixity, and which never adds one link to the chain of argument without testing its strength ; hence especially the constant use and frequent abuse of analysis, of subtle distinctions, because in the province of ethics and religion no precision is possible without a perpetual distinguo. Most critics do not admit in Newman this pre- dominance of the intellectual temperament, simply because Newman himself is ever ready to combat intellectualism and to expose its dangers to the spiritual life. As well might we assert that a man who is ever warning us against the dangers of passion has never been its victim himself. No doubt anti - intellectualism is the leitmotiv of Newman's controversy ; and the motto of the Orammar of Assent, borrowed from St. Ambrose, may be taken as the guiding principle of all his writings : " Non in dialectica placuit Deo salvuin facer e populum suum." But this does not contradict our diagnosis, but, on the contrary, confirms it. If Newman does dwell with such emphasis on the perils of intellectualism, it is because he knew them from experience, because he felt the need of a counterpoise, because he knew the impotence of ratiocination for the spiritual life. Here again the Apologia throws a vivid light upon his state of mind : " The truth is, I was beginning to prefer intellectual WHY WAS NEWMAN CONVERTED? 71 excellence to moral ; I was drifting in the direction of the Liberalism of the day. I was rudely awakened from my dream at the end of 1827 by two great blows — illness and bereavement " (Apologia, p. 14). Given this predominance of the intellectual activities, this craving for analysis, this restlessness of mind, Newman must have felt drawn to a religion which would both satisfy and restrain that imperative need of his temperament, keep it within bounds, and sub- ordinate it to what he considered the higher needs of his religious life. Now, the Roman Catholic religion fulfils those two opposite conditions, and no other religion fulfils therfi in the same degree. On the one hand, it gives satisfaction to the intellectual needs; for it is a logical system admirably co-ordinated in all its parts. There is a section of Protestantism, the most active and the most earnest of all, the Evangelical section, which has little room for dogma or doctrine, which reduces theology to a minimum, which derives its stimulus from the emotions and its illumination from the individual conscience. Catholicism, on the contrary, has always attached very great importance to dogma. It has always attempted to express the truths of revelation in a system of formulaa and propositions. This has been the constant Catholic tradition, building up in the Middle Ages the gigantic structures of the scholastic doctors, continued in the sixteenth century by Jesuit theologians like Bellarmine, restored in our days by Pius X. and the neo-Thomism of Leo xiii. Catholic scholasticism has often been compared to a Gothic cathedral. The Gothic cathedral does not stand 7710^ sua, like the rational monuments of Greek or 72 CARDINAL NEWMAN Roman architecture. It violates the laws of gravity, and it would collapse if it were not supported by buttresses; it is in constant need of repair, and is constantly hidden by scaffoldings ; but it is a sublime edifice, adapted to its purpose, suggesting the infinite, and its vertical lines rise in the sky as a symbol of prayer, of hope and aspiration. Even so the masterpieces of Catholic scholasticism of which the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas may be taken as the supreme type : even as the cathedral claims to be independent of the laws of gravity, even so scholasticism claims to be independent of the laws of reason ; it is buttressed by revelation interpreted by authority and tradition, and would collapse without its support ; it also is always in need of repair — in the form of commentaries and interpretations, the explana- tions of one age being superseded by the explanations of another. It also is a monument admirably adapted to its ends; once you grant the premises, what a magnificent system, symmetrical, consistent in all its parts, giving satisfaction to the highest intellectual needs : fides quwrens intellectum ! But, on the other hand, if Roman Catholicism gives satisfaction to intellectual needs, it keeps them within rigorous bounds, it divides the province of reason from the province of faith, it separates the natural from the supernatural. As a matter of fact, in Catholicism the conflict between faith and reason, between science and religion, does exist and has always existed. But logically it is not necessary that it should exist. If it exists, it is owing to the weakness of the Church as a human institution, to the indiscretion of Churchmen, not to the fault of principles. WHY WAS NEWMAN CONVERTED? 73 In the Protestant religion, not only does the conflict also exist, but theoretically it is necessary, it is inevitable ; for in bibliolatric Protestantism science and religion penetrate each other. There are always disputes of jurisdiction, rectification of boundaries. The truth and existence of Protestantism ultimately depend on a series of problems of exegesis. It is the professors of Greek and Hebrew and Assyrian and the professors of embryology and palaeontology who are the umpires of faith. The conclusions of the Neue KHtik are refuted by the conclusions of the Neuere KHtik, which are again upset by the discoveries of the Neueste Kritik. Catholicism is not, or ought not to be, subject to those conflicts. Catholic faith is not based upon Scripture, but on Scripture and tradition, both interpreted and "developed" by the Church. And even when these conflicts do arise, the Catholic religion is not shaken by them as the Protestant, because Catholicism possesses an elaborate discipline, a system of ascetic devotions and spiritual hygiene, the outcome of two thousand years of experience, and capable of stimulating and reviving those convictions which have been for one moment imperilled by doubt. 2. It is doubtful whether either Catholic discipline or Catholic dogma would have proved a sufficient barrier and a sufficient protection if Newman had not possessed another faculty more powerful, another instinct more imperious than his restless intellect; namely, tJie instinct and the craving for the spiritual life, the imagination and sensitiveness of the mystic. Newman is an incurable idealist, who has always lived in the invisible realm of the spirit: he never required to study the Eleatics or Berkeley to believe in 74 CARDINAL NEWMAN the non-reality of the material world. In his child- hood he feeds on The Thousand and One Nights as St. Ignatius Loyola fed on the Romances of Chivalry. On attaining his intellectual manhood, he continues to abstract himself from his surroundings. Dr. Abbott reproaches Newman with sacrificing the realities of reason to the phantoms of his imagination. The objection would have no meaning for Newman, inas- much as to him those phantoms, those pure ideas, are the only eternal, fundamental realities, of which the images of sense are only the changing and ephemeral symbols. All his life Newman has been investigating the mysterious harmonies between the visible and the invisible world. He is a Christian Platonist, and in his Apologia he has written on Alexandrian symbolism a magnificent passage which leaves us in no doubt as to his inmost meaning. It is this absorption in the invisible world which explains the isolation and the reserve which has so often puzzled his contemporaries, and which has often laid him open to the charge of egotism and hardness. The egotism of Newman is the egotism, the introspection of all mystics ; it is the egotism of the author of the Imitation, it is the egotism of Jesus Himself, who com- mands us to relinquish everything for the sake of our salvation and to subordinate to our salvation the affections of the family and the duties of the citizen. An essentially affectionate and tender-hearted nature, an admirable son and brother and friend, his faviily and his friends nevertheless belonged to that external world which was relegated to a second place ; they did not enter that inmost sanctuary in which takes place the mystical dialogue between the soul and its Maker. WHY WAS NEWMAN CONVERTED? 75 There lies the meaning of that favourite idea which recurs so often in the SermoTis and which reappears in the Apologia : ** We are alone, we shall die alone ! " ^ Now, given that poetic imagination, that apprehen- sion of spiritual realities, that mystical sensibility, that systematic symbolism and idealism, Newman must have felt drawn by natural affinity to Roman Catholicism. For Catholicism is essentially a religion of symbols. Catholic poetry, Catholic painting and music express in their language the ideas and ideals of scholasticism. What Dante expresses in images, St. Thomas expresses in syllogisms. And the same angelic doctor has in turn spoken the two languages : the abstract language in the Summa, the concrete language in his Hymns. For that very reason Catholicism has always been favourable to the highest poetry, because in its most adequate expression poetry is symbolism. Even Carlyle has been compelled to see in Shakespeare a Catholic poet. And, in the same sense, an eminent German theologian, Moehler, has been able to see in the contrast between concrete symbolism and abstract rationalism the fundamental opposition between Protestantism and Catholicism. I do not mean to say that Protestantism does not pro- duce any mystics, — thenamesof Boehmeand Swedenborg would refute my assertion, — but there is an essential difference between Catholic and Protestant mysticism. Catholic mysticism is a living principle, a motive of action, a doctrine of love ; Protestant or philosophical mysticism is purely passive, contemplative, sentimental, subjective. It is not the realistic, exuberant, passionate, * The words are borrowed firom Pascal : " junis mourrona aeuls". (Cf. Chapter VII. in this voluiue.) j6 CARDINAL NEWMAN proselytising mysticism of St. Francis of Assisi, of Fray Luis de Leon, of Santa Teresa, the Jacob's ladder between the invisible and the visible world. Catholicism lives and moves and has its being in the supernatural ; sacraments, the ritual, the miracles, maintain the correspondence and harmony between the two worlds. On the contrary, in Protestantism the supernatural is reduced to a minimum ; it only exists in homoeopathic doses ; most leaders of contemporary Protestant thought eliminate it completely. 3. The dualism of the sceptical thinker and the mystic poet are certainly the essential characteristics, but they do not exhaust his complex nature. For in that thinker and in that poet there is a man of action, having the sense of concrete realities, understanding all the springs of conduct. We are too much inclined to see in Newman only the contemplative side. His whole life has been one continuous act of the will straining towards an ideal aim. He does not cease telling us that the end of life is action.^ And contemplation and reason are only of interest in so far as they are directed towards action. A book is a deed, a seed, an active force for good or for evil. All Newman's books have been polemical or controversial works. And if he attaches so much importance to dogma, it is because he knows that a proposition is not an abstract truth but a living principle. He had the soul of an apostle and the practical gifts of an organiser. His first dream in adolescence is to become a missionary.^ On his return ^ See especially the paper on the ^' Tamworth Iteading-Eoom" in Discussicyiis and Arguments. ' His brother Francis became a, missionary in Persia. WHY WAS NEWMAN CONVERTED? 77 from Italy how happy he feels to spend his strength in a restless activity, appearing on the battlefield wherever his presence is needed and wherever he discovers a weak spot in the line of defence. He is scarcely converted when he wishes to found an order. He accepts the rectorship of the University of Ireland, and as soon as the attempt has failed he tries to establish a Catholic college at Oxford and to continue his missionary efforts on the scene of his first triumphs. In the face of the resistance of the ultramontanes and the suspicions of Rome, he is doomed to comparative inaction. This is the great misfortune of his life. And if he keeps up his resentment against Manning till the end, if his feelings of Christian charity are powerless to overcome his antipathy, it is because he makes Manning responsible for his compulsory inactivity. And this man of action is a statesman, a man of government. And the first condition of government is authority. Newman respects authority. The one fact which puts an end to his wavering atti- tude and decides the final step of his conversion is the verdict of authority ; the bishops have spoken out : episcopus locutus est ! Whilst in his theology he is an Alexandrian Greek, in his politics and in practical affairs he is a Roman. Individualism in politics is repugnant to him, and if by liberalism we understand the right of every individual to oppose the veto of his private judgment to the community, to the political or religious organisation of which he is a member, Newman has never been a liberal. Now, here again, as a man of action and of govern- ment, Newman must have felt an invincible attraction 78 CARDINAL NEWMAN to Roman Catholicism, For the Catholic Church is a spiritual army, a body politic entirely directed towards definite action. Through its discipline, its ascetic practices, it strikes at evil in the individual soul. Through its organisation, both monarchical and republican, through its secular hierarchy, through its regular orders, it strikes at evil in the community. And it requires no less than this formidable organisation of the Militant Church, in order — not indeed to triumph over evil, but to resist it, not to be overwhelmed by it, in order that all virtue and all goodness may not disappear from the world. In vain is it asserted that' the authority is too absolute and the discipline too military ; the first duty of the soldier is obedience, more important even than courage; and even though the soldier disapproves of the orders he has received, his duty is to submit. The obedience of Newman for twenty years was submitted to the most severe ordeal. For twenty years he had to submit to a policy which in his inmost heart he disapproved of. He had to accept the decisions of the Vatican Council which he thought inopportune. In the previous pages we have abundantly proved that by all the traits of his character and by the polarity of his nature Newman was irresistibly drawn to Roman Catholicism. In it alone did he find em- ployment for all his faculties. It was the fatal bent and declivity, the line of least resistance. There was in his conversion neither change nor catastrophe; there was only development and elective affinity of his temperament. I do not examine whether this temperament was normally constituted, whether the extreme scepticism WHY WAS NEWMAN CONVERTED? 79 and mysticism were legitimate, and whether there does not exist another conception of religion. This is not a controversial pamphlet, but a psychological study. Our purpose was to analyse Newman's character and to explain why he had found in Catholicism a refuge and a stronghold, and in its doctrine the solution of all his perplexities. Nor do I mean to suggest that any religious genius constituted like Newman must needs end in Catholicism. All I affirm is this : that, given the combination of his character and his circumstances and surroundings, the result was inevitable. Newman had not to choose between Platonism and Buddhism or Confucianism, he had to choose between two definite forms of Chris- tianity : Anglican Catholicism and Roman Catholicism. With his character he could not but choose Roman Catholicism. By this explanation I do not pretend I have solved the "mystery" of Newman. I am only indicating a method and paving the way. The final solution — if it can ever be discovered — must be left to more competent critics who have gone lower down into the depths of this soul and into the foundations of the philosophy of religion. CHAPTER V The Conflict between Newman and Manning In the previous chapter we have applied the psycho- logical method to the study of the great internal crisis which filled the first part of Newman's career and resulted in his conversion. In the present chapter we shall try to apply the same method to the in- vestigation of that external crisis, the conflict with Manning, which filled the second part of Newman's life, which compelled him in the full possession of his genius to withdraw from public activity and for thirty years to live under a cloud of suspicion and disfavour. In the course of the year 1850, the English people learned with stupefaction that Pope Pius ix. had decided to restore the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and Scotland; that he had intrusted Mgr. Wiseman with that eventful mission; that he had created him the first Catholic Archbishop of West- minster; and that, in order more fully to emphasise the importance of the new departure, he had pro- moted the new Archbishop to the dignity of Cardinal. On the reception of these news, public opinion in England was stirred to its depths. The press, the 80 NEWMAN AND MANNING 8i Church, and Parliament vied with each other in denouncing the " papal aggression." The days of the Gordon Riots seemed to revive. Anti-papal demonstra- tions agitated the country. The pope, the new cardinal, the Catholic bishops were burnt in e^gy. So powerful seemed popular indignation, that the most illustrious Catholic layman, the Duke of Norfolk, felt compelled to condemn the new papal policy. The British Parliament, obeying the voice of public opinion, introduced and passed a Bill, making it illegal for Catholic bishops to assume the new ecclesiastical titles. , Qnly recently restored to civil and political rights, the Bngiwh Catholic Church in England seemed threatened in her very existence by the external peril. But the peril proved more apparent than real. The anti-papal agitation, like many of oiu* modem political movements, was little more than a press campaign. The leading statesmen of both political parties — Dis- raeli and Gladstone — refused to be associated with the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, which from the beginning was a dead letter. The agitation subsided as suddenly as it had arisen. The true peril which threatened the restored Catholic Church came not from without, but from within: from the controversies and divisions between the Catholics themselves. And these divisions were the consequence of the very triumphs which had been recently achieved. The considerable number of con- verts who had joined the ranks of the Church were at the beginning a source of weakness rather than of strength. The Church at first did not succeed in assimilating the new leaven, and the fermentation 6 82 CARDINAL NEWMAN seemed to threaten her with deep-seated internal troubles. For those converts brought with them in- tellectual habits and political traditions which they had imbued and developed under the influence of Protestantism. The old spirit survived notwithstanding the new grace. The majority of the neophytes were Englishmen of the old stock, who had received the indelible impress of the University and of the public school and had been tainted with a classical and rationalistic culture. Of these neophytes the most illustrious was Father Newman. More than any other convert he had been imbued with the Anglican spirit and had continued to suffer from the nostalgia of his ancient University, and he had remained unconsciously loyal to the old prejudices and traditions. Having exerted for twenty- five years the dictatorship of genius, passive obedience was more difiicult to him than to his co-religionists. A restless and subtle intellect, it might be said of him what Caesar says of Cassius : " He thinks too mvuch : such men are dangerous." In vain did he say to human reason: Thou shalt not go further. His plea against rationalism was only through an appeal to human reason. His training in Catholic theology had been hasty and tardy, and had not succeeded in eliminating the influence of the doctors of Anglicanism. Even after his conversion he did not subject himself to the scholastic and Jesuitic discipline of Thomas Aquinas, of Bellarmine, of Suarez, and Petavius, but rather to the discipline of the fathers of the primitive Church, where heresy was in the air, where Origen and TertuUian were tainted with error, where not even St. Jerome or St. Augustine were free from suspicion. NEWMAN AND MANNING 83 Newman's works all bore the impress of his training, and from a Roman point of view were more dis- tinguished by their audacity and their originality than by the prudence and orthodoxy of the doctrines. The Essay on the Theory of Devdopment was destined eventually to become a dissolvent of the prevailing theology. The Grartimar of Assent was only a Catholic version of the Analogy of Butler, and might be inter- preted and held as undermining the foundations of absolute and objective religious truth. It was therefore inevitable that both Newman's doctrines and his personality should rouse the sus- picions of Catholic orthodoxy and of Catholic statesman- ship, which were both represented in all their purity and all their severity by Archbishop Manning. Even in the lifetime of Newman and Manning it was known to the outside world that the two men incarnated two different conceptions of Catholicism and two different views of Catholic discipline. But the outside world never knew how irreconcilable had been the policy of the two great leaders and how bitter their personal animosity. The ponderous biography of Manning by Purcell came as a sensation and as a scandal. It revealed the internal dissensions between the bishops in general and between Newman and Manning in particular ; it revealed the intrigues and the organised conspiracy of the ultramontane party ; it revealed the persecution to which Newman had been subjected, not only on the part of the Dublin Review, but on the part of the hierarchy, a persecution more bitter and more persistent than any which he had suffered in the Anglican Church ; and especially it revealed, that for thirty years Manning had strained every effort to 84 CARDINAL NEWMAN oppose Newman's every plan and scheme and to discredit him at the Vatican.