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DR. NEWMAN. 
 {From a lithograph published some time b^ore the year 1850.) 
 
-CARDINAL NEWMAN- 
 
 BY 
 
 RICHARD H. HUTTON 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 1891 
 
IN '^ ti E' 
 
 ^^/Z3 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The whole of this little essay was written and in type, 
 
 and most of it corrected for the press, before Cardinal 
 
 Newman's death. I thought it better, considering the 
 
 smallness of the space available for the treatment of so 
 
 great a subject, to devote the main part of the book 
 
 to the study of Dr. Newman's life before leaving the 
 
 Anglican Church, — in other words, to the course of 
 
 thought which led him to the Church of Kome, — and to 
 
 compress the latter part of his career into a single long 
 
 chapter. This seemed to me the best way of making 
 
 the book of interest to the great majority of English 
 
 readers. 
 
 R. H. H. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 OTAP, PAOE 
 
 I. Newman's genuineness and greatness ... 1 
 
 II. HIS EARLY LIFE AT HOME AND AT OXFORD — HIS 
 
 DOGMATIC CREED — HIS BOOK ON THE ARIANS 16 
 
 III. HURRELL FROUDE ANI» THE MEDITERRANEAN VOYAGE 34 
 
 IV. Newman's relation to the tractarian move- 
 
 ment ... ... ... ... ... ... 46 
 
 v. Newman's alleged scepticism 59 
 
 VI. balancing — DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA ... 71 
 
 Vn. THE PREACHER AT ST. MARY'S 97 
 
 VIII. ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS — TRACT 90 AND THE 
 
 JERUSALEM BISHOPRIC ... ... ... 138 
 
 IX. THE THEORY OF THE " DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN 
 
 doctrine" ... ... ... ... ... 162 
 
 X. NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC ... ... ... 190 
 
 XI. Newman's chief poem and the unity op his 
 
 LIFE ... ... ... 244 
 

 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 HIS GENUINENESS AND GREATNESS. 
 
 It is a strange and not a discreditable characteristic 
 of the days in which we live, that, in spite of the ardour 
 with which the English people have devoted themselves 
 to material progress and the scientific studies which 
 have ministered to material progress, one man at least 
 has been held to be truly great by the nation, who has 
 crossed all its prejudices and calmly ignored all its 
 prepossessions; who has lived more than half his life 
 in what Protestants at least would call a monastery, — 
 for his home at Littlemore as well as at Edgbaston 
 was more than half monastic, — who has loved penance, 
 who has ahvays held up the ascetic life to admiration, t^ 
 who has haunted our imaginations with his mild and 
 gentle yet austere figure, with his strong preference 
 even for superstition as compared with shallow, optimistic 
 sentiment; and has impressed upon us even more by 
 his practice than by his teaching, that " the lust of the 
 flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, are 
 
 B 
 
f^ CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 not of the Father but of the world." Cardinal Newman 
 has not been the more popular for being a Cardinal, 
 but the Church of Rome has certainly been less 
 unpopular in England since a man of such plain and I 
 simple life as he, was ranked among the princes of the' 
 Roman Catholic Church. 
 
 I suppose that one may safely regard it as a standard 
 of true greatness to surpass other men of the same 
 calibre of culture and character, men with whom com- 
 parison is reasonable, in the ardour and success with 
 which any purpose worthy of the highest endeavour is 
 prosecuted. Measuring by this standard, it would be 
 hard to fix on any man now living in England who 
 . could rival Cardinal Newman in the singleness, the 
 devotion, the steadfastness, and the nobility of his main 
 effort in life. I say this, though I cannot adopt for my- 
 self his later conception of the Church of Christ, hardly 
 even that earlier conception which led so inevitably to 
 the later. But that is nothing to the purpose. What 
 is perfectly clear to any one who can appreciate Cardinal 
 Newman at all, is that from the beginning to the end 
 of his career he has been jDenetrated by a fervent love 
 of God, a fervent gratitude for the Christian revelation, 
 and a steadfast resolve to devote the whole force of a 
 singularly powerful and even intense character to the 
 endeavour to promote the conversion of his fellow- 
 countrymen, from their tepid and unreal profession of 
 Christianity to a new and profound faith in it, — which 
 new and profound faith in it could, in his belief, be 
 gained only by the reorganization of the Christian 
 Church, and its re-enthronement in a position of authority 
 even greater than that which it held in the middle 
 ages. I know that this conception of Cardinal Newman 
 
HIS GENUINENESS AND GUEATNESS. 3 
 
 as having devoted a singularly large and apprehensive 
 intellect to the pure purpose of re- Christianizing a half- 
 Christian, or less than half-Christian, people, is not 
 frankly accepted by some of his keenest critics. Pro- 
 fessor Huxley, for instance, has said quite lately,^ " If 
 I were called upon to compile a Primer of Infidelity, 
 I think I should save myself trouble by making a selec- 
 tion from these works" (namely, Cardinal Newman's 
 Tract 85 in the Tracts for the, Times, and the 
 Essay on the Miracles recorded in the Ecclesiastical 
 History of the Early Ages), " and from the Essay on 
 Development, by the same author." I do not suppose 
 that Professor Huxley meant to suggest that these 
 essays of Dr. Newman were written with the intention 
 of undermining belief, though he thinks them so admir- 
 ably adapted for that purpose. But unquestionably 
 there is a very wdde-spread suspicion, which I suppose 
 Professor Huxley shares, that Cardinal Newman has 
 all through his life been on the very brink of infidelity, 
 and only saved from it by the deliberate exercise of a 
 strong and sturdy loill to believe. For my part, I 
 utterly reject this view, and do not think that it can 
 for a moment be held by any one who carefully 
 studies and appreciates his career, — which very few of 
 his critics do. Professor Huxley least of all, as he shows 
 by his astound ingly unintelligent criticism of a very sig- 
 nificant and very just passage from the Essay on Miracles, 
 which almost immediately follows this observation on the 
 sceptical tendency of Dr. Newman's writings. To my 
 apprehension, the true theory of Dr. Newman's attitude 
 of mind through a long life is the passage in his Aiwlogia 
 
 1 In the Nineteenth Century for June, 1889 ; note on p. 948. 
 
4 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 pro vita sua (so often quoted unintelligently by Roman 
 Catholics who have never really discriminated between 
 difficulties and doubts), in which Newman said, that 
 "ten thousand' difficulties do not make one doubt, as I 
 understand the subject ; difficulty and doubt are incom- 
 mensurate ; " ^ and which he illustrated by adding, '* Of 
 all points of faith, the being of a God is to my own 
 apprehension encompassed with most difficulty, and 
 borne in on our minds with most power." It might as 
 well be said, that because a man sees with the most 
 vivid and minute apprehension the difficulty of answer- 
 ing the necessitarian arguments against responsibility 
 and free will, or the difficulty of proving the existence 
 of any external world, he doubts the existence of his 
 own responsibility and free will, — though nothing else 
 in the world is so certain to him, not even the exist- 
 ence of the external world itself, — as that Cardinal 
 Newman's subtle and individual appreciation of the 
 various strong points of the sceptic's position, implies 
 any inclination to doubt the truth, and not only the 
 truth, but the certainty of the Christian revelation. 
 
 It is true, of course, that the greater part of Cardinal 
 Newman's life has been given to the discussion of the 
 question how such difficulties as beset the revealed 
 Christian theology ought to be met. He himself has 
 told us that he began the study of this class of difficul- 
 ties quite in his boyhood by reading Paine and David 
 Hume, and it is evident that no one ever entered into 
 these difficulties with more genuine insight — into what 
 they really prove and what they are really worth. It 
 is just the same with a much more imposing class of 
 
 ^ Apologia, p. 374. 
 
HIS GENUINENESS AND GREATNESS. 5 
 
 difficulties, the difficulties caused by the spectacle of 
 the world's worldiiness, misery, and sin. In the cele- 
 brated passage in the Apologia svhich has been so often 
 quoted, the passage in which Dr. Newman contrasts 
 the moral scenery of the actual world with that which 
 he should have expected from his knowledge of the 
 Creator, whose holiness is to him the deepest of all 
 certainties — a certainty on a level with the certainty 
 of his own existence-^he shows the same profound 
 apprehension of the obstacles with which the Christian 
 theology has to grapple, and the same absolute con- ■ 
 fidence that, however incompetent it is to solve these 
 difficulties, it can and will triumphantly surmount I 
 them. This is what makes Cardinal Newman a really j 
 great man.) His whole life has been lived in the pas- 
 sionate confidence that these great, these apparently 
 appalling difficulties, are not only not really insuperable, 
 but are infinitely less than those which any man would 
 encounter who, dealing honestly with his own conscience, 
 should yet give up as false the belief in the Divine 
 origin of the world and the Divine character of Chris- 
 tianity. He has treated the difficulties of faith in his 
 own way, and I cannot but think, in relation to that 
 considerable class of them for the treatment of which 
 he relies absolutely on the authority of the Church, in 
 a very unsatisfactory way ; but he has never in the least 
 ignored them, and he has devoted extraordinary learn- ] 
 ing, genius, and ardour of nature, through a long life, 
 with the most perfect singleness of purpose, to the / 
 battle with them. If any man ever succeeded in any- 
 thing, Cardinal Newman has succeeded in convincing 
 all those who study his career with an approach to 
 candour and discrimination, that the depth and luminous^ 
 
6 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 ness of his conviction that the true key to the enigma 
 of life is God's revelation of Himself in Christ and in 
 His Church, are infinitely deeper in him, and more 
 of the intimate essence of his mind and heart, than his 
 appreciation, keen as it is, of the obstacles which stand 
 in the way of those convictions and appear to bar the 
 access to them. 
 
 Now if the greatness of a man depends, as I have 
 said, chiefly on the ardour and energy which he devotes 
 to adequate objects, Cardinal Newman's life has cer- 
 tainly been a very great one. There are two lines of 
 Wordsworth's — whose poetry, strange to say, never 
 "found" Dr. Newman, though there is so much in his 
 writings that seems like a paraphrase of some of Words- 
 worth's finest poetry — which delineate exactly the labour 
 and strenuousness of the thinking aspects of his life — 
 
 " The intellectual power through words and things 
 Went sounding on a dim and perilous way." 
 
 This does not express that vividness of his faith in 
 Divine guidance, that exultation in the wisdom and 
 spiritual instinct of his Church, which has furnished 
 him wdth his confidence, and guaranteed his success, 
 but does exactly express the procedure of his intellect, 
 as he has taken exact measure of the depths of the 
 various channels by which he might safely travel to 
 " the haven where he would be," the care with which he 
 has buoyed the quicksands and the sunken rocks, and 
 the anxious vigilance with which he has traced out the 
 winding and often perilous passages in the way. But 
 how this aspect of his mind, how the results of his 
 arduous, intellectual explorations which he has so fully 
 and frankly given to the world, can have concealed 
 
HIS GENUINENESS AND GREATNESS. 7 
 
 from any man of large insight, the profound and 
 passionate conviction which lay beneath all this delicate 
 intellectual appreciation of difficulties, I cannot for a 
 moment understand. The very terms in which Dr. 
 Newman states his apprehension of the difficulties imply 
 the most unhesitating confidence that these difficulties 
 will vanish utterly away when viewed in the full light 
 of the Christian revelation. Take the very first sermon 
 of which there is any record amongst Dr. Newman's ^ 
 printed writings, one preached in Oxford in January, 
 1825, and entitled Temporal Advantages, when he can 
 only have been twenty-four years of age, from the 
 text, "We brought nothing into this world, and it is 
 certain we can carry nothing out ; and having food 
 and raiment, let us be therewith content," and consider 
 if it be possible that that sermon could have been written 
 by a man who did not feel to the full depth of his heart 
 and soul the reality and power of the Christian faith : 
 " What can increase their peace who believe and trust 
 in the Son of God ? Shall we add a drop to the ocean, 
 or grains to the sand of the sea ? . . . It is in this sense 
 that the Gospel of Christ is a leveller of ranks ; we pay 
 indeed our superiors full reverence, and with cheerful- 
 ness, as unto the Lord ; and we honour eminent talents 
 as deserving admiration and reward ; and the more 
 readily act ive times because these are little things to -pay^ ^ 
 Here the utterly unworldly nature of the man, the vivid 
 spiritual feeling that the inward life in God is every- 
 thing of the smallest consequence to the soul, spoke 
 out plainly, and at a time when Dr. Newman had not 
 reached anything like the full maturity of his power. 
 
 * Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. vii. p. 73. 
 
8 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 From that date onwards the vividness of his spiritual 
 insight grew steadily, till it reached its highest point, 
 and was recognized generally by the world when he 
 wrote his religious autobiography in 1864. Writing of 
 his own boyhood, when he was only just a man, he said 
 of himself, " I used to wish that the Arabian tales were 
 true ; my imagination ran on unknown influences, on 
 magical powers and talismans ; I thought life might be 
 a dream and I an angel, and all this world a deception, 
 my fellow - angels hiding themselves from me, and 
 deceiving me with the semblance of a material world." 
 And in the sermon on " The mind of little children " ^ 
 he speaks professedly from his own experience when he 
 says, " This we know full well — we know it from our 
 own recollections of ourselves and our experience of 
 children — that there is in the infant soul, in the fresh 
 years of its regenerate state, a discernment of the 
 unseen world in the things that are seen, a realization 
 of what is sovereign and adorable, and an incredulity 
 and ignorance about what is transient and changeable, 
 which mark it as the first outline of the matured 
 Christian, when weaned from things temporal, and 
 living in the intimate conviction of the Divine presence." 
 I quote these passages only to show how completely 
 the spiritual reality of the Oxford preacher had its 
 roots in his own past, how certain it is that Newman 
 was speaking from the depths of his own experience 
 when he said, that from a very early age he had rested 
 " in the thought of two, and two only, supreme and 
 luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator." 
 It is simply ridiculous for any one who knows intimately 
 
 * Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. ii., Sermon vi. 
 
HIS GENUINENESS AND GREATNESS. 9 
 
 the whole series of his writings to suppose for a moment 
 that Newman's nature is sceptical, and his mind kept 
 only by force of will from toppling over into unbelief. 
 On the contrary, his nature is profoundly and entirely 
 penetrated by the Christian idealism. And had it been 
 otherwise, I believe that he would have been much 
 more likely to ignore the sceptical aspects of the religious 
 problems of the day altogether, instead of giving them so 
 profound a study. It was his absolute confidence that 
 nothing could shake his faith in the truth of revelation 
 that induced him to master so completely as he did 
 the various aspects of the objections which led so many 
 men to withhold their faith from Christianity. This 
 then I regard as one certain test of Cardinal Newman's 
 greatness, that throughout a long life he has followed 
 with singular tenacity and concentration of purpose 
 one grand aim — that of winning his fellow-country- 
 men from their tepid and formal Christianity to a 
 Christianity worthy of the name, in spite of obstacles 
 in the way which he has recognized with a candour and 
 a vivacity that have strangely misled some of his critics 
 into imagining that he appreciated even more the 
 obstacles to belief than he did the spiritual power by 
 which those obstacles were to be surmounted. 
 
 A second safe test of greatness is to be found in 
 the unhesitating and unswerving consecration of great 
 genius or talent — genius or talent of a calibre sufficient 
 to detach a man from his original pursuit, and to secure 
 him distinguished success in a different field of effort, 
 — to the disinterested purpose with which he set out in 
 life. It would be difficult to find a clearer case of this 
 than is presented by Cardinal Newman's career. His 
 literary power has been so great, and has shown itself 
 
10 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 in a style of such singular grace and charm, as well as 
 in irony of such dehcacy and vivacity, that the highest 
 literary eminence was easily within his reach, had he 
 cared to win it, long before his name was actually known 
 to the world at large ; and he would have been a great 
 power in literature had he cared to devote himself to 
 literature in the wider sense, before the Oxford movement 
 had begun to cause anxiety in the Established Church. 
 But power of this kind is precisely what he never coveted, 
 or indeed, in his earlier years, was so much as conscious 
 of his ability to attain. It must have been some time 
 before it dawned upon him that he had any such power 
 at all. Perhaps when in the early part of 1833 Hurrell 
 Froude, with Newman's consent, chose a motto for the 
 Lyrct Apostolica from the words of Achilles when return- 
 ing to the battle, of which the drift was, " You shall know 
 the difference now that I am back again," he had some 
 inkling of his literary genius, as well as of his force of 
 character. But I think that the motto in question had 
 much more reference then to his zeal than to his literary 
 genius ; and assuredly up to that time — when his history 
 of the Arian heresy had not yet appeared — he seems to 
 have shown no sort of consciousness of literary power, 
 and to have hardly aimed, in his more serious work, at 
 anything like literary form. The history of the Arian 
 heresy is a very clear and accurate but a very homely, 
 not to say dry, theological discussion. And for the 
 next thirteen years at least, that is, from the thirty- 
 second to the forty-fifth year of his life, it was only 
 in a few short poems, and a feAV of the later University 
 sermons, that he betrayed his strange mastery of literary 
 effect. 
 
 All his many publications during this period of his life 
 
HIS GENUINENESS AND GREATNESS. 11 
 
 are remarkable for a severe and business-like treatment 
 of the theological subjects with which he dealt. It 
 was not indeed till after he became a Eoman Catholic 
 that Dr. Newman's literary genius showed itself ade- 
 quately in his prose writings, and not till twenty years 
 after he became a Roman Catholic that his unique poem 
 was written. The verses in the Lyra Apostolica are 
 almost the only early evidence of his rare and vivid 
 imagination. And as to that keen and searching irony 
 of which he was afterwards a master, there was little 
 trace of it till after he had nearly completed his 
 fiftieth year. Now it is a striking test of his true 
 greatness, that these great literary gifts should have 
 remained in him all but latent for so long a period, 
 and yet not quite latent, for they must have revealed 
 themselves partially to himself in the remarkable though 
 brief poems of which he wrote so many during his 
 Mediterranean tour in 1833. What it shows is, that 
 he really lost himself in his work of restoring, as he 
 thought, the Church of England, and, as it proved, of 
 convincing himself and a good many of his friends that 
 the only true Church was the Church of Rome. But 
 what was strictly speaking missionary work absorbed 
 him so completely between 1833 and 1845 that he seems 
 to have had neither time nor care for the development 
 of his own literary powers, which he used almost with- 
 out noticing them, and never used at all to the full 
 till after he had found his goal in Rome. Yet the man 
 who had shown such exquisite and almost ^schylean 
 genius as is betrayed in his poem on The Elements, 
 and the weird analogy which he drew between the 
 Jewish people and the Greek (Edipus in the Lyra 
 A^ostolica, cannot possibly have been quite ignorant 
 
i 
 
 12 CAKDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 that there was in him a rich vein of literary power if 
 he had only chosen to turn aside from his self-appointed 
 task of restoring authority to the Anglican Church, to 
 cultivate and exert it. I do not know any better test 
 of true devotion to a mission than Dr. Newman showed 
 in pouring out the Tracts for the Times, the lectures on 
 Justification, or the essays elaborating the Via Media, 
 as he called it, and the various and numerous contribu- 
 tions to Anglican divinity, with unremitting zeal, and 
 without apparently the slightest regard for popular 
 literary effect, — and this too for a long period of years, 
 — after he had discerned in himself the power to write 
 as he wrote in such poems as these : — 
 
 THE ELEMENTS {A Tragic Ghoms), 
 
 Man is permitted miicli 
 
 To scan and learn 
 
 In Nature's frame ; 
 
 Till he well-nigli can tame 
 
 Brute mischiefs, and can touch 
 
 Invisible things, and turn 
 
 All warring ills to purposes of good. 
 
 Thus as a God below, he can control, 
 
 And harmonize what seems amiss to flow 
 
 As severed from the whole 
 
 And dimly understood. 
 
 But o'er the elements 
 
 One Hand alone, 
 
 One Hand has sway. 
 
 What influence day by day 
 
 In straiter belt prevents 
 
 The impious Ocean, thrown 
 
 Alternate o'er the ever-sounding shore ? 
 
 Or who has eye to trace 
 
 How the Plague came 1 
 
 Forerun the doublings of the Tempest^s race ? 
 
 Or the Air's weight and flame 
 
 On a set scale explore 1 
 
HIS GENUINENESS AND GREATNESS. 13 
 
 Thus God has willed 
 
 That man, when fully skilled, 
 
 Still gropes in twilight dim ; 
 
 Encompassed all his hours 
 
 By fearfuUest powers 
 
 Inflexible to him ; 
 
 That so he may discern 
 
 His feebleness, 
 
 And e'en for earth's success ^^^ 
 
 To Him in wisdom turn, 
 
 Who holds for us the keys of either home, 
 
 Earth and the world to come. 
 
 Yet I doubt if anything as powerful as that could 
 have been written under any other than a strictly re- 
 ligious inspiration. At all events, there is no sign in 
 Newman's career of the general exercise of high imagin- 
 ation for any other than a strictly religious purpose. It 
 seems to have been elicited in him by his reHgious aims, 
 and never to have been elicited by any other kind of 
 aim. Would not ^schylus himself, if he had lived 
 again in our generation, have been proud to have 
 written the following on the Jewish race ? — 
 
 " piteous race 1 
 Fearful to look upon ; 
 Once standing in high place. 
 Heaven's eldest son. 
 
 aged blind, 
 
 Unvenerable ! as thou flittest by, 
 
 1 liken thee to him in pagan song. 
 In thy gaunt majesty, 
 
 The vagrant king, of haughty-purposed mind. 
 Whom prayer nor plague could bend ; 
 Wronged at the cost of him who did the wrong, 
 Accursed himself, but in his cursing strong, 
 And honoured in his end." 
 
 There seems something appropriate in the fact, that 
 the man who wrote these poems, and many like them 
 
14 CAEDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 in his youth, should yet never have sought, or apparently 
 have so much as thought of seeking, to cultivate his 
 literary faculty for its own sake at all, but should have 
 re-discovered it, as it were, from time to time, just when 
 it was most needed for the main purpose of his life. 
 His power of irony came out, for instance, for the first 
 time in its full strength in the Lectures on Anglican 
 Difficulties, and subsequently again in his Lectures on ^ 
 Catholicism in England, but assumed perhaps its most 
 exquisite form in the short conversation in which he 
 summed up the drift of his controversy with Mr. 
 I Kingsley on the supposed countenance which he had 
 given to the view that cunning, and not truth, is the 
 proper weapon of the Roman Catholic Church in her 
 dealings with the world. But in spite of his singular 
 command of imaginative eloquence, of the most rare 
 and delicate pathos, and of a satire finer at once in its 
 point and in its reserve than any satire of this generation, 
 Cardinal Newman has never apparently felt the slightest 
 disposition or desire to use these great gifts in any 
 cause at all except that to which he has dedicated his 
 whole life ; and the finest bit of irony which he ever 
 penned he suppressed in later editions of his work. 
 Indeed, widely read as he is in general literature, there 
 are probably fewer references to that literature in 
 Cardinal Newman's writings (if we except perhaps the 
 lectures on The Idea of a Univeo^sity, where such refer- 
 ences were almost essential), than in those of any third- 
 rate or fourth-rate theologian of his day. Perhaps the 
 only glimpse which the English world has had of his 
 purely literary tastes has been in the interest he has 
 taken in adapting the plays of Terence for the acting of 
 the boys of his Edgbaston school, and the skill with 
 
HIS GENUINENESS AND GREATNESS. 15 
 
 which he has trained them to perform their parts on that 
 little classical stage. But that was a mere fragment of 
 his duties as head of a Roman Catholic school, in the 
 administration of which he was concerned to show 
 that the lighter play of children's minds was not to be 
 neglected. For the most part, the long series of his 
 works show very little trace indeed of the deep interest 
 he takes in general literature, so completely has he 
 subordinated all his thoughts and cares to the one great 
 purpose of his life, and so averse has he been to allow 
 himself to be even apparently diverted from the more 
 serious of his tasks. I think there is hardly any other 
 instance in our literature of so definite and remarkable 
 a literary genius being entirely devoted, and devoted with 
 the full ardour of a brooding imagination, to the service 
 of revealed religion. For it has been definitely revealed 
 religion, and no mere philosophy of religion, which has 
 absorbed Cardinal Newman's attention from his earliest 
 youth to his latest age. He has indeed thought much 
 and subtly on the philosophy of faith, as a long series 
 of his Oxford sermons, and the volume entitled The 
 Gramma?- of Assent, sufficiently show. But with him the 
 philosophy of faith has been purely subordinate to laying 
 the foundation of faith in Christian doctrine and dosma, 
 and not in one of those thin, speculative substitutes for 
 a Christian creed which have so often been in. vogue 
 among rationalistic mystics. Whether tried then by 
 the test of the nobility, intensity, and steadfastness of 
 his work, or by the test of the greatness of the powers 
 which have been consecrated to that work. Cardinal 
 Newman has been one of the greatest of our modern 
 great men. 
 
CHAPTER li. 
 
 EARLY LIFE AT HOME AND AT OXFORD — NEWMAN'S 
 DOGMATIC CREED — HIS BOOK ON THE ARIANS. 
 
 John Henry Newman was bora in London on the 
 21st of February, 1801. He was the son of Mr. John 
 Newman, a member of the banking firm of Ramsbottom, 
 Newman, & Co., who at one time lived near Blooms- 
 bury Square, in the garden of which John Henry 
 Newman and Benjamin Disraeli used to play together 
 about 1810. The bank failed soon after the peace of 
 1815 had caused the contraction of the paper currency 
 and the rapid fall of prices, and this made it necessary 
 for Newman to take his degree without preparing him- 
 self for honours, at the earliest possible age. 
 
 Mrs. Newman was a Miss Fourdrinier, a member of 
 a Huguenot family which had settled in London as 
 paper manufacturers, and had introduced some im- 
 portant improvements into the machinery of paper 
 making. She was a moderate Calvinist, and taught 
 her children to read and love Scott, Romaine, Newton, 
 Milner, and all sincere thinkers of ^lat school. From 
 a child Newman was taught to take great delight in 
 the Bible, and to the effect produced on him by Scott's 
 essays and commentary, he declares that he may almost 
 
HIS EARLY LIFE. 17 
 
 be said " to owe " his " soul." It was Scott's " bold 
 unwoiidliness " and " vigorous independence of mind " 
 which so deeply impressed him. " He followed truth," 
 says Dr. Newman, " wherever it led him, beginning with 
 Unitarianism, and ending in a zealous faith in the Holy 
 Trinity;" and it was Scott who first planted deep in his 
 mind " that fundamental truth of religion." Indeed, 
 before he was sixteen he had made "a collection of 
 Scripture texts in proof of the doctrine," with remarks, 
 he believes, of his own upon them. And upon this 
 foundation, no doubt, was erected that firm faith in the 
 necessity of dogma as part and parcel of revelation 
 on Avhich in later life he so often insisted. The two 
 principles which he borrowed from Scott as " the scope 
 and issue of his doctrine " were " Holiness before peace," 
 and " Growth the only evidence of life." From the 
 time when, as a boy, he read Law's Serious Call, 
 Dr. Newman dates his firm inward assent to " the doc- 
 trine of eternal punishments as delivered by our Lord 
 Himself," in as true a sense as he held that of eternal 
 happiness, though, as he remarks, he has tried in 
 various ways " to make the truth less terrible to the 
 reason." When he was only fifteen he took great 
 delight in reading the extracts from the Fathers which 
 Milner gives in his Church history, and which prepos- 
 s^sed him in favour of the conceptions of ecclesiastical 
 influence and life which he found there, even at the 
 very time when he was induced to take up from Newton's 
 book on the prophecies, a notion so inconsistent with 
 the belief of the piimitive Church, as that the Church 
 of Rome is Antichrist — a conception which for many 
 years, he declares, " stained " his imagination, even 
 after his intellect had given judgment against it. 
 
 c 
 
18 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 And in the same year, the autumn of 1816, when he 
 was not yet sixteen, he was taken possession of by the 
 conviction that it was God's will that he should lead a 
 single life, a conviction which held its ground ever since 
 with certain brief intervals of a " month now and a month 
 then," up to the age of twenty-eight, after which it 
 possessed him without any break at all. Add to these 
 impressions, clearly not very coherent, since his admir- 
 ation for the early Fathers was certainly wholly incon- 
 sistent with his belief that Rome was Antichrist, the 
 rather capricious doctrine which he borrowed from a 
 book of Romaine's, that men know whether they are elect 
 or not, and that, if elect, they are of course sure of 
 their " final perseverance," — a view which he held till 
 a year or two after he had taken his degree at Oxford, 
 when it gradually faded away, — and we find enough 
 material for theological fermentation in his dreamy and 
 profoundly susceptible mind. His love of music and his 
 skill in it no doubt added to the charm of a somewhat 
 dreamy life. 
 