^ There is little cause for surprise if, in the passionate controversy which followed the publication of Mr. Purcell's volume, the British public took sides against Rome and against Manning in favour of Newman. The obvious conclusion which seemed to force itself upon the reader was the incompatibility between Roman Catholicism and intellectual independ- ence and veracity: because Newman had refused to surrender his conscience and his personality to the behests of Rome, he had been practically excommuni- cated ; because Manning was content to be the passive and unscrupulous agent of the Vatican, he became the omnipotent ruler of the Church in England, Public opinion seemed to endorse the caricature of Manning in Beaconsfield's masterpiece : he appeared as a Cardinal Grandison, a politician and a diplomat devoured with ambition, steeped in ecclesiastical intrigue. Such is still the verdict of ninety-nine out of every hundred readers of Purcell's biography. But it seems to me that this verdict is as unjust to Manning as Kingsley's condemnation was unjust to Newman: in both cases the judgment is based on a total misunder- * It is owing to his political intrigues at Rome that Manning has often been accused of having the "Jesuitical" strain in his temperament. As a matter of fact, there was very little of the Jesuit in Manning ; he was not conciliatory and diplomatic, but aggressive and uncompromising. And he consistently maintained his opposition to the Jesuit order in England, and excluded them from any active participation in the work of his diocese. The hostile attitude of Manning with regard to the Jesuits is all the more striking because Newman, like F^nelon, was always on the best terms with the order. See the interesting articles in The Month, Jan. to April 1903, " The Month and J. H. Newman." NEWMAN AND MANNING 85 standing of the facts. As has been abundantly shown by M, de Pressens^,^ it is absurd to attribute motives of vulgar ambition to a man who as much as Newman had sacrificed his dearest affections and the highest dignities of the Church to the cause of religious truth. And what is far more serious, accepting the common interpretation of Manning's character and policy, we entirely fail to understand the nature of the conflict between Newman and Manning. That conflict is not primarily a struggle between two personalities; it is essentially a struggle between two principles, equally necessary from the Catholic point of view, and therefore equally legitimate, Protestants are too generally inclined to believe that there always exists in the Roman Church a uniformity and a conformity obtained by an exercise of authority, and that this conformity and this peace of the Roman Church is but the silence of death, the suppression of every sign of independence : ubi silentium faciunt, pacem appellant. These Protestant critics forget that the Roman Church is a world-wide organisation, embracing every race, including every form of govern- ment. They especially forget that, being an integral and universal religion, Catholicism is obliged to give satisfaction to needs the most diverse and to conciliate principles the most opposite. And as the Catholic Church has to use human instruments and is a political organisation, in addition to being a system of dogmas ' It is interesting to note that the ablest and the most enthusiastic biography of Manning has been written by a French Protestant, M. de Pressens^, the eminent champion of Dreyfus and the Radical Socialist deputy, whose conversion to Eoman Catholicism was discounted on the publication of his work on Manning. 86 CARDINAL NEWMAN and symbols and rites, the eternal conflict between opposite principles and opposite tendencies must needs bring into play the same passions and the same[intrigues which we witness in the arena of secular politics. The diversity of doctrines and tendencies has found expression in the multiplicity of religious orders: contemplative and militant, learned and ignorant, wealthy and mendicant, democratic and aristocratic, austere and self-indulgent, secular and ccenobitic, every form of human activity is represented in the govern- ment of the Church. Between these orders there has always been an open or secret rivalry: Dominicans against Franciscans, Augustinians against Dominicans, Jesuits against Oratorians and Benedictines, regulars against seculars. And each of them has prevailed, according to the special needs of the times. Sometimes the Church needs reform from within, sometimes it needs expan- sion abroad. When her doctrines are assailed, she needs preachers and teachers, and the Dominicans appear; when devotion and charity are being relaxed, she needs confessors and saints, and she appeals to the Franciscans; when the political organisation is threatened, she needs a stronger discipline, a more centralised government, and the Jesuits become the bodyguard of the pope. And thus at every period in the history of the Church one of these varied activities has been predominant. As long as the conflicting tendencies do not threaten the general order, Rome does not interfere. For the Church knows that internal strife as well as external struggles are a condition of her world-wide organisa- tion, that divergencies of view and policy are a condition of the diversity of races and of culture. So far from NEWMAN AND MANNING 87 being surprised at the existence of conflicts -within the Church, we ought rather to wonder that these conflicts have always in the end stimulated her vitality and have been conducive to her ultimate triumph. Now those divergencies of opinion, those conflicts of policy, which are always inevitable and which are beneficent when confined within legitimate limits, were especiaUy so in England on the morrow of the restoration of the hierarchy. The Roman Church was confronted with two formidable tasks. In the first place, there was the propaganda amongst Protestants, the conversion of Anglicans. For that task Newman was pre-eminently fitted : in turn gentle and aggressive, conciliatory and uncompromising, he possessed in a supreme degree the controversial genius, the apostolic fervour, and the magnetic personality which characterise the religious reformer. But another task even more urgent forced itself upon Roman statesmanship. Before she could think of additional conquests, the Church would have to consolidate and to organise her existing possessions. The Roman Church in England — sur- rounded on all sides by Protestant communities — was like an army encamped in hostile territory, which was above all in need of a rigorous discipline and a strongly constituted authority. To strengthen the tie between England and the Mother Church, from which she had been separated for centuries, to conquer the local and centrifugal spirit, was the historical mission which devolved upon Cardinal Manning. Hence the ultra- montane attitude of Manning in the Roman question, his aggressive policy in the Vatican Council, hence his continuous journeys to Rome. Hence also the necessity of creating those organs that were still missing: 88 CARDINAL NEWMAN schools, religious orders, and charitable agencies. To these practical and social works the Roman Church would have to devote her youthful energies, through these she was to increase her influence. Once in the full possession of all her activities, once she had estab- lished her social mission — her apostolate in partihus injldelium — her propaganda with Protestants would become all the more easy and all the more efficient. It is obvious, therefore, that in the lifelong conflict between Newman and Manning there was above all a struggle between two principles and two policies. And as neither of these great men were saints of an Oriental type, as neither of them possessed the virtue of meek- ness and self-effacement, and as both were men of a strong character, it was inevitable that to an outside public the struggle between two principles should mainly assume the appearance of a struggle between two personalities and two temperaments. For Manning and Newman incarnate the eternal contrast between Martha and Mary, between the contemplative type and the active type. Newman is the thinker and the poet, the University man and the scholar : no doubt he also feels the need of action, but his action is through writing, through con- troversy, through persuasion, through public opinion. Manning is the statesman and the administrator, clear-headed and narrow, little given to speculation, with an indomitable will, of infinite resource in the choice of means, and always retaining the sense of what is real and possible. Insinuating, tactful, and sociable, he possesses those external gifts of countenance and manner which make for popularity and prestige. From his adolescence he has devoted himself to politics, NEWMAN AND MANNING 89 and has revealed himself as the bom ruler of men. At a time when Newman was investigating the history of the primitive Church and the development of dogma, Manning was already qualifying for a parlia- mentary career and achieving oratorical triumphs at the Oxford Union. Even after the bankruptcy of his father had compelled him to renounce his political ambitions — after he had entered the Church — he retained the political instinct, and within the Church he remained a statesman. A friend of Gladstone, a brother-in-law of Bishop Wilberforce, a dignitary of the Establishment, he revealed those qualities of an organiser and an administrator which were to trans- form the Catholic Church in England. This is not the place to enter into the detailed history — a history neither pleasant nor edifying — of the bitter struggle between the two leaders. In reading the painful story of this long quarrel and the many bitter and acrimonious letters exchanged, we are reminded once more that there is no animosity to be compared with theological animosity. Let it therefore be enough merely to point out two of many incidents which bring out into clearest relief the opposition between their respective temperaments and tendencies. It had been a cherished dream with Newman to establish at Oxford a Catholic College which would be both a seminary for young Catholics and a centre of operations against Anglicanism. Everything seemed to justify the most optimistic hopes of the success of such an institution : his intimate knowledge of the weak points of his opponents, the Catholicising tendencies of a large section of the Anglican Church, the memory and the experience of his past triumphs, the conviction 90 CARDINAL NEWMAN that truth brought into close touch with error was certain to prevail. To an outsider, it seems all the more extraordinary that Newman's plans should not have been adopted, because in our own day they have been realised by the Benedictines and the Jesuits under far less promising auspices. But from the very first Manning strenuously opposed Newman's scheme. He saw only its disadvantages and dangers. He was afraid that the daily contact of a small band of Catholics with an overwhelming majority of Protestants might be fatal to the purity of faith. And even if a large number of conversions were effected, there was the danger of an invasion of converts without discipline, without theological train- ing, without the true Catholic spirit, infected with the Oxford culture and conceit, converts who could not be assimilated in time, who would eventually constitute in the Catholic clergy a liberal majority, and who might transform the very spirit of the Catholic Church. The incidents which preceded and followed the Vatican Council brought out even more clearly and more forcibly the divergent policies of the two Catholic leaders. Still guided by the same instinct of the statesman. Manning was convinced that in face of the persistent attacks of science and philosophy, in face of the excesses of individualism and intellec- tualism, in face of the revolutionary spirit and the imminent suppression of the temporal power of the papacy, there was an urgent necessity of asserting, with all the more emphasis, the supernatural verities and the supremacy of the Church. Implicitly accepted since the Council of Trent, advocated with admirable NEWMAN AND MANNING 91 eloquence by the school of de Maistre, proclaimed by the ultramontane party, the dogma of papal infalli- bility was the final result of centuries of ecclesiastical centralisation and the logical conclusion of a doctrinal evolution. Newman could have no theoretical objections against the dogma of infallibility. Indeed, it might he considered as an application of his own theory of development: a latent doctrine which is gradually evolved by the course of history and the needs of the Church. He was not a liberal Catholic in the rational- ist sense of the word ; but he could not see the force of the political argument in favour of infallibility. On the contrary, he held its proclamation to be highly in- opportune. And as an " opportunist," not as a theologian, he opposed the dogma. He opposed it because it would prove a stumbling-block in the way of con- version, because it would frighten away from Rome thousands of converts who were already waiting at the threshold and applying for admission. He opposed it because he was more sensitive to the difficulties of the individual soul, whilst Manning realised more keenly the difficulties of government and the demands of a world-wide authority. Whoever may have been right, from the Catholic point of view, it is by no means necessary to attribute to either unworthy or selfish motives. Both in their policy had only in view the good of the Church, both were striving after the same ideal ; but they hoped to realise it by difierent means. There lies the true and permanent interest of the antagonism between Manning and Newman. It enables us to enter more deeply into their psychology. It enables us also to 92 CARDINAL NEWMAN understand the marvellous pliability and adaptability and complexity of a Church which can enlist in her service such opposite temperaments and which makes their very opposition subservient to her ulti- mate triumph. CHAPTER VI Newman's Apologetics The main cause of the barrenness and futility of most theological controversies lies in the difficulty of agree- ing on first principles and on the immediate data of the problem. We use the same words — reason, faith, conscience — but we give them a totally different mean- ing. Like Hamlet, the theologian crosses swords with the phantoms of his imagination. We do not start from the same beginnings, and yet we wonder that we do not meet at the end. It is true that we often do meet at the end : starting from opposite premises, we yet reach the same practical conclusions, — materialists and idealists, epicureans and stoics, Christians and Boud- dhists, all formulate the same fundamental rules of conduct, — but this very agreement shows that logic has little to do with the process, and that practice is entirely independent from theory. The practical con- clusion is not a legitimate inference from the premises : it is reached by a trick of legerdemain, by an act of the will, the deus ex machina in all problems of life and conduct. The " will to believe " in a definite creed gets us out of most of our logical difficulties.^ A second cause of error in theological controversy ^ This point has been clearly brought out in Mr. Balfour's Foundations 0/ Belief. 93 94 CARDINAL NEWMAN resides in the confusion of methods. Dazzled by the results produced by the methods of exact sciences, theologians have tried to apply these methods, without understanding their nature, to the discovery of religious truth. They forget that although truth is one, there are many ways to reach it, and that there are as many methods as there are sciences and classes of phenomena : observation of the zoologist, experimentation of the physiologist, divination of the historian or the in- structing judge, analysis and deduction of the mathe- matician, intuition of the literary critic, tact of the man of the world and of the statesman. They further forget that not only does each class of phenomena de- mand a different method, but they also presuppose a different sense and " organum," a special disposition and preparation, an instinct all the more infallible because more unconscious of its processes — historical sense, criti- cal sense, aesthetic sense, psychological sense, political sense ; faculties as necessary to the historian, the critic, the judge, the statesman as the sense of colour to the painter. And therefore, to apply to the investigation of theological problems the processes of mathematical science, is entirely to misunderstand the infinitely varied history of the discovery of truth, is to mutilate our human faculties, is to confuse reason with one of its secondary operations, i.e. ratiocination. The so-called methods of exact science only appear more efficient and more legitimate because they are concerned with abstract ideas and categories — like logic and mathematics, or as in the case of physics and chemistry, because they are concerned only with very simple phenomena, which can be isolated, which can be measured and verified, and in the results of which NEWMAN'S APOLOGETICS 95 neither human desires nor human passions are in the least interested. Already in the province of higher mathematics, where quantities cannot be defined, methods become more uncertain, solutions become more personal and can only be demonstrated by the result; quick in- tuition takes the place of cautious reasoning. But it is only when we enter the province of concrete and practical sciences that exact methods cease to prevail and that causes of error multiply: causes residing both in the complexity of phenomena and in the instruments of the investigator. Phenomena can be looked at under so many different aspects, objects lend themselves to so many optical illusions, reasons in favour of one solution can be counterbalanced by so many reasons in favour of the opposite solution — and the value of those reasons so Tnuch depends on the individvAil — that whatsoever solution is adopted must necessarily appear more or less arbitrary, probable rather than certain. Consider a great historical fact — for instance, some event of the French Revolution — which has happened almost within living memory, which has taken place in the sight of the whole world : each historian will narrate it and interpret it according to his preconceived notions and prejudices. Louis Blanc will be contra- dicted by Michelet, who will be contradicted by Taine, who will be refuted by Aulard. Indeed, one might almost say that after one hundred and twenty-five years of analysis and discussion, by the most acute and the most patient investigators of every school and every nation, there is hardly one important event or one important character of the French Revolution upon which anything like substantial agreement has been 96 CARDINAL NEWMAN reached ! So true is it that on any question touching human personality it is impossible to eliminate the personal equation, i.e. the uncertainty and arbitrariness of individual judgment ; so true is it that the quest of truth is not an automatic and mechanical process, which only affects the ratiocinative faculty : our whole being — our imagination, our emotions, our volition, as well as our intellect — are interested in the result. To that individual judgment, that principium individuationis, that personal equation in the pro- vince of moral sciences, Newman has given the name of illative sense. In creating a new word, Newman desired to point out the fact that his predecessors had not sufficiently observed the peculiar nature of the logical instrument in human sciences, and also to emphasise the importance which he himself attached to the necessary intervention of personality in the logical process. Indeed, it may be confidently asserted that the illative sense is the deus ex machina of Newman's apologetics. It makes all the difference between scholastic logic as an automatic thinking machine and the real logic of the thinker, the effort of the living personality engaged in the pursuit of truth. It is the "illative sense" which analyses, which selects, which classifies, which isolates or combines, which determines the angle under which an object is to be considered, which calls in fresh arguments where previous arguments are found wanting, which settles the value of each particular argument and the degree of probability of each particular fact, and which finally gives the casting vote. In other words, the illative sense decides according to the experience of each individual thinker, and that experience varies not NEWMAN'S APOLOGETICS 97 merely with every class of men, it is different in the historian and in the lawyer, in the philosopher and in the statesman — it even varies in each individual from year to year and almost from day to day as the arguments which appeared decisive yesterday have ceased to convince us to-day. From the very nature of the " illative sense " it must be contented with probabilities. From an early period Newman has adopted the principle of Bishop Butler, that probability is the guidance of life. No doubt, by some mysterious alchemy, those probabilities are transformed into certainties, but the certainties supplied by the illative sense are purely subjective. The probabilities which produce certainty in myself may fail to do so in others. This, however, does not mean that a certainty which is based on probabilities is necessarily less certain or convincing than a certainty which is founded on a demonstration universally accepted. Logical diffi- culties and doubts are incommensurate quantities : one single logical dijfficulty may provoke a strong doubt in others ; ten thousand difficulties may not create a doubt in myself. The certainty which is based on probabilities is different, it is not Jess. On the contrary, the certainty is all the stronger, all the more intense, because it is more intimate, more personal, because it is the result of our own experience of life, because we have had to struggle to conquer it. For it is especially life, our life, which must transmute mere opinions into convictions. The very essence and nature of our certainty is ex- pressed in that word conviction and in the word " martyr." Exact science produces neither convictions 7 98 CARDINAL NEWMAN nor martyrs. A martyr is the living witness', martyrdom is often the only evidence we can give in favour of a moral truth. A conviction is a victory which we obtain over the unknown, which we achieve over doubt and perplexity. Now in no other department of mental activity do those conditions which necessitate the employment of the illative sense present themselves so numerously as in the province of religious truth. For religious phenomena differ essentially from abstract ideas or logical categories, and from the simple and isolated phenomena of exact science in this respect — that they are in the highest degree complex, and concrete, and practical; they deal with feelings and emotions, with needs and instincts; they deal not with that which is, but with that which is to he, or might he, or ought to he, with possibilities and ideals and duties. Religion is the synthesis, the harmony, of the activities of man : it includes a metaphysical element in its dogma, in its interpretation of the problems of existence ; it includes an ethical element in its sanctions and commands ; it includes an aesthetic element in its rites and symbols and ceremonies ; it includes a political element in the organisation of the Church. It brings into play every faculty to transform the religious ideal into reality — education of the intellect, education of the imagination, of the will, of the moral sense, of the social sense. And all those elements — metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic, political ; all those faculties — intellectual, imaginative, emotional — are combined in infinitely varied proportions according to race or even accord- ing to the individual believer. With some individuals, religion is purely contemplative and mystical; with NEWMAN'S APOLOGETICS 99 others, it is mainly practical. The thinker attaches greater importance to dogma, the statesman to the ecclesiastical organisation, the artist to forms and rites, the poet to feelings and ideals. And the value of each constituent element is in a large measure deter- mined by the individual experience. As we pointed out in a previous chapter, even in a Church so uniform and so conservative as the Roman Catholic Church, you find every variety of religious experience and religious temperament — doctores subtiles, angelici, serapJiici : the joyous mysticism of Santa Teresa and of St. Francis of Assisi, the diplomacy of Jesuits, the intellectual activity of Dominicans and Benedictines. It must be obvious that those very characteristics of the religious phenomena which we have just indi- cated — their complexity and individuality, the various combination of their constituent elements — preclude the use of the simple and direct methods of exact science, exclude the very possibility of demonstrative certitude, compel us to be contented with probabilities, and necessitate the intervention of this "illative sense" in a larger measure than in the investigation of any other human activity. Nowhere else will the " illative sense," this personal equation, be more personal. Nowhere else is it so closely concerned with the fun- damental facts of personality and nowhere else is it so strictly reduced to probabilities undemonstrable by objective reasons, because these reasons are supplied by the most secret and the most intimate revelations of the human soul. This illative sense interpreting the data of the religious conscience is what we are agreed to call " faith." The word " faith " is vague, like the pheno- lOO CARDINAL NEWMAN mena it expresses, but in all times mankind have seen in " faith " a state of the soul, a special disposition to give our assent to religious truth on credit, on trust — independently of the ordinary processes of human reasoning. In the economy of faith reasoning has always played a secondary or a negative part. To seek to produce or to deduce faith by a process of ratiocina- tion is contrary to all experience, contrary to the very nature of faith, which has its root in the will and in the heart. This is the meaning of Pascal's aphorism : " Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas." If ratiocination could lead us to faith, faith would be the monopoly of an intellectual ^lite, the possession of the most subtle dialecticians. A certain amount of leisure and the highest culture would be the ante- cedent conditions of the most perfect faith. The enormous majority of mankind — the simple, the ignorant, the poor — would then be doomed to unbelief. It is the very opposite which is the fact. It is a universal experience that the largest number of sceptics are found amongst "intellectuals"; that the intellectual temperament, if not incompatible with faith, is, to say the least, unfavourable to it. The most robust faith is found amongst common people and amongst women who reason least. It is amongst the scribes that Christ has found His enemies. It is amongst fishermen and tradesmen that He has found His disciples. This is the inner meaning of Pascal's words so often misunderstood : " Ilfaut sabetir." ^ The God of Pascal is the " Dieu des simples et des ignorants, non des philosophes et des savants." And the same ^ Pascal has found the expression in Montaigne, who uses it twice in the Apologie de R. de Sebonde. NEWMAN'S APOLOGETICS loi truth is embodied in the famous words of St. Ambrose which Newman has adopted as his motto: " Non in dialectiea placuit Deo salvum facere mundum." Faith then implies special conditions, special dis- positions, a special atmosphere.^ In what measure these conditions and dispositions depend on ourselves, on an exercise of the will, or are given to us, in what measure they are bom with us or acquired, is the central problem of Christian theology. According to the doctrine of Lutheranism, which Newman ^ The following is an analysis of Newman's conception of faith hj one of the ablest of French Newmanites and Liberal Catholics : — "According to Newman, the assent of the believer is free. Faith is a certitude which is not metaphysical but moral, and for which sacrifice is required. Those sacrifices are of two kinds : some intellectual, others emotional. Newman does not even attempt to bring over to religion any mind which does not accept certain indispensable postulates. The belief in God, in the immortality of the soul, in freedom, in the existence of sin and virtue, in the possibility of a revelation and of a mediator be- tween God and man — is a first foundation which he does not undertake to establish in a rebellious mind. Atid even after these postulates are accepted, Nevnnan does not think tlmt faith will necessarily follow. He repeatedly says that faith is ' an ethical state' — that is to say, one brought about by influences other than those generally called intellectual. One might sum them all up in a certain tvish to believe, of which it is difficult to trace the origin and the analysis of which is most com- plicated. Moral and physical circumstances, an habitual seriousness of thought, an aversion to dissipation and excesses, illness and health, sofferings which ennoble, age and place, hereditary influences of every kind contribute very largely in its production, and the part assigiud to 0-race consists mainly in the general arrangement of the scene. The same arguments which would not in the least afiect us in one moral state wiU seem irresistible in another frame of mind : this is a fact of common experience, a fact which every man may often have verified for himself." — Abb^ Dimnet, La Pensie Catholiquc dans VAngleterre Contemporaine, 1906, pp. xxiii.-xxiv. The essence of the "wish to believe" theory is contained in Pascal's saying : "Tu ne me chercherais pas, si tu ne m'avais d^ja trouv^," 102 CARDINAL NEWMAN opposes in his Lectures on Justification, the most scholastic of all his works, those dispositions of faith which are the beginning and end of all religion are independent of works and observances — they are a gift of Grace. According to the Catholic doctrine, which seems to interpret more adequately our religious experience, those dispositions of faith are partly independent of us, partly the result of our own eiforts and struggles. No doubt faith is a gift of Grace, but to deserve the divine Grace and to preserve it we must co-operate with the divine Will. To believe, we must wish to believe and will to believe. Faith is an act of volition and an act of love.^ The biographies of saints teach us that we can call forth the dispositions and conditions of faith by prayer, by fasting, by acts of renunciation, by good works, by spiritual exercises, and by the acts of external religion.^ Even though you ^ No theologian or pliiloaopher has ever more clearly or more forcibly expressed the importance of the will in the production of faith, than Pascal in the following words. Even tlie Port-Royalists did not dare to reproduce this admirable passage, and sui>pressed it : "At least become conscious of your impotence to believe, as you yourself admit that reason leads you on to belief, but that you cannot achieve belief. Therefore learn to convince yourself, not by an increase of the proofs of the existence of God, but by a diminution of your passions. You wish to be led on to faith, but you do not know the way ; you wish to be cured of infidelity, and you ask the remedy : Uamfrom those who have been tied like yourself, and who now risk all their substance in the venture of faith ; they are people who know the way you must travel and who are cured of a disease of which you desire to be cured. Follow the method by which they began ; it is by acting as if they did believe, by taking holy water, by having masses said for them, etc. . . . This mil make you believe by the very laws of your nature and will stupefy your reason. — But that is exactly what I am afraid of. — And why ? What have you to lose ? Naturellement onSme cela vousferd croire et vous abitira," * Tyrrell, External Religion : its Use and Abuse, NEWMAN'S APOLOGETICS 103 do not believe, says Pascal, act as if you did believe : pray, lie down prostrate before the altar, make the sign of the cross, practise humility and charity, and you will end by believing. It is not only faith which produces good works ; good works in turn kindle and stimulate faith. Faith is tJie divine flower which can only blossom on the tree of life. ' The technical and methodical study of the disposi- tions and conditions of faith is the subject-matter of a special science : in its theoretical aspect, this science embraces the whole psychology of religion; in its practical aspect, it includes the " ascesis " and discipline of religious life and conduct. Newman holds that faith is independent of ratiocina- tion; this does not imply that faith is necessarily contrary to ratiocination or that ratiocination plays a negligible part in our religious life.^ This ought not to be the case, and is only due to an abuse of ratiocination. For in the first place, nothing could be more fatal to our religious life than an intestine war between our higher faculties or the assumption or ^ Newman has not always been consistent in his analysis of the relations between faith and reason ; sometimes he represents reason as the ally of faith, and faith seeking the assistance of reason : Jidea qucercTis intdhctum. This is the position of St. Thomas Aquinas. But more generally Newman follows rather the early fathers than rationalising mediseTal scholasticism, and he describes human reason as hostile to faith ; he assails ' ' the all-corrodiug, aU-dissolving scepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries." He reconciles the contradic- tion by distinguishing between "right reason and corrupt reason." " I know that even the unaided reason, when correctly exercised, leads to a belief in Qod, in the immortality of the soul, and in a future retriba- tion ; but I am considering the faculty of reason actually and histori- cally ; and in this point of view, I do not think I am wrong in saying that its tendency is towards a simple unbelief in matters of religion " (.Apologia, p. 269). 104 CARDINAL NEWMAN the suspicion that the facts and conclusions of our intellectual experience are contradicted or discredited by the facts and conclusions of our religious experience. And therefore ratiocination rightly exercised ought by fixing its own limits to remove one of the great impediments to a religious life. For it is only by a process of reasoning that those liifnits can he jixed. In the very act of self -limitation ratiocination takes us to the threshold of religion, and restores the harmony between our several activities. And, in the second place, it is one of the functions of ratiocination to put in a clearer light the mysterious subconscious phenomena which constitute the data of our religious experience : jides qucerens inteUectum. It is the patient and searching analysis of those data, the weighing and classifying of them, which gives us the probabilities on which our faith is based. No doubt faith only can transform those probabilities into certainties ; but without the intellectual process the probabilities would not emerge into the region of consciousness, and our faith would degenerate into a blind and groping superstition. What then are in Newman's Erkenntnisslehre those probabilities and proofs which experience and ratiocina- tion put at the disposal of faith ? The first proof and the foundation of Newman's apologetics is the agreement between individual experience and the experience of mankind on the fundamental truths of religion. This proof appears to us in two different forms : the argu- ment from analogy and the argument from universal consent ; the one more indefinite, the other more explicit. Both can be reduced to this proposition: if religious truth exists, as religious truth exists, history teaches NEWMAN'S APOLOGETICS 105 us where that truth resides, by the unity, the continuity, the universality of the same tradition and the consent of ages.^ The argument from analogy is based on the agreement between the testimonies of natural religion and of revealed religion. We generally mean by natural religion a system of beliefs and doctrines reached by the mere processes of reason, and natural religion is generally synonymous with rational religion, the religion of Paley or of the Vicaire Savoyard. But it is obviously a misnomer and a stretch of language to call natural religion beliefs and principles which are in the first place not natural but highly artificial, and which in the second place are not religion, which have never existed as religion, and which have only existed in the brain of a few thinkers. If the word natural religion has any real meaning, we must understand it to mean the religion of natv/re, i.e. the spontaneous, instinctive religion of people living in a state of nature, i.e. primitive traditions, and practices, and beliefs. Now in all primitive peoples we precisely find the same natural religion, the same essential data, the idea of a Golden Age, of a Fall, of an Atonement and redemption, the institution of propitiatory and expia- tory sacrifices — i.e. exactly those beliefs and institu- tions which are the foundation of Christianity. This spontaneous agreement between natural re- ligion and revealed religion, without possible outside influence or previous understanding, proves that with Christianity we are in the presence of a religion based on the nature of man, on the immediate data of ^ Orammar of Assent. io6 CARDINAL NEWMAN conscience, on the direct interpretation of the mysteries of our moral existence.^ The argument from analogy is rendered more definite and more complete by the argument from universal consent. Newman has told us in his Apologia the genesis of this proof. He tells us the deep and lasting impression produced upon his mind by a phrase of St. Augustine : securus judical orhia terrarum, quoted in an article by Cardinal Wiseman in the Dublin Review. Those few words came to him as an illumination, and proved an epoch in the develop- ment of his religious opinions. The securus judical was the beginning of the end: from that moment Newman ceased to be a Protestant. The argument from universal consent is as old as Christian apologetics. It may be even contended that it is anterior to Christianity, as we find it used by Cicero and the Academics and Eclectics. St. Augustine first used it amongst the early fathers, St. Vincentius of Lerius crystallised it in the famous formula : Quod semper, quod ubique, quod db omnibus.^ The same ^ We find the same argument underlying Pascal's Thoughts — namely, the analogy and pre-established harmony between human nature and revealed religion. ^ See the recent volume of Brunetiere et LabrioUe, Saint Vincent de Lerins, 1906. The little tract of St. Vincentius, Commonitorium, has had an extraordinary fortune. It is supposed to have appeared about 434, but the Middle Ages seem to have held it in very slight esteem, and St. Thomas Aquinas does not mention it once. From the beginning of the sixteenth century there have been numberless editions and translations : in the sixteenth century, 35 editions and 22 translations ; in the seventeenth, 23 editions and 12 translations ; in the eighteenth century, 12 editions and 12 translations ; and in the nineteenth century, 13 editions and 21 translations, Bellarmine calls it libellus plane aureus. Catholic apologists from Bossuet to DoUinger constantly quote the NEWMAN'S APOLOGETICS 107 argument is found in J. de Maistre ; it is the comer- stone of the system of Lamennais. But Newman gave it a cogency and a precision which it possesses in none of his predecessors. It was in order to establish this proof that for ten years he devoted himself to patristic studies and that he directed his disciples towards the history of the primitive Church. As against Roman Catholicism, Protestantism rests its claim on its agreement with early Christianity. But Newman has little difficulty in proving that the unity and continuity of the Christian tradition is only found in Catholicism, and that either there is no revelation, or that revelation is vested in and safe- guarded by the Church of Rome. " This one thing at least is certain : whatever history teaches, whatever it omits, whatever it exaggerates or extenuates, whatever it says and unsays, at least the Christianity of history is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth, it is this ; and Protestantism has ever felt it so. I do not mean that every writer on the Protestant side has felt it, — for it was the fashion at first, at iBast as a rhetorical argument against Rome, to appeal to past ages, or to some of them, — but Protestantism, as a whole, feels it, and has felt it. This is shown in the determination already referred to of dispensing with historical Christianity altogether, and of forming a Christianity from the Bible alone. Men never would have put it aside unless they had despaired of it. It is shown by the long neglect of ecclesiastical history in England which prevails even in the English Church. Our popular Commonitorium of St. Vincentius. See the discussion of Newman's Difficulties in Bnmetiere, St. FinccTit, Preface, xx.