 Newman took his degree in 1820, a few months before 
 he completed his twentieth year, and, as I have said, he 
 had not prepared himself for honours at all (though he re- 
 ceived a third class for the excellent character of his work), 
 his father's failure having rendered it necessary that he 
 should, as soon as possible, be independent of external 
 aid. His early University life, of five or six years, was 
 spent at Trinity College, and he is said to have published 
 in 1821 two cantos of a poem on St. Bartholomeio s Eve^ 
 which I have never seen. No doubt the Huguenot 
 traditions in his mother's family rendered that event 
 one of the most impressive to him in all the range of 
 modern ecclesiastical history, and perhaps it is a matter 
 
HIS EAKLY LIF^. Id 
 
 of some surprise that it did not prove to have ex- 
 erted greater influence than it actually did, as an 
 antidote to his patristic prepossessions, especially in con- 
 nection with Newton's teaching that Rome is Antichrist. 
 In 1823 Newman was elected to a fellowship in Oriel 
 College, then the most distinguished in the University. 
 It was at this time that he was most lonely, not having 
 as yet formed any close friendships in Oriel, and feeling, 
 as he says, rather " proud of his college " than at home 
 there. Dr. Copleston, who was at that time Provost of 
 Oriel, to whom Newman afterwards paid so fine a 
 tribute in his lectures on The Idea of a University, once 
 met him taking his lonely walk, and said to him with a 
 bow "Nunquam minus solus quam cum solus," a sen- 
 tence which must always have described Dr. Newman's 
 feeling for solitude, though he soon formed an intimate 
 friendship with Dr. Pusey, which lasted to the end of 
 the iatter's life, though it was, of course, more or less 
 broken in upon by Dr. Newman's conversion to Roman 
 Catholicism. In the same year he first read Butler's 
 Analogy, and gathered from it two principles, which, as 
 he tells us himself, profoundly influenced his future 
 course of thought. The one was that you should inter- 
 pret the less certain aspects of what is called natural 
 religion, in the sense of revealed religion, and not vice 
 versa, in other words, that you should take the sacra- 
 mental system of revealed religion as the key to natural 
 religion, and look at material phenomena as intended to 
 convey, and actually conveying, spiritual influences... 
 This teaching perfectly fell in with his boyish dream that 
 the world was not what it seemed, and that a certain 
 disguise of higher influences under a material mask 
 might be involved in the structural principles of the 
 
20 CARDINAL NEWMAK". 
 
 universe. And this teaching was confirmed later by 
 Newman's profound love for Keble's Christian Year. 
 
 Keble was a fellow of liis new College, and his volume 
 of poems so entitled was published in 1827, when New- 
 man was already beginning to exercise a considerable 
 influence at Oriel as a tutor of his College and as an 
 examiner in the University. The doctrine " that material 
 phenomena are both the types and the instruments of 
 real things unseen " was suggested by Butler's principle 
 that there is a real analogy between the system of nature 
 and the system of revelation, and that the latter should 
 teach us to interpret the former rather than the former 
 to interpret the latter, while Keble's poetry suggested a 
 hundred ways in which that analogy might be traced. 
 
 The second principle which Newman learned from 
 Butler was, that " probability is the guide of life." But 
 he could not, as he tells us, accept this as satisfactory 
 in the region of religious belief. If it were possible to 
 act on such a principle, " the celebrated saying, * 
 God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul/ 
 would be a legitimate form of devotion ; but," as New- 
 man asks, " * who can really pray to a Being about whose 
 existence he is seriously in doubt ? ' " Might not the 
 word " seriously " be omitted ? Who could really pray 
 to a highly probable God, to a God for the reahty of 
 whose existence he thinks there are even ninety-nine 
 chances against one ? Is it prayer till you recognize your 
 mental contact with the object of prayer ? Indeed 
 Newman felt this so strongly, and felt so profoundly the 
 certainty of God's relation to himself, that he learned 
 to draw a distinction between the reasons which he 
 could give for any belief and the" certainty with which 
 he held it, holdino^ that reasons which in themselves 
 
HIS DOGMATIC CREED. 21 
 
 only amount to probabilities are often transformed into 
 absolute certitude by the action of the Divine will. 
 Thus Newman accepted Butler's teaching only so far 
 as it displayed the rational j9?'C2)a7^a^zo;t for belief, but 
 rejected it so far as it suggested that any doubt as to 
 the highest truths might remain. 
 
 During the earlier part of his life at Oriel College 
 Newman made a fast friendship with Dr. Hawkins, 
 afterwards the Provost of the College, and he attributes 
 to the influence of Dr. Hawkins that finer care in the 
 use of words, that delicacy in discriminating between 
 cognate ideas, that habit " of obviating mistakes by 
 anticipation, which to my surprise has since been 
 considered, even in quarters friendly to me, to savour 
 of the polemics of Rome." Dr. Hawkins was a fine 
 scholar, and a scholar who was no more of a casuist 
 than any man must be who is careful in distinguishing 
 between different though closely related ideas. It 
 seems to me that no greater mistake was ever made 
 tlian in ascribing to the influence of Roman Catholic 
 craft and casuistry that delight which Cardinal Newman 
 has always taken in distinguishing between closely 
 related yet quite different thoughts, and which he 
 learned at Oxford, mostly from Dr. Hawkins, partly 
 also from Dr. Whately. I am far from familiar with 
 Roman Catholic controversy, but, so far as I know it, it 
 seems to me to be rather deficient than prolific in the 
 sort of subtlety which springs out of refined scholar- 
 ship. Casuistic subtlety is one thing, and scholarly or 
 psychological subtlety quite another. The former, 
 which appears to be so abundant in the manuals of 
 pastoral theology and morality, is a subtlety that has 
 been organized for a particular practical purpose, and 
 
22 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 which often ignores the most important differences 
 when that practical purpose is not in question. But 
 the sort of subtlety in which Dr. Hawkins and Dr. 
 Whately were very soon surpassed by their companion 
 and pupil was a very different thing — a subtlety born of 
 meditation, self-scrutiny, and a genuine delight in the 
 comparison of words and thoughts, — which were com- 
 pared and contrasted, not for any ulterior jDurpose, but 
 solely for the scientific pleasure derived from accurate 
 classification and self-discipline. 
 
 Dr. Hawkins also taught Newman " the doctrine of 
 
 tradition," namely, that the tradition of the Church 
 
 was the original authority for doctrinal statements, and 
 
 that Scripture was never intended to supply the first 
 
 converts with their doctrinal creed, but only to afford 
 
 , the verification of that creed with which the tradition of 
 
 the Church had furnished them. Just in the same way 
 
 vno one would look in the law-reports for the systematic 
 
 (doctrines of English law, or in parliamentary debates 
 
 /for the accepted principles of the English constitution; 
 
 \but when the principles of English law and of the 
 
 ) English constitution had been explicitly laid down, the 
 
 / authorities which laid them down would verify them 
 
 / by references respectively to the law reports or 
 
 Vparliamentary debates. 
 
 Thus Newman early came to assume that the living 
 Church was the body to which we must still cling, both 
 for the explicit statement of our creed and for the ex- 
 plicit exposition of rites and their significance; while 
 he regarded Scripture only as containing that body of 
 facts to which the Church referred as her authority for 
 the creed which she inculcated, and for the worship she 
 enjoined. 
 
HIS DOGMATIC CREED. 23 
 
 In Lis book on The Arians of the Fourth Centiiry 
 Newman gave full expression to his confidence that 
 dogma is the backbone of religion, and this he has 
 always asserted with the utmost consistency and energy. 
 " From the age of fifteen," he says in the Apologia, 
 "dogma has been the fundamental principle of my 
 religion ; I know no other religion ; I cannot enter into 
 the idea of any other sort of religion ; religion as a mere 
 sentiment is to me a dream and a mockery. As well 
 can there be filial love without the fact of a father, as 
 devotion without the fact of a Supreme Being. What 
 I held in 1816 I held in 1833, and I hold in 1864. 
 Please God I shall hold it to the end. Even when I 
 was under Dr. Whately's influence I had no temptation 
 to be less zealous for the great dogmas of the faith, and 
 at various times I used to resist such trains of thouo^ht 
 on his part as seemed to me (rightly or wrongly) to 
 obscure them." ^ I suppose that all clear-headed men 
 will agree with Cardinal Newman in admitting that, 
 without the confession of certain intellectual truths, 
 and without a careful sifting of what these truths are, 
 there is no possibility of the safe preservation of any 
 Divine revelation. But surely in this and other similar 
 passages of his works he a little confuses between the 
 intellectual conceptions which are necessarily implied 
 in the fact of revelation, and the life and character 
 which are the subjects of revelation. It is perfectly true 
 that we cannot have filial feelings without a father or 
 mother, and that we cannot have a father or mother 
 without a full intellectual assent to the assertion of 
 their existencOj and to a good many other statements 
 
 ^ Apologia, p. 120. 
 
24 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 as to the mind and character of that father or nniother. 
 But it is also perfectly true that many of those 
 / statements will be more or less mistaken, — deflected 
 from the truth by our natural incapacity to enter fully 
 \ into the mind and character of others. And therefore 
 1 it does not in the least follow that, though there can 
 ' be no true worship without our admitting the existence 
 of God, and various great truths about God, all 
 that we say about God need be nearly as certain 
 I as the very fact of His existence must be, nor even 
 j that all that is revealed about God need be quite as 
 / clear and quite as free from liability to misunder- 
 I standing as the great fact itself of His existence 
 \ and of His holiness. If the great object of Christ's 
 Mncarnation was the revelation of God Himself to the 
 world, not the revelation of dogmas concerning God, 
 then the primary object of Christ's life, and of the 
 life of the Church, was the unveiling of the reality, for 
 which purpose the due definition and guarding of 
 dogma was only a secondary and subordinate duty. 
 As the Church itself admitted, and even maintained, 
 it was quite possible both to feel rightly and to think 
 rightly in relation to God without using the best 
 or most accurate words to express those right thoughts 
 and right feelings ; and again, it is perfectly easy to 
 conceive that a multitude of Christians may have had 
 the right feelings towards God without having had the 
 most accurate and clearly defined thoughts concern- 
 ing His essential being. Dogma is essential in order 
 ' to display and safeguard the revelation, but dogma is 
 not itself the revelation. And it is conceivable that 
 in drawing out and safeguarding the revelation, the 
 Church may not unfrequently have laid even too much 
 
HIS DOGMATIC CREED. 25 
 
 stress on right conceptions, and too little on right 
 attitudes of will and emotion. Dogma is only subsidiary 
 to that unveiling of God to man which is the single 
 aim of revelation, and instead of being made subsidiary, 
 it is sometimes made to stand in the place of that to 
 which it ought to be purely instrumental. ^ 
 
 In his first theological book, that on The Arians of the 
 Fourth Ceniicry, Newman himself admitted this when he 
 said, " while the line of tradition, drawn out, as it was, to 
 the distance of two centuries from the Apostles, had at 
 length been of too frail a texture to resist the touch of 
 subtle and ill-directed reason, the Church was naturally 
 unwillinof to have recourse to that novel thous^h 
 necessary measure of imposing an authoritative creed 
 on those whom it invested with the office of teaching. 
 If I avow my belief that freedom from symbols and 
 articles is abstractedly the highest state of Christian 
 communion, and the peculiar privilege of the primitive 
 Church, it is not from any tenderness towards that/ 
 proud impatience of control in which many exult as in' 
 a virtue, but first because technicality and formalism 
 are, in their degree, inevitable results of public con- 
 fessions of faith ; and next because, where confessions 
 do not exist, the mysteries of Divine truth, instead of 
 being exposed to the gaze of the profane and unin- 
 structed, are kept hidden in the bosom of the Church 
 far more faithfully than is otherwise possible, and 
 reserved, by a private teaching through the channel 
 of her ministers, as rewards in due measure and season 
 for those who are prepared to profit by them — for 
 those, that is, who are diligently passing through the 
 successive stages of faith and obedience." ^ 
 
 ^ Arians of the Fourth Century ^ chap. i. sec. ii. 
 
26 • CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 The admission that " technicality and formalism " 
 necessarily follow on dogmatic definitions is important, 
 but hardly adequate to the truth. Tlie real danger is, 
 that the pains taken to understand, and avail themselves 
 of, theological safeguards against error, shall super- 
 sede in men's minds the habit of gazing steadily at the 
 fulness of the Divine character as gradually unveiled 
 to them, though the diffusion of this habit is the end 
 and aim of Hebrew prophecy and the purpose of 
 Christ's life and death and resurrection. Dogma is 
 analysis and inference, and necessarily inadequate 
 analysis and inference. Such analysis and inference 
 are forced on the Church by denials which tend to 
 obscure the revelation given. But for those who were 
 not likely to have been tempted and misled by those 
 denials, dogmatic teaching may be positively mischievous 
 as fixing their attention too exclusively on those aspects 
 of revelation which are the least likely to develop 
 a spiritual life. In The Avians of the Fourth Century 
 Newman illustrated very effectively what he found 
 in dogma that was really essential to the true 
 apprehension of revelation. 
 
 And I cannot better deal with this early and very 
 careful bit of work than by giving some specimen of its 
 bearing on Newman's great principle that dogma is of 
 the very essence of revelation. The book was finished 
 in July, 1832, before the movement of 1833 began, and 
 was published at the end of 1833. It may be said to 
 have closed the first section of Newman's life. It is in 
 many respects of high interest for its close reasoning 
 and strict fidelity to principle, though it displays little 
 of the literary skill of his later writings, being, indeed, 
 dry almost to grittiness. If God, he says, did not send 
 
HIS DOGMATIC CREED. 27 
 
 His own Son into the world to be a ransom for sinners, 
 and to inspire them with a new passion of devotion to 
 their Creator, and a new loathing for the evil in them- 
 selves, then the whole story of revelation, of which the 
 climax is anticipated in the account of Abraham's willing- 
 ness to give up his only son Isaac at the invitation of 
 God, is a dream, and the life of men on earth is robbed 
 of its spiritual mainstay. Yet, in order to safeguard the 
 truth of this revelation, if once it be denied and dis- 
 sected by the sceptic, how much dogmatic analysis and 
 definition, and of precautionary explanation is necessary! 
 In fact, the whole Arian and Nestorian controversies are 
 raised at once, so soon as an objector begins to recount 
 the difficulties which beset the mind when it encounters 
 such a revelation as this. If Christ were separate from 
 God, then the love of God in giving up Christ to death 
 for man would be in no wise specially attested ; the 
 sacrifice of Isaac would have been, in fact, a greater 
 sacrifice, relatively to the power and character of the 
 human being who made it, than was the sacrifice on 
 Calvary. But if Christ were God, how much has to be 
 explained in order to save this teaching from the alterna- 
 tive objection of either publishing to the world the love 
 of a God who could cease to exist, or publishing some- 
 thing like a dramatic fiction in place of the greatest 
 and most mysterious of all truths. Scripture insists, 
 remarks Newman, that Christ is not only spoken of as 
 God's Son in respect of His pre-existent nature, but 
 in respect of His human nature, and that, in order to 
 fix this idea firmly in our minds, He is called not only 
 the Son of God in the state in which He lived before 
 He appeared on earth, but absolutely God's " Son," or 
 " only-begotten " Son. And this is announced in terms 
 
28 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 which are intended to assert that whatever was in God 
 was in the Son of God. " As the Father hath life in 
 Himself, so hath He given to the Son to have life in 
 Himself .... that all men should honour the Son even 
 as they honour the Father;" but then the word "Son" 
 implies subordination, and Christ Himself asserted " My 
 Father is greater than I ; " and there the Arian con- 
 ception at once enters, and if the word " Son " be too 
 much insisted on in the sense which it bears in our 
 human relations, there will be a tendency either to 
 regard the Son of God as a creature, and therefore, so 
 far as He is worshipped, there will be a tendency to 
 worship a creature as Creator ; or else in denying the 
 Son of God the true Divine nature, to withdraw from 
 Him all worship properly so called, which the Aiians and 
 Unitarians, who have legitimately developed the Arian 
 idea, actually have done. But against this degradation 
 of Christ from the divinity so persistently asserted for 
 Him in Scripture, the whole drift of the revelation pro- 
 tests. And in order to secure the idea of " Son " from 
 the materialistic misconceptions so engrafted on it, the 
 revelation of Christ as the Word, or Reason, or Wisdom 
 of God is given us, " to denote His essential presence in 
 the Father in as full a sense as the attribute of wisdom 
 is essential to Him." And also to denote His mediation 
 — that it is through Him that the Father 'speaks to 
 men — this declaration that the Son is also the Word of 
 God is subjoined, and guards us against the impression 
 that He is as individually distinct from the Father as 
 a human son from a human father; indeed, it compels 
 us to think of Him as identified with the Father in 
 some sense much closer than sonship in its human 
 aspects would imply. But here again comes in the 
 
tJlS DOGMATIC CREED. §d 
 
 danger, tliat in speaking of Christ as the Word or 
 Wisdom of God, the sense of a separate personality 
 Avould be obliterated, which would end in the notion that 
 the Father died upon the cross. To obviate this danger 
 Cln^ist is spoken of as the Word of God in a separate 
 personality, as a permanently existing, real, and living 
 Word, not as the mere breath or voice of the Father. 
 All these definitions are requisite in order to protect 
 the notion that Christ was at once " of God " and " in 
 God," without both of which it would be impossible to 
 read His life and death at once truly and spiritually 
 and to give Him the love and worship which He 
 claims. I have been obliged to summarize, but this 
 close piece of reasoning will give an age which has 
 almost forgotten what the claims of theological dogma 
 are, some insight into Newman's vigorous and strenuous 
 work. 
 
 Of course I have no intention of following Newman 
 through the careful and scholarly book on the Arians. 
 My only object is to make it quite clear, that in defend- 
 ing dogma he was defending what is at once essential 
 to the very life and essence of the story of Christ's sac- 
 rifice for man in which Divine revelation culminates, 
 and yet that in thus defending it, there is very great 
 danger of losing sight of the core of the revelation, and 
 indeed a moral certainty that many of those who would 
 never have killed the soul of revelation by insisting on 
 analyzing and dissecting its meaning for themselves, 
 have been diverted from what is most moving and most 
 elevating in it by the necessity of studying definitions 
 and explanations for which they had no craving and 
 would never have asked. I think the book shows that 
 to some extent Newman underrated this unfortunate 
 
30 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 effect of dogma on the most spiritual minds, and that 
 he thought of dogma a little too much as the essence, 
 instead of as the mere protective covering, of revelation. 
 The substance of revelation is the character of God, and . 
 dogma is only necessary to those whose minds cannot 
 enter into this marvellous revelation of the character 
 of God and of His love for man without asking a 
 hundred questions to which, in our present state, only 
 very imperfect and unsatisfactory answers can be given 
 — answers that only show how much greater are the 
 difficulties of the semi-sceptics than of the hearty be- 
 lievers, and do not show that Christian faith is itself 
 ,free from serious difficulty. In fact, the only attitude in 
 which the mere, intellect of man can rest easily, is the 
 attitude of ignoring the whole difficulty and acquiescing 
 in pure agnosticism. But then that is an attitude in 
 which the soul of man cannot rest at all, — nor even the 
 intellect of a man who has a soul as well as an intel- 
 lect. But for the predominantly intellectual, dogmatic 
 theology is a noble study, especially if it is so pursued 
 as to remind them that the most it can effect is to 
 point out the path of least resistance for the understand- 
 ing that is coupled with a Christian heart and soul, 
 and the much greater difficulties into which the under- 
 standing must plunge if it passes into a heretical region 
 of thought. Theology, no doubt, is to some extent 
 truly described as a line of escape which passes between 
 the devil and the deep sea. If we are to believe with 
 all our hearts the only life-giving story of the Creator's 
 purposes and love, of which human history has furnished 
 us with any trace, we must take our way between 
 moral recklessness and self-will on the one side, and 
 that apathy which springs out of utter despair of finding 
 
HIS DOGMATIC CREED. 31 
 
 a solution for the problem of life on the other side. 
 And no doubt even that way is not without its perils, 
 but these perils can, I think, be shown to be much less 
 than those of believers who, while clinging to the 
 gospel of Christ, try to get rid of all the subtleties and 
 distinctions of theological science. And this is what 
 Newman's book on the Arians so carefully and 
 elaborately shows. 
 
 The book, too, has another interest besides the great 
 precision and delicacy with which Newman traced out 
 the precise positions of the various heretical thinkers, 
 from Sabellius to Arius, including the whole school of 
 semi-Arians, who were the antagonists of Athanasius. 
 It shows Newman's delight in the Alexandrian school 
 of theology, with its emphatic teaching as to the 
 secondary or allegorical interpretation of Scripture, its 
 reserve and its very gradual unfolding of the mysteries 
 of Christianity to its catechumens, its conception of the 
 Divine " economy " of revelation, and its doctrine that 
 fragments of the teaching that had been carefully 
 concentrated and kept continuous for the benefit of the 
 Jews, are to be found scattered widely through the 
 Pagan world. Newman was the first to deny that 
 Arianism was of Alexandrian origin, and to maintain, 
 what scholars now generally admit, that it originated 
 in Antioch. Indeed, Newman loved the Greek the- 
 ology so well that he quickly discovered its essential 
 orthodoxy, and the Judaizing affinities of the Arian 
 heresy, which had previously been supposed to origin- 
 ate with Arius himself. Newman's book was mfeant 
 as a vindication of the Alexandrian school of theology 
 from all direct responsibility for that heresy. And in 
 this I believe he fully succeeded. 
 
S2 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 As a great deal of the prejudice against Dr. New- 
 man has been founded on his defence of the Alex- 
 andrian principle of spiritual economies to be practised 
 by men in teaching revealed truth, just as it was 
 practised by God in revealing it, I must say a few 
 words on that subject. Newman pleads that St. Paul 
 was practising an " economy " when on Mars hill he 
 availed himself first of the altar erected to the Unknown 
 God, and next of the authority of a Greek for the 
 doctrine of God's fatherhood, instead of starting from 
 the ground of the Hebrew Scriptures, which was of 
 course his own starting-point ; nay, that the first chapter 
 of the book of Job, in which Satan is represented as 
 commissioned by God to tempt Job and prove his 
 fidelity, and the twenty-second cliapter of the first 
 book of Kings, in which God is represented as asking 
 for a lying spirit to entice Ahab to his destruction by 
 inducing the prophets of Israel to prophesy falsely con- 
 cerning his engagement with the king of Syria at 
 Ramoth-gilead, are both evidently " economical " in the 
 sense that they do not convey absolute truth concerning 
 the ways of God, but only " substantial truth in the 
 form in which we were best able to receive it." Again, 
 he argues that the Mosaic dispensation as a whole is 
 an obvious " economy " " simulating unchangeableness, 
 though from the first it was destined to be abolished." 
 In any case, our Lord's own declaration, " I have yet 
 many other things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear 
 them now. Howbeit, when He, the Spirit of Truth 
 is come. He shall guide you into all truth, for He 
 shall not speak of Himself; but whatsoever things He 
 shall hear, those shall He speak; and He shall show 
 you things to come," is as express a sanction of 
 
HIS DOGMATIC CREED. 33 
 
 " economy " as belonging to the very principle of God's 
 revelation as can well be conceived ; and it seems almost 
 trivial to say that that which the providence of God 
 sanctions, the prudence of man should not despise. Of 
 course it is quite another question whether the conceit 
 of prudence may not suggest, and sometimes practise, 
 a mischievous reticence, and keep back portions of the 
 Divine revelation which, if not withheld, would be the 
 best fitted to make a profound impression on the heart. 
 That is a question of individual judgment and moral 
 insight ; but to contend that the principle of economy 
 is to be condemned in toto, is about as silly as to con- 
 tend that what is suitable for impressing the hearts of 
 grown-up men and women, is equally suitable for im- 
 pressing the hearts of children ; or that what is fitted 
 for the ears of the highly-educated, is equally fitted for 
 the ears of the ignorant and superstitious. I do not 
 myself think that Newman can be justly accused of 
 any disposition to push the principle of " economy " 
 to excess. If he has ever done so, it is only by 
 making occasional alterations in the original text of 
 his own books without calling attention to them. And 
 this has, I think, been rather due to a dislike for 
 avowing the variations in his own judgment than to 
 any dislike for speaking his mind freely enough while 
 he is about it. The principle of "economy" is nothing 
 in the world but good sense applied to the question of 
 the best mode of bringing home God's truth to the 
 minds of others. 
 
 D 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 HURRELL FROUDE AND THE MEDITERRANEAN VOYAGE. 
 