-xxt. io8 CARDINAL NEWMAN religion scarcely recognises the fact of the twelve long ages which lie between the Councils of Nicsea and Trent, except as affording one or two passages to illustrate its wild interpretations of certain prophecies of St. Paul and St. John. It is melancholy to say it, but the chief — perhaps the only — English writer who has any claim to be considered an ecclesiastical historian is the unbeliever Gibbon. To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant." ^ This proof, like the proof from analogy, is obviously of great value as a controversial argument. Inasmuch as Protestantism has chosen to place the discussion on this historical ground of continuity and antiquity of doctrine, Newman has a right to establish by facts and texts that the Protestant claim is refuted by history. But whatever may be the value of this argument as an argumentuTYi ad hominem, Newman himself with his usual candour states some of the difficulties which prevent it from possessing the logical and intrinsic value which is given to it by Catholic controversialists generally. But they are far more formidable than Newman could suspect. Even assuming Catholicism to be the only legitimate representative of Christianity; and the only lineal descendant of the primitive Church, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to establish the fact of a universal consent on the truths of Christianity. But Christian apologists forget, and Newman himself forgets, that the enormous majority of human races remain outside the pale of Christianity, and that, historically or geo- graphically, Christianity has no claim to be regarded as the Universal Church. For centuries Christian ^ See IntroductioQ of the £ssay on the Theory of DevelopmerU. NEWMAN'S APOLOGETICS 109 communities have obeyed the command of Christ, "Docete omnes gentes," they have made heroic efforts, and hundreds of thousands of missionaries have laid down their lives to convert the heathen. Notwithstanding the support of Christian Governments, notwithstanding the prestige of a higher civilisation, missionary enter- prise on the whole has proved a complete failure, a failure which appears all the more striking if we contrast it with the relatively much greater success of Mohammedan propaganda even in our own times. But inside Christianity it is equally impossible to prove either the catholicity of one doctrine or the catholicity of one church. Newman himself admits the difficulty of any rigorous definition. If we study in detail the history either of dogma or of practice, we find the greatest divergencies. As long as Catholic dogma retains its vagueness, there may seem to be agreement ; and as M. Leroy ^ has pointed out, it is of the very essence of dogmatic definition to be negative and exclusive rather than positive. As soon as theologians attempt to establish positive propositions, heresy appears : whether we consider TertuUian, Origen, and St. Jerome in the early Christianity, or the history of Jansenism and quietism in modern Catholicism, there is always the same inevitable peril. And even where we find agreement, we never find " uni- versal consent." The Council of Nicaea was decided by an overwhelming majority of Greek fathers.* The Council of the Vatican was decided by an equally overwhelming majority of Latin bishops, especially * Leroy, Dogme et Critique. ' Only an infinitesimal minority of Latin fathers being present. See Hefele, History of ihe Councils, 1. no CARDINAL NEWMAN Italian and Spanish. In the same way, at the present moment the Roman Catholic Church has ceased to be Catholic : she is governed by a small body of Italian and Spanish prelates. The French, German, English, and American elements — i.e. from a human point of view, the most important and the most advanced sections of the Catholic Church — only play a very secondary part. Strictly and in a geographical sense, the catholicity of a Christian community is largely dependent on historical accidents. The Roman Catholic Church has appeared more universal because she was the religion of Latin races, and because until recent times the political expansion of the Latin nation was greater than that of other nations. But with the extra- ordinary expansion of these other nations their national religions have become more and more international, i.e. universal and catholic: the Anglican Church has become pan-Anglican — having spread in every part of the British Empire; the Greek-Orthodox Russian religion has become pan-Slavic — being the religion of the Greeks, Roumanians, Bulgarians, Servians, as well as of the Russian world-empire. In other words, the application of the argument from universal consent varies with the vicissitudes of political power, and a proof valid in the fifteenth century ceased to be valid in the sixteenth, much less in the twentieth century. But there is another intrinsic reason which weakens if it does not destroy the strength both of the argu- ment from analogy and from universal consent: it is entirely arbitrary in its application. According as you widen or restrict the fundamental truths with respect to which there is supposed to be analogy or NEWMAN'S APOLOGETICS iii agreement, you include a very large part or a very small section of humanity. Widen your definitions, be contented with vague resemblances, and you may prove the analogy between Buddhism and Christianity, between Platonism and the gospel, between St. Paul and Seneca. On the contrary, restrict your definitions, and you may establish a gulf between the theory of Anglican Catholicism and the theory of Roman Catholicism ; or you may more surely and more safely establish a gulf between the practice of Roman Catholicism in Portugal and the practice of Roman Catholicism in Germany. Finally, intellectually and morally it might be con- tended that universal consent may be considered as a criterion of error rather than of truth. It may be contended that it is error which is universal, it is truth which is isolated and persecuted, which only exists in the conscience of an 61ite. It is corrupt doctrines and practices on which it is easiest to secure agreement. It is because Mohammedanism has adapted itself to the weaknesses of Eastern and tropical races that it has spread with such alarming rapidity in Asia and Africa. It is because in the seventeenth century Jesuits accom- modated themselves to the superstitions and practices of China and Japan, because they contented them- selves with inoculating a Christian spirit and reading a Christian meaning into the Chinese and Japanese religions, that their missions achieved their triumphs. It is because the Jesuits accommodated themselves to the relaxed morality of Southern nations that Jesuitic Catholicism is still supreme in Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Universal consent would only become a valid argument if laxity and pliability in doctrine 112 CARDINAL NEWMAN and practice could be considered as a criterion of a higher religious truth and morality. It is probably the consciousness of the weakness of the first line of defence which we find in his first polemical works,^ that has suggested to Newman that second line of defence which is called the theory of development. This theory appears to us as an anticipated application of Darwinism to religious philosophy, a theory all the more remarkable because it preceded by thirty years the publication of the Origin of Species} Newman considers the Roman Catholic Church as a living organism like the mustard-seed of the gospel. By the side of the Roman Church other organisms have arisen and have struggled with it for nourish- ment, for light and life. The Catholic Church alone has become a gigantic tree, which affords shadow and shelter to the whole human race and which plunges its roots in the first ages of Christianity. The Church has always remained identical to herself, and has yet adapted herself to every climate. She has developed a coherent system, every part of which consists with every other, and she has yet conformed herself to every human need. She has maintained the same severe and austere ideal, opposed to every natural instinct, and has therefore been assailed from age to age ^ However, the argument from analogy has been restated in the Orammar of Assent, 2 The theory of development is already outlined in the Oxford University Sermons. It is strange that such a clear thinker as Leslie Stephen should not have separated the two lines of argument: the argument from analogy and universal consent, and the argument from development. In Newman's apologetics they are clearly distinct. See Stephen, An Agnostic's Apology, p. 198. NEWMAN'S APOLOGETICS 113 by internal and external foes. She has resisted every assault, and has emerged from each successive struggle stronger, better organised and equipped for new ordeals and dangers. Now the very growth and development of the Catholic Church is, according to Newman, an irre- sistible argument in favour of her divine origin. For, humanly speaking, in the struggle for life amongst various religions, there must happen what happens in the struggle for life in the animal or vegetable world. It is the strongest organism which survives, and which, merely by surviving, proves that it is the strongest. If, therefore, there exists a revealed religion — and Protestants admit that it does exist — an experience of twenty centuries has been conclusive in favour of the Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. And either there has been no revelation, or we must decide for the one Church which has preserved that revelation in its purity and integrity. Newman has strengthened the argument from de- velopment by trying to give it scientific precision, by surrounding it with an elaborate technical apparatus, and by laying down the criteria which enable us to distinguish a doctrinal development from a doctrinal corruption. Preservation of type, continuity of its principles, power of assimilation, logical sequence, anticipation of its future, conservative action upon its past, chronic vigour — such are the seven " notes " of true doctrinal development. And it is only by applying all those criteria to a given doctrine that we can rest satisfied as to its truth. We must not confuse the argument from development 8 114 CARDINAL NEWMAN with another one often used by Protestant apologists, the argument from results and expressed in the words of the gospel : you shall judge the tree by the fruit thereof. Newman has shown in what seems to me his boldest and most remarkable controversial work, the Difficulties of Anglicans, that the argument from results in its common form proves nothing either for or against Roman Catholicism: in the first place, because it is impossible to prove that such and such results are the necessary consequences of Catholicism ; and in the second place, because it is difiicult to agree on those human fruits which one has a right to expect from a Christian religion. The Protestants object to Catholicism, the baneful fruits of superstition in such Catholic countries as Spain, Portugal, and Ireland.^ But the Catholics are entitled to reply that these countries have not always been economically poor, or politically weak, or morally corrupt; that there was a time when those Catholic nations were in the van of progress and civilisation, when Protestant countries like Germany were a prey to anarchy or political servitude ; that, therefore, it is an unwarranted assumption that the present ap- parent decline of some Catholic nations is a result of the Catholic religion, and not the result of physical, or physiological, or political, or historical causes. But assuming that Catholicism may be held re- sponsible for the present state of Spain or Portugal, that state even then could not be urged as a valid ^ The ablest statement of the Protestant argument is still to be found in Laveleye : " Le Protestantisme et le Catholicisme dans leurs rapports avec la liberte et la prosperity des peuples. " NEWMAN'S APOLOGETICS 115 argument.^ Christianity has not been given to the world to enrich nations ; on the contrary, it proclaims an ideal of poverty. It has not been given to the world to ensure public morality or the stability of political institutions, as an enlightened interest is of itself sufficient to guarantee those temporal blessings. Christ came into the world to reveal and to impose a certain ideal of sanctity, to convert and save human souls, and the only relevant issue between Protest- antism and Catholicism is whether the Church of St. Francis and of St. Vincent de Paul has re- mained inore or less loyal to that ideal of Christian sanctity than the Church of Luther, or Henry viii., or Calvin, The argument contained in the Theory of Develop- ment is therefore very different from the argument refuted in the Dificulties of Anglicans. The one is internal, the other is external; the one is objective, the other is subjective and arbitrary. The one seems mainly favourable to Catholicism, the other is mainly adduced by Protestants. And the argument from the theory of development is in a sense entirely new. No doubt it implicitly existed already in Christian apologetics, — it can be traced in Pascal, it was current in the eighteenth century, as it is mainly against this argument that Gibbon directed his famous chapter, — but in the exact form which Newman has given to it, by the scientific precision of the statement as much as by the ingenuity of the applications, the argument is original. It has become the Novum Organum of ^ See a powerful statement of the Roman position in the Anglican Difficulties, Lectures viii. and ix. See also discussion of these lectures in Leslie Stephen, An Agnostv^s Apology, p. 174. Ii6 CARDINAL NEWMAN Catholic controversialists. The most advanced section of French Catholics have put it in the front rank of attack. From its first appearance, Anglican divines understood its far-reaching significance. In a character- istic letter to Bishop Wilberforce, Gladstone states his misgivings and difficulties, and expresses a wish that a Butler may arise to reply to the mighty champion of Romanism. Alas ! no Bishop Butler did arise. Newman and Butler were on the enemy's side, and Anglicanism had to be content with the championship of a Mozley. And all the arguments of poor Mozley were shattered to atoms by the formidable controversial engine. Nor is it easy to see what even a much more powerful champion might have answered. The misfortune of Anglicans was that they accepted the same premises and principles as Roman Catholics, but did not follow them up to their logical conclusions. Our only way of escape from Newman is to deny his preTnises. Not accepting his premises, we are not compelled to accept his conclusions. If revelation is not an external historical fact, but an internal process; if it is not transcendental, but immanent in the human soul : the gradual conquest of science and the slow achievement of moral eiFort — the whole scientific fabric of Newman falls to the ground. The vitality of the Roman Church is only a cogent principle taken in conjunction with the acceptance of a special conception of human nature and of a special providential and supernatural inter- position. But the mere fact of the vitality of a Church is not in itself supernatural and miraculous. And especially the vitality of the Roman Catholic Church may appear as the natural consequence of NEWMAN'S APOLOGETICS 117 the Roman system. It only proves the natv/raZ superiority of Catholic discipline and organisation, it only establishes the claim of the Roman Church to be the masterpiece of human policy, a claim admitted and proclaimed before Newman's Theory of Development in the famous review by Macaulay of Ranke's History of the Popes. The survival of the Catholic political system is no more extraordinary than the survival for two thousand years of the political system of pagan Rome of which Christian Rome and Byzantium were the lineal descendants. The fundamental identity and continuity of Catholicism are the inevitable conse- quence of the principle of a centralised and absolute spiritual authority. And finally, the efficiency of the Church in the sphere of life and conduct is the result of her wonderful psychological discipline, of her rules, and rites, and ceremonies. They only prove that no other Church has ever possessed such a profound and minute knowledge of the human heart. They only prove that the Church has used the most perfect means of realising her ideal ; they do not prove that the ideal itself is true. And here again the very fact of the vitality of the Roman Church might be used against her. The vitality of a creed proves that it is adapted to the needs of those who accept it ; it does not prove either the legitimacy or the value of those needs. Those needs themselves may only be a sign of moral weak- ness. From that point of view, the very difiusion of Catholicism may be a note of inferiority. It would only mean that Catholicism has followed the line of least resistance, that it has "accommodated" itself to the weakness of mankind. The very need of authority ii8 CARDINAL NEWMAN and certitude is with many natures a form of the vis inerticE, and implies a relaxation of the sense of responsibility and an abdication of the curiosity which are amongst the noblest attributes of man. Few men are strong enough to bear the stern yoke of liberty and to obey the categorical imperative of their moral law. The enormous majority feel the need of an external authority and of a visible Church which appeals to their senses, which humours their frailty, and relieves them from the trouble of thinking and acting for themselves. And as the theory of development has often been compared to the Darwinian theory, one might borrow from Darwin himself the analogical argument against the legitimacy of Newman's apologetics. If we consider the world of plants and animals, those organisms who have spread most widely over the surface of the earth are by no means the highest and noblest in the hier- archy of life. It is the ignoble weed, the prickly or poisonous herb which will be met with in every latitude. On the contrary, the most exquisite plants, the masterpieces of creation, are the result of an excep- tional combination of favoured conditions, of endless processes of natural or artificial selection; they can only live as long as those favoured conditions are con- tinued : a diminution of a few degrees in temperature may be sufficient to kill them, even as a diminution of a few degrees in our moral temperature may kill certain heroic characters — that is to say, their vitality and diffusion are limited by the very reason of their beauty and perfection. We have shown that none of the arguments from universal consent or from analogy, from development NEWMAN'S APOLOGETICS 119 or vitality, carry with them any logical finality. But it may legitimately be urged that the negative conclusion does not contradict the thesis of Newman, that it only confirms it. For the thesis of Newman is precisely that demonstrative reason alone can only provide us with probabilities. The weight and the cogency of those probabilities depends on the illative sense and on the private experience of each individual illumined by faith. It is the illative sense, it is faith which has the casting vote. Newman, therefore, is perfectly justified in asserting that our criticism is only valid against orthodox Protestants, who base their claims on ratiocination alone ; it is not valid against a Catholic, who appeals to a higher tribunal. On the contrary, the more you demonstrate the impotence of reason, the more you predispose the human soul to surrender itself to the jurisdiction of faith, which alone can exorcise the ghost of religious doubt and which alone can give satisfaction to the eternal need of religious certitude. This brings us to the so often debated question of Newman's scepticism. I confess that I have never quite understood the relevancy of the accusation. It seems to me that the term scepticism as applied to Newman is generally used in two very different meanings, and that, according as we use the one or the other meaning, we are stating either a paradox or a truism. If we assert, with Dr. Abbott and Huxley, that Newman has the temperament of a sceptic, that he is a kind of Catholic Hamlet, that he has never conquered the anguish of doubt, that his faith is wavering and 120 CARDINAL NEWMAN vacillating, this is a paradox which it is difficult to take seriously. Applied to Pascal, a layman, a scientist, and a convert from the world to religion, such an accusation, although unfounded, would be conceivable and relevant ; but, as applied to Newman, it is simply absurd. Never was faith surer of itself. It is true Newman is always stating difficulties, but that is only because he wants to convert others, and because therefore he has to enter into the difficulties of others ; but to himself, ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt. It is true that Newman has audacities which cause the timid to shudder, and that he is ever looking down into the abyss of unbelief; but that is only because his own head is cool and his foot firmly planted on the rock of faith. If, on the contrary, we merely assert that Newman does not believe in the possibility for unassisted human reason to discover religious truth, we enounce a bare truism. A theologian is not a sceptic because he believes in theology and disbelieves in ratiocina- tion. In that sense every believer in supernatural Christianity is bound to be a sceptic : he is bound to be a sceptic a priori because the impotence of ratiocina- tion is a necessary