 The friendship between Newman and Mr. Hurrell 
 Froude, the elder brother of the historian, which com- 
 Hienced in 1826, and became intimate in 1829, lasting 
 thence to Mr. Fronde's death from consumption in 
 1836, was certainly one of the most important influences 
 which acted on Newman's career at the most critical 
 period of his life. Newman's was one of the minds 
 which matured slowly, and it was not till he ^vas 
 twenty-six years of age that it became clear whether he 
 would be in the main a religious leader or one of the 
 pillars o^ the Whately party, that is, the party who 
 threw their influence into the scale of minimizing the 
 spiritual aspect and spiritual significance of revelation 
 rather than of maximizing it. Newman himself mentions, 
 that for two or three years before 1827 he was "begin- 
 ning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral," or in 
 other words, " drifting in the direction of Liberalism." 
 " I was rudely awakened from my dream at the end of 
 1827 by two great blows, illness and bereavement," and 
 then in 1829 came fuller intimacy with Hurrell Froude, 
 which seems to have fully determined, if anything were 
 
MEDITERRANEAN VOYAGE. 35 
 
 then needed to determine, the direction in which his 
 mind would proceed. Mr. Hurrell Froude was, as New- 
 man describes him, a man of the highest gifts — gentle, 
 tender, playful, versatile, and of the most winning 
 patience and considerateness in discussion. He was 
 a man of high genius, " brimful and overflowing with 
 ideas and views, in him original, which were too many 
 and strong even for his bodily strength, and which 
 crowded and jostled against each other in their effort 
 after distinct shape and expression. And he had an 
 intellect as critical and logical as it was speculative 
 and bold. He professed openly his admiration of the 
 Church of Kome and his hatred of the Reformers. 
 He delighted in the notion of an hierarchical system, 
 of sacerdotal power, and of full ecclesiastical liberty. 
 He felt scorn of the maxim * the Bible and the Bible 
 only as the religion of Protestants ' ; and he gloried 
 in accepting tradition as a main instrument of re- 
 ligious teaching. He had a high, severe idea of the 
 intrinsic excellence of virginity, and he considered the 
 Blessed Virgin the great pattern. He delighted in 
 thinking of the saints ; he had a keen appreciation of 
 the idea of sanctity, its possibility and its heights, and 
 he was more than inclined to believe a large amount 
 of miraculous interference as occurring in the early and 
 middle ages. He embi^aced the principle of penance and 
 mortification. He had a deep devotion to the Real 
 Presence, in which he had a firm faith. He was power- 
 fully drawn to the mediaeval Church, but not to the 
 primitive." Dr. Newman adds, that Hurrell Froude "was 
 fond of historical inquiry and the politics of religion. 
 He had no turn for theology as such. He had no 
 appreciation of the writings of the Fathers, of the 
 
36 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 detail or development of doctrine, of the definite 
 traditions of the Church viewed in their matter, of the 
 teaching of the (Ecumenical Councils, or of the con- 
 troversies out of which they arose." He was " a high 
 Tory of the Cavalier stamp, and was disgusted with the 
 Toryism of the opponents of the Reform Bill." ^ And 
 I feel little doubt that Dr. Newman's wrath against 
 " Liberalism," as for many years afterwards he always 
 called it, — identifying as he did Liberalism with Lati- 
 tudinarianism, — was to a very considerable extent a 
 moral contagion caught from Hurrell Froude. 
 
 There are a few singularly beautiful lines added by 
 Newman after Hurrell Froude's death in 1836 to the 
 exquisite poem called Separation of Friends, written in 
 1833; and these sufficiently prove the tenderness of 
 Newman's friendship for Hurrell Froude, and the in- 
 timacy of the relation between them. The poem as it 
 was first written on the separation between friends 
 caused by death, ran thus — 
 
 " Do not their souls, who 'neath the altar wait 
 
 Until their second birth, 
 The gift of patience need, as separate 
 
 From their first friends of earth 1 
 Not that earth's blessings are not all outshone 
 
 By Eden's Angel flame, 
 But that Earth knows not that the Dead has won 
 
 That Crown which was his aim. 
 For when he left it, 'twas a twilight scene 
 
 About his silent bier, 
 A breathless struggle, Faith and Sight between, 
 
 And Hope and sacred Fear. 
 Fear startled at his pains and dreary end, 
 
 Hope raised her chalice high. 
 And the twin-sisters still his shade attend, 
 
 Viewed in the mourner's eye. 
 
 ^ Apologia, pp. 84-6. 
 
MEDITERKANEAN VOYAGE, 37 
 
 So day by day for him from earth ascends, 
 
 As dew in summer even, 
 The speechless intercession of his friends, 
 
 Towards the azure heaven." 
 
 This was an abrupt close. Nearly three years later 
 it appeared that the true close had but been reserved 
 till the friend with whom in his illness Newman had 
 been travelling, had left him alone here to offer this 
 "speechless intercession" on behalf of him who had 
 departed. Then after Froudo's death, on the 28th 
 February, 1836, Newman added the final lines — 
 
 " Ah ! dearest, with a word he could dispel 
 
 All questioning, and raise 
 Our hearts to rapture, whispering all was well, 
 
 And turning prayer to praise. 
 And other secrets too he could declare. 
 
 By patterns all divine, 
 His earthly creed retouching here and there, 
 
 And deepening every line. 
 Dearest ! he longs to speak as I to know, 
 
 And yet we both refrain : 
 It were not good ; a little doubt below, 
 
 And all will soon be plain." 
 
 Such was Newman's feeling for the friend — already 
 suffering from the commencement of the consumption 
 of which he died three years later — with whom he 
 visited the Mediterranean, between December 1832 and 
 April 1833, when they separated at Rome — Newman to 
 turn to Sicily, where he fell ill, and to spend some- 
 thing like three months of solitude after his four months' 
 voyage along the African, Greek, and Italian coasts. It 
 was on this journey that the remarkable series of verses 
 afterwards published with the signature b in the Zyra 
 A;postolica, — some of them poems of the purest beauty, 
 
38 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 some of them mere doctrinal or didactic or theologico- 
 political anathemas, — were first written. 
 
 The isles of Greece are closely associated with another 
 great name, but it would be hard to find a more marvel- 
 lous contrast than that between the attitude of feel- 
 ing with which Byron gazed on the scenes in which 
 "burning Sappho lived and sung," and where, as, with 
 his genuine passion for political liberty, he delighted to 
 remember, there "grew the arts of war and peace," 
 and that with which Newman and Froude, well 
 versed indeed in the classical associations of those 
 rocky shores, but still more deeply interested in the 
 ecclesiastical memories they stirred, gazed upon them. 
 They visited Ithaca, but in his poems written "off 
 Ithaca" Newman never mentions the name of Ulysses, 
 though in passing Lisbon he had recalled that strong 
 pagan figure in the lines which he headed The Isles of 
 the Sirens — 
 
 " Cease, stranger, cease those piercing notes, 
 The craft of Siren choirs ; 
 Hush the seductive voice that floats 
 Upon the languid wires. 
 
 Music's ethereal fire was given, 
 
 Not to dissolve our clay, 
 But draw Promethean beams from Heaven, 
 And purge the dross away. 
 
 Weak self ! with thee the mischief lies — 
 
 Those throbs a tale disclose ; 
 Nor age nor trial has made wise 
 
 The Man of many woes." 
 
 There you see some trace of the influence of Fronde's 
 high ascetic nature speaking in the heart of a devotee 
 of music, but a devotee of music of the most exalted 
 kind. Hurrell Froude in a letter home mentions 
 that the commander of the steamer in which they 
 
MEDITERRANEAN VOYAGE. 39 
 
 sailed sang several songs, accompanying himself on the 
 Spanish guitar, and it must have been these songs which 
 suggested to Newman The Isles of the Sirens. 
 
 When the friends reach Ithaca, Newman seems to 
 forget " the man of many woes " altogether ; he is musing 
 on the difficulty and duty of keeping himself " unspotted 
 from the world," which is the last thing I suppose 
 that Homer's Ulysses ever thought about, while Byron 
 in the same scenes thought only of how he could spot 
 himself most effectually ; or if Newman indulges for 
 a moment in the reminiscence of that strong ideal 
 passion for his native country which made Ulysses pine 
 for the bare and rocky islet amidst the seductions of 
 the isle of Calypso and the flattery of his Phseacian 
 hosts, it only suggests to him to paint that ideal 
 patriotism which inspired the longing of Moses to tread 
 the soil of Canaan in the hour of his death upon Mount 
 Nebo, and which has so often served the Christian in 
 place of patriotism when contemplating a home for 
 which his soul had yearned, but the soil of which he 
 has never trodden. 
 
 THE DEATH OF MOSES. 
 
 " My Fathers' hope ! my childhood's dream ! 
 The promise from on high ! 
 Long waited for ! its glories beam 
 Now when my death is nigh. 
 
 My death is come, but not decay ; 
 
 Nor eye nor mind is dim ; 
 The keenness of youth's vigorous day 
 
 Thrills in each nerve and limb. 
 
 Blest scene ! thrice welcome after toil — 
 
 If no deceit I view ; 
 might my lips but press the soil 
 
 Apd prove the vision true 1 
 
V 
 
 40 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 Its glorious heights, its wealthy plains, 
 
 Its many -tinted groves. 
 They call ! but He my steps restrains 
 
 Who chastens whom He loves. 
 
 Ah ! now they melt . . . they are but shades . . 
 
 I die ! — yet is no rest, 
 Lord ! in store, since Canaan fades, 
 
 But seen, and not possest ! " 
 
 That was written " off Ithaca," on the 30th December, 
 1832. Newman's nostalgia was more in sympathy with 
 that of Moses than with that of Ulysses ; the home he 
 longed for was a home he had never yet gained. There is 
 something very strange in the connection between these 
 classical scenes and the thoughts they excited in the 
 travellers, for I cannot help thinking that most of these 
 poems must have owed their origin almost as much to 
 Froude's suggestion as to Newman's pen. The lines, for 
 instance, on "England," in which Newman calls her "Tyre 
 of the West," and accuses her of trusting in such poor 
 defences as the fortified rock of Gibraltar, and such 
 poor resources as her rich commerce supplied, look as 
 if they had owed a good deal of their inspiration to 
 Froude's cavalier contempt for the wealth earned by 
 trade, as well as his scorn for any ostentatious display 
 of power not rooted in a devout theocratic faith. Off 
 Zante Newman muses on "the Greek fathers," and 
 passes by " the heathen praise " of Greece, to recall the 
 Christian achievements of Clement, Dionysius, Origen, 
 and Basil, Gregory of Nazianzen, and "royal-hearted 
 Athanase, with Paul's own mantle blest." At Corcyra 
 he cannot forget his Thucydides, it is true, but the turn 
 he gives to the reflections the historian had suggested 
 to him directed his thoughts again to the political 
 ruthlessness of maritime power, and the individual 
 
MEDITERRANEAN VOYAGE. 41 
 
 responsibility of each member of a nation for bis share 
 in its fierce and cruel deeds. 
 
 " I sat beneath an olive's branches gray, 
 And gazed upon the site of a lost town, 
 By sage and poet chosen for renown ; 
 There dwelt a race that on the sea held sway, 
 And, restless as its waters, forced a way 
 For civil strife a thousand states to drown. 
 That multitudinous stream we now note down, 
 As though one life, in birth and in decay. 
 Yet, is their being's history spent and run, 
 Whose spirits live in awful singleness. 
 Each in his self-formed sphere of light or gloom 1 
 Henceforth, while pondering the fierce deeds then done, 
 Such reverence on me shall its seal impress. 
 As though I corpses saw, and walked the tomb." 
 
 There is to me something very striking in the 
 contrast between the class of thoughts which the old 
 Greek and Roman localities suggest to a Whig poet like 
 Byron, with a broad dash of license in his whiggery, to 
 classical scholars like dough, imbued with what is now 
 called " the modern spirit," — as well its moral earnest- 
 ness as its intellectual scepticism, — and to grave spirits 
 like Newman's and Hurrell Froude's, dominated not only 
 by a religious but by a strongly-marked ecclesiastical bias. 
 Hurrell Froude writes from Rome — " Rome is the place, 
 after all, where there is most to astonish one, and of all 
 ages, even the present. I don't know that I take much 
 interest in the relics of the empire, magnificent as 
 they are, although there is something sentimental in 
 seeing (as one literally may) the cows and oxen, * Roman- 
 oque foro et lautis mugire carinis.' But the thing 
 which most takes possession of one's mind is the entire 
 absorption of the old Roman splendour in an unthought- 
 of system ; to see their columns, the marbles and bronzes 
 
42 CAEDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 which had been brought together at such an immense 
 cost, all diverted from their first objects, and taken up 
 by Christianity — St. Peter and St. Paul standing at the 
 top of Trajan's and Antonine's columns, and St. Peter 
 buried in the Circus of Nero, with all the splendour of 
 Home concentrated in his mausoleum."^ The effect 
 of all this on Newman, who at this time had not yet got 
 over his strong prepossession against the Church of 
 Rome, was rather to repel him and drive him into 
 dwelling on the simplicity and modesty of the primitive 
 Church, than to pre-engage his imagination for the faith 
 to which he ultimately resigned himself At Messina, 
 for instance, he complains of the fascination exerted 
 over his heart by "these scenes of ancient heathen 
 fame/' and by the associations which the poetry of Virgil 
 and Horiice had made so dear to him, and reproaches 
 himself that the " shades of power and those who bore a 
 part in the mad deeds that set the world in flame," 
 should still charm his imagination, excusing himself 
 on the old plea " homo sum ; nihil humani a me alienum 
 puto;" and as a rule the more striking the associations of 
 the place, the more he retreats into reveries on the 
 Divine warnings which rebuke earthly pride, and on 
 that call to renounce their fondest dreams by which the 
 heroes of God's grace have been distinguished. Just 
 as before he started on his tour he had impressed upon 
 himself, at Hurrell Froude's Devonshire home. Darting- 
 ton, that he must never indulge the enthusiasm he was 
 capable of feeling for " streamlet bright, and soft 
 secluded grove," since he had vowed himself to higher 
 affections ; so in the great scenes of classical antiquity 
 
 1 Froude's Remains^ vol. i. pp. 298, 299. 
 
MEDITERRANEAN VOYAGE. 43 
 
 he schooled himself to draw back with so much the 
 sterner resolution from the natural associations of the 
 place, to those Divine lessons which Scripture contained. 
 Two of his finest poems on David were written in quaran- 
 tine at Malta. At Frascati he reproaches himself for 
 feeling so keenly the temptations of the world around 
 him, and hopes for the time when he shall no longer 
 " feel a secret joy that hell is near." At Tre Fontani he 
 thanks God that he has been drawn on so gradually to 
 the conviction that he must lead a lonely life devoted to 
 his missionary work; and it is only at Palermo, after 
 his serious illness in Sicily, and while waiting impa- 
 tiently for the means of returning home, that he allows 
 himself to take some comfort in visiting the Roman 
 Catholic Churches, and accepting their soothing in- 
 fluence, as the gifts of a good Samaritan to a wounded 
 wanderer. He exclaims — 
 
 " that thy creed were sound ! 
 
 For thou dost soothe the heart, thou Church of Rome, 
 By thy unwearied watch and varied round 
 
 Of service, in thy Saviour's holy home. 
 I cannot walk the city's sultry streets, 
 But the wide porch invites to still retreats, 
 
 Where passion's thirst is calmed,and care's unthankful gloom. 
 
 There, on a foreign shore, 
 
 The homesick solitary finds a friend : 
 Thoughts, prisoned long for lack of speech, outpour 
 
 Their tears ; and doubts in resignation end. f 
 
 I almost fainted from the long delay, 
 That tangles me within this languid bay, 
 
 When comes a foe, my wounds with oil and wine to tend." 
 
 So that the Church of Rome, though doing for him 
 the office of the good Samaritan, is still to him " a foe." 
 It is when he is fairly on his voyage back to under- 
 take that work which throughout his dangerous illness ? 
 
44 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 he was so deeply convinced that he had yet to do in 
 England, as to fill him with the assurance that he should 
 not die, that his most exquisite poems were written, 
 — those verses shining with the softest and the whitest 
 poetic lustre, which have fairly conquered even the 
 admiration of the severest Protestant Churches, ad- 
 dressed to the "kindly light" which he entreated, 
 " amidst the encircling gloom," to lead him on ; and 
 the two splendid studies in the style of the tragic Greek 
 chorus, one of which I have given at length in a pre- 
 vious chapter. For grandeur of outline, purity of taste, 
 and radiance of total effect, I know hardly any short 
 poems in the language that equal them. 
 
 As regards the influence of this journey on Newman's 
 future career, it appears that while in many respects 
 it diminished his horror of Romanism, in consequence 
 especially of the influence of Hurrell Froude, it had 
 a contrary effect on Hurrell Froude's own mind, and 
 later again, through him to some extent I suppose, 
 on Newman's. Hurrell Froude writes from Naples on 
 the I7th February, 1833 — "I remember you told me 
 that I should come back a better Englishman than 
 I went away ; better satisfied not only that our 
 Church is nearest in theory right, but also that prac- 
 tically, in spite of its abuses, it works better ; and 
 to own the truth, your prophecy is already nearly 
 realized. Certainly I have as yet only seen the sur- 
 face of things, but what I have seen does not come 
 up to my notions of propriety. These Catholic countries 
 seem in an especial manner Karix^^iv ttjv aXrjO^Lav kv 
 dbLKLa, and the priesthood are themselves so sensible 
 of the hollow basis on which their power rests, that they 
 dare not resist the most atrocious encroachments of the 
 
MEDITERRANEAN VOYAGE. 45 
 
 State upon their privileges." ^ And after detailing the 
 abuses of the Roman Catholic system in Sicily he goes 
 on, " The Church of England has fallen low, and will 
 probably be worse before it is better ; but let the Whigs 
 do their worst, they cannot sink us so deep as these 
 people have allowed themselves to fall, while retaining 
 all the superficials of a religious country." ^ When it 
 is considered that this was the impression of Eoman 
 Catholicism, judged by its fruits, which that one of the 
 two friends who was by far the most inclined to the 
 Roman system brought away from his life in a Roman 
 Catholic country, we cannot wonder that Newman 
 should have remained for eight more years a zealous 
 Anglican, before he even began to foresee clearly 
 whither he was tending. 
 
 ' Hurrell Froude's Bemains, vol. i. p. 293. 
 2 Ibid. p. 294. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 NEWMAN'S RELATION TO THE TRACTARIAN MOVEMENT. 
 
 During the whole of his Mediterranean journey 
 Newman was, as we have seen, profoundly impressed 
 with the conviction that he and the band of friends 
 who wished to restore the authority of the Church of 
 England had a great work before them. In Rome 
 Newman and Froude had an interview with Monseigneur, 
 afterwards Cardinal, Wiseman, and the latter expressed 
 a wish in parting that they might make a second visit to 
 Rome, to which Newman replied " with great gravity, 
 *We have a work to do in England.'" He adds, "I 
 went down at once to Sicily, and the presentiment grew 
 stronger. I struck into the middle of the island, and 
 fell ill of a fever at Leonforte. My servant thought 
 that I should die, and begged for my last directions. 
 I gave them as he wished, but I said, ' I shall not die.' 
 I repeated, 'I shall not die, for I have not sinned 
 against light, I have not sinned against light.' I have 
 never been able," he adds in the Apologia, "to make 
 out at all what I meant. I got to Castra Giovanni, and 
 was laid up there for nearly three weeks. Towards 
 the end of May I set off for Palermo, taking three days 
 for the journey. Before starting from my inn on the 
 
TRACTARIAN MOVEMENT. 47 
 
 morning of May 26th or 27th, I sat down on my bed 
 and began to sob bitterly. My servant, who had acted 
 as my nurse, asked what ailed me. I could only answer, 
 ' I have a work to do in England.' " On the Sunday after 
 his arrival at home, namely, July 14th, 1833, Mr. Keble 
 preached the Assize sermon in the University pulpit. 
 " It was published," says Newman, " under the title of 
 National Apostasi/. I have ever considered, and kept 
 the day as the start of the religious movement of 1833." 
 It was the forty-fourth anniversary of the taking of 
 the Bastille, which the French people keep as the 
 anniversary of the great Revolution. The Tractarian 
 movement was no doubt in its tendency distinctly 
 anti-revolutionary, for it not only used " Liberalism " 
 as the name for its chief foe, identifying, as it then 
 did. Liberalism with Latitudinarianism, but it proved a 
 distinctly clerical movement, while the Revolutionary 
 party in France has always regarded " clericalism " as a 
 foe even more bitter than the Church of Rome herself. 
 Now Tractarianism was clerical to the core — more 
 clerical, I conceive, in some real sense than the Roman 
 Catholic Church herself. The recoil against the world 
 which made Newman so unwilling to recall even the 
 glories of pagan antiquity when he was abroad, the 
 semi-evangelical, semi-ascetic dread of any but a con- 
 sciously religious life, which marked the poems and 
 tendencies of 1833, all seemed to imply a somewhat 
 rigid form of sacerdotalism. In the very first of the 
 Tracts for the Times which was written by Newman 
 himself he asks, " On what are we to rest our authority 
 when the State deserts us ? " and the answer given is, 
 "On our Apostolical descent." Of course the Roman 
 Catholic Church would give the same answer, but there 
 
48 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 is a great difference between the attitude of a Church 
 which has always and notoriously rested on the claim 
 of Apostolic descent, and a Church which puts in such 
 a claim at a time when a very considerable proportion 
 of its clergy repudiate it, and when the claim sounds to 
 the ears of most men strange and paradoxical. This was 
 so much the case in the Anglican Church that Newman 
 tells a story of one of the bishops, " who on reading 
 an early Tract on the Apostolical Succession could not 
 make up his mind whether he held the doctrine or 
 not." But of course in such a condition of things the 
 claim for the Apostolical succession forced the party 
 which made it into a much more pronounced and 
 self-conscious, not to say almost aggressive and even 
 pretentious, type of sacerdotalism than that of a Church 
 wherein direct Apostolical succession had been the 
 plainly and universally avowed basis of the priesthood 
 for nearly two thousand years. And Newman's personal 
 attitude gave a great deal of additional effect to 
 the ostentatiously sacerdotal tone of the party. " I 
 thought," he says, "that the Apostolical form of 
 doctrine was essential and imperative, and its grounds 
 of evidence impregnable. Owing to this confidence, it 
 came to pass at that time that there was a double aspect 
 in my bearing towards others, which it is necessary for 
 me to enlarge on. My behaviour had a mixture in it 
 both of fierceness and of sport, and on this account, I 
 dare say, it gave offence to many; nor am I here 
 defending it." ^ "I was not unwilling to draw an 
 opponent on step by step to the brink of some 
 intellectual abs\irdity, and to leave him to get back 
 
 * Apologia, p. 114. 
 
^RACTAElAN MOVEMENT. 49 
 
 as he could. I was not unwilling to play with a man 
 who asked impertinent questions. I think I had in 
 my mouth the words of the wise man, * Answer a fool 
 according to his folly/ especially if he was prying or 
 spiteful. I was reckless of the gossip which was cir- 
 culated about me, and when I might easily have set 
 it right, did not deign to do so. Also I used irony 
 in conversation, when matter-of-fact men could not 
 see what I meant." ^ And then what Newman calls 
 his occasional " fierceness " was equally well calculated 
 to impress men with his setting up a new order of 
 things on a definitely sacerdotal basis. " In the very 
 first page of the first Tract," he tells us, " I said of the 
 bishops that, ' black event though it would be for the 
 country, yet we could not wish them a more blessed 
 termination of their course than the spoiling of their 
 goods and martyrdom.'"^ ''Again, when one of my 
 friends of liberal and evangelical opinions wrote to 
 expostulate with me on the course I was taking, 
 I said that we would ride over him and his as 
 Othniel prevailed over Chushan Rishathaim, King of 
 Mesopotamia. Again, I would have no dealings with 
 my brother, and I put my conduct upon a syllogism. 
 I said, 'St. Paul bids us avoid those who cause 
 divisions; you cause divisions, therefore I must avoid 
 you.' I dissuaded a lady from attending the marriage 
 of a sister who had seceded from the Anglican Church." ^ 
 All this gave an impression that the head of the 
 movement which claimed Apostolical succession as the 
 foundation of the order of the Anglican Church was 
 himself almost "fiercely" sacerdotal. I don't think 
 
 ^ Apologia, p. 115. 2 j^^^ p. 117^ 3 jn^^ p 1x8. 
 
 E 
 
V 
 
 50 CAKDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 that that ever was his character at all. Indeed, I 
 think his was very much the reverse of a specially 
 sacerdotal character. Cardinal Newman has always 
 been too shy and too reserved a man, with too individual 
 a nature, to care to assert effectively for a caste the 
 sway it should theoretically exert over his fellow-men. 
 Least of all would he care to exercise that sway 
 through the respect felt for his position as a priest, 
 rather than through the affection felt for his person 
 as an individual. But it is perfectly true, I think, 
 that he regarded an authoritative Church as at least 
 as important an element in revelation as a clearly- 
 defined doctrine, and that, so far as I can judge, he 
 never gave that pre-eminence to the gradual unveiling 
 of the character of God as the main subject-matter of 
 revelation, which could alone, I suppose, hold sufficiently 
 in check the tendency to exalt and magnify the function 
 of the priesthood. 
 
 Newman was always more or less disposed to accept 
 Bishop Butler's principle, that probability is the guide 
 of life (though, as I have shown, he did not think it 
 could be applied to enforce the duty of prayer on 
 those who only believed the existence of God to be a 
 highly probable hypothesis), to a much greater extent 
 than I should have thought either safe or in conformity 
 with our Lord's teaching, and hence he attached a much 
 greater relative importance to the institutions which 
 grew up under the Gospel as significant parts of the 
 Divine purpose of revelation, than they were perhaps 
 intended to bear. He thought as much, I suppose, of 
 the effect — in the direction of humility, for example — 
 which the habit of confession and the ordinance of 
 absolution would produce on the human character, as 
 
TRACTARIAN MOVEMENT. 61 
 
 he thou£flit of the ejBfect in the same direction which 
 the constant study of Christ's character would produce, 
 for him and his colleagues. Revelation meant not 
 merely, perhaps not chiefly, the unveiling of the Divine 
 character and personality, but the totality of the 
 results to be produced by all the new agencies which 
 Christianity set in motion, and of these of course he 
 regarded an authoritative Church as by far the most 
 important. To him the Church, instead of being merely 
 the great organization which handed down to future 
 generations the original testimony to Christ, and which 
 strove to embody His teaching in actual practice, was 
 in the first instance the depository of the sacraments 
 which Christ instituted, and became through their in- 
 strumentality the only agency competent to impress 
 adequately on the soul those regenerate habits of mind 
 which could alone make that testimony efi'ectuaL 
 
 Newman and his friends hold, if I understand them 
 rightly, that the institutions that grew up in the kingdom 
 of God, which our Lord announced, counted for at least as 
 much in relation to the salvation of men as the unveiling 
 of God's character itself, — this kingdom of God being 
 another name for the Church into which the Apostles 
 (and their successors) were to have the power of 
 admitting those who were willing to submit to the 
 appropriate conditions. But this implied definite con- 
 ditions under which alone valid sacraments could be 
 granted and received, and a certain number of tradi- 
 tional principles by which the ministers of these 
 sacraments must be bound. Questions relating to the 
 Church generally became, therefore, in the minds of 
 those who held that these sacraments were of the 
 first importance as' agents of spiritual life, not mere 
 
52 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 ecclesiastical questions, but questions of theology of the 
 utmost significance, questions of theology at least as 
 weighty as the due unveiling of the Divine character 
 itself. Hurrell Froude, in the remarkable essay on 
 Rationalism as shown in the Interpretation of Scriioture, 
 which seems to present the Tractarian view of the 
 Church and its agency with singular clearness, maintains 
 that Christ, in breathing on His Apostles, gave them 
 the power of transmitting to others the gift which He 
 had bestowed on them, by prayer and the laying on of 
 hands ; that the Apostles did so transmit it to others, 
 and they again to others, and that in this way only it 
 has been preserved in the world to the present day. 
 This gift, it was contended, also bestows the power to 
 admit into communion and to exclude from it ; to bless 
 and intercede for those who are in communion ; to bless 
 bread and wine so as to create the body and blood of 
 Christ in the same sense in which our Lord's blessing 
 made them so; and "to enable delegates to perform 
 this great miracle by ordaining them with imposition 
 of hands." 
 
 It was frankly admitted by the leading Tractarians, — 
 and explicitly by both Newman and Froude, — that there 
 is comparatively little explicit statement in the New 
 Testament on the subject of these most important terms 
 of cominuaion^and the privileges of communicants, and 
 that it is somewhat mysterious that there is so little, 
 though they held that what there is on the subject is 
 very impressive, and quite sufficient to direct attention to 
 the significance of the traditional teaching on this head. 
 Of course they supplemented the evidence, which they 
 regarded as so deficient in Scripture, by the teaching 
 and practice of the primitive Church in the earliest 
 
TRACTAEIAN MOVEMENT. 53 
 
 age in which its teaching and practice are intimately- 
 known to us. And so far as the evidence still seemed 
 more or less inadequate, they schooled themselves with 
 Bishop Butler's doctrine, that the Almighty, in revealing 
 to us any part of His will in writing, has done more 
 than we had any reason to expect, and that consequently 
 He may have left many parts of it unrevealed in writing, 
 for aught reason tells us to the contrary. They argued, 
 that so soon as we have clear evidence of the tendency 
 of God's will from any one source, natural piety ought 
 to make us eager to supplement our knowledge of it, so 
 far as it is possible to do so from any other sufficient 
 source of knowledge, just as a son who had certain 
 documentary evidence of his father's wishes would, if 
 he heartily loved that father, be eager to supplement 
 the knowledge so acquired by the oral testimony of any 
 credible witnesses of his father's death, who should tell 
 him that he had expressed wishes to them about him 
 which were not embodied in the formal will. And 
 they argued, that if a generously filial spirit would show 
 itself by accepting such credible oral testimony, then 
 it is reasonable for Christians to supplement the teach- 
 ing of the New Testament as to our Lord's purpose 
 by the evidence of the friends and successors of the 
 Apostles, as it was embodied in the habits and devotions 
 of the primitive Church. Especially they insisted that 
 in the case supposed as to the father's will, the son 
 would be doubly eager to guide himself by the oral 
 evidence of those who were around the death-bed, if 
 the drift of these unwritten directions tended on the 
 whole to enforce on him self-denial and self-sacrifice, 
 for this would increase the obligation on him for cir- 
 cumspection, and abridge his right to do as he pleased 
 
54 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 with the property. And this was the case, they con- 
 tended, as regarded the traditional practice of the 
 primitive Church with regard to the use and con- 
 ditions of the sacraments. And they pressed Butler's 
 use of the doctrine that probability is the guide of life, 
 most earnestly when it came to the question as to the 
 amount of evidence. Even, they said, if we can only 
 convince ourselves that there is a slight presumption 
 that it was Christ's will that we should govern our- 
 selves by the ordinances and practices of the primitive 
 Church, we are as much bound to act upon that pre- 
 sumption, — supposing, of course, that there is nothing 
 contrary in it to His known will, — as if we had the fullest 
 proof that it was so. Indeed, they went further, and 
 urged that probably the speculative difficulties in 
 which the evidence of some parts of religion is involved, 
 is a providential part of some persons' trial, and the 
 only sort of trial which would really provide them with 
 the proper materials for the discipline of their own cha- 
 racter. Such people feel no temptation to the ordinary 
 sins of injustice, unrestrained pleasure-seeking, and irre- 
 ligion, but they need discipline for their wills just as 
 much as those who are so tempted, and for them the 
 true discipline is to act on a presumption as to what 
 God's will is, which they know to be anything but 
 certain, and that too with as much earnestness and 
 dutifulness as they would act on it if they had the most 
 final evidence that it is His will. 
 
 I insist upon this very marked element in the Tract- 
 arian movement, because it distinguished the whole 
 genius of that movement. It gave the Tractarians 
 the same anxious, and, as I may call it, precautionary 
 piety which distinguished the great Bishop Butler's 
 
TEACTARIAN MOVEMENT. 55 
 
 type of religion, and which is as different from the im- 
 plicit and joyous confidence which the Roman Catholics 
 place in their Church, as it is from the sober conven- 
 tionahsm of the religion of the " Establishment." 
 
 It will be seen later, that when Newman at last 
 made up his mind to join the Church of Rome, his 
 genius bloomed out with a force and freedom such as 
 it never displayed in the Anglican communion, though 
 he belonged to that communion till he was forty-four 
 years of age. And I ascribe a good deal of its re- 
 pression during the twelve years between 1883 and 
 1845 to that habit of schooling himself to act on as- 
 sumptions of which there could be no certitude, which 
 the Tractarian party, conscious that it was proposing a 
 religious system more or less alien to the temper of 
 their Church, forced itself to adopt. The Tractarians 
 lived more like a colony of immigrants amongst a 
 people of different language and customs, than like a 
 band of patriots who w^ere reviving the old glories of 
 their native country. Indeed, they felt that they were 
 acting on a hypothesis which was not only intrinsically 
 doubtful, but as yet unacclimatized to th^ soil of English 
 Churchmanship, and w^hich did not take very kindly to 
 that soil. 
 
 The following passage from Hurrell Froude's essay on 
 Rationalism as shoion in the Interpretations of Scripture, 
 embodies very adequately the principles of the Tractarian 
 movement. After admitting that the ancient belief of 
 the Church respecting the sacraments and the priest- 
 hood *'is not forced upon us by Scripture," and that 
 " the texts which seem to imply it do not necessarily 
 imply it," he goes on — " Hence it is inferred that they 
 certainly do not imply it ; that it is not alluded to in 
 
56 CAEDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 Scripture; and is therefore a foolish if not criminal 
 superstition. Persons who think in this manner will do 
 well to recollect that there are in the Bible the follow- 
 
 ^ ing words, — ' Thomas, because thou hast seen Me thou 
 hast believed ; blessed are they that have not seen and 
 yet have believed.' These words do not apply directly 
 either to the sacred elements or to the priesthood ; 
 primarily they refer to our Lord's resurrection, not to 
 the institutions which were the standing monuments 
 of it ; yet they are not the words of one who would be 
 exceedingly displeased at our accepting even these on 
 evidence short of demonstration. 'Blessed are they 
 that have not seen and yet have believed ' — this declar- 
 ation (humanly speaking) is strangely unguarded, if a 
 generous, unsuspecting reverence for all that claims to 
 be from Him is indeed so dangerous a temper ; nor do I 
 think that man's condition an unenviable one who at the 
 last day shall plead as validly for all his errors as this 
 text will plead for those of a ready faith. If at that 
 day it shall indeed prove true that sacerdotal Benedic- 
 tions and Absolutions, and the mysterious Consecration 
 of the Bread and Wine, are nothing more than many 
 a zealous Protestant would reduce them to; and the 
 reverence of those who have bowed to them as Christ's 
 ordinances, shall thus turn out to have been superfluous, 
 is it to be thought that the fear to reject what might 
 possibly be from the Lord, will prove no excuse for 
 having accepted what was not ? that the temper which 
 has in these instances been led astray by trusting 
 evidence short of demonstration, will find no grace in 
 His eyes who reproved the incredulity of Thomas?" 
 
 , Thus the very core of the Tractarian movement 
 was a precautionary creed for which the leaders felt 
 
TKACTAKIAN MOVEMENT. 57 
 
 that the evidence was doubtful, but which they held 
 to be more likely than not, and in any case to be an 
 ecclesiastical " working hypothesis " on which it was 
 their duty to act. This attitude of mind it was that 
 tinged the whole Tractarian movement with an air of 
 anxious venturesomeness, of hesitating audacity, of care- 
 worn courage, which was as foreign as possible to the 
 spirit of the Anglican Church in which it originated, 
 and as different as possible from the spirit of the 
 Roman Catholic Church in which it found its goal. 
 That Newman himself adopted this tone as explicitly 
 as either Froude or any other of the leaders, is demon- 
 strable. " If we will doubt," he wrote in Tract 85, "that 
 is, if we will not allow evidence to be sufficient which 
 merely results in a balance on the side of revelation ; if 
 we will determine that no evidence is enough to prove 
 revealed doctrine but what is overpowering ; if we will 
 not go by evidence in which there are (so to say) three 
 chances for revelation and only two against, we cannot be 
 Christians; we shall miss Christ either in His inspired 
 Scriptures, or in His doctrines, or in His ordinances." 
 It is characteristic of the change in Newman's views, 
 that in republishing this tract with all the necessary 
 retractations after his conversion to the Roman Catholic 
 Church, he did not allow this sentence to stand as it 
 stands here, even though it was covered by the necessary 
 retractations, and altered it into " a dozen chances for 
 revelation and only two against," instead of " three 
 chances for revelation and only two against." In other 
 words, he evidently held that even as a Protestant he 
 had underrated the magnitude of the probability on 
 which he believed, and that he had actually felt a much 
 larger confidence in the truth of his assumption than 
 
58 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 his language at the time expressed. And that was no 
 doubt really the case. In his extreme anxiety not to 
 understate the difficulties with which he was grappling, 
 he often, I think, in his Tractarian days, gave an 
 impression of a much more doubtful attitude of mind 
 than he bad really been conscious of. 
 
 And this leads me naturally to the charge which has 
 so often been brought against him, that with a pro- 
 foundly sceptical intellect, he forced upon himself a 
 belief which was not only not the true conclusion of 
 his unbiased mind, but was one which he had im- 
 plicitly, though not perhaps with full consciousness, 
 rejected. Let me add, however, that Newman's at- 
 titude in the movement was always far more hesitating, 
 precautionary, and tentative than that of Ward and 
 the advanced party. But Mr. Wilfrid Ward's admir- 
 able life of his father has given so powerful a sketch 
 of the tone of the right wing of the Tractarian move- 
 ment, that it is quite unnecessary for me to dwell 
 upon it at any length. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 Newman's alleged scepticism. 
 
 I quoted at the opening of this essay a passage in 
 which Professor Huxley suggests that it would be 
 easy to extract a very effective " Primer of Infidelity " 
 from Cardinal Newman's writings, especially from the 
 Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles^ the Tract 85 on 
 Holy Scripture in Relation to the Catholic Greedy 
 and the Essay on Develo'pment. And I admit that 
 this might be accomplished; and yet I no more ad- 
 mit that Newman's mind is essentially sceptical, than 
 I admit that Professor Huxley's is essentially credulous 
 because it would be possible by careful selection to get 
 a good deal out of his writings which might furnish a 
 primer of fundamental beliefs. The very passage by 
 which Professor Huxley illustrates his remark will serve 
 admirably to show how very empty of true significance 
 the remark is. He says that " there is something 
 really impressive in the magnificent contempt with 
 which Dr. Newman sweeps aside alike those who offer 
 and those who demand what ordinary men call evidence 
 for miracles." And in proof of this he quotes the 
 following from the Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles — 
 
 " Some infidel authors advise us to accept no miracles 
 which would not have a verdict in their favour in a Court 
 of Justice; that is, they employ against Scripture a 
 
60 CAEDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 weapon whicli Protestants would confine to attacks 
 upon the Church ; as if moral and religious questions 
 required legal proofs, and evidence were the test of 
 truth." 1 And Professor Huxley goes on — "'As if 
 evidence were the test of truth ! ' although the truth in 
 question is the occurrence or non-occurrence of certain 
 phenomena at a certain time or place. This sudden 
 revelation of the great gulf fixed between the ecclesi- 
 astical and the scientific mind, is enough to take away 
 the breath of one unfamiliar with the clerical organ." 
 I should rather say that this remark of Professor 
 Huxley's, as coming from one who professes familiarity 
 with the essay in question, is enough to take away 
 the breath of any one unfamiliar with the scientific 
 organ. Read in its context, Dr. Newman's observation 
 is not only not startling, but is a mere truism. 
 The essayist had been arguing that a fact may be, 
 and is in multitudes of instances, just as true even 
 though there be no evidence to prove it true, as it 
 is when it is attested by the most incontrovertible 
 evidence. The evidence may be our best or even our 
 only ground for believing it, but the absence of such 
 evidence does not in the least disprove the reality of 
 the fact, it only deprives us of any good reason for 
 believing the fact. 
 
 Professor Huxley would be about the last man, 
 I suppose, to maintain that evidence is really the 
 test of truth, instead of being merely the path by 
 which we obtain access to the truth. There are 
 millions of truths to which we have as yet no access 
 because we have no evidence of them, but which are 
 
 ^ Ttvo Essays on Scripture Miracles and on Ecclesiastical, by 
 John Henry Newman. Second edition, p. 231. 
 
ALLEGED SCEPTICISM. 61 
 
 nevertheless just as much truths as the ponderability 
 of the atmosphere was a truth for all the centuries 
 before it was discovered that the air had weight, or the 
 tendency of the moon to fall towards the earth before 
 Newton discovered it. Instead of revealing *' the great 
 gulf fixed between the ecclesiastical and the scientific 
 mind," the words of Newman which Professor Huxley 
 quotes are indefinitely more strict and scientific than 
 the very unscientific words in which his scientific 
 opponent criticizes them. Indeed, a greater or more 
 careless bit of interpretation of a very exact writer 
 I never read than Professor Huxley's criticism. 
 Newman's whole drift in the passage from which 
 Professor Huxley makes what he seems to consider 
 this startling extract, is as plain as words can make it. 
 He reminds his readers that evidence for a class of 
 facts is of two kinds — the evidence that there is such 
 a class of facts in existence, and the evidence that a 
 particular event belonging to that class really took 
 place. He insists that when evidence for the real 
 existence of the class has been satisfactorily made out, 
 the strong antecedent improbability against a totally 
 new class of facts is removed, and that it is then reason- 
 able to accept much less convincing evidence on the 
 second head than we ought to require if we had reason 
 to doubt whether such a class of facts existed at all. 
 But even when we are satisfied on that head, he insists 
 that in reference to events of this kind which excite 
 men's wonder and admiration, we ought *'to be pre- 
 pared for fiction and exaggeration in the narrative to an 
 indefinite extent."^ He believes in all the Scripture 
 
 ^ Two Essays on Scripture Miracles and on Ecclesiastical, by 
 John Henry Newman. Second edition, p. 229. 
 
62 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 \ miracles, because he believes in " the inspiration of 
 ', Scripture " as imposed upon us by the same authority 
 ' which has given us revelation as a whole ; but he points 
 out that, apart from the general principle of the inspir- 
 ation of Scripture, there are very many of the Scripture 
 miracles in which there would be nothing in the 
 narrative to compel belief. Of course he maintains, 
 with all the apologists, that there are leading miracles, 
 , like the resurrection of our Lord, which are supported 
 I by an overwhelming amount of proof, at all events 
 to all those who begin with a belief in God, and an 
 expectation therefore of some manifestation to men 
 of His character and purposes. He holds with regard 
 to miracles, that only " a few can be exhibited with 
 evidence of so cogent and complete a character as to 
 demand his [the student's] acceptance," apart from the 
 general principle of the inspiration of Scripture, which 
 he regards as covering all Scripture miracles which would 
 otherwise be doubtful ; while as to the alleged miracles 
 of ecclesiastical history, "a great number of them, as 
 far as the evidence goes, are neither entirely true nor 
 entirely false, but have very various degrees of proba- 
 bility viewed one with another; all of them recommended 
 to his [the student's] devout attention by the circum- 
 stance that others of the same family have been proved 
 to be true, and all prejudiced by his knowledge that 
 so many others, on the contrary, are certainly not true. 
 It will be his wisdom, then, not to reject or scorn 
 accounts of miracles where there is a fair chance of 
 their being true ; but to allow himself to be in suspense, 
 to raise his mind to Him of whom they may possibly 
 be telling, to 'stand in awe and sin not,' and to ask 
 for light, yet to do no more ; not boldly to put forward 
 
ALLEGED SCEPTICISM. 63 
 
 what, if it be from God, yet has not been put forward 
 by Him. What He does in secret, we must think 
 over in secret; what He has openly showed in the 
 sight of the heathen, we must pubKsh abroad, ' crying 
 aloud avid sparing not.' An alleged miracle is not 
 untrue because it is unproved ; nor is it excluded from 
 our faith because it is not admitted into our controversy. 
 Some are for our conviction, and these we are to 
 ' confess with the mouth ' as well as ' believe with the 
 heart'; others are for our comfort and encourage- 
 ment, and these we are to * keep and ponder them 
 in our heart,' without urging them upon unwilling 
 ears." ^ 
 
 It seems to me that nothing could be more candid 
 or more reasonable than this statement — granting Dr. 
 Newman his general principle that all Scripture is 
 inspired as to matters of fact, so that Scripture narratives 
 of miracles stand on that ground, and on that ground 
 alone, on a different footing from all other such narra- 
 tives. It is irrational in the highest degree for any 
 man who is absolutely convinced of the resurrection of 
 our Lord to ask for " legal " proofs of other miracles 
 of the same class, and manifesting the same character; 
 just as it would be irrational in the highest degree for 
 any man who knew a friend intimately to ask for legal 
 proofs that he was innocent of an alleged crime, before 
 believing him to be innocent of it. It may be perfectly 
 right in a Court of law to require legal proofs of guilt, 
 and when there are adequate legal proofs of guilt to 
 condemn the accused in the absence of any legal 
 disproof of their validity ; but it is not right, it is pure 
 
 ^ Tivo Essays on Scripture Miracles and on Ecclesiastical. 
 Second edition, pp. 229, 230. 
 
64 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 folly, for those who have far better evidence on the 
 subject within their reach than any Court of law can 
 have, to allow their judgment to be overruled by the 
 rules of a Court of law. The strict rules of legal evidence 
 are very valuable for those who have access to no better 
 evidence, but they rely, and rely rightly, on evidence 
 as much below the best to which the select few have 
 access, as it is above the best to which the world in 
 general has access. A man might just as well defer 
 to the rules of evidence accepted by a Court of law 
 in relation to a fact of which his own memory and con- 
 science are (to him) the final and conclusive evidence, 
 as in relation to a fact of which his intimate knowledge 
 of a friend gave him far better assurance than any 
 evidence a Court of law could collect. It is simply a 
 truism to say that we should be highly unreasonable, 
 not specially reasonable, creatures, if we always demanded 
 legal proof before giving our hearty belief; and I think 
 that this applies even to specific miracles directly we 
 
 ( are satisfied of the existence of the class of events 
 
 ' called miracles, and of the moral and religious con- 
 ditions under which the specific miracles are said to 
 (have occurred. If I am convinced, as I heartily am, 
 'of the resurrection of our Lord, to doubt that He stilled 
 the tempest, and raised the dead, when this is related 
 of Him by the same authorities and in the same spirit 
 in which His resurrection is recorded, seems to me not 
 a reasonable but a most unreasonable kind of doubt. 
 And yet this is the sort of doubt which Professor Huxley 
 expects us to foster in ourselves, only on the ground that 
 
 j there would not be sufficient separate evidence of the 
 latter events if they stood quite apart, and in no organic 
 
 j connection with the first. However, I am not arguing 
 
ALLEGED SCEPTICISM. 65 
 
 the question, except so far as to show how candid and 
 in every sense reasonable is Newman's mode of present- 
 ing it, and how utterly unjust it is to accuse him of 
 laying down principles which place a great gulf between 
 the ecclesiastical and the scientific mind. Professor 
 Huxley's insinuation, that it is because miracles " may 
 or have served a moral or religious end," that Newman 
 encourages the belief in them is absolutely without a 
 particle of foundation. It is not because they may 
 serve, or have served, a moral or religious end that New- 
 man regards them as more or less credible ; but exclu- 
 sively because they belong to a class of which the real 
 existence has been proved by what he considers irre- 
 fragable evidence, that he demands a predisposition 
 to accept them on sufficient external attestation, under 
 any circumstances which bring them fairly within the 
 conditions constituting that class. I suppose that if 
 no one had ever heard of an active volcano, the accounts 
 received of a great eruption such as took place a year 
 or two ago in Java and Sumatra would be rightly re- 
 ceived at first with extreme incredulity ; and yet that, 
 knowing what we do of those natural phenomena, there 
 was no predisposition amongst scientific men to doubt 
 the facts then narrated so long as there appeared to 
 be clear individual testimony to those facts. 
 
 It is just the same with the Christian miracles. If the 
 greatest of these rests on what Christians regard as over- 
 whelming evidence, the lesser miracles are looked upon 
 without any of that preliminary incredulity which we 
 should rightly feel, if no event of the kind had ever been 
 established to our satisfaction. All that Newman insists 
 upon is, that "our feeling towards the ecclesiastical 
 miracles turns much less on the evidence producible for 
 
 F 
 
66 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 them, than on our view concerning their antecedent pro- 
 babihty. If we think such interpositions of Providence 
 likely, or not unlikely, there is quite enough evidence 
 existing to convince us that they really do occur; if 
 we think them as unlikely as they appear to Douglas, 
 Middleton, and others, then even evidence as great as 
 that which is producible for the miracles of Scripture 
 would not be too much, nay, perhaps not enough, to 
 conquer an inveterate, deep-rooted, and as it may bo 
 called, ethical incredulity." ^ And then he goes on to 
 show, that those who believe that there is a special 
 Divine presence in the Church, are predisposed to expect 
 from that special Divine presence the same kind of effects 
 as they had expected from the divinity of Christ, and 
 had actually found in the records of His life. In fact, 
 the whole "gulf" which exists, if any exists, between 
 Dr. Newman and Professor Huxley, is described in the 
 following sentence of the former : " The direct effect of 
 evidence is to create a presumption, according to its 
 strength, in favour of the fact attested ; it does not appear 
 how it can create a presumption the other way!* That 
 is perfectly true, and is most pertinent where the defect 
 of evidence is due, as in almost all historical cases, to 
 the insufficient investigation which took place at the 
 time, or to the loss of the records of that investigation, 
 if there was investigation. But of course it does not 
 apply to contemporary events where good evidence 
 must usually have been producible, if it existed, and 
 where it was challenged, but not produced. In that case 
 the inadequacy of the evidence may amount to proof 
 that good evidence does not exist at all, although if the 
 
 1 Two Essays on Scripture Miracles and on Ecclesiastical, second 
 edition, pp. 183-4. 
 
ALLEGED SCEPTICISM. 67 
 
 alleged event had really happened, good evidence for it 
 must have existed at the time. But Newman is con- 
 fessedly arguing concerning the evidence of long past 
 events, of which it would be impossible to assert that 
 the slightness of the testimony actually adduced, fur- 
 nished an indirect proof that there was no better evidence 
 to give. It would be extremely difficult to imagine 
 much slighter evidence than that which exists for 
 the Trojan war as a real event; yet no one w^ould say 
 that, such as it is, it is of a kind to establish a pre- 
 sumption unfavourahU to the reality of such a war. 
 So far as it goes — and that is not far — it tends to create 
 a presumption that there was such a war. And the 
 same may be said for almost all the evidence, however 
 slight and insufficient it may be, of which Newman is 
 speaking. It is only when we know that adequate 
 evidence must have existed, if the event happened at 
 all, and that it was challenged and not forthcoming, 
 that Newman's remark is untrue. It is not only true, 
 but a truism in relation to events of which the records 
 are more or less obliterated. 
 
 Where then is the trace of Newman's sceptical 
 bias? It is impossible to furnish more abundant 
 proof than his writings contain of his profound belief, 
 first in the supernatural government of the world in 
 general, next in the specially Divine revelation granted 
 to the Jewish people, and lastly in the great fact of 
 the incarnation, and of the foundation of a Church in 
 which the same supernatural presence that was incarnate 
 in Christ was immanent. He firmly believes that 
 these antecedent convictions are essential for any due 
 estimate of the miraculous element in the history of 
 the Jewish and Christian Churches ; and though he 
 
68 CARDINAL NEWMAK 
 
 holds these convictions with all his heart, he still 
 appreciates with the soberest good sense the character 
 of the special evidence, or defect of evidence, for all the 
 alleged miracles which he examines. Would it have 
 furnished a better guarantee for Newman's Christian 
 faith if he had not sifted this special evidence with 
 the sobriety and discrimination which he has actually 
 displayed, for example, in reducing the alleged miracle 
 of ''The Thundering Legion" to its true proportions? 
 On the contrary, it is precisely that sobriety and dis- 
 crimination which wins a certain respect for his judg- 
 ment when he expresses his belief as he does in re- 
 lation to the well-attested failure of the Emperor Julian 
 to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem, that there was 
 something in the story (as recounted by Julian's own 
 friend, and as a fragment of a letter from the hand of 
 the Emperor himself confirms it) of that fiery out- 
 break which prevented the rebuilding of the Temple, 
 beyond a mere strange coincidence; though of course 
 the concurrence of a great outburst of natural forces with 
 the expression of the Christian belief that the enter- 
 prise would fail, is regarded as a mere coincidence by all 
 sceptics. There is nothing which so completely refutes 
 the theory of Newman's deep-rooted scepticism as the 
 clearness and candour with which he discusses and sums 
 up the evidence for and against mediaeval miracles. 
 
 After all, the gravamen of the assertion, that New- 
 man's nature is essentially sceptical, is to be found in 
 the heartiness and sincerity with which he accepted our 
 Lord's teaching, " Blessed are they who have not 
 seen, and yet have believed;" in other words, in his 
 belief that it is the predisposition to find what is Divine 
 in the world which enables us to discern it when it 
 
ALLEGED SCEPTICISM. 69 
 
 ' comes within our range of experience. That is the 
 true idealist philosophy, and not only the true idealist 
 philosophy, but the true realist philosophy also. The 
 mathematician finds in himself the principles which 
 enable him to compute the courses of the planets, and 
 the eclipses and occultations of the sun, moon, and 
 stars; and if he had not had those principles within 
 him, he would never have been able to declare what 
 had taken place so many centuries before he was born, 
 and what will take place for so many centuries after 
 he is dead. The novelist and the dramatist finds in 
 himself the key to the character of his fellow-men, and 
 without that key would never be able to create for us so 
 much which not only helps us to understand our fellow- 
 men, but which positively adds to our knowledge of our 
 own hearts. And so, too, the theologian would never 
 find anything but an enigma in revelation, if he did 
 not use the Divine anticipations which prompt him from 
 within, to help him to unriddle the traces of Divine agency 
 which he finds without. It is no more a disproof of 
 miracles to say that as a rule they are only believed to 
 happen by those who have a predisposition to believe, 
 than it was a disproof of the existence of the American 
 continent to say that it was only discovered by a navi- 
 gator who was absolutely prepossessed with an almost 
 unreasonably vehement conviction that it was there. 
 And it seems to me that Newman could have given no 
 more conclusive proof of the depth of his faith in 
 the Christian revelation and the divinity of the 
 ecclesiastical system, than the boldness with which he 
 confronted the weak points in the evidence for the 
 miracles, as well of Scripture as of ecclesiastical history, 
 and demonstrated that his reason was as calm and 
 
70 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 unbiased as his spirit was devout — nay, that in spite of 
 his disposition to expect Divine interpositions wherever 
 he recognized an undoubted indwelling of the Divine 
 presence, he was not disposed to ignore any distinct 
 evidence of exaggeration, confusion, and falsehood in 
 the records of these alleged interpositions. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 BALANCING — DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. 
 