consequence of our corrupt nature ; but for this impotence and this corruption, neither revelation nor grace would have been necessary. And he is bound to be a sceptic from the teachings of experience : for he observes that faith has no necessary relation to intellectual gifts, as the greatest genius may be entirely devoid of faith, and declares with Laplace that science does not need the hypothesis of the exist- ence of God; he also observes that faith is not necessarily nor exclusively restricted to moral merit. NEWMAN'S APOLOGETICS 121 as some of the noblest characters of history have not received the grace of faith. It is obvious, therefore, that Newman in his so-called scepticism only remains loyal to the great Catholic tradition. So far from reproaching him with scepti- cism, an orthodox Catholic might rather reproach him with not having dwelt enough upon the super- natural conditions of religious faith and with not having extricated himself suflficiently from the trammels of rationalism. Indeed, I am surprised that the majority of Newman's critics have insisted so exclusively on the intellectual difficulties of his apologetics and that they should not have pointed out its fundamental moral difficulties, which seem to me far more formidable. The reason is probably that the moral difficulties are common both to Catholics and to orthodox Protestants. What most readers object to are not the conclusions which challenge their intellect; it is the premises which challenge their moral sense. What shocks them is that Newman's conception of God is that of a God of terror, not of a God of love or of justice ; he remains the vindictive tribal God of the Old Testament and of natural religion, not the merciful Christ of the Gospel. Newman himself does not seem to be conscious of that difficulty. He who devotes twenty pages to enter into all the intricacies of one intellectual difficulty will only dwell in a few passing lines on the eternity of punishment. And his explanations seem to non- believers as immoral as they are puerile and futile. To those who protest against the doctrine of hell, in the name of the moral conscience, he replies in the most solemn tone that the Catholic Church allows us to believe 122 CARDINAL NEWMAN with the Jesuit Petavius that hell, after all, may contain refrigeria ! ^ It is useless to comment on such an explanation ! That a great intellect and a lofty and pure character should thus summarily dismiss one of the most tremendous difficulties of the Catholic dogma, abundantly shows us where lies the weakness of Newman's apologetics. It is not such and such an argument, it is not such and such a fact which separate Newman from his readers : it is the very spirit and atmosphere of his works. And it is such statements which remind us that Newman lives and moves and has his being in a world totally different from that inhabited by the enormous majority of his readers. Those who already live in that world, and who are already provided with those organs of faith which enable them to breathe its rarefied atmosphere, will find in Newman an incomparable apologist. But ordinary seekers after truth will discover that that world is separated from our nether world by an abyss which not even the wonderful genius of Newman will ever enable them to bridge: (/jrihug uyzcof/jirpf^rog eiatro) ! " He tells us in a famous passage of the Apologia that it is his firm conviction that it would be a gain to this country were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion than at present it shows itself to be. The great instrument ^ In the appendix to the Orammar of Assent : it is, however, very striking that in the Theory of Development, in which he discusses every Catholic dogma, he does not once mention the doctrine of hell and eternal punishment. There is a beautiful spiritual interpretation of hell punishment in the poem "Refrigerium." The poem, strangely enough, is not reproduced in the "edition definitive." Perhaps New- man felt it was not " orthodox." NEWMAN'S APOLOGETICS 123 of his opponents is as objectionable as their end is futile and their temper is shallow. The lovers of progress found their hopes on the influence of illumina- tion in dispelling superstition. 'Superstition,' replies Newman, ' is better than your so-called illumination.' Superstition, in fact, differs from religion, not in the temper and disposition of mind which it indicates, but in the authority which it accepts ; it is the blind man groping after the guiding hand vouchsafed to him in revelation. The world when trying to turn to its Maker has ever professed a gloomy religion, in spite of itself. Its sacrifices, its bodily tortures, its fierce delight in self -tormenting, testify to its sense of guilt and corruption. These ' dark and desperate struggles ' are superstition when set beside Christianity, but such superstition 'is man's purest and best religion before the gospel shines on him. To be gloomy, to see ourselves with horror,' to wait naked and shivering among the trees of the garden — in a word, to be superstitious — is Nature's best offering, her most accept- able service, her most matured and enlarged wisdom, in presence of a holy and offended God." ^ 1 See Leslie Stephen, An Agnostic's Apology, pp. 173-174. CHAPTER VII Pascal and Newman Religious philosophy and apologetic literature in France have been nourished for the last seventy-five years on the TJioughts of Pascal. Since the famous Report of Victor Cousin, the most penetrating moralists — Vinet, Sainte-Beuve, Havet, Sully, Prudhomme, Boutroux — have applied themselves to the investigation of the fascinating and perplexing mystery. "The Catholic Church," says M. Boutroux in his admirable monograph on Pascal, " has been for a long time satisfied with apologetic systems which are based mainly on pure reason and on authority. But to-day we witness inside the Church remarkable efforts to seek the first reasons for belief, no more in the objects of faith, but in man and in his nature. According to this method, the first condition of any demonstration of religion ought to be the awakening in the human soul of a desire to possess God, a desire which indeed constitutes one of its elemental instincts, but which is oppressed and repressed by our sensuous life. The problem would be to disentangle in nature itself the claims of the supernatural. Now it is partly under the influence of Pascal, read and meditated in the simplicity of our heart, that those aspects of Christian PASCAL AND NEWMAN 125 apologetics are being developed" (Boutroux, Pascal, pp. 201, 202). For the last ten years the younger generation have turned away from the problem of Pascal and have given their allegiance to Cardinal Newman ; and to- day, even in France, the influence of Newman on the ^lite of Roman Catholicism is certainly stronger and deeper than the influence of Pascal. The same battles which once were fought about the Pens^es are being waged to-day round the Apologia, and the University Sermons, and the Theory of Development, and the Grammar of Assent. The same minds which once would follow the teachings of the one are to-day the disciples of the other. Between those two great names — the greatest, perhaps, in the religious literature of the modem world — a comparison there- fore naturally suggests itself. Their parallel destinies correspond to the same preoccupations, the same needs of the times. And therefore to contrast Pascal and Newman, is to probe the very depths of the spirit of the age. And, moreover, they belong to the same spiritual family. To compare their works is one of the best means of understanding them both. We see their characteristics in their true prospective ; we distinguish those which are only secondary from those which are fundamental ; we distinguish those which are rooted in the spiritual temperament from those which are only due to the accidents of time and place.^ ' Madame Lucie Felix Faore-Goyau was the first to point out the analogies between Newman and Pascal, as she was one of the first to introduce Newman to the French public 126 CARDINAL NEWMAN THE DIFFERENCES At first sight the differences appear to be far more important than the resemblances. It would seem as if their surroundings, the age in which they lived, the circumstances of their existence, had created a gulf between them. 1. Newman is a professional churchman, with the narrow outlook of his class ; a recluse and a monk ; a theologian writing primarily for theologians ; a convert from Anglicanism, devoting himself to the conversion of his former co-religionists. Pascal is a layman : a great physicist and mathema- tician, he has taken a leading part in the scientific movement of his time, and has immortalised his name by epoch-making discoveries. A man of the world, he writes for men of the world. What interests him in religion is not one particular sect as distinguished from another sect, but its human and universal aspect. And therefore he wishes to found Christianity on the bed rock of the human soul. He does not, like Newman, write for Anglicans or converts from Anglicanism ; he wishes to be understood of every man; he appeals alike to Protestants and Catholics, to believers and unbelievers. 2. And with a wider outlook, there also seems to be a greater intensity, a deeper religious passion in Pascal than in Newman, The conversion of Pascal was rather a revolution than a gradual evolution; like St. Paul, Pascal had his illumination on the way to Damascus.^ The "conversion" of Newman was ^ The tendency of the eighteenth-century commentators of Pascal was to emphasise the "catastrophic" nature of Pascal's conversion and PASCAL AND NEWMAN 127 an even, and equable, and continuous development extending over fifteen years. Newman himself con- fesses in his Apologia that his reception into Catholi- cism did not produce any great change in his inner life. And the change is not much more apparent in his works. For he again makes the significant admission that in the twelve volumes of his Protestant works, where he treats of every question of the religious life, he can hardly trace one important error : so little difference is there between the Protestant phase and the Catholic phase/ 3. Such a contrast between religious apprehension in Newman and in Pascal suggests some constitutional opposition in their temperament. Pascal is from childhood an invalid, predestined to a premature death. His life, though brief, is one long tragedy. He tells us that from his adolescence he did not spend one day without acute sufiering; and, generalising his own individual experience, he proclaims that illness is the natural state of the true Christian. And this physical martyrdom is reflected in the tone of anguish and intense passion which is the keynote of the Pens^es. There is something morbid, pathological, excessive, unbalanced, something of a Christian Hamlet in the Tincompromising pessimism, in the glorification of suffering, in the absence of the gentler and more human aspects of religion. At the age when Pascal dies, Newman has not yet fulfilled one-half of his career, and there still remain to him the fifty most fruitful years of his life. Monsieur Raoul Goilt notwithstanding, Newman always re- to attribute this conversion to morbid causes and to strange occurrences, like the imaginary accident at the Bridge of Neuilly. 128 CARDINAL NEWMAN tained his moral health as well as his physical health ; he always impresses us, even through the most painful trials and perplexities, by his calmness, his serenity, the equipoise of his mind. 4. And these constitutional differences are expressed in the very external appearance of their works. The religious philosophy of Pascal is embodied in one little volume of scattered thoughts, written down in the intervals of suffering, fragments which the ingenuity of three centuries has been unable to piece together so as to form one consistent whole. The philosophy of Newman is expressed in forty volumes, written in the leisure of fifty years and in the vigour of almost unbroken health ; every argument in its place, in battle order ; nothing left to chance, and almost every one of those forty volumes a masterpiece of com- position. THE RESEMBLANCES And yet all those differences are not as essential as they seem, and are only the result of the differences between their external circumstances. Widely as they differ in their physical constitution, they have funda- mentally the same intellectual and religious tempera- ment. 1. Both men are characterised by the same univer- sality of mental gifts. Pascal is equally supreme in the three provinces of intellectual activity: a great scientist, he is also a great philosophical thinker and the creator of classical French prose. Newman is a preacher and an educationist, a journalist and a con- troversialist, a dialectician and a theologian, a poet and a novelist. And both Pascal and Newman have placed PASCAL AND NEWMAN 129 the same extraordinary versatility at the service of the one sacred cause, on the altar of religion : Pascal has sacrificed the genius of science, Newman has sacrificed the genius of poetry. 2. In both writers we find the same combination of contradictory qualities : on the one hand, a keen and incisive intellect, which is never the dupe of formulas and is ever ready to seize on the weak points of an opponent ; the clear perception of the truths of exact science — what Pascal calls V esprit gdowMrique — joined to the esprit de finesse, the perception of the finer and more delicate truths of moral science ; and, on the other hand, a mystical imagination, an acute receptiveness to religious emotion, an apprehension of and an ever- present sense of wonder and awe before the realities of the invisible world. 3. Both writers are characterised by the same funda- mental originality. They are never daunted by received opinions or prejudices. Even when they are extolling habit and tradition, they depart from traditional opinions. This originality has probably been assisted in both by an ignorance truly extraordinary considering the atmosphere in which they lived. Never was there an intellect which had in it less of a bookworm than Pascal; one might almost say that the Bible and Montaigne constituted the staple of his reading. Newman as a clergyman and an Oxford Fellow and tutor had necessarily a wider culture, and he had much more of the historical mind. He was deeply read in the literature of the Fathers, but he knew little of foreign literature ; he only dimly suspected the existence of German philosophy, and German theology, and German 9 130 CARDINAL NEWMAN Higher Criticism, and from an early epoch he succeeded in repressing and suppressing any intellectual curiosity which might have taken him away from the contem- plation of the eternal verities. 4. For indeed ignorance in both was only a result of their entire absorption in the religious ideal and their absolute detachment from mundane things. Pascal never misses an opportunity of expressing his con- tempt for the philosophy of Descartes. Even his own magnificent discoveries in physical science and in mathematics came to be regarded only as a passing episode. No doubt in Newman's life we do not witness the same painful experience of self-mutilation and of a mighty genius committing suicide ; but Newman also, as time went on, retired more and more from the busy scenes of the outside world and led the contemplative life of the solitary monk, and he was only saved from the excesses of asceticism by his interest in education and his duties as the superior of the Birmingham Oratory. 5. Both writers created a new Christian " Apologia " based on a new conception of the religious phenomenon and on a new philosophy of faith. Both, warned and terrified by the demands of their own imperious in- tellectual instincts, used all the resources of a mighty mind to combat religious intellectualism. Religion is a disposition of the soul, a fact of experience. Religious truth is not established by the ratiocinative faculties, it is proved and realised by our lives. Faith is the supreme blossom of our moral activity. The famous phrase in the Mystery of Jesus, "A mesure que tu eaypierae tes picMs, tu les comprendras" and those PASCAL AND NEWMAN 131 other words, even more characteristic, " Cela vous fera croire et vous ahStira," indicating the duty of repressing the intellect, give the keynote of the religious philo- sophy of Newman and of Pascal. 6. Precisely because Pascal and Newman base the truths of religion on the analysis and interpretation of our psychological experiences, their tendency is to insist on the subjective and individual aspect rather than on the ecclesiastical or political and social aspect. Whatever may be the theoretical importance which both attach to the authority of the Church and to the ministry of the priest, practically their conception of religion is mainly individualistic, one might almost say egotistic. As in the Iinitation of Christ, religion is a mystical dialogue between God and the soul. The Church may provide the superstructure, conscience alone provides the foundations. In our intercourse with God we are alone, we live alone, and we die alone. In the Apologia Newman recurs to the words of Pascal, " Nous mourrons seuls." Neither Pascal nor Newman ever emphasises the mediation of the priest; the only mediator for Pascal is Christ. And for Newman there are only two realities: God and himself. 7. Both writers have adopted in the exposition of these extreme views the same extreme, aggressive attitude. Both are polemical writers. We must not be deceived by the conciliatory form, the courteous manner, the concessions for argument's sake. This is a mere matter of tact and policy. At heart Newman is as uncompromising as Pascal. He is as little content to remain on his defence or to remain sitting " on the fence"; he is as ready to take the offensive and to 132 CARDINAL NEWMAN carry warfare into the camp of the enemy; he uses as intemperate language. 8. The aggressiveness and audacity and originality of both have equally terrified their co-religionists and have been equally misunderstood. Both have been accused of scepticism, of taking a leap in the dark, of having taken counsel from despair. In both cases the accusation is almost equally absurd. No doubt they both delight to emphasise the uncertainties of faith, to accumulate the difiiculties and shadows which hide from our view the Deus ahsconditus. But in both cases the spirit and inspiration are the same; there must be something heroic and generous in our dealings with God. We must not attempt to drive a hard bargain. Faith must be a wager, a risk, says Pascal.^ Faith has its ventures, says Newman.^ And the more hazardous the risks, the more heroic the venture, the greater will be our deserts. 9. Notwithstanding the absurdity of the accusation of scepticism, the fact remains that neither Pascal nor Newman can be regarded, or have been regarded, as " safe " apologists from the point of view of ortho- doxy. Both have fought Protestantism as a system of religion, yet both are Protestant in spirit because they are ever ready to " protest " in the name of conscience. Is it necessary to point out the numberless passages in Newman's works on the supremacy of the religious conscience ? — for instance, the famous passage in the 1 See in Pascal's Thoughts (ed. BrunschM-igg, p. 437) the character- istic pages on the regie du pari: "II se joue un jeu, & I'extremit^ de cette distance infinie, oil il arrivera croix ou pile. . . . Oui : mais il faut yarier." 2 Cf. the sermon on the Ventures of Faith, PASCAL AND NEWMAN 133 Letter to the Duke of Norfolk on the hypothetical toast to conscience first, to the pope afterwards ? Or the equally significant Letter to Bishop Ullathome denounc- ing an insolent faction of Romanists ? But the Protest- ant spirit of Pascal is no less striking, though much less known. We are to-day in a better position than were his contemporaries to interpret the hidden meaning of Pascal, as the strongest passages had been suppressed by the Port Royalists. Yet the Port Royalists were not ultramontanes. But even they could not publish such formidable " protests " as the following : — " The pope hates and fears learned men, because they are not submitted to him by a vow." ^ " Each time the Jesuits shall surprise the confidence of the pope, they will cause the whole of Christendom to commit perjury." ^ " If the Port Royalists keep silence (from cowardice) the stones will speak." ' " It is better to obey God than men." * " If my letters are condemned in Rome, what I condemn in them shall be condemned in heaven : Ad tuum, Domine Jesu, trihiinal appello" ^ " Am I alone against thirty thousand ? Not at all. You may keep on your side the court and the impostors. I have the truth on my side. She is my whole strength ; if I lose her, I am lost. Neither accusations nor persecutions will be wanting. But I ^ " Le pape hait et craint lea savants, qui ne lui sent pas soumis par voeu. " * "Toutes les fois que lea J^suites surprendrout le pape, on rendra tonte la chr^tient^ parjure." ' •' Si ceux lii se taisent, les pierres parleront." * " II est meilleur d'oWir a Dieu qu'aux honimes." * "Si mes lettres sont condamnees a Rome, ce que j'y condanme est condamnd dans le ciel : Ad tuum, Domine Jesu, tribunal appello." 