 Newman's life at Oxford between 1838 and 1843 
 was no doubt in the main one of eager ecclesiastical 
 propagandism, but after Hurrell Froude's death in 1836 
 it was certainly propagandism of a less confident kind. 
 He was deeply convinced that the Anglican Church 
 had a great work to do ; that she had ignored her true 
 work ; that she had gone to sleep at her post ; that she 
 needed awakening to the duties she had neglected ; and 
 that if once she could be induced to claim her true 
 position, not as an establishment, but as a Church, she 
 might take a proud position in the Church of Christ. 
 But in spite of the ardour, and sometimes, perhaps, 
 the fierceness, as he called it, of his propagandism, 
 especially while Hurrell Froude was still at his side, 
 the irony with which he met his foes, the enthusiasm 
 v/ith which he supported his friends, there was probably 
 not a month during the whole decade in which he was 
 not more or less engaged in trying to define his position, 
 to make out precisely what the theology of his Church 
 really was, where he was standing, whose the authority 
 was in the name of Avhich he spoke. He was deeply 
 convinced that, in regard to the worship of the Virgin 
 
72 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 Mary, and the invocation of saints, Rome was in the 
 gravest error. He thought the Keformers in still graver 
 error in their view of the Sacraments. Yet he had 
 hard work to pilot himself and his party along that 
 "Via Media" which they wished to regard as the true 
 theology midway between Rome and Protestantism. 
 Almost all his books of the period remind me of the 
 soundings which are taken in the supposed neigh- 
 bourhood of land when a ship has run for several 
 days by the log alone, and has not been able to get the 
 altitude of the sun at noon. Then the lead is cast every 
 two or three minutes, while the cry of the number of 
 fathoms found is anxiously listened to by the ship's 
 crew and passengers. 
 
 I could not go carefully through the various publica- 
 tions of this period without prolonging this little book 
 to an unconscionable length. Some of them are too 
 technical to interest general readers, and very few of 
 them exhibit the rare literary power of Newman's later 
 works. But they all show the same conscientious and 
 almost morbid desire to clear up the theological position 
 of the party, though generally without any very satis- 
 factory result. Newman intended, he says, to preach a 
 second and better Reformation, a return not t® the six- 
 teenth century, but to the seventeenth, to the theology 
 of Laud. "No time was to be lost, for the Whigs had 
 come to do their worst, and the rescue might come 
 too late. Bishoprics were already in course of sup- 
 pression ; Church property was in course of confiscation ; 
 sees would soon be receiving unsuitable occupants. We 
 knew enough to begin preaching upon, and there was 
 no one else to preach. I felt as on a vessel which 
 first gets under weigh, and then clears out the deck, 
 
DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. 73 
 
 and stores away luggage and live stock into the proper 
 receptacles." ^ 
 
 At the same time, from the very first, amidst all the 
 hurry to preach Church principles, there was at least an 
 equal amount of self-questioning as to what precisely 
 the new Church principles were to be. How were the 
 Calvinistic elements in the Anglican Church to be dealt 
 with, and minimized ? How were the authorities of the 
 English Church to be persuaded that they ought to take 
 a much higher stand than they had been accustomed to 
 take, both against heresy and against the interference of 
 the State ? How was the Via Media to be made so plain 
 and impressive that the position of the renovated hier- 
 archy should be clearly marked out, as against both 
 Rome on the one side, and the representatives of the 
 Reformers and the Erastians on the other ? In a w^ord, 
 though the movement went on merrily enough, Newman 
 was constantly going through the process which the 
 Germans call Orientirung — determining the true position 
 of the new party, its precise latitude and longitude, so 
 that it should be in no danger of being confounded 
 with either Romanism or Protestantism. 
 
 One of the most remarkable, and certainly I think 
 the most fascinating of all his efforts in this way, was 
 the Lechtrcs on the Frophctical Office of the Chttrch vieiued 
 relatively to Romanism and Fo-pular Protestantism, pub- 
 lished in 1837, and since republished in the volumes 
 entitled The Via Media. 
 
 It is an extremely characteristic as well as an ex- 
 tremely subtle effort to discriminate the true view as 
 to the use and abuse of private judgment, as to the 
 
 ^ Apologia, p. 113. 
 
74 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 "^ authority of the Church, and as to the authority of 
 : antiquity, and to discriminate these as well from the 
 Roman Catholic view on the one side, as from the 
 ordinary Protestant view on the other. He tells us 
 quite frankly, that there are '' conscientious and sensible 
 men," who do not approve of the attempt he is making 
 at all, on the ground that " though the views which may 
 be put forward be in themselves innocent or true, yet 
 under our circumstances they all lead to Rome, if only 
 because tiie mind when once set in motion in any direction 
 finds it difficult to stop ; and again, because the article of 
 * the Church ' has been accidentally the badge and index 
 of that system." ^ As it turned out, these " conscien- 
 tious and sensible men " showed themselves to be shrewd 
 prophets. They knew how unlikely it was that such a 
 Church as the Church of England, which was a political 
 compromise between opposite tendencies from the day 
 of its separation from Rome, could successfully assert 
 for herself anything like a strong ecclesiastical independ- 
 ence, and what an advantage such a Church as the 
 Church of Rome would have in competing with the 
 Church of England for the guidance of minds which 
 asked for a visible authority rather than for mere 
 spiritual persuasiveness. Newman with his usual 
 keenness saw the difficulties of his position better than 
 he saw the way of surmounting them. 
 
 "Protestantism and Popery," he said in his Intro- 
 ductory Lecture, " are real religions ; no one can doubt 
 about them ; they have furnished the mould in which 
 nations have been cast ; but the Via Media, viewed as 
 an integral system, has never had existence except on 
 
 1 Via Mediaf vol. i. p. 8. 
 
DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. 75 
 
 paper ; it is known not positively but negatively, in its 
 differences from the rival creeds, not in its own properties; 
 and can only be described as a third system, neither 
 the one nor the other, but with something of each, 
 cutting between them, and, as if with a critical fastidi- 
 ousness, trifling with them both, and boasting to be 
 nearer antiquity than either. What is this but to 
 fancy a road over mountains and rivers which has 
 never been cut ? When we profess our Via Media 
 as the very truth of the apostles, we seem to by- 
 standers to be mere antiquarians or pedants, amusing 
 ourselves with illusions or learned subtleties, and unable 
 to grapple with things as they are." ^ Nevertheless, so 
 profound was Newman's conviction that Romanism and 
 popular Protestantism were both astray, that he was 
 convinced that he should succeed in virtually making 
 this " road over mountains and rivers," which hitherto 
 had never been cut. It was a gallant enterprise, but one 
 that, for all practical purposes, failed. The road was 
 never made, though a track was marked out over the 
 mountains, and fords were found across the rivers, practic- 
 able for a few adventurous men, and which are used by 
 a certain number of stragglers even to the present day. 
 One of the best parts of the book was Newman's 
 attack on that notion that it is a great privilege to 
 judge for oneself on subjects on which one has no means 
 of judging wisely for Oneself — a privilege to which 
 Englishmen assuredly cling tenaciously. He insists 
 with great force, that to treat it as a mighty privilege 
 that you should set out in life without any guidance f 
 is absurd in any field of thought and knowledge; but 
 
 1 Via Media, vol. i. pp. 16, 17. 
 
76 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 if absurd in every other field, it is most absurd of all 
 in the field of revelation, where it is so difficult to 
 apprehend clearly the true proportions of things, and 
 so easy to exaggerate one aspect of the Divine teaching 
 and to ignore or even suppress another. In main- 
 taining his Via Media as to the function of private 
 judgment, and maintaining that it took an intermediate 
 course between trusting absolutely to the authority of 
 a Church which settles everything by its fiat, and the 
 ultra-Protestant principle which pretends that every 
 Christian should be able to make out from his Bible 
 alone what has been revealed, Newman asserts thatto use 
 private judgment properly you must hegin with the habit 
 of obedience to those who have " natural authority " over 
 you, no matter who they are ; and must cultivate a teach- 
 able temper before you dare to cavil and scrutinize. 
 The very best sort of investigation, he maintains, is 
 conducted half unconsciously, without any pride in it, 
 and without any fuss about it. People who boast of 
 their exercise of the right of private judgment seldom 
 exercise it in the right spirit, which cannot be one of 
 ostentatious satisfaction at the use of such a liberty, 
 since it should be one of eagerness to get at the truth, 
 while eagerness to get at the truth implies eagerness 
 to avail yourself of any help that will really serve your 
 purpose — in other words, implies eagerness to give up 
 your liberty to an experienced and honest guide. Those 
 who say to themselves, " I am examining, I am scru- 
 tinizing, I am judging, I am free to choose or reject, I 
 am exercising the right of Private Judgment," are 
 indulging in a very strange kind of satisfaction, like the 
 satisfaction of a person who exults in his grief for a 
 friend, and says, " I am weeping ; I am overcome and 
 
DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. 77 
 
 agonized for the second or third time ; I am resolved 
 to weep." ^ A person who said that would not be 
 credited with feeling very deeply ; and it is an equally 
 strange infatuation, in Newman's mind, to boast of 
 being without an opinion, and of being determined to 
 find the truth without aid. " Who would boast," he 
 asks, "that he was without worldly means, and had 
 to get them as he could ? Is heavenly treasure less 
 precious than earthly? Is it anything inspiring or 
 consolatory to consider, as such persons do, that 
 Almighty God has left them entirely to their own 
 efforts, has failed to interpret their wants, has let them 
 lose in ignorance at least a considerable part of their 
 short life, and their tenderest and most malleable years ? 
 Is it a hardship or a yoke, on the contrary, to be told 
 that what, in the order of Providence, is put before them 
 to believe, whether absolutely true or not, is in such 
 sense from Him, that it will inspire their hearts to obey 
 it, and will convey to them many truths which they 
 otherwise could not know, and prepare them perhaps 
 for the comunication of higher and clearer views ? " ^ In 
 short, private judgment, according to Newman, is at its 
 best when it is working half unconsciously to realize 
 the full meaning of what has been impressed upon it, and 
 is not so much the attitude of a mind sitting in judgment, 
 as of a mind striving earnestly to apprehend and piece 
 together the lessons it has learned from many different 
 quarters, without asserting any arbitrary liberty or 
 -; falling into any defiant attitude. Reverence and 
 ; humility are, in Newman's view, the just conditions of 
 I the right exercise of private judgment, and you cannot 
 
 1 Via Media, vol. i. p. 137. ^ j^i^i^ yoi. i p^ 137, 
 
78 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 have these conditions for forming your judgment under 
 the most favourable form without a Church that has 
 authority, but does not overstrain that authority. " If 
 Scripture-reading," he says, " lias in England been the 
 cause of schism, it is because we are deprived of the 
 power of excommunicating, which in the revealed 
 scheme is the formal antagonist and curb of Private 
 Judgment." ^ Rome, on the other hand, does not suffi- 
 ciently train the members of her communion to com- 
 pare the Scriptures with her teaching, but imposes her 
 teaching on them too absolutely as that of an infallible 
 Church, which may dictate without any attempt to 
 elicit and secure her children's individual apprehension 
 and assent. Newman charges Rome with being too 
 intellectual, too systematic in the theology she imposes. 
 Rome professes to take a complete survey and make a 
 complete map of the region of Divine mysteries, and so 
 falls into the same error as the Scotch Presbyterianism, 
 for instance, which, from a very different point of view, 
 commits the same fault. 
 
 " When religion is reduced in all its parts to a system, 
 there is hazard of something earthly being made the 
 chief object of our contemplation instead of our Maker. 
 Now Rome classifies our duties and their reward, the 
 things to believe, the things to do, the modes of pleasing 
 God, the penalties and the remedies of sin, with such 
 exactness that an individual knows (so to speak) just 
 where he is upon his journey heavenward, how far he has 
 got, how much he has to pass ; and his duties become a 
 matter of calculation." ^ Now the Via Media between 
 the absoluteness of the Roman Church and the self- 
 
 ^ Via Media, vol. i. p. 140. 
 
 2 ]^yl^ p, 102. 
 
DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. 79 
 
 will of many of the Protestant sects, which sometimes 
 results in a system as definite and sharply defined, is 
 the comparatively gentle authority of a Church which 
 elicits and even cultivates the spirit of freedom in 
 its children, but curbs it and will not allow it to go 
 beyond a certain point in asserting either freedom of 
 opinion or freedom of practice. Newman held that 
 the infallibility w^hich Rome claims not only makes her 
 arrogant towards the private judgment of her children, 
 but also encourages an arrogance in her dealings with 
 " the deposit of truth " committed to her, and with the 
 earliest traditions of the Church, that leads to virtual 
 indifference to the authority of antiquity, and in fact 
 to a breach with its traditions. And this he held that 
 Rome had done in relation to the doctrine both of Pur- 
 gatory and Indulgences, as well as in relation to the 
 doctrine of Infallibility itself He accused the Church 
 of Rome of hardly even affecting to produce a formal 
 proof of her infallibility, the dogma being " serviceable 
 in practice though extravagant in theory." He thought 
 the Roman claim of infallibility to be rather like the 
 political maxim that *'the king can do no wrong," 
 " which vividly expresses some great and necessary 
 principle," ^ though not of course attempting any argu- 
 mentative proof. "A teacher who claims infallibility is 
 readily believed on his simple word." The Roman 
 Church, he thought, rids herself of competition by fore- 
 stalling it. " And probably in the eyes of her children 
 this is not the least persuasive argument for her in- 
 fallibility, that she alone of all Churches dares claim 
 it, as if a secret instinct and involuntary misgivings 
 
 * Via Media, vol. i. p. 117. 
 
80 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 restrained those rival communions which go so far 
 towards affecting it."i 
 
 In the preface to the third edition of this book, 
 published after Newman became a Roman Catholic, 
 and in the notes appended to the Anti-Romanist 
 portion of this volume, Newman of course retracts what 
 he had said of the arrogance and presumption of the 
 Roman Church, and intimates that he had spoken 
 rather because he had confidence in the Anglican 
 divines of the seventeenth century, whom he followed 
 in making these statements, than because he had 
 verified for himself all their charges against Rome. 
 These charges were necessary, he says, to the position 
 of the Anglican Church ; and though he believed them 
 to be true, he believed them rather on tradition than 
 on liis own knowledge. He had but partially examined 
 the controversy, but he accepted, as he was bound to 
 do, the authority of the divines of his own Church 
 on its merits. In fact, he had acted on his own 
 principle in relation to private judgment, he had ac- 
 cepted the bias of those whom he regarded as his 
 proper teachers, and had only partially verified their 
 statements for himself. 
 
 It is sometimes intimated that this assumption of 
 the truth of charges which Newman had not fully 
 examined savoured of that tone of mind which implies 
 not so much a profound conviction that a creed is true, 
 as a willing assent to its truth, of which the Roman 
 Catholics are specially accused. And if it be a fitting 
 subject for accusation, I think it is a just accusation; 
 but I doubt whether it is a fitting subject for it at all. 
 
 1 Via Media, p. 117. 
 
DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. 8l 
 
 If any man examines his real creed on any subject what- 
 ever, rehgious, moral, political, or psychological, he will 
 find that there are in it a few articles of deep personal 
 conviction, on which he may be truly said to be one of 
 those adherents who help to diffuse them, but a great 
 many articles which he accepts only because they have 
 usually been held in connection with those on which his 
 own conviction is earnest, and are held by those for whose 
 general tone of mind he feels a deep respect, and from 
 intercourse with whom he has learned the greater part 
 of his own religious or moral or political or psycho- 
 logical creed. 
 
 For instance, Newman believed with all his heart, as 
 an article of deep personal conviction, that an organized 
 Church was necessary both to interpret Scripture 
 and to administer the Sacraments ordained by our 
 Lord, but he accepted almost passively as a part of 
 the creed of those Anglican divines who had inspired 
 him with this conviction, the opinion that Purgatory 
 and the Invocation of Saints are not only non-scriptural 
 but non-primitive, and cannot be identified as beliefs 
 of the early Church at all ; and again, that Rome, relying 
 on her own assumed infallibility, had early become 
 quite careless as to the origin of her traditions, and 
 had allowed herself to sanction beliefs which she could 
 not trace back to the times of the Apostles, or even 
 of the apostolic fathers. He knew enough to know 
 that nothing could be more plausible than such a 
 position. He did not know enough to be sure that he 
 should always hold it on the strength of the historical 
 evidence alone ; but if he is to be very seriously blamed 
 for advancing it, as all his Anglican predecessors had 
 advanced it, I think there is hardly a controversialist 
 
 G 
 
82 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 in the world who will not be liable to blame of the 
 same kind. I suppose the truth to be, that there is no 
 Scriptural evidence worthy of the name, and but little 
 evidence in the records of the primitive Church, for 
 the doctrines and practices which Newman and the 
 great Anglican divines of the seventeenth century con- 
 demned as Romanizing innovations on the doctrines 
 and practices of the Apostolic Church, but that there 
 is enough trace of them in comparatively early writings 
 to convince those who are otherwise assured of the 
 need of a single authority to determine controversy, 
 that the Romanists have a fair case for asserting that 
 these traditions have a root in the early past. 
 
 These are points on which it is quite easy for those who 
 cannot believe in an infallible Church to feel assured that 
 the soi-disant infallible Church has used her assumed 
 infallibility to add to the faith of the Apostles ; while 
 it is equally easy for those who cannot believe that any 
 Church whose authority on any matter of creed is less 
 than absolute, is a Church worthy of the name, to 
 accept as sufficient evidence of an undeveloped germ 
 of doctrine or usage what those whose attitude of mind 
 was different would regard as evidence utterly unworthy 
 of serious notice. Newman's craving for a final human 
 authority on matters of dogma made rapid strides be- 
 tween 1837, when these lectures on the Roman and 
 Protestant controversy were written, and 1845, when he 
 joined the Church of Rome. It is very natural, and 
 not, I think, a matter for censure, that his estimate 
 of the evidence for the primitiveness of the Roman 
 Catholic creed changed to some extent as his sense of 
 the necessity for some final tribunal in these matters 
 steadily grew. ~ 
 
DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. 83 
 
 A very much less interesting book than The Fro- 
 phetical Office of the Church was the Lectures on 
 Justification hy Faith, published in 1838, which I con- 
 fess I have found somewhat straw- chopping and dry. 
 It is an attempt to show that, while the Roman theology 
 is rio^ht in makino^ sanctification the substance of 
 justification, the Lutheran and Anglican theology is 
 yet right in making justification (by which Newman 
 means not maldng man just, but accounting him just) 
 the initial stage, and sanctification only the necessary 
 consequence of justification. It is, I think, very 
 difficult for a layman of this generation to enter into 
 the interest of this controversy at all. Even laymen 
 can fully understand the magic of faith, how new and 
 how potent a motive is furnished to man's life the 
 moment they can discern a really Divine nature in 
 which they may implicitly trust for the guidance of 
 their hearts and wills. But none the less they often 
 find it both difficult and unprofitable to enter into 
 the finer distinctions which St. Paul has been supposed 
 to draw between the various stages of the Divine 
 change, and especially the " imputation " of righteous- 
 ness, or " accounting righteous," which, according to 
 Lutheran divines, precedes the nutking righteous. All 
 they know is that faith is a renovating principle in the 
 highest sense; but it does not seem to them of the 
 highest moment to discern whether, between the gift 
 of faith and the resulting spiritual renovation, there is 
 or is not wedged in this somewhat unreal and, as it 
 seems, at first sight at all events, fictitious declaration, 
 that they are already accounted in the sight of God 
 what they only hope to become. Newman says, with 
 what seems unanswerable force, in these lectures, 
 
84 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 " Strange it is, but such is the opinion of one of the 
 two schools of divinity which have all along been 
 mentioned, that God's calling us righteous implies not 
 only that we have not been, but that we never shall be 
 righteous. Surely it is a strange paradox to say that 
 a thing is not, because He says it is ; that the solemn 
 averment of the living and true God is inconsistent 
 with the fact averred ; that His accepting our obedience 
 is a bar to His making it acceptable ; and that the glory 
 of His pronouncing lis righteous lies in His leaving 
 us mirighteous." ^ Strange indeed, and more than 
 incredible, intolerable to piety. But even Newman's 
 own statement of the case, though not open to the 
 charge of being so intolerably paradoxical as this 
 horrible doctrine, is to my mind full of difficulty. 
 " Justification," he says, " is ' the glorious voice of the 
 Lord' declaring us to be righteous. That it is a 
 declaration, not a making, is sufficiently clear from this 
 one argument, that it is the justification of a sinner, 
 of one who has been a sinner; and the past cannot be 
 reversed except by accotinting it reversed. Nothing 
 can bring back time bygone; nothing can undo what 
 is done. God treats us as if that had not been which 
 has been; that is, by a merciful economy or repre- 
 sentation, He says of us as to the past, what in fact is 
 otherwise than what He says it is. It is true that 
 justification extends to the present as well as to the 
 past; yet if so, still in spite of this it must mean an 
 imputation or declaration, or it would cease to have 
 respect to the past. And if it once be granted to mean 
 an imputation, it cannot mean anything else, for it 
 
 ^ Lectures on tJie Doctrine of Justification, 3rd edition, p. 78. 
 
DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. 85 
 
 Ccannot have two meanings at once. To account and to 
 make are perfectly distinct ideas. The subject-matter 
 may be double, but the act of justification is one ; what 
 it is as to the past, such must it be as to the present ; 
 it is a declaration about the past, it is a declaration 
 about the present." ^ And then he goes on to illustrate 
 his meaning thus : " In the fourth chapter of his Epistle 
 to the Romans St. Paul makes justification synonymous 
 with ^imputing righteousness/ and quotes David's 
 words concerning the blessedness of those 'whose 
 iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered,' and 
 * to whom the Lord will not impute sin.' Righteousness 
 then is the name, character, or estimation of righteous- 
 ness vouchsafed to the past, and extending from the 
 past to the present, as far as the present is affected by 
 the past. It is the accounting a person not to have 
 that present guilt, peril, odiousness, ill-repute with 
 which the past actually burdens him. If a wrong has 
 been done you, and you forgive the offender, you count 
 it as though it had not been, you pass it over. You 
 view him as before he did it, and treat him as on his 
 oriojinal footinfj^. You consider him to have been what 
 he has not been, fair and friendly towards you ; that is, 
 you impute righteousness to him or justify him. When 
 a parent forgives a child, it is on the same principle. 
 He says, ' I will think no more of it this time ; I will 
 forget what has happened; I will give you one more 
 trial' In this sense it is all one to say that he forgives 
 the child, or that he counts him to have been and to 
 be a good child, and treats him as if he had not been 
 disobedient. He declares him dutiful, and thereby 
 
 1 Jjectures on Justification, p. 67.. - *•. . 
 
 (^ 
 
 ow 
 
86 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 indirectly forgives that past self which lives in his 
 present self and makes him a debtor." But the 
 illustration seems to me to tell entirely against the 
 doctrine that imputation is a sort of legal fiction. The 
 father forgives the child in the confidence that by 
 relying on the child's better self, and showing him that 
 he trusts that better self, he will fortify and strengthen 
 the better self against the worse. Neither the child 
 nor the father supposes for a moment that the recol- 
 lection of the act of disobedience is really blotted out, 
 or that there is any fictitious hypothesis in the case. 
 The child knows that the first disobedience is not to 
 be brought up against him so long as he acts on 
 the higher spirit which has regained the victory, and 
 that simply for the reason that the father's renewed 
 trust is itself a renovating power, and far more potent 
 than the principle of fear. And that is, I suppose, 
 what is meant in the 32nd Psalm by the Lord's not 
 imputing iniquity, for the passage runs : " Blessed is 
 he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. 
 Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not 
 iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile ; " in other 
 words, who is really purified from evil by the trust 
 which God places in him. It does not seem to me 
 that there is any trace here of a legal fiction at all. 
 The reason God does not impute iniquity is because 
 He sees the change of heart which grace and faith 
 have made, because He sees that at last " in his spirit 
 there is no guile." There is no taking for granted that 
 the man to whom the Lord will not impute iniquity 
 has been sinless, there is only a declaration of the 
 intention to trust the renovated spirit in him as the 
 best and highest means of strengthening that spirit. 
 
DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. 87 
 
 The former struggle is recognized ; the defeat is recog- 
 nized ; the renewal of the struggle and the victory are 
 recognized; and the Divine trust is promised by way 
 of securing that victory. Newman believes, of course, 
 that the "accounting just" is followed by the being 
 just. I should have thought that God would not, and 
 could not, declare any man just till he was just, and 
 that the being just must precede the Divine declaration 
 that he is just. Nor, so far as I can see, does 
 Newman make the matter any clearer by the following 
 explanation of it. " God's word," he says, *' effects what 
 it announces. This is its characteristic all through 
 Scripture. He ' calleth those things which be not as 
 though they are,' and they are forthwith. Thus in the 
 beginning He said, ' Let there be light, and there was 
 light.' Word and deed went together in creation ; and 
 so again ' in the regeneration,' ' The Lord gave the wordy 
 great was the company of the preachers.' So again in 
 His miracles. He called Lazarus from the grave, and 
 the dead arose ; He said * Be thou cleansed,' and the 
 leprosy departed ; He rehcked the winds and the waves* 
 and they were still ; He commanded the evil spirits, and 
 they fled away; He said to St. Peter, St. Andrew, 
 St. John, St. James, and St. Matthew, ' Follow Me,' and 
 they arose, ' for His word was with power/ And so again 
 in the sacraments. His word is the consecrating principle. 
 As He blessed the loaves and fishes, and they multiplied, 
 so He ' blessed and brake,' and the bread became His 
 Body." ^ And that would all be applicable if what was 
 asserted by these theologians were, that at God's word 
 " Let the soul be just," it became just. But what they 
 
 1 Lectures on Justification, 3rd edition, p. 81. 
 
88 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 say is, that He declares it to be just while it is still 
 unjust, and by "accounting" it what it is not, by 
 imputing to it qualities which it has not, He makes 
 it what He had assumed it to be. This seems to me 
 a wholly artificial sort of language, and one which 
 tends towards the depreciation of inspired teaching, not 
 towards its exaltation. The drift of the lectures on 
 justification is to show that justification must issue in 
 sanctification ; but the Catholic doctrine that what 
 justifies is either grace or charity, and that these are 
 different names for the same reality, — grace being the 
 word which tells us whence the gift comes, and charity 
 the word which tells us what manner of life it causes, — 
 seems to me much nearer the truth than any form of the 
 Lutheran doctrine. The lectures were indeed an elaborate 
 effort to reconcile the Lutheran view of this subject 
 with the Catholic view, and constituted the application 
 of the conception of the Via Media to the special subject 
 of faith and its regenerating effects on the soul. 
 
 A much more interesting effort of Newman's to 
 reconcile his position with Anglican doctrine was his 
 attempt to show, in the lectures on Holy Scriphcre in 
 Relation to the Catholic Creed, that there is no more 
 difficulty in proving from Scripture the Church doctrines 
 he was preaching than there was in proving from 
 Scripture the doctrine of the Trinity, and much less 
 than in proving the authenticity of the canon. These 
 lectures were published in 1838 as Tract 85 of the 
 famous Tracts for the Times, and are even more charac- 
 teristic of Newman's mind and method at that time than 
 the much more famous Tract 90. He begins by putting 
 very strongly the difficulty in which those persons are 
 placed who desire to believe in the authority of the 
 
DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. 89 
 
 Anglican Church, and who have yet been taught by her 
 that all her doctrines may be proved from Scripture. 
 " They find that the proof is rested by us on Scripture, 
 and therefore they require more explicit Scripture proof. 
 They say, 'All this that you say about the Church is 
 very specious and very attractive ; but where is it to be 
 found in the inspired volume ? ' And that it is not found 
 there (that is, I mean, not found as fully as it might 
 be), seems to them proved at once by the simple fact 
 that all persons (I may say all, for the exceptions are 
 very few) — all those who try to form their creed by Scrip- 
 ture only — fall away from the Church and her doctrines, 
 and join one or other sect and party, as if showing, that 
 whatever is or is not scriptural, at least the Church, by 
 consent of all men, is not so." ^ Newman admits that 
 he had felt this difficulty very keenly himself, and says 
 he regards it as " one of the main difficulties, and (as 
 I think) one of the intended difficulties, which God's 
 providence puts at this day in the path of those who 
 seek Him, for purposes known or unknown, ascertain- 
 able or not." ^ But great as the difficulty is, he states 
 his conviction that, as he has otherwise most abundant 
 proof of "the Divine origin of the Church system of 
 doctrine," as of apostolical succession and the sacra- 
 mental system which depends upon it, he ought not to 
 be in any way dismayed because the evidence, though 
 given also in Scripture, " might be given more explicitly 
 and fully, and (if I may so say) more consistently." 
 
 This introduction to the lectures seems to me a 
 virtual admission that without the evidence of ecclesi- 
 astical history and tradition outside Scripture, Newman 
 
 1 Trad 85, p. 2, 2 j^^^ ^ 2, 
 
90 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 could never have found in Scripture adequate proof 
 of the Church system. He did find it there when 
 the history of the primitive Church had drawn his 
 attention to the manner in which that Church un- 
 derstood and acted upon Scripture, but without the 
 aid of that practical commentary, he clearly admits, 
 I think, that Scripture would not have furnished him 
 wi«th adequate proof of the Church system. In dealing 
 with the difficulty, he begins by owning that the 
 general drift of his argument is of a kind to make him 
 somewhat anxious as to its effect. Its tendency is to 
 show that those who give up Church principles because 
 they are not explicitly taught in Scripture, ought to 
 give up other principles too which have always been 
 held to be of the very essence of revelation; and he 
 admits his reluctance to push any argument which may 
 have the effect not of making those who do not now 
 hold Church principles accept them, but of making 
 them give up Christian doctrines which they had hither- 
 to confidently held. " When I show a man that he is 
 inconsistent," he says, " I make him decide whether of 
 the two he loves better — the portion of truth or the 
 portion of error which he already holds. If he loves 
 the truth better, he will abandon the error; if the 
 error, he will abandon the truth. And this is a fearful 
 and anxious trial to put him under, and one cannot but 
 feel loth to have recourse to it. One feels that perhaps 
 it may be better to keep silence, and to allow him, in 
 shallowness and presumption, to assail one's own position 
 with impunity, than to retort, however justly, his weapons 
 on himself; better for oneself to seem a bigot, than to 
 make him a scoffer."^ But, serious as he feels this 
 1 Tract 85, pp. 3, 4. 
 
DEFINING THE FIA MEDIA. 91 
 
 difficulty to be, he holds that on the whole it avails only 
 " for the cautious use, not for the abandonment, of the 
 argument in question. For it is our plain duty to 
 push and defend the truth in a straightforward way. 
 Those who are to stumble must stumble rather than 
 the heirs of grace should not hear." Therefore, though 
 he admits frankly that when his argument has effect, 
 it may have either a bad effect or a good, he has so 
 much more confidence in the good effect it will have 
 on men who love the truth, than in the bad effect it 
 may have on men who love their own opinion, that he 
 thinks it his duty to push home the argument that 
 Scripture, if it does not explicitly establish Church 
 doctrines, does not explicitly establish even the univers- 
 ally received Christian doctrines, in order that he may 
 induce those who are disposed to Church principles to 
 accept them frankly on implicit rather than on explicit 
 Scripture testimony. And then Newman explains can- 
 didly what he finds to be the only Scripture testimony 
 to two leading Church doctrines. 
 
 While Baptism and its spiritual benefits are often 
 mentioned in the Epistles, "its peculiarity as the one 
 plenary remission of sin " " is not insisted on with such 
 frequency and earnestness as might be expected, — chiefly 
 in one or two passages of our Epistles, and these 
 obscurely (in Heb. vi. and x.). Again, the doctrine of 
 Absolution is made to rest on but one or two texts (in 
 Matt. xvi. and John xx.), with little or no practical 
 exemplification of it in the Epistles, where it was to be 
 expected. * Why,' it may be asked, * are not the Apostles 
 continually urging their converts to rid themselves of 
 sin after Baptism as best they can, by penance, con- 
 fession, absolution, satisfaction ? Again, why are Christ's 
 
92 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 ministers nowhere called priests, or at most in one or 
 two obscure passages (as in Rom. xv.) ? ' " ^ 
 
 And after a number of similar questions, comes 
 Newman's mode of meeting the difficulty, which is 
 to show that if we are to accept only what is plainly 
 and consistently enforced in Scripture, we should 
 have to sacrifice not only what are called Church 
 doctrines, but external worship altogether, to accept 
 Christ's saying, that the hour cometh when neither 
 in Samaria nor at Jerusalem the Father shall be 
 worshipped, as prohibiting all external rites, and 
 forbidding them in principle ; as denying all benefit 
 from the Eucharist, or from Baptism, or from public 
 worship itself. On " lioio many special or palmary texts 
 do any of the doctrines or rites we hold depend ? What 
 doctrines or rites would be left to us if we demanded 
 the clearest and fullest evidence before we believed 
 anything ? " ^ Newman's drift is, that if that sort of 
 Scripture evidence were required for every doctrine and 
 rite, nothing of Christianity would be left beyond at 
 most what the Latitudinarians are willing to concede. 
 By Latitudinarianism Newman means the view that it 
 is not at all important what doctrine a man holds, so 
 long as he acts up conscientiously to whatever doctrine 
 he does honestly hold. That is a view which Newman 
 thinks simply absurd as a view of Revelation, It might 
 be an adequate view of natural religion, but when God 
 reveals Himself, it is obvious that He does attach great 
 importance to the substance of the revelation given, 
 and that He cannot possibly be indifferent what a man 
 believes concerning Him, since He has provided so 
 
 1 Tract 85, pp. 5, 6. 2 Ibid. p. 12, 
 
DEFINING THE VtA MEDIA. 93 
 
 elaborate an agency for giving him a true belief, or at 
 least a much truer belief than he had before, or than, 
 by the mere light of nature, he could have obtained. 
 " There is an overpowering improbability," he says, 
 " in Almighty God's announcing that He has revealed 
 something, and revealing nothing; there is no antecedent 
 improbability in His revealing it elsewhere than in an 
 inspired volume." ^ Hence, if Newman had to choose 
 between Latitudinarianism and Roman Catholicism, he 
 would have chosen the latter as far the more rational 
 of the two views of revelation to any one who was 
 convinced that a revelation had been made. Still he 
 thought that the doctrine of the Via Media, that Scrip- 
 ture does reveal with sufficient clearness the whole 
 Church system, if you will consent to look at Avhat it 
 implies, as well as at what it explicitly states, was quite 
 tenable; but that Latitudinarianism, or indifference to 
 doctrine so long as a man acted honestly on his own 
 view, was utterly untenable. 
 
 Newman never seemed to think that the unveiling 
 of God's own character was, after all, the main purpose 
 of revelation, and that that might possibly be ade- 
 quately accomplished without the aid of any elaborate 
 Church system, or any great network of doctrine over 
 and above the evidence of what God had actually 
 done in order to embody that character in a human 
 life and personality. To Newman's mind, the "dog- 
 matic system" on which he insists, always seems to 
 me to overshadow somewhat the central truth of revel- 
 ation — the truth as to the character of God, and the 
 significance of that truth as displayed in what He 
 
 1 Tract 85, p. 19. 
 
94 CAEDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 had done for men. It is surely not nearly so certain 
 that any elaborately ramified "system" has been 
 revealed to us, as it is that God's character has been 
 emphatically revealed in what the Son of God was and 
 did for mankind. 
 
 Nothing can be more remarkable than the way in 
 which Newman illustrates the principle that if you 
 look only to the surface of Scripture, you find not only 
 no adequate evidence for many of the greater Christian 
 doctrines, but no adequate evidence for the inspiration 
 of Scripture itself, and still more, no adequate evidence 
 for the exact contents of revelation, for what Scripture 
 consists of, for what is properly included in the canon. 
 He described in a most graphic passage the apparently 
 accidental character of the contents of Scripture. " It is 
 as if you were to seize the papers or correspondence of 
 leading men in any school of philosophy or science which 
 were never designed for publication, and bring them out 
 in one volume. You would find probably in the collection 
 so resulting many papers begun and not finished ; some 
 parts systematic and didactic, but the greater part 
 made up of hints or of notices which assume first prin- 
 ciples instead of asserting them, or of discussions upon 
 particular points which happened to require their 
 attention. I say the doctrines, the first principles, the 
 rules, the objects of the school would be taken for 
 granted, alluded to, implied, not stated. You would 
 have some trouble to get at them ; you would have 
 many repetitions, many hiatuses, many things which 
 looked like contradictions ; you would have to work 
 your way through heterogeneous materials, and after 
 your best efforts there would be much hopelessly 
 obscure; and on the other hand, you might look in 
 
DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. 95 
 
 vain in sucli a casual collection for some particular 
 opinions wliich the critics are known, nevertheless, to 
 have held, nay, to have insisted on." ^ 
 
 Such is, he says, with some limitations, the character 
 of Scripture, which is not only an apparently miscel- 
 laneous collection of writings, but one of which we 
 only know that the primitive Church had sifted it 
 out, and believed this to be the authentic collection, 
 though why these books were accepted and others 
 rejected we do not know. But what Newman infers 
 from this is not that this account of the Bible is the 
 true account, but that there is obviously a great deal 
 beneath the letter of the Bible which we can only get 
 at by trusting the authority of the Church, the same 
 authority by which alone confessedly the canon of Scrip- 
 ture was determined. He regards all these criticisms on 
 Scripture as proving not that it is what it seems to be 
 at first sight, but that it is much deeper than what 
 it seems to be at first sight, and what only the Church 
 has adequately disclosed to us. His general inference 
 from his examination is, that "whether this or that 
 doctrine, this or that book of Scripture, is fully provable 
 or not, that line of objection to them cannot be right 
 which when pursued destroys Church, Creed, Bible 
 altogether^which obliterates the very Name of Christ 
 from the world." ^ His view evidently was, that there 
 is something analogous in the apparently accidental and 
 miscellaneous character of Scripture to the apparently 
 accidental and miscellaneous character of human life, 
 which, though it is governed in every detail by Provi- 
 dence, and meant for the discipline and probation of 
 
 1 Tract 85, pp. 30—31. ^ j^^^ pp. iqo. 
 
96 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 man, seems to be so full of what is unintentional, and 
 what does not bear upon the discipline and probation of 
 man. The Church reveals a hidden unity and purpose 
 within Scripture, just as Scripture reveals a hidden 
 unity and purpose in human life, and the true Christian 
 has to choose between accepting this hidden unity and 
 purpose in deference to the teaching of the Church, 
 and entering on a course of destructive criticism which 
 must end in breaking down the belief in revelation 
 itself, and leaving nothing of the least value for our 
 faith to apprehend. His whole drift was, that the 
 Church can verify its credentials out of Scripture if 
 men will follow her guidance in first accepting as 
 Scripture what she has given them, and then looking 
 devoutly for the true meaning of Scripture where she 
 tells them to look for it ; but that without this humility 
 and trust in the Church, Scripture alone will fail us, 
 and yield up incoherent or capricious meanings, varying 
 with the minds of those who take upon themselves the 
 task of interpreting it. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 NEWMAN AT ST. MARY's. 
 
 From 1828 to 1843 Newman was vicar of St. Mary's 
 as well as chaplain of Littlemore, and preached in the 
 pulpit of St. Mary's those Parochial and Plain Sermons 
 by which perhaps he has influenced the world more 
 deeply, though not perhaps more widely, than it has 
 ever fallen to any Englishman of our time to influence 
 it through the instrumentality of the pulpit. Mr. 
 Gladstone has described Newman's manner in the 
 pulpit in a speech on preaching, which he delivered 
 at the City Temple in 1887. "When I was an under- 
 graduate of Oxford," he said, " Dr. Newman was looked 
 upon rather with prejudice as what is termed a Low 
 Churchman, but was very much respected for his 
 character and his known ability. Without ostentation 
 or effort, but by simple excellence, he was constantly 
 drawing undergraduates more and more around him. 
 Now Dr. Newman's manner in the pulpit was one 
 about which, if you considered it in its separate parts, you 
 would arrive at very unsatisfactory conclusions. There 
 was not very much change in the inflexion of the voice ; 
 action there was none. His sermons were read, and 
 his eyes were always bent on his book ; and all that, 
 
 H 
 
98 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 you will say, is against efficiency in preaching. Yes, 
 but you must take the man as a whole, and there was 
 a stamp and a seal upon him ; there was a solemn 
 sweetness and music in the tone ; there was a complete- 
 ness in the figure, taken together with the tone and 
 with the manner, which made even his delivery, such 
 as I have described it, and though exclusively from 
 written sermons, singularly attractive." 
 
 I should very much doubt if Newman could ever have 
 been properly described as a Low Churchman after he 
 became the vicar of St. Mary's in 1828. He himself 
 tells us in his Apologia, that between 1822 and 1825 he 
 was fully under the influence of Dr. Hawkins, afterwards 
 the Provost of Oriel, from whom he learned the doctrines 
 of Baptismal Regeneration, and the relation between 
 Scripture and tradition, as moderate High Churchmen 
 understood that relation. Indeed, the first of the two 
 sermons belonging to the year 1828 is a sermon on 
 Baptismal Regeneration, and I do not think it possible 
 that any one who held the views therein set down could 
 properly be described as a Low Churchman. Moreover, 
 on the appearance of The Christian Year in 1827, 
 Newman adopted at once and enthusiastically the 
 sacramental system as it was set forth in The Christian 
 Year, and from 1828, when he was first made vicar of 
 St, Mary's, he became one of Keble's intimate friends 
 and, as one may say, disciples. Hence it is clear, I 
 think, that Newman's reputed Low Churchmanship 
 must have been in 1828 the mere vestige of the 
 character by which he was at first known at Oxford, 
 and not in any respects a true reflection of the teaching 
 to which he gave utterance in the pulpit of his own 
 church. Newman when vicar of St. Mary's must be 
 
NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 99 
 
 regarded, I think, as a representative of high eccle- 
 siastical views from the very first. But I need not say 
 that it was not this characteristic of his which gained 
 him the eager attention of the Oxford undergraduates. 
 The very first characteristic about the parochial sermons 
 of this vicar of St. Mary's is, that they are so clear 
 and so emphatic in their recognition of the actual 
 facts of life. 
 
 Take as an illustration what may well have been one 
 of the very first sermons preached by him as vicar of 
 St. Mary's on "Religion a weariness to the natural 
 man" (July 27th, 1828, sermon 2 of vol. vii.). Consider 
 the calmness with which he sets the facts of the case 
 before his hearers. " Putting aside for an instant the 
 thought of the ingratitude and the sin which indiffer- 
 ence to Christianity implies, let us, as far as we dare, 
 view it merely as a matter of fact, after the manner of 
 the text, and form a judgment on the probable conse- 
 quences of it; let us take the state of the case as it is 
 proved, and survey it dispassionately, as even an un- 
 believer might survey it, without at the moment con- 
 sidering whether it is sinful or not ; as a misfortune, 
 if we will, or a strange accident, or a necessary condition 
 of our nature — one of the phenomena, as it may be 
 called, of the present world." That is just the way to 
 take the ears of young men, to tell them that you want 
 to put edification for a moment aside, and to face the 
 facts of the world as they are, without moralizing or 
 preaching. Then how vividly he describes the feelings 
 of the young about religion. " The very terms ' religion,' 
 * devotion,' * piety,' * conscientiousness,' ' mortification,' 
 and the like you find to be inexpressibly dull and 
 cheerless ; you cannot find fault with them, indeed you 
 
100 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 would if you could ; and whenever the words are ex- 
 plained in particulars and realized, then you do find 
 occasion for exception and objection. But though you 
 cannot deny the claims of religion used as a vague and 
 general term, yet how irksome, cold, uninteresting, un- 
 inviting does it at best appear to you ! how severe its 
 voice ! how forbidding its aspect ! With what animation, 
 on the contrary, do you enter into the mere pursuits 
 of time and the world ! What bright anticipations of 
 joy and happiness flit before your eyes ! How you are 
 struck and dazzled at the view of the prizes of this life, 
 as they are called ! How you admire the elegancies 
 of art, the brilliance of wealth, or the force of intellect ! 
 According to your opportunities, you mix in the world, 
 you meet and converse with persons of various con- 
 ditions and pursuits, and are engaged in the number- 
 less occurrences of daily life. You are full of news ; 
 you know what this or that person is doing, and what 
 has befallen him ; what has not happened, which was 
 near happening, what may happen. You are full of 
 ideas and feelings upon all that goes on around you. 
 But from some cause or other religion has no part, no 
 sensible influence, in your judgment of men and things. 
 It is out of your way. Perhaps you have your pleasure 
 parties ; you readily take your share in them time after 
 time ; you pass continuous hours in society where you 
 know that it is quite impossible even to mention the 
 name of religion. Your heart is in scenes and places 
 where conversation on serious subjects is strictly for- 
 bidden by the rules of the world's propriety." ^ 
 
 Nothing could be more characteristic of Newman's 
 
 1 Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. vii. A new edition, pp. 
 17, 18. Rivingtons, 1868. 
 
NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 101 
 
 preaching than the passage in which he reminds his 
 hearers how greatly they enjoy the little thrill of 
 excitement which accompanies news-telling, nay, not 
 merely news-telling, but telling what, under certain 
 conditions which were " very near happening," but did 
 not happen, the news might have been though it was 
 not ; and in what strange contrast this thrill of pleasur- 
 able interest in imparting to others the tidings of what 
 might have been as much as a ripple in the stream of 
 time (though in fact it was not even a ripple), stands 
 to the dismay and weariness with which the mere 
 mention of eternal interests is regarded. That profound 
 reality of mind was one of the most important of the 
 characteristics which made Newman's preaching so 
 potent an influence at Oxford. 
 
 Again, nothing is more striking — it is indeed another 
 aspect of this same reality of mind — than Newman's 
 constant anxiety not to exaggerate at all in his delinea- 
 tions of human weakness and frivolousness. In the 
 sermon on the duty of self-denial, preached in the Lent 
 of 1830, he describes the preoccupations of ordinary 
 society in a light not very different from that of the 
 sermon I have just quoted; but observe how anxious 
 he is not in the least to exceed the truth. '' You may 
 go into mixed society; you will hear men conversing 
 on their friend's prospects, openings in trade, or realized 
 wealth, on his advantageous situation, the pleasant con- 
 nections he has formed, the land he has purchased, the 
 house he has built ; then they amuse themselves with 
 conjecturing what this or that man's property may be, 
 where he lost, where he gained, his shrewdness or his 
 rashness, or his good fortune in this or that speculation. 
 Observe, I do not say that such conversation is wrong; 
 
102 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 I do not say that we must always have on our lips the 
 very thoughts which are deepest in our hearts, or that 
 it is safe to judge of individuals by such speeches ; but 
 when this sort of conversation is the customary standard 
 conversation of the world, and when a line of conduct 
 answering to it is the prevalent conduct of the world 
 (and this is the case), is it not a grave question for each 
 of us, as livino^ in the world, to ask himself what abidinor 
 notion we have of the necessity of self-denial, and how 
 far we are clear of the danger of resembling that evil 
 generation which * ate and drank, which married wives, 
 and were given in marriage, which bought and sold, 
 planted and builded, till it rained fire and brimstone 
 from heaven and destroyed them all." ' ^ In the studious 
 guardedness of this criticism of the world's ways lies 
 more than half the impressiveness and power of this 
 sermon. 
 
 It is impossible to speak of the extraordinaiy reality 
 of Newman's sermons at St. Mary's without referring 
 especially to the wonderful sermon preached on the 
 2nd June, 1839, on "Unreal Words." To more than 
 one living man that sermon has, I believe, been one of 
 the greater influences governing the conduct of their life 
 — I mean, of course, their interior life as well as their 
 external conduct. The teaching that under the Christian 
 Revelation we are " no longer in the region of^hadovvs," 
 that as the true light shines we are bound to avail 
 ourselves of it and make all our professions and words 
 real, and yet that nothing is so rare as reality and 
 singleness of mind, and that we ought to test our own 
 sincerity as Christ so often tested the sincerity of those 
 
 1 Parochial and Plam Sermons^ vol. vii. p. 88. 
 
NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 103 
 
 who made great professions to Him, is enforced with a 
 freshness and dramatic insight that makes the sermon 
 unforgettable. The whole effect of it is to make its 
 readers feel how easy it is to be unconsciously insincere. 
 Newman does not want " to hinder us from obeying," 
 but " to sober us in professing." " To make professions," 
 he says, '' is to play with edged tools, unless we attend 
 to what we are saying. Words have a meaning, whether 
 we mean that meaning or not ; and they are imputed 
 to us in their real meaning when our not meaning it is 
 our own fault." ^ 
 
 This is the sense in which Newman understands 
 our Lord's saying, "By thy Avords thou shalt be 
 justified, and by thy words thou shalt be con- 
 demned." Observe, he says, how little reality there 
 is in any speech about matters with which people are 
 not familiar, how absurdly a person entirely unfamiliar 
 with military affairs will blunder if he attempts to 
 make 'arrangements for the commissariat of an army, 
 or how many ridiculous mistakes will be made by a 
 foreigner who comes over and dashes at once into plans 
 for the supply of our markets. It would be like the 
 mistakes of a dim-sighted man in judging of colours, 
 or a person who had no knowledge of music in criticizing 
 a performance on the organ. It is the same when a 
 stranger offers an amiable panegyric on the manners 
 and character of some one of whom he knows nothing. 
 They praise the wrong things, and if they find fault 
 at all, imagine slights where no slight was intended, 
 discover imaginary meanings in events, and do not 
 understand the difference between one point and 
 
 1 Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. v., ser. iii. p. 33, edition 
 of 1868. 
 
104 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 another. "They look at them as infants gaze at the 
 objects which meet their eyes, in a vague, unappre- 
 hensive way, as if not knowing whether a thing is a 
 hundred miles off or close at hand, whether great or 
 small, hard or soft." ^ Just so unreal, he says, are most 
 men in their religious duties. They pray not with all 
 their hearts in their prayer, but are full of self-con- 
 sciousness, and dwell on the solemnity of the act in 
 which they are engaged, and attempt to rise to the 
 occasion by feeding their mind on the thought of the 
 greatness of God and the insignificance of man. That 
 is not prayer, but only an inflated reverie to which 
 the thought of prayer may give rise. Of this nature 
 are the commonplaces about the vanity of life and the 
 certainty of death, or the reflections to which people 
 often give utterance in sickness or low spirits — " lifeless 
 sounds whether of pipe or harp." The whole drift of 
 the sermon is concentrated in the sentence, "Aim at 
 things, and your words will be right without aiming." ^ 
 " Let us avoid talking of whatever kind, whether mere 
 empty talking, or censorious talking, or idle profession, 
 or descanting upon Gospel doctrines, or the affectation 
 of philosophy, or the pretence of eloquence." ^ I sin- 
 cerely believe that many men's lives have been much 
 sincerer and more genuine than they otherwise would 
 have been for the writing and publication of this 
 sermon. 
 
 But though reality was the first of Newman's 
 characteristics as a preacher, it would not have been 
 half as effective as it was, had it not been combined 
 with that profound and vivid apprehension of the truth 
 
 ^ Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. v., ser. iii. p. 36, edition 
 of 1868. 2 iii^^ p, 44 3 ji,i^^ p_ 45^ 
 
NEWMAN AT ST. MAEYU 105 
 
 and the marvel of revelation which is so seldom united 
 with realism such as his. Sincere preachers have 
 abounded in recent years, preachers who have shown 
 their sincerity by openly discarding the belief in those 
 truths of the Christian revelation which cannot, after 
 some sort of fashion, be reconciled to what is called 
 " modern thought.'' Newman held that modern thought 
 needed reforming in the light of the Christian revel- 
 ation, not the Christian revelation in the light of modern 
 thought. Comparatively early in his pulpit at St. Mary's, 
 as early as 26th August, 1832, he had denounced "the 
 religion of the day," expressly because it accepted only 
 that side of revealed religion which fell in with the 
 tendencies of modern civilization, because it substituted 
 enlightened prudence, or the love of the beautiful, or 
 a mixture of the two, for the awe and fear which con- 
 science inspires and Divine revelation sternly enforces. 
 He did not accommodate his religion to the moral and 
 intellectual atmosphere in which he found himself. 
 If he had, it might have been comparatively easy to 
 him to make men realize vividly what they were, and 
 what he wished them to become. On the contrary, 
 what he wished them to become, involved in e?t&ry 
 respect a very painful change of attitude, a change 
 which they could not bring about without going through 
 much inward tribulation. ** I do not at all deny," he 
 said, ''that this spirit of the world uses words and 
 makes professions which it would not adopt except for 
 the suggestions of Scripture; nor do I deny that it 
 takes a general colouring from Christianity, so as really 
 to be modified by it, nay, in a measure, enlightened 
 and exalted by it. Again, I fully grant that many 
 persons in whom this bad spirit shows itself are but 
 
106 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 partially infected by it, and at bottom good Christians 
 though imperfect. Still, after all here is an existing 
 teaching only partially evangelical, built upon worldly 
 principle, yet pretending to be the Gospel, dropping 
 one whole side of the Gospel, its austere character, 
 and considering it enough to be benevolent, courteous, 
 candid, correct in conduct, delicate, — though it includes 
 no true fear of God, no fervent zeal for His honour, no 
 deep hatred of sin, no horror at the sight of sinners, 
 no indignation and compassion at the blasphemies of 
 heretics, no jealous adherence^ to doctrinal truth, no 
 especial sensitiveness about the particular means of 
 gaining ends, providing the ends be good, no loyalty 
 to the Holy Apostolic Church of which the creed 
 speaks, no sense of the authority of religion as external 
 to the mind, in a word, no seriousness, — and therefore 
 is neither hot nor cold, but (in Scripture language) 
 lukeioarmy ^ 
 
 This was the sermon in which Newman boldly de- 
 nounced the optimistic religions of the day as shallow 
 and false, and expressed his belief that " it would be 
 a gain to this country were it really more superstitious, 
 more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion 
 than at present it shows itself to be. Not, of course, 
 that I think the tempers of mind herein implied de- 
 sirable, which would be an evident absurdity; but I 
 think them infinitely more desirable and more promis- 
 ing than a heathen obduracy and a cold, self-sufiicient, 
 self- wise tranquillity." ^ " Miserable," he said, " as were 
 the superstitions of the dark ages, revolting as are 
 the tortures now in use among the heathen of the 
 
 1 Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. i. pp. 313-14, edit, of 1868. 
 2 Hid, p. 320-21. 
 