134 CARDINAL NEWMAN have the truth, and we shall see who will win the day.»i 10. What still further strengthens the impression of heterodoxy is that in both Pascal and Newman we find a strong leaven of Calvinism. Both have a horror of an easy religion, both emphasise the stem aspects of Christianity, both warn us against taking the smooth path. The Port Royalists, of whom Pascal is the advocate, are the Calvinists of the Gallican Church. And Newman himself, of Huguenot origin and educated by a Calvinist mother, has never shaken off the influences of his early training. 11. If our parallelism has not been strained to satisfy a preconceived theory, we ought to find all those striking analogies reflected both in the style of the two writers and in the influence which they have exerted — because in a great writer style is but the ex- pression of the inmost personality, and because influence is but the interpretation of a thinker by posterity. Now the style of Pascal and Newman present the most characteristic resemblances : both combine the intellectual qualities with the emotional, irony with pathos ; both are abstract and " spiritual " ; both have balance and rhythm, and they are musical rather than imaginative. Pascal's style is probably more impressive by its greater brevity and lapidarity. Both are perfectly simple and chastened — neither ever depends for efiect on rhetoric; both are not only inimitable, but they evade literary analysis because ^ *'Je suis seul contre trente mille ? Point. Gardez, vous la cour, vous I'imposture ; moi la verit6 ; c'est toute ma force ; si je la perds, je suis perdu. Je ne manquerai pas d'accusations et de persecutions. Mais j'ai la v6rit6, et nous verrons qui I'emportera." PASCAL AND NEWMAN 135 they owe nothing to artifice. And yet both owe a great deal to art. Whilst producing the impression of spontaneity and inevitableness, they are yet the result of infinite labour. Sunima ars est celare artem I We know from Newman's confession the agonies he went through in the process of writing. We know that Pascal re-wrote sixteen times some of his Provincial Letters, and we can point to the passage at the begin- ning of one of the " Provinciales " where he apologises for the length of the letter, because he has not had time to make it shorter. 12. And the influence of both writers proves beyond contest that several generations instinctively and independently have read the same meaning into their works. Both have turned religious thought into new and deeper channels; they have raised the moral temperature of those who have come under their spelL Consciously they have no doubt worked in the cause of Roman Catholicism in the strict sense of the word, but their influence has exceeded the limits of their church ; they have been, and continue to be, the delight alike of Catholics and Protestants, of believers and sceptics — and thus unconsciously and above all they have worked in the cause of that wider Catholicism which includes all those who believe in the " Kingdom of God " and who strive to realise it in their lives and hearts. CHAPTER VIII Was Newman a Liberal Catholic? It was Newman's fate all through his Catholic life to be persecuted by the ultramontane party, by that "insolent faction" which in France under Louis Veuillot and in England under Cardinal Manning were ever advocating violent measures and extreme decis- ions. Newman's anti-ultramontane feelings were so well known even on the Continent that Monseigneur Dupanloup asked him to be his secretary at the Vatican Council. Like his illustrious colleague of the French Oratory, Father Gratry, before and during the Council, Newman strenuously opposed the pro- clamation of papal infallibility. No doubt after the Council he submitted and defended the new dogma against Gladstone in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk ; but the letter did not allay the suspicions of the Roman Curia as to his orthodoxy, for it contained so many reservations that it might appear as an attempt to qualify and minimise and explain away papal infallibility rather than as a plea in its defence : he protested against the extravagant statements of the " Vaticanists," and upheld the supremacy of conscience, the arbiter of moral truth, wherever it might appear contrary to religious dogma. 136 WAS NEWMAN A LIBERAL CATHOLIC ? 137 " There are those among us, as it must be confessed, who for years past have conducted themselves as if no responsibility attached to wild words and overbearing deeds ; who have stated truths in the most paradoxical form, and stretched principles till they were close upon snapping ; and who at length, having done their best to set the house on fire, leave to others the task of putting out the flame. The English people are sufficiently sensitive of the claims of the pope without having them, as if in defiance, flourished in their faces." 1 "Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts (which indeed does not seem quite the thing), I shall drink — to the pope, if you please, — still, to Conscience first, and to the pope afterwards." ^ In the presence of Newman's attitude towards the ultramontane party one is naturally led on to define the exact position which he took up in the great controversy which divided the Roman Church in the second part of the nineteenth century. Did he belong to the right wing or to the left wing of the Church ? Was he in favour of a narrower or of a wider concep- tion of church policy ? In one word, was he a liberal Catholic, and in what sense, and in what measure ? If the problem were merely a question of words, and could be settled by texts, we should have to give a negative answer. We ought to conclude that Newman was an opponent rather than an advocate of liberalism. Tractarianism itself was a reaction against liberalism, and Abbe Bremond admits that Newman was essen- tially un homme de reaction. To support this * Difficulties of Anglicans, ii. 176. * Ihid, ii. 261. 138 CARDINAL NEWMAN conclusion we should find in Newman's writings, and especially in the Apologia, a large number of passages condemning modern liberalism. But if we read those passages accurately, we find that Newman attached to the word " liberalism " a definite historical meaning. " What Newman named ' Liberalism ' was a single force disguised in many forms : rationalism in religion, revolution or reform in politics, erastianism and latitudinarianism in Church. It was the spirit of change, negation, disintegration, destruction." ^ "The Apologia is the history of a great battle against liberalism, understanding hy liberalism the tendencies of modern thought to destroy the basis of revealed religion, and ultimately of all that can be called religion at all." ^ From the two passages just quoted it seems obvious that the condemnation of a certain form of negative and aggressive " liberalism " does not in the least imply that Newman was not a " liberal Catholic," and that before we can accurately define his opinions we must subject them to a patient and minute analysis. This is all the more necessary because there does not exist in the vocabulary of politics or philosophy one single word which is more constantly misused and mis- understood than the word " liberalism." There exists every variety and type of liberal from the "free- thinker " who worships liberty as an idol, to the philo- sophical liberal who sees in liberty the condition of intellectual and moral discipline, down to the con- ^ Fairbaim, Catholicism, Roman and Anglican, p. 307. Principal Fairbairn appears to me among Protestants by far the ablest critic of Newman's apologetics. * Dean Church, Occasional Papers, ii. 386. WAS NEWMAN A LIBERAL CATHOLIC ? 1 39 servative liberal who accepts liberalism as a necessary evil. The exact meaning of the word " liberal " must therefore be strictly defined by the circumstances of time and place and by the personal characteristics of the thinker whose conception of the term we attempt to describe. Intolerance belongs to every age and every religion. We incline towards intolerance by our qualities as well as by our defects. We are intolerant not merely from narrowness of mind, from deficiency of imagina- tion, from lack of respect for the personality of others, we are intolerant by the very strength of our convictions and the fervour of our enthusiasm. Any man with strong convictions is almost inevitably in- tolerant ; he cannot impartially consider the arguments of an opponent. Indeed the very use of the word " tolerance " is a proof of intolerance and defines the attitude of our mind towards those opinions which we do not share : we do not tolerate truth or goodness, we only tolerate evil and error. Vainly do we proclaim the principle of toleration, vainly do we write it on the statute-book : we cannot practise it in our lives and manners. There is an intolerance more insidious, more subtle and dangerous than legislative intolerance ; and that is the intolerance of public opinion. England boasts of being pre- eminently the country of freedom. As a matter of fact there are few countries where the public are more intolerant of individual thought and private judgment. Protestantism claims to be based on religious liberty. As a matter of fact there are many Protestant sects who are far more fanatical and oppressive than the Roman Catholic Church, 140 CARDINAL NEWMAN The truth remains, however, that for the extreme Romanist, who takes his principles from the Syllabus, the word " liberal Catholic " is a contradictio in adjecto. One may be a Catholic and a liberal, a liberal although a Catholic — one cannot be a liberal Catholic. Having the monopoly of truth, the Church cannot concede the liberty of error. And therefore an extreme Catholic is intolerant not merely from temperament and disposition, but from principle and doctrine: and there lies the danger. The Protestant is intolerant unwittingly and unwillingly ; the Catholic is intolerant consciously, voluntarily, and glorifies in his intolerance. The Catholic condemns liberty in others, he only demands it for himself. When he claims freedom in education, we know that it is only a step towards the monopoly of education. And he does not hide his ultimate end nor can he be accused of duplicity. Louis Veuillot has admirably summed up the Catholic thesis : You owe us freedom in order to comply with your 'principles. . . . We deny you freedom in order to comply with ours. These words of Veuillot are absurd and odious ; they justify — whatever may be asserted by Anatole Leroy Beaulieu in his remarkable book on Liberal Catholi- cism, — all the oppressive measures which have been directed in our day by the temporal power against the clerical party. For the State may fully reply to the Church, " In denying us liberty, you give us the right and duty to turn against you. To deprive you of liberty is not to use reprisals, it is merely to exercise our right of self-defence. It is not to betray the sacred cause of freedom, it is to protect it. We only take your warning that the first use you will make of WAS NEWMAN A LIBERAL CATHOLIC ? 141 your own liberty, when you are strong enough, will bo to strangle ours." The first duty of a liberal, in the very interests of tolerance, is to be intolerant towards those who preach intolerance. It seems certain that if Catholicism did triumph, there would be an end of liberty. But then, Catholicism never does triumph thoroughly. The Catholic Church ever remains the militant Church. And so completely is theory contradicted by fact, that it still remains a historical problem whether the Catholic Church has not favoured liberty as much as or more than Pro- testantism. It is still a historical problem whether, by remaining consistently loyal to her own principles, the Catholic Church has not strengthened the adverse principle, and whether, by establishing the thesis, she has not also established the antithesis. Not only has she developed moral freedom by the discipline she imposes, by the resistance she opposes to human passion, by the constant effort she demands from the human will : she indirectly favours political liberty, by asserting the independence of the spiritual power. She has made Caesarism impossible: under Louis xiv. the Church alone had retained a remnant of liberty ; F^nelon and Bossuet alone had the courage to protest against the excesses of despotism. And finally, by declaring war on human reason, by refusing every compromise, by calling forth an eternal opposition, may it not be said that Roman Catholicism has furthered the cause of intellectual liberty — all the more effectively because unwillingly ? In a Catholic country reason is always on its defence ; it never relaxes under the influence of compromise, it never capitulates: for it knows that capitulation would mean abdication and 142 CARDINAL NEWMAN destruction.^ Heresy and nonconformity are inevit- able and permanent in a Catholic country: oportet hcBreses esse. It would therefore be unfair to assert that intoler- ance is a monopoly of Romanism, or that Romanism has been ever fatal to liberty. Experience teaches us that religious toleration depends on historical condi- tions rather than on the nature of religions themselves. Wherever any church is alone in possession of the field and has no rivalry to dread, that church is ever intolerant. There is a guarantee of tolerance only in those countries where religious opinions are profoundly divided and where several churches are struggling for existence. In those countries it is necessary to es- tablish a modus vivendi among the churches; with them all, toleration is a question of life and death. Under such conditions the surroundings must needs be unfavourable to the growth of intolerance. The temporal power, from the necessities of the situation, is divorced from religion and is compelled to observe between the different churches a rigorous neutrality and the " liberty of indifference." Now the activity of Newman was displayed precisely in surroundings where, and in an age when, all the forces which make for toleration were in full activity. The Established Church had given up the policy of enforcing her doctrines and had ended in latitudi- narianism and erastianism. From his first Oxford year Newman belonged to a minority which was compelled ^ " It is but natural that the church which most taxes faith should most provoke unbelief. It is the simple and sober truth to say that no church has begotten so much doubt and disbelief as the Church of Rome." — Fairbairn, Catholicism, Roman and Anglican, p. 62. WAS NEWMAN A LIBERAL CATHOLIC ? 143 to a constant struggle to get its views accepted. And whilst Newman condemned " liberalism " in theory, he claimed liberty for his own party, and the success of his propaganda entirely depended on that very lati- tudinarianism on the part of the hierarchy which he so fiercely denounced. After he became a Catholic he retained the Anglican habits of mind, and carried those habits into the Roman Catholic Church.^ A liberal by the influence of his Anglican surround- ings, Newman was also a liberal by the teachings of his personal experience. His conversion had been the result of the inner workings of his mind during a period of fifteen years, the conclusion of a slow dialectical process. To a man who had gone through such an experience the very idea of external pressure or violence must have been hateful, and he must ever have respected in others what others had respected in himself,^ He always assumed that the only natural means of conversion are persuasion and example, even as the only supernatural means are prayer and the illumination of gi*ace. To make an appeal to external influences, to the temporal power, was it not to sub- stitute human means for the ways of Providence, was it not to exhibit an absence of faith in the ultimate triumph of truth ? On his personal experience Newman was to build ^ " In a very real sense, he did not cease to be an Anglican when he became a Roman Catholic." — Fairbaim, p. 79. ' My impression is that Newman became more tolerant in later years. He certainly is more tolerant as a Catholic than be was as an Anglican. By natural disposition he was essentially intolerant, as is shown in his relations with Archbiahop Whately and with members of his own family. The sterner side of Newman has always struck me more than (he ^'gentler" side. 144 CARDINAL NEWMAN a new theory of religion, and that theory was essenti- ally individualistic, i.e. liberal. " In the heart of this chief of English Catholics," says Principal Fairbairn, " there is an intense individualism — indeed, it was the strength of his individualism that made a Catholic of him."^ The religious phenomenon is a spontaneous and voluntary act which takes place in the deepest and most intimate recesses of the human conscience, so intimate that the very persuasion of friendship or affection may appear as an intrusion. No doubt Newman holds that the inner workings of the religious mind are barren outside the communion of saints and without the ministry of the Church ; but our entering that Communion and that Church is an act of free adhesion, and such adhesion we can give or refuse at our own risk and peril. Any form of coercion is not only ill-advised, but immoral. The liberty of the individual conscience is intangible. That freedom of error and of evil which theologians of a certain school would deny to the Christian, is the very law of God in the world. They protest against the toleration of evil. But God Himself tolerates moral evil and physical evil, because such toleration is the very condition of moral responsibility. I would only single out two or three striking passages to support my interpretation of Newman's view of religion and to show that it certainly is based on his own experiences. " I am the last Tnan 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 he God's command in order to make his path easier for ^ Fairbairn, p. 118. WAS NEWMAN A LIBERAL CATHOLIC? 145 him or his heart lighter. I am the last man to quarrel with them for this jealous deference to the voice of their conscience whatever be the judgment that others may form of them in consequence, for this reason, because their present circumstances have once, as you know, been Tny oum."^ "A faulty conscience, faith- fully obeyed, through God's mercy, had in the long-run brought me right." '^ "Life in this world is motion, and involves a con- tinual process of change. Living things grow into their perfection, into their decline, into their death. No rule of art will suffice to stop the operation of this natural law, whether in the material world or in the human mind. We can indeed encounter disorders when they occur, by external antagonism and remedies ; but we cannot eradicate the process itself, out of which they arise. Life has the same right to decay as it has to wax strong. This is specially the case with great ideas. You may stifle them ; or you mxiy refuse them elbow-room; or again, you may torment them, ^ Difficulties of Anglicans, p. 3. This remarkable passage refutes in anticipation an attack of the author of Ecce Homo which is obviously an allusion to Newman : — "If He (our Lord) meant anything by His constant denunciation of hypocrites, there is nothing which He would have visited with sterner censure than that short cut to belief which many persons take, when, overwhelmed with difficulties which beset their minds, and afraid of damnation, they suddenly resolve to strive no longer, but giving their minds a holiday, to rest content with saying that they believe, and acting as if they did." — Ecce Homo, p. 79. It is a convincing proof how much Newman's mind had remained an enigma even to his best friends, that Lord Blachford, on the anonymous publication of Ecce Homo, persistently attributed the authorship to Newman. See Letters of Lord Blachford. ^ Difficulties, ii. 6. lO 146 CARDINAL NEWMAN with your continual meddling ; or you may let them have free course and range, and he content, instead of anticipating their excesses, to expose and restrain those excesses after they have occurred. But you liave only this alternative, and for myself I prefer much, wherever it is possible, to be first generous and then just; to grant full liberty of thought, and to call it to account when abused." ^ It is precisely because in Newman's conception the religious act is an act of free assent that he reduces to a minimum all external influences and, especially, the influence of the priest. There is a dangerous tendency in the Roman Catholic Church to minimise the part of the layman, to magnify the part of the clergy and to make them the ultimate authority in all the acts of religious life. That tendency clearly appears in Mgr. Talbot and in Manning ; ^ it shows itself in most Catholic countries whenever laymen interfere in matters of Church policy; it shows itself in the enormous im- portance which the Jesuits attribute to the director of conscience. It is the same sacerdotalism, the same conception of the Church as a spiritual bureaucracy, which quite recently caused the Vatican to reject the French associations for worship (associations cultuelles) because they gave to laymen a large share in the administration of the Church. No doubt, it must be repeated, Newman emphasises the ministry of the Church and the Communion of Saints, but the Church is but the channel of Divine grace through her sacraments and her discipline ; she is but the depository of the eternal verities through her doctrine, and the priest is but an intermediary. His * Difficulties, ii. 79. * See Purcell's Life of Manning passim. WAS NEWMAN A LIBERAL CATHOLIC ? 