NEWMAN AT ST. MAEY'S. 107 
 
 East, better, far better is it to torture one's body all 
 one's days, and to make this life a hell upon earth, 
 than to remain in a brief tranquillity here, till the pit 
 at length opens under us, and awakens us to an eternal 
 fruitless consciousness and remorse. Think of Christ's 
 own words, ' What shall a man give in exchange for 
 his soul?' Again He says, 'Fear Him who after He 
 hath killed hath power to cast into hell ; yea, I say unto 
 you, fear Him.' Dare not to think that you have got 
 to the bottom of your hearts; you do not know what 
 evil lies there. How long and earnestly must you pray, 
 how many years must you pass in careful obedience, 
 before you have any right to lay aside sorrow, and to 
 rejoice in the Lord ?"^ 
 
 From this it is evident that Newman did not hesitate 
 to preach unsparingly what he held to be the austere 
 and threatening side of Christianity. And it is rarely 
 indeed that a man who dares to do this, confronts the 
 facts of human life, and the petty manoeuvres and little 
 self-deceptions of the heart, with the exquisite insight 
 and delicate, unexaggerating candour which Newman 
 displayed. Those who preach an austere religion 
 usually take refuge in generalities, laying on the dull 
 colours in impressive masses, which excite the imagin- 
 ation without bringing home to the conscience the 
 actual significance of moral cowardice and worldlines?. 
 Newman made no attempt to pile up horrors, but 
 while he kept to the language of Scripture in speaking 
 of what was most awful, he showed a profound and 
 accurate knowledge of the frivolities and self-deceptions 
 of men which gave the world the measure of his 
 appreciation and his hatred of what is worst in men. 
 1 Parochial and Plain Sermons^ vol. i. p. 323. 
 
108 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 That a man with so precise and delicate an insight into 
 the subtle and intricate web of human motives should 
 display so hearty an abhorrence of that tainted interior 
 self which he so well understood, and should accept the 
 severest judgments upon it as the very voice of Divine 
 justice, appeared a remarkable vindication of that stern- 
 ness of the Divine mind on which he insisted with so 
 much vividness and force. That so sympathetic and 
 musical a voice should cry aloud and spare not, was of 
 itself a singular testimony to the forbearance of the 
 Divine wrath, and to the searching fire of the Divine love. 
 For the tenderness and pathos in these sermons are 
 at least as striking as their delicate realism and their 
 uncompromising severity. There is a genuine marvel in 
 the combination of so much sweetness and pity with 
 so much sternness. We almost hear again the thrill 
 of the subdued voice as we read those passages with 
 which the sermons abound, where the overwhelminor 
 miracle of grace is delineated. For instance — "All 
 the trouble which the world inflicts upon us, and which 
 flesh cannot but feel, — sorrow, pain, care, bereavement, 
 — these avail not to disturb the tranquillity and the 
 intensity with which faith gazes upon the Divine 
 Majesty. All the necessary exactness of our obedience, 
 the anxiety about failing, the pain of self-denial, the 
 watchfulness, the zeal, the self-chastisements which are 
 required of us, as little interfere with this vision of 
 faith as if they were practised by another, not by our- 
 selves. We are two or three selves at once, in the 
 wonderful structure of our minds, and can weep while 
 we smile, and labour while we meditate." ^ 
 
 1 Parochial and Plain Sermons^ vol. iv. pp. 146-7, edition of 
 1868. 
 
NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 109 
 
 Or take the passage in one of the sermons on the 
 Epiphany, in which Newman illustrates from ordinary 
 human life that transitory gleam of earthly glory 
 which Christ had in His infancy, when an angel an- 
 nounced His coming, Elizabeth saluted Him still unborn 
 as her Lord, when the shepherds worshipped at the 
 message they received from on high, and a star blazed 
 above the humble roof under which He entered into our 
 sorrows. "It often happens that when persons are in 
 serious illnesses, and in delirium in consequence, or 
 other disturbance of mind, they have some few minutes 
 of respite in the midst of it, when they are even more 
 than themselves, as if to show us what they really are, 
 and to interpret for us what else would be dreary. And, 
 again, some have thought that the minds of children 
 have on them traces of something more than earthly, 
 which fade away as life goes on, but are the promise of 
 what is intended for them hereafter. And somewhat 
 in this way, if we may dare compare ourselves with our 
 gracious Lord, in a parallel though higher way, Christ 
 descends to the shadows of this world, with the transitory 
 tokens on Him of that future glory into which He 
 could not enter till He had suffered. The star burned 
 brightly over Him for a time, though it then faded 
 away." ^ 
 
 But what was most pathetic in Newman's sermons 
 at St. Mary's was not so much the tenderness of 
 feeling which he combined with great severity of 
 conscience, — though that was most pathetic, — as the 
 perpetual and constant struggle he made to convince a 
 world that was not at all disposed to be convinced on 
 
 ^ Parochial and Plain SermonSf vol. vii. pp. 80, 81. 
 
/ 
 
 no CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 that head, that Christianity is not compatible with that 
 eager and almost headlong immersion in external pur- 
 suits and practical cares which seems to be the special 
 temptation of the English genius and temperament. 
 Englishmen, so long, at all events, as they restrain 
 themselves within given rules of conduct, are visited by 
 no compunctions when they plunge into life and take 
 their fill, as it were, of its joys and griefs, its anxieties 
 and cares. They have no wish at all to be " detached " 
 from this cheery and vehement fashion of living, no con- 
 viction even that they ought to be detached from it. 
 
 But Newman from the first date of his preaching in 
 St. Mary's strove to drive home to his hearers his own 
 profound conviction that such a life is not the Christian's 
 life at all, and he pressed this upon them, till at last he 
 was all but convinced that he could not press it on 
 them with any success from his Anglican position, and 
 must find some other Church in which he could, in 
 his own opinion, more consistently preach that some 
 degree of detachment of the heart from the joys and 
 cares of this life, and of steady increase in the degree of 
 this detachment, is essential to thai growth in the love 
 of God upon which all rehgious and_ moral discipline is 
 intended to concentrate itself and in which it should 
 find its consummation. He seems to have become 
 gradually persuaded that this ideal of life was the 
 opposite of the genuine Protestant ideal, and that the 
 reason why Protestant nations on the whole beat the 
 Roman Catholic nations in the race for predominance, 
 is precisely this, that they give their hearts to that 
 race, while the Roman Catholics, the more they are 
 filled with the spirit of their religion, the more detach 
 their hearts from the earthly struggle, and when they 
 
NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. Ill 
 
 are untrue to it, illustrate the saying that " the corruption 
 of the best is the worst." 
 
 I have shown how trenchant was Newman's de- 
 nunciation of the mere religion of civilization as early 
 as 1832, thirteen years before he abandoned the 
 Anglican Church. During the whole of that time 
 an impression was, I think, steadily growing, which 
 eventually assumed the force of a conviction, that 
 the theology of the Via Media would not hold water, 
 that the religion of the Via Media would never hold 
 its own without the aid of those witnesses to the 
 blessedness of worship which regular religious orders, 
 devoted even in this world to the life of adoration, 
 afford, and that Anglicanism aims too much at a com- 
 promise between different ideals of life, ever to sustain 
 heartily religious orders of this kind. I have shown 
 his feeling as to " the Religion of the Day " in 1832. 
 Let me take one of the sermons of 1836 (vol. iv. 
 sermon xx.), called " The Ventures of Faith," which 
 shows how this feeHng, that even the Christian life 
 of the Anglican communion was not what it should 
 be, was growing upon him even then, though he was 
 far from feeling as yet any doubt at all as to the 
 Church to which he owed his loyalty and love. He 
 asks, how would Christians be greater losers (as they 
 ought to be of course) than any other men, supposing, 
 what is impossible, that Christ's promises were to fail ? 
 " What have we ventured for Christ ? " he asks ; " what 
 have we given to Him on a belief of His promise ? " — 
 namely, that if we forsake all for Christ, Christ will Him- 
 self reward us both in this life and the next. " The 
 Apostle said that he and his brethren would be of all 
 men the most miserable if the dead were not raised. 
 
112 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 Can we in any degree apply this to ourselves ? We 
 think, perhaps, at present we have some hope of heaven ; 
 well, this we should lose, of course; but how should 
 we be worse off as to our ^present condition ? A trader 
 who has embarked some property in a speculation 
 which fails, not only loses his prospect of gain, but 
 somewhat of his own which he ventured with the hope 
 of the gain. This is the question — What have we 
 ventured ? I really fear, when we come to examine, it 
 will be found that there is nothing we resolve, nothing 
 we do, nothing we do not do, nothing we avoid, nothing 
 we choose, nothing we give up, nothing we pursue, 
 which we should not resolve, and do, and not do, and 
 avoid, and choose, and give up, and pursue, if Christ 
 had not died and heaven were not promised us. I 
 really fear that most men called Christians, whatever 
 they may profess, whatever they may think they feel, 
 whatever warmth and illumination and love they may 
 claim as their own, yet would go on almost as they do, 
 neither much better nor much worse, if they believed 
 Christianity to be a fable. When young they indulge 
 their lusts, or at least pursue the world's vanities ; as 
 time goes on they get into a fair way of business or 
 other mode of making money; then they marry and 
 settle ; and their interest coinciding with their duty, 
 they seem to be, and think themselves, respectable and 
 religious men; they grow attached to things as they 
 are ; they begin to have a zeal against vice and error ; 
 and they follow after peace with all men. Such conduct 
 indeed, as far as it goes, is right and praiseworthy. 
 Only I say it has not necessarily anything to do with 
 religion at all ; there is nothing in it which is any proof 
 of the presence of religious principle in those who adopt 
 
NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 113 
 
 it ; there is nothing they would not do still, though they 
 had nothing to gain from it except what they gain from 
 it now : they do gain something now, they do gratify 
 their present wishes, they are quiet and orderly because 
 it is their interest and taste to do so ; but they vcniui^e 
 nothing, they risk, they sacrifice, they abandon nothing, 
 on the faith of Christ's word." 
 
 And then Newman went on to say that St. Barnabas, 
 for instance, had a property in Cyprus which he gave 
 up for the poor of Christ, and that he therefore did 
 something that he would not have done unless the 
 Gospel were true, and that if the Gospel could have 
 turned out a fable, St. Barnabas would have made a 
 great mistake. But which of us, he asks, does what 
 St. Barnabas did — gives up the prospect of wealth or 
 eminence in order to be nearer Christ, or puts off 
 worldly comforts, or schools himself by inflicting on 
 himself voluntary penances for his sins, or even in 
 prospect of wealth honestly and heartily prays that he 
 may never be rich, because he thinks that riches would 
 alienate his heart from Christ ? Yet if we do none of 
 these things, we are not really shaping our whole 
 earthly course by Christ's promises, and making our 
 life quite other than it would have been but for those 
 promises. Such was Newman's pathetic impatience 
 with the apparent absence in the Anglican Church of 
 anything like habitual renunciation of the world as 
 early even as 1836. But the feeling certainly grew 
 rapidly before he first began to entertain any doubt 
 that he was in a true Church. In a sermon preached 
 on the 3rd March, 1839, on " Endurance, the Christian's 
 portion," he expresses most pathetically his belief, that 
 Christians who live a perfectly serene and happy life have 
 
 I 
 
114 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 forfeited by their unfaithfulness the promise made to 
 Christians of suffering in this world, which our Lord 
 and St. Paul, and indeed all the Apostles, gave, and that 
 their prosperity and good understanding with the world 
 are as much proof that they are not living in obedience 
 to the revealed truth, as the troubles and sufferings of 
 the Jews under the Mosaic dispensation were proof that 
 they (who had been promised prosperity if they did 
 obey God's law) were not living in obedience to that 
 truth. 
 
 He insists especially on the prosperity derived 
 from the alliance of the State with the Church, as 
 a kind of prosperity earned by unfaithfulness to the 
 Church's true interests. "If 'the present distress* 
 of which St. Paul speaks does not denote tHe ordinary 
 state of the Christian Church, the New Testament is 
 scarcely written for us, but must be remodelled before 
 it can be made apply. There are men of the world 
 in this day who are attempting to supersede the 
 precepts of Christ about almsgiving and the main- 
 tenance of the poor. We are accustomed to object that 
 they contravene Scripture. Again, we hear of men 
 drawing up a Church government for themselves, or 
 omitting Sacraments, or modifying doctrines. We say 
 they do not read Scripture rightly. They answer, per- 
 haps, that Scripture commands or countenances many 
 things which are not binding on us eighteen hundred 
 years after. They consider that the management of the 
 poor, the form of the "Church, the power of the State 
 over it, the nature of its faith, or the choice of its 
 ordinances, are not points on which we need rigidly 
 keep to Scripture ; that times have changed. This is 
 what they say; and can we find fault with them if 
 
NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 115 
 
 we ourselves allow that the New Testament is a dead 
 letter in another most essential part of it ? Is it 
 strange that they should think that the world may now 
 tyrannize over the Church, when we allow that the 
 Church may now indulge in the world ? Surely they 
 do but make a fair bargain with us; both they and we 
 put aside Scripture, and then agree together — we to 
 live in ease, and they to rule. We have taken the 
 world's pay, and must not grudge its yoke. Independ- 
 ence surely is not the Church's privilege, unless hardship 
 is her portion. Well, and perhaps affliction, hardship, 
 distress, ill-usage, evil report, are her portion, both 
 promised and bestowed, though at first sight they may 
 seem not to be. What proof is there that temporal 
 happiness was the gift of the Law, which will not avail 
 for temporal adversity being that of the Gospel ? . . . You 
 will say perhaps that the Jewish promise was suspended 
 on a condition, the condition of obedience, and that the 
 Jews forfeited the reward because they did not merit it. 
 True ; let it be so. And what hinders, in like manner, 
 if Christians are in prosperity, not in adversity, that it 
 is because they too have forfeited the promise and 
 privilege of affliction by disobedience ? " ^ 
 
 The pathos of this self-accusation, that he and his 
 friends had forfeited the privilege of adversity which 
 Christ had promised, by disobedience, seems to me 
 perfectly unique. Yet pathos of this kind runs like 
 a silver thread through the whole series of Oxford 
 sermons. Obviously Newman was very restive under 
 the political conditions of the Establishment, not only 
 because he wanted to obtain a greater independence 
 
 1 Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. v. pp. 290 — 292, edition 
 of 1868. 
 
116 OAEDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 for the Church than the political alliance with the 
 State admitted, but also because he resented the comfort, 
 the ease, the sleek serenity, the worldly consideration 
 and influence over worldly people, to which the alliance 
 with the State had brought our Anglican clergy. He 
 believed that no Church which was full of the spirit 
 of Christ could possibly be on such good terms with the 
 spirit of the Avorld. 
 
 This was the line of thought which led Newman to 
 the position which he took up so decidedly in 1843, 
 when he was already wavering in his allegiance to the 
 Church of England, as to the true character of " The 
 Apostolical Christian " ; and the pathos of his faith and 
 his self-distrust was never more powerfully expressed. 
 
 He preached on this subject early in February 1843, 
 and it was obvious from this sermon whither his thoughts 
 were leading him.^ It is possible, he said, to draw out 
 from the New Testament itself the typical character- 
 istics of the Christian of the first age of the Church, 
 only we had read the passages which describe him so 
 often that we had lost the power of taking in their true 
 meaning. The first of the characteristics of a "Bible 
 Christian" was to be "without worldly ties or objects, 
 to be living in this w^orld but not for this world." St. 
 Paul says, " Our conversation is in heaven;" and again, 
 " Here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to 
 come." And it is from heaven, St. Paul tells us, that 
 he looks for Christ. This, said Newman, was the chief 
 mark of the Christian of the early Church — that he was 
 one who looked for Christ, " not for gain, or distinction, 
 or power, or pleasure, or comfort." The affections were 
 
 1 The sermon is the nineteenth of those in the volume on 
 Subjects of the Day (edition of 1869). 
 
NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 117 
 
 to be set " on things above, not on things of the earth." 
 '^. Hence loatching was an especial mark of the Scripture 
 Christian. "What I say unto you, I say unto all, 
 Watch." And the primitive Christians kept the com- 
 mand. " They were continually in the Temple, praising 
 and blessing God." "These all continued with one 
 accord in prayer and supplication with the women." 
 Peter goes up to the housetop to pray at the sixth 
 hour. Paul and Silas pray and sing praises at midnight 
 in their prison. The Church of Tyre bring Paul on his 
 way out of the city, and kneel down on the shore and 
 pray. And the result of all this watching and prayer 
 
 , is that the primitive Christians became "a simple, 
 innocent, grave, humble, patient, meek, and loving 
 
 , body, without earthly advantages or worldly influence." 
 They unite their possessions and have them in 
 2 common, and are of one heart and one soul, and dis- 
 tribution is made by the Apostles to every man accord- 
 ing as he has need. They take literally the exhortation 
 to have their treasure in heaven, and not one which 
 moth and dust can corrupt ; they obey the injunction, 
 " Let your loins be girded about, and your lights burn- 
 ing ; " and again, that implied in " how hardly shall they 
 that have riches enter into the kingdom of God." They 
 take literally the suggestion, " No man that warreth 
 ir entangleth himself with the affairs of this life ; that he 
 may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier." 
 " Love not the world, neither the things of the world," 
 was the rule of their life. "Be ye not conformed to 
 this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of 
 your mind," was the ideal of their inward character. 
 They earnestly desired with St. Paul that the world 
 should be- crucified to them, and they unto the world. 
 
118 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 In a word, "they love God, and give up the world." 
 And finally, they glory in their tribulations, to use St. 
 Paul's language. These troubles borne for Christ are 
 a genuine source of joy to them. They are blessed in 
 their mourning, and in their hungering and thirsting, 
 and poverty and privations, as Christ promised them 
 that they should be. Newman then entreats his hearers 
 in the following pathetic words — "Bear to look at 
 the Christianity of the Bible ; bear to contemplate the 
 idea of a Christian traced by inspiration without gloss 
 or comment, or tradition of men. Bear to have read 
 to you a number of texts, texts which might be multi- 
 plied sevenfold ; texts which can be confronted by no 
 others ; which are no partial selections, but a specimen 
 of the whole of the New Testament."^ It does not 
 follow, he says, that all men are called upon to imitate 
 this model to the life, — though he does not explain why 
 it does not follow, supposing that these commands were 
 given, as they were, to all the first disciples of Christ, 
 and that apparently they were followed by the primitive 
 Church as a whole ; — but whether that follows or not, 
 it is at least true that this was the life enjoined on His 
 followers by our Lord, and it is also true, that in all ages 
 there have been plenty of persons who followed them 
 literally. When asked who these are, Newman answers, 
 — and it must have taken great gallantry and courage 
 to make this answer in an Oxford pulpit at that day, — 
 " I am loth to say ; I have reason to ask you to be honest 
 and candid, for so it is, as if from consciousness of the 
 fact, and dislike to have it urged upon us, we and our fore- 
 fathers have been accustomed to scorn and ridicule these 
 
 1 Newman's sermons on Subjects of the Day, edition of 1869, 
 pp. 289, 290. 
 
NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 119 
 
 faithful, obedient pei:sons, and in our Saviour's very 
 Avords, ' to cast out their name as evil for the Son of man's 
 sake.' But if the truth must be spoken, what are the 
 humble monk and the holy nun, and other regulars, as 
 they were called, but Christians after the very pattern 
 given us in Scripture ? What have they done but 
 this — pepetuate in the world the Christianity of the 
 Bible ? Did our Saviour come on earth suddenly, as 
 He will one day visit it, in whom would He see the 
 features of the Christians whom He and His Apostles 
 left behind them but in them ? Who but these give 
 up home and friends, and wealth and ease, good name 
 and liberty of will, for the kingdom of heaven ? Where 
 shall we find the image of St. Paul, or St. Peter, or St, 
 John, or of Mary the mother of Mark, or of Philip's 
 daughters, but in those who, whether they remain in 
 seclusion, or are sent over the earth, have calm faces, 
 and most plaintive voices, and spare frames, and gentle 
 manners, and hearts weaned from the world, and wills 
 subdued ; and for their meekness meet with insult, and 
 for their purity with slander, and for their gravity with 
 suspicion, and for their courage with cruelty ; yet meet 
 with Christ everywhere — Christ their all-sufficient, ever- 
 lasting portion, to make up to them, both here and 
 hereafter, all they suffer, all they dare, for His Name's 
 sake?" 
 
 This is the sermon which seems to me to announce 
 
 most clearly the change of faith which was coming, 
 
 but which was still deferred for more than two 
 
 ! years. And the pangs of the anticipated rupture give 
 
 / to the pathos of all his sermons at this time the most 
 
 ' exquisite tenderness and depth. Evidently he had 
 
 made up his mind that detachment from the world was 
 
120 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 enjoined by our Lord on His followers, and could see 
 evidence of that detachment partially indeed in the 
 secular clergy of Catholic countries, but completely 
 only in the " Regular Clergy " of Christian monasticism. 
 He never explains why he thinks that which is obliga- 
 tory on those who set the example, is not obligatory also 
 on the Christian community at large, why it should 
 need a distinct call to make it the duty of ordinary 
 Christians now, to act like the ordinary Christians of 
 the primitive Church. He suggests that Ananias and 
 Sappbirawere not required to give up all their property, 
 but were only required to be honest in stating what it 
 was that they had given up. And he speaks of them as 
 a proof that " those great surrenders which Scripture 
 speaks of are not incumbent on all Christians. They 
 could not be voluntary," he says, " if they were duties ; 
 they could not be meritorious if they were not vohmtary." 
 But if that be so, surely a great part of the literalness he 
 has demanded for the interpretation of our Lord's words, 
 " He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not 
 worthy of Me ; and he that loveth son or daughter more 
 than Me is not worthy of Me," vanishes at once. Either 
 these and similar passages exclude from true discipleship 
 all who do not make these sacrifices, or they do not ; 
 and if they do not, surely they cannot be said to lay an 
 absolute obligation on the Church at all. However, 
 Newman had satisfied himself that what was imposed 
 on those who were to set a Christian example was not 
 inposed on all the followers of Christ, and this sermon 
 was the announcement that he could see no true Church 
 except where the ecclesiastical motive-power at least 
 was in the hands of men who had renounced the joys of 
 the world for Christ's sake, in other words, was in the 
 
NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 121 
 
 hands of a self-denying clergy, and under the moral 
 influence of the great monastic orders. 
 
 Newman's next sermon, preached within a fortnight 
 of this, and bringing out still more completely the deep 
 pathos of his situation in a Church which he loved dearly 
 but revered less every year, was that on " Wisdom and 
 Innocence," which so painfully impressed the late Canon 
 Kingsley, and served to convince him that not only had 
 truth " never been a virtue with the Roman clergy," but 
 that " Father Newman informs us that it had not, and on 
 the whole ought not to be, that cunning is the weapon 
 which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to with- 
 stand the brute force of the wicked world, which marries 
 and is given in marriage." And no doubt the sermon 
 was Newman's own answer to the assertion that the 
 independent ecclesiastical polity v^hich he so much pre- 
 ferred to the humdrum Anglican establishment, has 
 usually been disfigured by a diplomatic and furtive 
 policy, which is plainly inconsistent with Christian 
 rectitude and courage. What he said in answer to 
 this was to put forward our Lord's injunction to His 
 disciples, to meet the persecutions of the world of which 
 He forewarned them by being "wise as serpents and 
 harmless as doves." They were to go forth as " sheep in 
 the midst of wolves," but not with the helplessness and 
 witlessness of sheep. They were to injure no one, but 
 they were to be prudent and wary, and not to expose 
 themselves to unnecessary danger. They were to use 
 a certain reserve, and not blurt out what would merely 
 irritate the world without some sufficient hope of teach- 
 ing the world. Now such conduct produces in the 
 world the impression of duplicity and craft, an impres- 
 sion which is greatly heightened when it is observed 
 
122 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 how successful Christians are in spreading their teach- 
 ing not only in spite of their weakness but in conse- 
 quence of it, for the blessing of God which rests upon 
 the diffusion of the truth, and has of course a super- 
 natural effect, is not recognized by the world, and so 
 the world assumes that there must be great subtlety 
 and craft where there was really nothing more than 
 simplicity of purpose and the presence of mind which 
 absolute faith brings with it. And no doubt Newman's 
 was a sufficient explanation of the disposition of the world 
 to ascribe craft and subtlety to the primitive Christians. 
 But Newman hardly recognized how thoroughly the 
 maxim that the corruption of the best is the worst, 
 applies to the ecclesiastical type of character, and how 
 often that reserve and prudence which Christ en- 
 joined has been transformed in that character into the 
 duplicity and cunning which the world justly condemns. 
 "Bishops," he said, "have been called hypocritical in 
 submitting and yet opposing themselves to the civil 
 power in a matter of plain duty if a popular move- 
 ment was the consequence ; and then hypocritical again 
 if they did their best to repress it." ^ No doubt they 
 have, sometimes unjustly, and sometimes quite justly. 
 It is a very difficult matter, especially when a great 
 and able ecclesiastic finds himself pitted against a 
 violent world, to keep his actions steadfastly within 
 the lines of strict Christian simplicity and charity, and 
 when he once transgresses these lines, he soon shows 
 us how much easier it is to discredit the Church than 
 to bring disgrace on the Avorld. I don't think that 
 the sermon itself was at all open to Mr. Kingsley's 
 
 ^ Sermons on Subjects of the Day, p. 306. 
 
NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 123 
 
 interpretation of it; but I do think that, considered 
 as an historical apology for the ecclesiastical type of 
 character, it did need much stronger admissions than 
 any which Newman gaye as to the perversions to which 
 that type of character has shown itself to be liable. As 
 a defence of the humility and meekness of the primitive 
 Church, it is very effective to say, as Newman did of her 
 bitter enemies, " It is easy to insinuate, when men are 
 malevolent, that those who triumph through meekness 
 have affected the meekness to secure the triumph," but 
 men who were not malevolent have made that remark 
 concerning many of the ecclesiastical politicians for 
 whose indirectness of policy it was supposed — perhaps 
 mistakenly — that this sermon was intended to offer an 
 apology. Perhaps the sermon would have answered 
 its purpose better if a franker confession had been 
 made, that Churchmen, in obeying their Lord's com- 
 mand, have been apt to mingle a good deal too much 
 of the wisdom of the serpent with a good deal too 
 little of the harmlessness of the dove ; and that when 
 they have done so, they have evolved a type of char- 
 acter inferior instead of superior to the worldly character 
 which devotes itself to the same order of affairs. 
 