147 mission ceases at the threshold of the soul. "The Christian soul is moulded by means of the Church. The rites, the dogmatic formulae, the external organisa- tion, are again the umbra et imago of the Reality. But through these God appears to speak directly to the faithful soul." ^ It is the soul which must decide in last resort. It does not behove the priest to obtrude his part in the mystical drama in which there are only two dramatis personce : God and Conscience.^ A liberal through the influence of his Protestant surroundings, through the teaching of his personal experience, a liberal in his conception of religion and of the sacerdotal ministry, Newman is also a liberal in his theory of the relations between Church and State.* He is generally very reticent on this burning * Ward, Problems and Persons, p. 267. ' " I rested in the thought of two, and two only, absolute and luminously self-evident beings — myself and my Creator." — Newman, Apologia, p. 4. ' Two passages in the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk define the limits of papal infallibility : — " If either the pope or the queen demanded of mean 'absolute obedience' he or she would be transgressing the laws of human society. I give an absolute obedience to neither. Further, if ever this double allegiance pulled me in contrary ways, which in this age of the world I think it never will, then I should decide according to the particular case, which is beyond all rule, and must be decided on its own merits. I should look to see what theologians could do for me, what the bishops and clergy around me, what my confessor ; what friends whom I revered : and if, after all, I could not take their view of the matter, then / must rule myself by my own jxidgmeiit and my ovm conscience. Here, of course, it will be objected to me, that I am, after all, having recourse to theProtestantdoctrineof Private judgment : not so; it is the Protestant doctrine that Private judgment is our ordinary guide in religious matters, but I use it, in the case in question, in very extraordinary and rare, nay impossible, emergencies." — Difficulties, ii. 243-4. *^ Let us suppose members of Parliament, or of the Privy Council, took 148 CARDINAL NEWMAN question, and the absence of any political controversy in Newman's writings is as remarkable as its presence in the works of Manning; but the very silence in Newman is singularly significant. As an Anglican he had learnt that the Church has nothing to gain in seeking the support of the State. In such an alliance it is always the Church who is the dupe. For it is not the Church which succeeds in realising her ideals in the State, it is the State which uses the spiritual power for its own secular ends. As a Catholic he never forgot that lesson of Protestant erastianism. In a famous sermon on the Mission of St. Philip Neri he shows us how fatal to the Catholic Church had been the alliance between the temporal and the spiritual power under the rule of the Medici. He never ceased to proclaim that the Kingdom of God is not of this world. And, finally, it is the same internal and spiritual Catholicism which explains the attitude of Newman in social questions. The priest as a private citizen may concern himself with social problems, but the Church must not do so as a Church. The priest must not be a mere agent of lay philanthropy : he is the minister of divine charity. Newman — so different in that respect from Lamennais, with whom otherwise he has so many points of resemblance — does not believe in Christian Socialism, and his aloofness and reserve on the vital practical questions of modern democracy will certainly weaken his hold of the new generation. an oath that they would not acknowledge the right of succession of a Prince of Wales, if he became a Catholic : in that case, I should not consider the pope could release me from that oath, had I hound myself by it." — Difficulties, ii. 241. WAS NEWMAN A LIBERAL CATHOLIC ? 149 Here again we can only interpret his silence and the implicit meaning of his doctrine. There is, however, one significant incident in his later years which shows that our interpretation is not an arbitrary one.^ His brother Francis asked him one day to give his support to the temperance campaign. Whilst Manning threw himself heart and soul into the crusade, Newman absolutely refused to give his countenance to the * See F. W. Newman, The Early History of the Late Cardinal Newman, 1891, pp. 109-10: "But this new movement of Christians leads me on to another painful phenomenon in the late Cardinal's character. " On 22nd October 1869 Archbishop Manning made his first appearance in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, to co-operate with Protestants against the enormous excess of the trade in intoxicating drink. For a year previous we had investigated the subject and had taken the precaution to discuss the matter at headquarters, so as to act without fear of higher disapproval. I was on the platform and heard him with delight. The vast audience felt as one heart and one soul. We knew what sacrifice of time and energy a man of onerous duties and great influence has to make when he breaks through routine in the cause of fundamental public morality , and makes speeches which must incur certainly much criticism, probably much ill-will, besides the novelty of standing on a common platform with Protestants. It tilled me with enthusiasm and joy, but I was merely a type of the thousands who listened in deep, rapt silence to his magnificent speech. I wrote at once to my brother, believing that I had got a topic on which we should at length find interest in common. I cannot guarantee my words, but I know that I was elated and my admiration warm. He replied in a kind note, but with only these few words bearing on my topic : ' As to what you tell me of Archbishop Manning, I have heard that some also of our Irish bishops think that too many drink shops were licensed. As for me, I do not know whether we have too many or too few. ' " This seemed to curdle my heart like a lump of ice. I handed the note to a Manchester friend, who exclaimed, ' Why ! one would think he was living on a diflierent planet.' (Since writing this I learn from a passage in the Apologia, page 112, that his writing in the Becord newspaper was stopped by the editor when he wanted to cUtack Temperance Societies about 1834.)" ISO CARDINAL NEWMAN agitation, and Francis Newman compares the admirable devotion and public spirit of Manning with the selfish apathy of his brother: his indignation was such that from this moment the relations between the two brothers ceased almost completely. As a matter of fact, the attitude of Newman was perfectly logical and consistent with his individualistic, egotistic, and mystic conception of religion.^ Let us first reform ourselves, and we shall thereby reform others. Let the Christian live as a Christian and influence by the example he sets : the propaganda of his life and virtues will be more eflficient than any political propaganda. To sum up our argument : if Newman stands at the antipodes of rationalistic liberalism, he is at an equal distance from ultramontane and bureaucratic sacer- dotalism. Catholic liberalism may not be with him a guiding principle as it was with Montalembert, but none the less is the belief in the inviolability of the religious conscience rooted in his temperament and in his inmost soul. And this belief alone in the supremacy of conscience enables us to conclude that Newman is a liberal Catholic in the highest sense of the word. ^ One day, ou a visit to Count Tolstoy, during the darkest days of the Russian Revolution, I asked the prophet of Yassnaia Poliana why he kept aloof from and silent in that tremendous crisis of his country. Tolstoy replied to me : " When a man is on the eve of appearing before his Judge, all merely temporal matters must sink into insignificance." Newman might have made a similar reply. CHAPTER IX Cardinal Newman and Modernism The Roman Catholic Church of to-day is passing through an internal crisis, the most ominous she has known since the Reformation. Her fundamental dogmas are being called in question, her discipline, her institutions are being assailed. In the face of the reactionary attitude of the Roman Curia, a spirit of insubordination is spreading to every branch of the Church. Although France remains the centre of the movement, no country is escaping unhurt. And from the laity revolt has extended to the clergy : numberless are the priests who have made common cause with the innovators. Most disquieting of all omens, even the Jesuits, the spiritual bodyguard of Rome, are infected with the new spirit, and it is an English Jesuit, the ex- Father Tyrrell, who is one of the leaders of the modernists.^ The conservative section amongst Roman Catholics may nourish the fond hope that the Church will emerge from this crisis as she has ever done before : Devs dabit hi» quoque finem. They forget that the present situation is without any analogy in history. As long ' Another representative of the "modernist" Jesuits is Father Dele- haye : cf. his remarkable and significant book, Li^rendes hagiographiques. X51 152 CARDINAL NEWMAN as scientific truths were a monopoly of an insignificant ^lite, Rome could silence a troublesome opposition. But to-day, when a ubiquitous press brings the dis- coveries and conclusions of modern research within reach of the millions, any attempt to quell spiritual rebellion is doomed to failure. As long as the pre- ponderating influence belonged to the ancient churches and to the Latin races, Rome could hope to impose her dogma, oppose her veto to innovation, and bring back to obedience nations accustomed to a passive discipline. But to-day, when the power of numbers and of wealth and of intellect has been transferred to the British, Teutonic, and American peoples, it is absolutely out of the question to exorcise a spirit of independence which forms part of the mental constitution of an Englishman, a German, or an American. And to-day, Roman conserva- tism against "modernism "simply means one small section of the Church — namely, Italy and Spain — as against the whole Catholic world. That would be a most short- sighted view of the present situation which would assume that the recent papal Encyclical has said the final word on the matter. A declaration of war is not generally supposed to mark the termination but the beginning of a catnpaign. And the Encyclical means nothing more than that war has been solemnly declared. The present crisis can only end in a complete transformation of the ancient Church and in the concession of what Thiers once called "the necessary liberties," or in a schism which would be the disruption and dissolution of Catholicism. In the previous chapter we attempted to define the position of Newman in the question of Catholic liberalism. We would now venture to describe his NEWMAN AND MODERNISM 153 attitude in the far more momentous problems of " modernism." If we were to believe some of the leaders like Loisy, Newman would be no less than the spiritual father of the modernists and the initiator of the movement. Through an irony of fate, Newman would thus only have joined the Catholic Church to become the inspirer of the most formidable Catholic rebellion since the days of Luther and Calvin, he would only have ceased to be a schismatic to become a redoubtable heretic. In what measure is that interpretation legitimate ? Does such a filiation exist? Would Newman himself have recognised his own thoughts in the new doctrines? or would he have disavowed those who proclaim themselves his disciples ? Among all the problems raised by a study of Newman's personality and writings, there is none of more surpassing interest.^ It would be impossible to express in a formula a complex movement like modernism where tendencies the most vague are mixed up with ideas the most far-reaching. It will be safest to accept the definition and analysis propounded in the recent Encyclical. Whatever one's personal predilections may be, the papal utterance is certainly a masterpiece of ecclesi- astical controversy, and must be held on the whole to be a fair analysis of the " modernist " doctrines. But even if the Encyclical had not done justice to the new theories, for practical purposes it is the interpretation of Rome — which, whether right or wrong, must needs carry most weight. Now, according to the Encyclical ' See on this question two papers from opposite points of view by Father Gerrard, S.J,, and ex- Father Tyrrell, Hibbert Journal, January 1908. 154 CARDINAL NEWMAN there are three aspects and elements of modernism : evolution, symbolism, and vital immanence. (1) It implies the acceptance of the principle of variation and development^ as opposed to the principle of immut- ability ; it applies to theology the Darwinian doctrine of evolution, being equally opposed to revolution and to reaction. (2) It brings to the solution of the conflict between science and theology a new method of scriptural interpretation; it substitutes a symbolical and alle- gorical reading of the Bible for the literal and historical reading. (3) It introduces a new conception of the religious phenomenon, a new philosophy of religion, and substitutes the principle of "vital immanence" for the principle of "transcendency." Let us try to analyse those three tendencies of modernism and examine their relation to the religious philosophy of Newman. 1. The modernists assert that the Church, being a living organism, must obey the laws of all living organisms: to live is to change, is to adapt oneself to the needs of the times and of the surroundings. And the more strenuous the life is, the more rapid must be the changes. New problems arise, and new doctrines and new institutions, new habits and new traditions. The relations between the Church and State cannot be the same under an ancient monarchy like Louis xiv., under a revolutionary despotism like Napoleon i., and under a modern republic, a French or American democracy. Catholic teaching cannot be the same in the Middle Ages, when the clergy had a monopoly of all science and met with no opposition, ^ It is interesting to notice that the Encyclical avoids the term development and only uses the words "evolution" and "variation." NEWMAN AND MODERNISM 155 and in contemporary society, where education is general and compulsory, and where the majority of scientists are hostile to the Church. Ecclesiastical discipline cannot be the same in a community where passive obedience is the rule and in a community where universal suffrage is supreme. To a new situation there must correspond new duties; new needs must create new organs and give rise to new principles. Now modernists assert that Newman has precisely provided the Church with such a new organ. His theory of development is as much a Novum Organum for Catholicism as Kant's method has been for modem philosophy. He has been the first to accustom Catholic thought to a new conception, so difierent from the conception of immutability, and to apply to theology the methods of biology. It might no doubt be objected that Newman does not give to the word " development " the vague and wide and elastic meaning which it possesses in biology. The " development " of a theologian like Newman has nothing in common with the " evolution " of a theologian like Professor Drummond. He is indeed very careful to distinguish development from adaptation and from variation in the Darwinian sense. The development of a dogma is merely the unfolding of possibilities and consequences contained in the premises. And although Newman repeatedly uses the analogy of organic development, his conception reminds us rather of a logical process tlian of an organic growth ; the relation between the undeveloped dogma and its development is the relation between an implicit and an explicit statement. To assert that Newman has been the Darwin of theology would therefore be as historically 156 CARDINAL NEWMAN true as to assert that Darwin is contained in Heraclitus and Lucretius. On the other hand, modernists may justly reply that Newman has thrown into general circulation and has covered with the authority of his name a magic word which implied a new method of research. So far from the vagueness of the word being an obstacle to its diffusion, it is this very vagueness which has contributed to the success of the philosophy} The ^ It would therefore be more exact to say that Newman's Essay has provided Catholic apologetics with a working hypothesis and with a temporary means of escape from the rigidity of scholastic dogma, rather than with a new philosophic principle. From a purely philosophic point of view the use of the new terminology connected with the theory of development can only introduce hopeless con/iision and Tnislcading metaphors into the stvdy of theology. The sooner this working hypothesis has done its work the better for the philosophic study of religion. Such seems also to be the opinion of Mr. Tyrrell : " Theology could then be recognised as belonging simply to the institutional part of Christianity, and as governed by the same necessary laws of change and development accommodation. There would be no inconvenience in allowing that its later phases may condemn the earlier to obsolescence, or that the Church of to-day is theologically more en- lightened than that of the Apostles. No longer holding to revelation and dogma as mere theology, we could rid ourselves frankly of all those fallacious 'germs-and-organism' metaphors which attempt to describe spiritual in terms of physiological development — the higher in terms of the lower. For whereas we can predict exactly that an egg will result in a chicken, or an acorn in an oak, or that a boy will grow into a man, we can never predict how the boy will (as we say) turn out ; what his experiences vrill be from day to day, or how he will arrange them in his mind, and deal with them in his conduct ; how he will build up his own mental and moral character ; what heroes, what ideals or standards he will set before himself. Physically, men are of the same species ; spiritually, each is a species apart. And so with the collective spirit and its developments ; so with sciences and arts and institutions, and societies and religions. On the spiritual side, and so far as they are freely self- forming, their future evades all prediction, since it is not contained in or predetermined by their NEWMAN AND MODERNISM 157 theory of development has become the " Sesame," opening all the secret gates of the old theology. It may be said, no doubt, that the disciples have gone far beyond the master, and that the master would have disavowed them ; but, nevertheless, Newman has been the initiator. The significance of a man's writings must be appreciated not merely through what his writings actually contain, but through the influence they have exerted. And it is a strictly historical fact that it is Newman who has started Loisy and his school on the road where they have travelled so far ; it is a fact that Loisy has proclaimed Newman the greatest Catholic theologian of the century, and that he has read the modernist principles into Newman's writings. On the publication of the Theory of Development in 1845 Newman submitted his Essay to the examination and approval of the Congregation of the Index. Rome refused to approve or to condemn, as the Essay had been written whilst Newman was still an Anglican. Well would it have been if the conservative section of the Church of Rome had demanded the suppression of a book which was to have such a fateful history! 2. It is especially the interpretation of the Bible and of the history of the Church which has shown the danger of the doctrinaire attitude and of doctrinal immobility, and which has brought to a point the present. Only so far as they have also a natural side which brings them under the general uniformities of nature can we foretell certain eventualities common to their class. Spiritual development is not a process of passive unfolding, of which each step is rigorously determined by the preceding ; but a process of active reconstruction, conditioned by the chance materials furnished through the quite incalculable succession of experiences." — Tyrrell, Through Scylla and Charybdia. 158 CARDINAL NEWMAN conflict between science and religion, or rather between science and theology, or rather between science and theologism. Catholics and Protestants alike for centuries have bound up their faith with a literal interpretation of Scripture. Now the progress of the historical and philological sciences auxiliary to biblical study, has entirely overthrown that interpretation. And therefore it is strictly true to aflfirm that to-day the most sacred beliefs of mankind are at the mercy of a small band of infidel archaeologists, egyptologists, and assyriologists. These philologists have discovered that dogmas which theologians asserted to be the comer- stone of faith were based on the misrendering of a word or on the interpolation of a text. For the last two generations Catholic and Protestant orthodoxy has been looking with dismay at the advance of the " higher criticism," has disputed every conclusion and has withheld to the last each inevitable concession. Anyone who has closely followed the history of the conflict will admit that it can only admit of one solution: churches will be compelled to give up an untenable position ; they will have to substitute a spiritual interpretation for the verbal and literal interpretation. They will have to admit that the object of the Bible is not to impart scientific or historic truth, but moral and religious truth. As Dean Stanley admitted to Newman, such a change ought to be far easier to Catholicism than to Protestantism. Protestantism, having no other basis than the Bible, is almost doomed to bibliolatry: let the verbal inspira- tion of the Bible be given up, and the very foundation of Protestantism crumbles away. Catholicism, on the contrary, is not based on the Bible alone, it is NEWMAN AND MODERNISM 159 based on tradition and on the living ministry of the Church. To a Catholic, revelation is not merely a thing of the past, localised in time and space, but a revelation which continues in and through the Church. That is probably the reason why Newman never attached to the problems of biblical criticism the paramount importance which is attached to them in the Protestant churches. He felt that these were not the vital questions of religion, and that the future of religion cannot be bound up with the conclusions of philologists and archaeologists. And when Dean Stanley tells us that if Newman had only devoted himself to the study of German theology, the history of the Anglican Church would have been entirely different, he seems to me to misunderstand Newman's position. I do not think that it would have been essentially modified by the study of German higher criticism. He would have simply accepted the conclusions of science and would have got over any diflBculties by substituting a symbolical meaning for the historical and literal interpretation. He would have done so all the more readily because symbolism appealed to his mystical imagination ; but his symbolism would not have been the symbolism of Strauss, but the symbolism of Moehler, whom he had thoroughly assimilated. One fact is certain, he would not have been content to lag behind the heels of German critics or make unwilling and inglorious concessions to the de- mands of science. His intellect was too clear-sighted and too manly to approve of a policy of compromise and evasion, and to see a menace to religion in every discovery of scholarship. His faith was too robust not to look dangers full in the face. He would have i6o CARDINAL NEWMAN done what he actually did as an old man of eighty-three : he would have demanded an exhaustive inquiry into the biblical question without reticence or afterthought, secure and certain that religion would have nothing to dread from such an inquiry and would emerge from the ordeal with renewed vigour.^ '^Little as Newman has written on the biblical controversy, that little [can hardly be reconciled with recent papal viterances. The Council of the Vatican decreed : "The Books of the Old and New Testament, whole and entire, with all their parts, as enumerated in the decree of the same Council (Trent) and in the ancient Latin Vulgate, are to be received as sacred and canonical. And the Church holds them as sacred and canonical, not because, having been composed by human industry, they were afterwards approved by her authority ; not only because they contain revelation without errors ; but because, having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, they have Ood for their author." " It is true, no doubt, that copyists have made mistakes in the text of the Bible : this question, when it arises, should be carefully considered on its merits, and the fact not too easily admitted, but only in those passages where the proof is clear. It may also happen that the sense of a passage remains ambiguous, and in this case good hermeneutical methods will greatly assist in clearing up the obscurity. But it is absolutely wrong and forbidden either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture or to admit that the sacred writer has erred. For the system of those who, in order to rid themselves of these difficulties, do not hesitate to concede that Divine inspiration regards the things of faith and morals, and nothing beyond, because (as they wrongly think) in a question of the truth or falsehood of a passage, we should consider not so much what God has said as the reason and purpose which He had in mind in saying it — this system cannot be tolerated. For all the books which the Church receives as sacred and canonical are written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost." Newman, speaking as a cardinal of the Roman Church in an article published in the Nineteenth Centui~y, February 1884, p. 188, explains away the difficulty raised by the last sentence, and interprets author {auctor) as meaning no more than primary cause. But this definition is scarcely consistent with the Encyclical of 1893 on the study of sacred Scripture. NEWMAN AND MODERNISM i6i 3. But modernism does not merely introduce a new principle of development and a new method of inter- pretation, it also implies a new conception of religion. It applies itself to purifying religion from the errors which corrupt it. Now of all those errors the most important is the error of rationalism and scholasticism. That error is not inherent in or essential to the Roman Church. Originally the Roman Church was not a system of ideas, but an ideal of life and of government.^ It is external and accidental influences which have gradually increased the importance of dogma. The Fathers of the early Church have mixed with the beliefs of Christianity the conceptions of Greek and Alexandrian philosophy. The philosophy of Aristotle has completed the triumph of scholasticism ; nor can we wonder that, as in a barbarous state of society, the clergy had a monopoly of science and canon law, they should have manifested a tendency to give to theology the precision of a scientific and juridical system. ^ This essentially practical character of the Roman Church is clearly expressed in a remarkable passage of Hutton, the biographer of Newman : '* Rome alone has presented her theology to the world in a thoroughly institutional form. What Protestants believe, Rome embo Uutton, Theological Essays, p. 406. 1 66 CARDINAL NEWMAN and oppressed with a crushing weight the human conscience and human thought.^ The first effect of Catholic scholasticism and Pro- testant rationalism has been to mutilate the religious ideal. The living ideal becomes an abstract idea. It is reduced to a collection of propositions and doctrines, to a formulary or catechism or confession of faith. The absolute and the infinite are concentrated into ten or twenty or thirty-nine articles. And having mutilated the religious ideal, scholasticism proceeds to mutilate religious life. Religious life is reduced to faith, which is deduced from the interpreta- tion of a book and which is separated from works. There is in the formulae of the creed a mystical virtue, apart from the merits of the recipient. In short, it is not the creed which is based on life, it is life which is deduced from the creed. For this mutilated religious life and ideal, modernists substitute the integral conception of religion. Religion is not only mystical, it is not mainly a mystical phil- osophy, it is the realisation of the ideal in our collective as well as in our individual life, through the convergent operation of all our human faculties. Religion is an interpretation of the mysteries of our moral life, a protest against evil and death, a source of strength and power in suffering, a bond of unity and love, an aspiration towards immortality ; it is the establishment ^ This oppression has only broken down within living memory. See the admirable picture which Mr. Edmund Gosse gives us of his "religious" education in that masterpiece, Father and Son. In the whole range of Catholic autobiography I do not know of any education so inhuman, i.e. so repressive of all natural human instincts ; the document is all the more instructive because the educator was a dis- tinguished scientist. NEWMAN AND MODERNISM 167 of the kiugdom of God. Religion manifests herself, not on the surface of our conscious life, but in the depths of the subconscious. The religious instinct is like an invisible lamp illuminating our most intimate personality. Bring it to the surface, and it will be extinguished in the crude light of ratiocination as the stars pale in the glaring light of the sun. It is always impossible to imprison living realities in a formula. A code of laws, a written constitution, have but little relation to the facts which they express. Two nations may have the same written constitution without there being the slightest resemblance in their policy. Most European nations have copied the British parliamentary institutions. Yet no copy resembles the original. The reality of representative government only exists in England. And yet one might assert that in a text of law, or in a political statute, the facts expressed are so simple that they can be analysed and formulated in intelligible language. But how to analyse and to express the attributes of God or the intuitions and aspirations of the soul ? It is as impos- sible to transpose the mystical language of the spirit into dogmatic formulas as it would be to transpose the language of music into the language of painting. To this impossibility of expression must be added that words, the dogma of one generation, become unintelligible to another generation. The letter of a dogma does not change, but the meaning of the words which render it is continuously changing. For instance, the vocabulary of Catholic scholasticism in the Middle Ages is conditioned by the phraseology of the age and by a definite interpretation of the philosophy of Aristotle. When we read in a text of Thomas Aquinas 1 68 CARDINAL NEWMAN of form and substance, of faith and reason, we are exposed to a perpetual misunderstanding. Those words, taken by themselves, are only the shadow projected by transcendent realities, and when we try to seize hold of them we grasp only the shadow of a shadow. No doubt there must be a pre-established harmony between our intellect and the other faculties of reason : " we must think our faith " ; ^ and therefore dogma is a necessary element of religion, but that element is secondary. Dogma has not even the psychological value of a concrete symbol : a concrete symbol being a sensuous image, appeals to the senses and the im- agination, and through the senses and the imagination stirs the emotions ; it translates the invisible idea into a visible fact. An intellectual proposition or dogma is but an abstract formula or algebraic notation, it does not reach the realities of religious life and does not influence it. One might almost say it is not a religious phenomenon, it is only an epiphenomenon. History and experience teach us that two religions which have nearly the same dogma,^ like the Roman Church and the Greek Church, are nevertheless separated by an abyss. On the contrary, two Protestant sects which profess a totally different dogma bear a striking resemblance in practical life. Is that not a practical demonstration that dogma is of quite secondary importance, and that it does not cause the vitality of a religion ? What explains the marvellous vitality of * "Nous deiwns penser noire foi" is a phrase curreut amongst French moderuists, wlio nearly all have been deeply influenced by Newman. ' And which actually settled their dogmatic ditFerences in the Council of Florence. NEWMAN AND MODERNISM 169 the Roman Church are its symbols and rites, its spiritual exercises, its hygiene of the soul, its moral discipline, its political organisation, the result of an experience of twenty centuries; it is these that con- stitute the true inheritance and eternal possession of the Catholic religion, it is these which enable even those who have given up the Catholic dogmas to proclaim themselves sons of the Catholic Church. There lies the strength also of the position of the modernists : even though they give us a new conception of the Catholic religion, they remain loyal to the ancient idea of the Church, to the categorical imperative of the collective conscience.^ No doubt they assert against the ultramontane party that the Church must respect the autonomy of conscience, but they no less emphati- cally assert against the Protestants the unity and communion of the visible Body. The individual soul draws its nourishment from the Church as the plant from the soil which feeds it : it is as absurd exclusively to rely on private judgment and to isolate the faithful from the communion of the Church as it would be to abstract the individual from the State. The individual only realises himself in and through the State. The soul only attains to the plenitude of its life through the Church. The Church is a society organised for the creation and the diffusion of spiritual energy through the world. Consider the physical forces of nature. As long as electricity only exists in a diffused state, it ' The modernist interpretation of the Chnrch ia best stated in Loisy's FEvangile et VEijlise. Of this little masterpiece there has appeared an English version, which is rather a caricature than a translation, and which does not give any idea of the original. The average English translations of French works are a disgrace to English literature and scholarship . . . and to English publishers. I70 CARDINAL NEWMAN remains latent, potential ; but concentrate the diffused force, imprison it, discipline it, and it will accomplish miracles. It is even thus with the spiritual force of religion. As long as this force remains dispersed and dissipated in the individual, it is ineffectual; but organise it, make each individual participate in the universal life of the Church, and you realise the kingdom of God upon earth. Such, in their essence, are the ideas and ideals of Catholic modernists. It is impossible not to be struck with their resemblance to some aspects of Newman's religious philosophy. Like them, he substitutes integral religion for a mutilated form of religion, the religion of the heart for the religion of reason. Like them, he dreads the excesses of Catholic scholasticism and professes little sympathy with the theology of Thomas Aquinas, which has become, under Leo xiii. and Pius X,, the official theology of the Church. " Of course I maintain the value of the ' Schola ' as one of the loci theologici', nevertheless, I sympathise with Petavius in preferring to the 'contentious and subtle theology ' of the Middle Age that ' more elegant and fruitful teaching which is moulded after the image of erudite antiquity.' The fathers made me a Catholic, and I am not going to kick down the ladder by which I ascended into the Church. It is a ladder quite as serviceable for that purpose now as it was twenty years ago. Though I hold, as you know, a process of development in apostolic truth as time goes on, such development does not supersede the fathers, but explains and completes them."^ And yet with all his opposition to mediaeval ^ DiffieuUieSf ii. 24. NEWMAN AND MODERNISM 171 scholasticism and modern rationalism Newman remains at heart a scholastic and a rationalist. He has never disentangled himself from his evangelical and Anglican influences, and has never shaken off the tyranny of his intellectual temperament. So far from minimising the part of dogma, it would sometimes seem as if he were attempting to add some parts of the dogmatic structure of Protestantism to the dogma of Catholicism. If any advanced modernist were inclined to claim Newman on the strength of isolated texts, I would ask him to meditate the following page, which strikes the keynote of a considerable section of New- man's controversial writings : — " Protestants, then, consider that faith and love are inseparable; where there is faith, there, they think, are love and obedience ; and in proportion to the strength and degree of the former, are the strength and degree of the latter. They do not think the inconsistency possible of really believing without obeying; and, where they see disobedience, they cannot imagine there the existence of real faith. Catholics, on the other hand, hold that faith and love, faith and obedience, faith and works, are simply separable, and ordinarily separated, in fact ; that faith does not imply love, obedience, or works; that the firmest faith, so as to move mountains, may exist without love — that is, real faith, as really faith in the strict sense of the word as the faith of a martyr or a doctor. In other words, when Catholics speak of faith they are contemplating the existence of a gift which Protestantism does not even imagine. Faith is a spiritual sight of the unseen; and since, in matter of fact, Protestantism does not impart this 172 CARDINAL NEWMAN sight, does not see the unseen, has no experience of this habit, this act of the mind — therefore, since it retains the word "faith," it is obliged to find some other meaning for it; and its common, perhaps its commonest, idea is, that faith is substantially the same as obedience; at least, that it is the impulse, the motive of obedience, or the fervour and heartiness which attend good works. In a word, faith is hope or it is love, or it is a mixture of the two. Protestants define or determine faith not by its nature or essence, but by its effects. When it succeeds in producing good works, they call it real faith ; when it does not, they call it counterfeit — as though we should say, a house is a house when it is inhabited, but that a house to let is not a house. If we so spoke, it would be plain that we confused between houses and homes, and had no correct image before our minds of a house per se. And in like manner, when Protestants main- tain that faith is not really faith except it be fruitful, whether they are right or wrong in saying so, anyhow it is plain that the idea of faith as a habit in itself, as a something substantive, is simply, from the nature of the case, foreign to their minds, and that is the particular point on which I am now insisting."^ I do not know whether such perverse dogmatic utterances — which, let us remember, are not isolated, but which are characteristic of Newman's teaching — are orthodox Catholic, but they certainly are not " modernist " nor do they suggest the " new theology." This brings us to a more fundamental opposition between modernism and Newmanism : the modernist attempts to absorb and merge the supernatural into 1 Difficulties, i. 269-271. NEWMAN AND MODERNISM 173 our natural moral life, to substitute vital immanence for transcendence, the subjective elements of religion to the objective, the eternal and internal revelation of the soul for the external revelation of history. On the contrary, it is the tendency of Newman to assert the transcendent and supernatural character of religion and the Church, to deepen the gulf between natural religion and revealed religion. It is absolutely certain that Newman would have rejected any doctrine having for its object to "humanise" and "minimise" and " compromise " Christianity. A modernist unwittingly in many aspects of his teaching, Newman has been consciously and systemati- cally a religious reactionary. And therefore I would only consent to call him the spiritual father of "modernism" on the understanding that children often bear very little resemblance to their parents, and that parents cannot be held responsible for the deeds of their offspring. The new Catholicism will be stripped of its supernatural and dogmatic elements, and will only retain the spirit, not the letter of the Gospel, and it will apply to the realisation of its ideal those psychological and political means which a collective experience of two thousand years has shown to be most efficient. It will combine Roman practice with Protestant principle.^ That Catholicism of the future will certainly not be the miraculous and historical Catholicism of Newman, the eschatological ' "I do believe that the Christianity which alone can conquer the earth will be a faith neither so entirely rooted in inward and personal emotions as that of Luther, nor so studiously reflected in secondary agencies and external institutions as that of Rome." — Button, Theo- logical Essays, p. 397. 174 CARDINAL NEWMAN Church of the early fathers. But Newman will nevertheless have contributed to the advent of the internal and eternal Gospel, because his disciples will have been able to deduce from his works those con- clusions which they do not contain. The same phenomenon will happen in the case of Newman which has happened to Plato and Aristotle, to Goethe and Hegel, which has happened to Christianity itself. The practical mind of humanity will ignore those works which it can no more utilise, and will only retain those which are still adapted to its needs. The 'plastic mind of humanity will read into his religious philosophy its own living thoughts, and the vitality and influence of Newman will be in proportion as he is more ingeniously misunderstood. PHtUed by Hoeeibon & Oibb Limited, Edinburgh. In n eat Crown 8yo Yolames, THREE SHILLINGS each. WORLD'S EPOCH = MAKERS. EDITED BY OLIPHANT SMEATON, M.A. 'An excellent Series of Biographical Studies.' — AxnENiEUM. ' We advise our readers to keep a watch on this most able series. 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