 On the whole, I think that Newman's extraordinary 
 power in the pulpit of St. Mary's was due to the 
 wonderful blending of the reality of his insight into 
 human life and character with his absolute faith in 
 revelation and the spiritual world which that revel- 
 ation opened to his view, heightened as these great 
 gifts were by a nature singularly sensitive to the pangs 
 of lacerated feelings and wounded affections, and sub- 
 jected to a severe strain by his gradual discovery that 
 his ideal of the Christian character and Christian 
 
124 CAKDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 doctrine was undermining his position as a Christian 
 teacher, and demanding from him the one act of self- 
 denial which he had long taught himself to regard as 
 one of deliberate disobedience to the spiritual authority 
 which he regarded as speaking to him with God's own 
 voice. The great difference between his style as an 
 Anglican teacher and his style as a Catholic teacher, 
 was due to the profound pathos of his situation in 
 the former position, and the comparative freedom of 
 his situation in the latter. In both positions the 
 delicacy and tenderness of his nature made themselves 
 powerfully felt, but in the former he spoke like one 
 repressing the anxious forebodings of his own heart, 
 in the latter like one pouring out the pity of an 
 . enfranchised spirit. 
 
 As University preacher Newman perhaps hardly 
 exerted so characteristic an influence as he did in the 
 sermons in which he strove chiefly to drive home the 
 significance of the Christian revelation. His University 
 sermons may be said to be more or less attempts to 
 discover the true relation of Reason to Faith, and great 
 as these sermons are, abounding in passages of the 
 highest power, and here and there of great eloquence, 
 beauty, and pathos, they are not so saturated with the 
 nature of the man, as the " parochial " sermons and the 
 sermons on Sitl>jects of the Day. Still the great series 
 discussing the relation of Faith to Reason is a very 
 memorable series, and the wonderful sermon on The 
 Theory of Development in Religious Doctrine with which 
 it closes, is probably among the noblest ever composed 
 on what may be called the method of revelation. The 
 whole series is full of new light on a subject which has 
 been frequently treated since, the relation of implicit to 
 
NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 125 
 
 explicit reason, though seldom with anything like New- 
 man's power and lucidity. Indeed, the subject interested 
 him so deeply that he took it up again five-and-twenty 
 years after his conversion in his Grammar of Assent. 
 Newman started with an exposition of the mistaken 
 idea which the sceptical world usually attaches to the 
 word "Faith," as a species of weak and superstitious 
 apology for reason, foundationless belief which contents 
 itself rather with an excuse for credulity than with 
 anything that deserves the name of evidence. A rustic 
 will sometimes adduce as evidence of some strange 
 event, that the tree under the shade of which it 
 happened is still to be seen growing, and that he 
 himself has seen it, or that the very room in which it 
 took place is known to him. Faith, according to New- 
 man, is usually supposed by the world to be an imbecile 
 reason of such a kind as this. But in reality, he 
 argued, faith has its origin in eagerness to believe 
 that for which the evidence is more antecedent and 
 presumptive than a posteriori and inductive. But such 
 an eagerness to believe may be, and often is, a perfectly 
 just and in the highest sense reasonable eagerness, 
 where it is the outcome of the highest tendencies which 
 are implicit, or folded up in man's nature ; whereas it is 
 an unjust and unreasonable eagerness to believe, where 
 it is the outcome of the poorer and baser part of his 
 nature; the difference being that in the former case 
 the eagerness to believe proceeds from what is supreme 
 over man, or divine, while in the latter case it proceeds 
 from what is selfish and tainted in man, and far from 
 having any authority to secure our submission. But 
 apart from the question of moral predisposition, New- 
 man was concerned to show also how readily the 
 
126 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 sceptical world itself does trust these prepossessions, 
 which it regards as merely superstitions in the region 
 of religion, when they are the prepossessions of a great 
 practical genius, as, for example, a military genius like 
 Napoleon's. "Consider," he said, "the preternatural 
 sagacity with which a great general knows what his 
 friends and enemies are about, and what will be the 
 final result, and where, of their combined movements, 
 and then say whether, if he were required to argue the 
 matter in word or on paper, all his most brilliant con- 
 jectures might not be refuted, and all his producible 
 reasons exposed as illogical." ^ In other words, such a 
 general reasons by the antecedent presumptions of the 
 case, and the least straw of evidence is sufficient to con- 
 firm these presumptions, whereas, if he had gone by the 
 explicit evidence alone, he could not have ventured to 
 draw any confident conclusions at all. Whence does 
 such a general gather his antecedent presumptions ? 
 Evidently from all his previous studies, and partly even 
 from all his previous reveries and imaginations as to 
 the proper mode of conducting campaigns, just as a 
 first-rate mountaineer, to use another of Newman's illus- 
 trations,2 uses all his previous experience in climbing 
 when he scales a steep cliff, using his eyes, his hands, 
 his feet, his physical endowments of every kind, in 
 some combination of which he cannot in the least 
 analyze the proportions, and one probably which no 
 one else could imitate, to achieve a feat which no one 
 else could perform. 
 
 "And such is the way in which all men, gifted or 
 not gifted, commonly reason — not by rule, but by an 
 
 ^ University Sermons, pp. 217, 218 ; 3rd edition, 1872. 
 2 Ibid. p. 257. 
 
NEWMAN AT ST. MAKY'S. 127 
 
 inward faculty." Newman held that this especially 
 applies to the way in which faith outstrips what is 
 ordinarily called evidence. Just as a man who knows 
 another intimately will judge by the slightest grain of 
 evidence undecipherable to any one, else what was his 
 motive and what his line of conduct under given cir- 
 cumstances, though the actual story of what he did 
 may be only half extant, so the prophet or apostle un- 
 derstood what God was doing before any one else un- 
 derstood it, and so the disciple of that prophet or 
 apostle imderstood what his Master intended when the 
 outside world was in perplexity and amazement. And 
 so too in all the moral experience of life, the quick and 
 vigilant conscience finds the clue to God's purposes 
 more easily and with more certainty than the slow and 
 sluggish conscience ; and what one man rejects as 
 evidence altogether, and deems too trivial to be of any 
 account, except to the superstitious, and from his point 
 of view rightly so rejects, another man with a different 
 moral experience accepts eagerly as for him absolutely 
 convincing, and rightly so accepts. In short, New- 
 man maintains that implicit reasoning is a far more 
 active and useful agent in actual life than explicit 
 reasoning, and accounts for a great deal more of the 
 practical wisdom of life. Courts of justice must go 
 chiefly by explicit evidence, as they are not familiar 
 with the ways and motives of those with whom they 
 deal ; but it would be as foolish for men who do know 
 these ways and motives to trammel themselves with 
 legal rules, as it would for Marlborough or Napoleon 
 to trammel themselves with the formal principles of 
 strategy, though their own minds contained not only 
 all that had yielded these formal principles, but a great 
 
128 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 deal more beside. And especially Newman maintains, 
 that in judging of revelation man must guide himself, 
 if he would guide himself rightly, more by the craving 
 and love for God, which is God's witness in the heart, 
 than by the external evidence of the supernatural as 
 it is presented to him in treatises on Christian evidence. 
 Newman took up the same theme in the great 
 University sermon on " The Theory of Development in 
 Religious Doctrine." It was preached in February 1843, 
 and was, I suppose, the last University sermon preached 
 by him in the University pulpit, though he remained 
 an Anglican, nominally at least, during the two years 
 of his retirement at Littlemore. In that sermon he 
 starts virtually from the maxim which, as he tells us, he 
 learnt from Scott, the author of the commentaries, that 
 the true test of life is growth, but he applies it in 
 a somewhat novel way to the dogmatic development 
 of the impressions derived from revelation. " Reason," 
 he said, " has not only submitted, it has ministered to 
 faith ; it has illustrated its documents ; it has raised 
 illiterate peasants into philosophers and divines ; it has 
 elicited a meaning from their words which their imme- 
 diate hearers little suspected. Stranger surely is it 
 that St. John should be a theologian than that St. 
 Peter should be a prince. This is a phenomenon proper 
 to the gospel and a note of divinity. Its half sentences, 
 its overflowings of language, admit of development ; they 
 have a life in them which shows itself in progress ; a 
 truth which has the token of consistency; a reality 
 which is fruitful in resources ; a depth which extends 
 into mystery; for they are representations of what is 
 actual, and has a definite location, and necessary bear- 
 ing, and a meaning in the great system of things, and 
 
NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 129 
 
 a harmony in what it is, and a compatibihty in what 
 it involves. What form of Paganism can furnish a 
 parallel? What philosopher has left his words to 
 posterity as a talent which could be put to usury, as 
 a mine which could be wrought? Here too is the 
 badge of heresy ; its dogmas are unfruitful ; it has no 
 theology, so far forth as it is heresy it has none. 
 Deduct its remnant of Catholic theology and what 
 remains ? Polemics, explanations, protests." ^ 
 
 Newman goes on to explain the process by which the 
 impressions of God derived from the inspired teachers of 
 the Church took hold of the mind of the first ages and 
 worked upon them — often without getting any explicit 
 acknowledgment for years or even centuries together, — 
 yet showing their vitality at least by the decision with 
 which they rejected and shook off misconceptions in- 
 consistent with their full development. " The Christian 
 mind," he says, " reasons out a series of dogmatic state- 
 ments one from another," but reasons them out " not 
 from those statements taken in themselves as logical 
 propositions, but as being itself enlightened and (as if) 
 inhabited by that sacred impression which is prior to 
 them, which acts as a regulating principle, ever present, 
 upon the reasoning, and without which no one has any 
 warrant to reason at all. Such sentences as ' the Word 
 was God,' or as ^ the Only-begotten Son who is in the 
 bosom of the Father,' or 'the Word was made flesh,' 
 or 'the Holy Ghost which proceedeth from the Father,' 
 are not a mere letter which we may handle by the 
 rules of art at our own will, but august tokens of most 
 simple, ineffable, adorable facts, embraced, enshrined 
 
 1 Uiiiversity Sermonsj pp. 317, 318. 
 
 K 
 
130 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 according to its measure in the believing mind."^ 
 Thus " Scripture begins a series of developments which 
 it does not finish," but it records these first living im- 
 pressions, while the developed dogmas do but mark 
 out, as it were, so far as it is possible to do so, the real 
 range, depth, and character of those impressions. 
 
 The multiplicity of propositions implies no multiplicity 
 of dogmas, but resembles rather the multiplicity of 
 observations taken in the trigonometrical survey of any 
 country, of any conspicuous landmark or mountain-top. 
 These imply, of course, no complexity in that landmark, 
 but only that it is necessary to determine the bearing 
 upon it of all the other points from which it can be 
 seen. Observations are added to observations not with 
 the view of multiplying landmarks, but with the 
 view of making it quite clear how other things stand 
 with relation to it. And so propositions are added to 
 propositions in the definition of dogma, not because 
 the Divine reality described is itself complex, but be- 
 cause being so much beyond and above us, it is not 
 easy to fix our thoughts with regard to it without 
 describing the impressions it makes upon us from a 
 great many different points of view. 
 
 But then Newman raises the abstract difficulty, how 
 it is possible for the infinite Being to make on a finite 
 being any adequate impression that will reveal His 
 nature at all. If God's nature is infinite, the impression 
 or idea it produces within us must be infinite also in 
 order to be adequate; and if our nature is finite, no 
 impression or idea to which it is adequate can be other 
 than finite. And to a certain extent Newman concedes 
 
 * University Sermons, p. 334 
 
NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 131 
 
 this, since Scripture itself treats our human knowledge 
 even of God as He is revealed as necessarily inadequate, 
 as the knowledge obtained by gazing through a glass 
 darkly, and not as it will be when we are face to face ; 
 but he maintains that though it may be inadequate, 
 it need not be without that real correspondence with 
 the Divine nature which constitutes real knowledge. 
 Just as geometry and the higher analysis are totally 
 different, and each in their way inadequate methods 
 of elaborating the same necessary truths, one failing to 
 cover the ground at one point, the other falling short 
 at another point, and yet both agreeing substantially in 
 their results, and each enabling us to push our real 
 knowledge of space further, so he says theology by 
 calling in symbol and metaphor, and making use now 
 of one part of our nature, now of another, by stimulating 
 our conscience, exalting the emotions, and stretching 
 our intellectual grasp, gives us knowledge of the 
 real correspondence between God's nature and ours. 
 And then he goes on to that noble passage, probably 
 unequalled in its kind since the writings of St. 
 Augustine, in which he dwells upon the wonders of 
 musical expression, as suggesting that in spite of its 
 limitations, human nature contains within itself ele- 
 ments capable of expansion into infinite and eternal 
 meanings : — " There are seven notes in the scale ; 
 make them fourteen, yet what a slender outfit for 
 so vast an enterprise ! What science brings so much 
 out of so little ? Out of what poor elements does 
 some great master in it create his new world ! 
 Shall we say that all this exuberant inventiveness is 
 a mere ingenuity or trick of art, like some game or 
 fashion of the day, without reality, without meaning? 
 
132 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 We may do so, and then perhaps we shall also account 
 the science of theology to be a matter of words ; yet as 
 there is a divinity in the theology of the Church, 
 which those who feel cannot communicate, so is there 
 also in the wonderful creation of sublimity and beauty 
 of which I am speaking. To many men the very names 
 which the science employs are utterly incomprehensible. 
 To speak of an idea or a subject seems to be fanciful 
 or trifling; to speak of the views which it opens upon 
 us to be childish extravagance ; yet is it possible that 
 that inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, 
 so rich yet so simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so 
 various yet so majestic, should be a mere sound which 
 is gone and perishes ? Can it be that these mysterious 
 stiiTinors of heart, and keen emotions, and strangle 
 yearnings after we know not what, and awful im- 
 pressions from we know not whence, should be wrought 
 in us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, 
 and begins and ends in itself ? It is not so ; it cannot 
 be. No ; they have escaped from some higher sphere ; 
 they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in the 
 medium of created sound; they are echoes from our 
 Home ; they are the voice of Angels, or the magnificat 
 of Saints, or the living laws of Divine government, or 
 the Divine Attributes; something are they beside 
 themselves, which we cannot compass, which we cannot 
 utter — though mortal man, and he perhaps not other- 
 wise distinguished above his fellows, has the gift of 
 eliciting them." ^ 
 
 And then passing into that idealistic mood of 
 thought to which he had been prone from his earliest 
 
 ^ University Sermons, pp. 346-7, 3rd edition. 
 
NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 133 
 
 boyhood, Newman suggests once more that, knowing 
 so little as we do of the ultimate causes even of our 
 sensations and perceptions, it may well be that the 
 whole structure of the universe, physical no less than 
 intellectual and moral, is but a system intended to 
 educate the spirit into a right frame of mind towards 
 the moral and spiritual realities of the universe, indeed 
 to inspire us with trust — trust that the knowledge 
 which we gain from it, whether it be greater or less, 
 whether it be exact or vague, whether it tell us 
 precisely what we suppose it to tell us, or only brings 
 our minds as closely as they admit of being brought 
 into correspondence with the ultimate realities of 
 things, is the best that we could have in our present 
 state, and may be implicitly depended on to do for us 
 all that knowledge could do until *'the day break 
 and the shadows flee away." In other words, if the 
 theological conceptions provided by revelation are to be 
 regarded as purely relative, and as adapted more or less 
 to our finite apprehension, yet so far from there being 
 any reason to think of them as less intrinsically true 
 than the affirmations of our senses and our judgments 
 concerning sensible objects, there is not a little reason 
 to suppose that while all are relative to our capacities, 
 these truths of revelation are those which approximate 
 more closely to absolute truths than any others within 
 our reach. The highest creeds are doubtless unworthy 
 of the Divine verities, but they contain the fullest 
 measure of truth of which our nature admits. They 
 contain the truth "as far as they go, and under the 
 conditions of thought which human feebleness imposes. 
 It is true that God is without beginning, if eternity 
 may worthily be considered to imply succession; in 
 
134 CARDINAL NEWMAK". 
 
 every place if He who is a Spirit can have relations 
 with place. It is right to speak of His Being and 
 Attributes, if He be not rather superessential ; it is 
 true to say that He is wise or powerful, if we may 
 consider Him other than the most simple Unity. He is 
 truly Three if He is truly One ; He is truly One if the 
 idea of Him falls under earthly number. He has a 
 triple personality in the sense in which the Infinite can 
 be understood to have Personality at all." ^ 
 
 And perhaps this is the place to say that I think 
 Newman in his idealism emphasizes too much the 
 unknowable aspect of the Divine nature. Surely he 
 insists too much on the pure mysteries revealed to us, 
 and too little on that wonderful character of God 
 displayed in the gospels, which is the consummation 
 of all the teaching of the law and the prophets, and 
 which is hardly to be classed under conceptions, which 
 either assert or deny loundary at all. Is there not 
 something in man's character which simply ignores 
 quantitative rules and measures? Does it add much 
 to our conception of our Lord's human nature and life 
 to speak of it as bounded or as not bounded by finite 
 limitations? Is it not like attributing colour to a 
 thought, or locality to an idea ? However difficult it 
 may be for us to understand the relation of the Eternal 
 Father to the Eternal Son, and of both to the Eternal 
 Spirit, and of all three Divine Persons to the One 
 God, it is comparatively easy to understand that God, 
 whether Father, Son, or Spirit, or the unity of the 
 three, is manifested in Christ, and that, in the singular 
 combination of His meekness and His austerity, His 
 
 1 University Sermons, p. 356. 
 
NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 135 
 
 mercy and His wrath, His patience and His unyielding- 
 ness, His resolve to shed blessing on evil and good 
 alike, and His unshrinking recognition that nevertheless 
 there are those who transform their best blessings into 
 sentences of condemnation on themselves, we get a 
 glimpse which cannot deceive us of the true creative 
 spirit, a glimpse which is none the less true-'tliough we 
 are in apprehension limited, and He unlimited. It 
 f seems to me that Newman might have insisted more 
 than he has done on the absolute character of the 
 moral and spiritual revelation given us in the life of 
 Christ; and that it is more because this revelation 
 cannot stand alone, without some clear glimpse of how 
 the same being can have been both God and man, 
 that what he insists on as the dogmatic doctrine of 
 the Trinity has come to be of the essence of revealed y 
 truth. 
 
 No one who knows Newman's writings well can doubt 
 for a moment that from first to last the conviction that 
 all the true light of the world is to be found in reve- 
 lation has dominated his thoughts. But I think he 
 has insisted a good deal more than he need have done 
 on the subordinate difficulties before which the human 
 mind reels, and a good deal less than he need on the 
 commanding truths, in the warmth of which the human 
 mind expands. Admit that there are economies, admit 
 that there are adaptations, admit that there are 
 symbolic elements in theology which are at best only 
 the nearest approximations to the truth of which finite 
 minds admit, yet surely there are clear rays of absolute 
 truth, which are more than ''economies," more than 
 adaptations, more than symbols of reality, in the 
 character of our Lord. He Avas like the sunshine and 
 
136 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 the rain in diffusing his mercy on the grateful and the 
 ungrateful alike, and in turning the other clieek, as 
 Providence in its wider administration of human affairs 
 so often seems to do, to him who has struck a passionate 
 blow at Divine goodness. But while Christ imper- 
 sonated the large and serene benignity of the Divine 
 nature, which so steadily ignores ingratitude and even 
 insult where they proceed from men who have not yet 
 come to themselves, who have not realized that they 
 are dealing with an individual character so far above 
 their own that their ingratitude and insults carry no 
 sting at all, except so far as they show evil in them- 
 selves, yet He impersonated also the sternness and the 
 inexorability of God towards perverted consciences and 
 consummated sin. Surely in this power of diffusing the 
 sunshine and dew among the evil and the good alike, 
 of ignoring importunity and irritability and exacting- 
 ness and even torment with that calm magnanimity or 
 even compassion which our Lord not only enjoined in 
 the Sermon on the Mount, but personally exemplified 
 in the agonies of the Cross, and yet of combining with 
 all this supreme Majesty towards human folly and 
 pettiness and misdoing, a power of reproving weakness, 
 and branding wickedness, and exposing self-deception 
 such as only the inspirer of the conscience could wield, 
 we may justly say that we have a revelation of God 
 that is much more than a mere economical adaptation 
 to human weakness, and that may fitly be called an 
 unveiling to our eyes of absolute truth. I cannot help 
 thinking that Newman, though he always insisted on 
 the certainty of the communion between God and the 
 individual soul as the very starting-point of revelation, 
 has conceded too much to those who speak of God as only 
 
NEWMAN AT ST. MAEY'S. 137 
 
 presenting Himself to us through sign and symbol and 
 mediate adaptations, and has hardly dwelt enough on 
 those aspects of revelation in which we see the very 
 majesty and the very holiness of His character without 
 even a film to hide its splendour and its purity from y 
 our eyes. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS — TRACT 90, AND THE 
 JERUSALEM BISHOPRIC. 
 
 Long before 1841 Newman had found that the 
 Tracts for the Times caused much alarm in tlie minds 
 of steady Anglicans, indeed in some of those who were 
 not in any sense of the word Low Churchmen. In 1838 
 the then Bishop of Oxford (Dr. Bagot) made some 
 slisfht animadversion on their character which was more 
 or less of the nature of censure. Newman offered to 
 stop them at once if his Bishop wished it. But at that 
 time the Bishop declined to express any such wish. 
 The truth is, that Newman was at the head of a move- 
 ment of which, as he afterwards recognized very 
 frankly, he w^as by no means the master. It did not 
 move as he had hoped that it would move ; it had a 
 law of its own, like a mass of snow or a flood once set 
 in motion, which can be controlled only by the laws of 
 gravitation and by the general conformation of the 
 surface of the country over which it passes. The Lectures 
 on Anglican Difficulties, published after Newman became 
 a Roman Catholic, confessed this plainly ; and in a more 
 biographic form, though not, I think, the form which 
 the Cardinal w^ould have given to the " History of his 
 
ADVANCmQ ESTRANGEMENTS. 139 
 
 religious opinions," if he had written it after the tem- 
 porary estrangement between himself and the late 
 William George Ward was at an end, he reiterated the 
 confession in the autobiography. In the Apologia ^ he 
 says — "While my old and true friends were thus in 
 trouble about me, I suppose they felt not only anxiety, 
 but pain, to see that I was gradually surrendering myself 
 to the influence of others, who had not their own claims 
 upon me, younger men, and of a cast of mind uncon- 
 genial to my own. A new school of thought was rising, 
 as is usual in such movements, and was sweeping the 
 original party of the movement aside, and was taking 
 its place. The most prominent person in it was a man 
 of elegant genius, of classical mind, of rare talent in 
 literary composition — Mr. Oakeley." 
 
 The most prominent person in this new party was 
 certainly not Mr. Oakeley, who, accomplished and 
 scholarly as he was, was hardly a man to lead a phalanx 
 which, as Newman says, " cut into the original movement 
 at an angle, fell across its line of thought, and then set 
 about turning that line in its own direction," but a 
 much more vigorous thinker and much more trenchant 
 exponent of thought, William George Ward. In the 
 very charming and brilliant account of this remarkable 
 man's earlier career, which was published in 1889 by his 
 son, Wilfrid Ward, we get such a picture of him as we 
 have seldom had painted of a subordinate leader em- 
 barked in a great movement. Without any of Newman's 
 clinging affection for the English Church, and with very 
 little of his profound distrust of mere logic, Mr. Ward 
 exhibited a willingness to carry Church principles into 
 
 ^ p. 277, 1st edition. 
 
140 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 action, and a certain hilarity in braving the dismay 
 which that willingness produced, that made him to a 
 very real extent a thorn in Newman's side, though Ward 
 was at the same time one of the most loyal and ardent 
 of Newman's followers. He was indeed in almost every 
 respect a difficult and restless disciple. He loved a 
 certain bareness, not to say nakedness, both of logic 
 and expression, which stand in very strong contrast to 
 Newman's carefully and delicately shaded studies of the 
 many modifying circumstances which tend to qualify 
 the principles he enunciated. Newman speaks of the 
 difficulty he found in dealing with persons who called on 
 him on purpose to " pump " him as to how he got over 
 this and the other difficulty in the Anglican position. 
 Of these inveterate pumpers Ward must have been much 
 the ablest and most indefatigable. He loved just those 
 things in the Roman Catholic tendencies of the move- 
 ment from which Newman most sensitively shrank. 
 He seems to me to have loved best the most carnal 
 forms of the Roman Catholic devotions, just those which 
 repelled Newman, because they put in a broad popular 
 form what Newman could only endure when veiled in 
 an abstract principle. Ward heartily admired what I 
 have elsewhere called the "glare" of the continental 
 piety. To dwell on and even exaggerate the Roman 
 Catholic view of the infallibility of the Church was his 
 delight. The cultus of the saints was no trouble to him. 
 The stress laid upon the worship of the Virgin filled 
 him with exultation. He held " Justification by Faith " 
 to be almost a diabolic doctrine, and asked Mr. Oakeley 
 whether it was not true that Melancthon was less 
 " detestable " than most of the Reformers. To such 
 a disciple the Via Media was like a strait waistcoat. 
 
ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS. 141 
 
 And he delighted in asking Newman questions which 
 were difficult to answer in any spirit loyal to that 
 Via Media view of the Anglican position, and then 
 in retailing far and wide the concessions to his own 
 difficulties which he had obtained. 
 
 There was a singular naimU about Mr. Ward, a 
 glee in either giving or receiving a severe intellectual 
 cudgelling, which rendered it almost impossible to take 
 offence at his hard hitting. He was the most bland 
 of logical swordsmen, and would smile as sweetly if 
 his view were denounced as wicked, as he would when 
 declaring the view of his opponent to be an utterly 
 abominable though logical inference from premisses 
 which no healthy conscience would ever have admitted. 
 Far from loving, as Newman did, the sobriety of the 
 English Church, and finding in its studious moderation 
 a note of divinity, Ward loved all the ostensibilities, not 
 to say the ostentations, of the Church of Rome, as it had 
 developed itself in its war with the world, the haughty '^ 
 claim of its priesthood to override worldly dignities, the 
 effusion and the fame of its saints, the multiplicity 
 of its miracles, the pageantry of its pilgrimages, the 
 pride of its humility, the military grandeur of its organ- 
 ization, and the calm defiance with which it treated the 
 imputation of superstition and of ignorant credulity.^ 
 No doubt he was one of the most exacting of the 
 many followers of whom Newman repeats that they kept 
 saying to him, " What will you make of the Articles ? " 
 For the Articles not only specially excited Ward's 
 doctrinal detestation of the Lutheran view of faith, 
 but excited also that dislike of compromise, that pro- 
 found contempt for judicious trimming, which was one 
 of the most marked of his characteristics, and which 
 
142 CAEDTNAL NEWMAN. 
 
 soon carried him far beyond Newman and his ultra- 
 montanism, when once they had joined the Roman 
 CathoUc Church. 
 
 Newman declares with obvious truth in his Apologia, 
 that he himself did not share the apprehensions which 
 the question, "What will you make of the Articles?" 
 implied. It was not in the least his own sense of 
 difficulty — as it usually had been — which led him to 
 deal with the Articles in the famous Tract 90 ; it was 
 rather " the restlessness actual and prospective of those 
 who neither liked the Via Media, nor my strong 
 judgment against Rome," and of these Ward was much 
 the most active and the most vivid. " I had been en- 
 joined, I think by my Bishop, to keep these men straight, 
 and I wished so to do ; but their tangible difficulty was 
 subscription to the Articles ; and thus the question of 
 the Articles came before me. It was thrown in our 
 teeth, ' How can you manage to sign the Articles ? They 
 are directly against Rome.' ' Against Rome ! ' I made 
 answer. ' What do you mean by Rome ? ' and then I 
 proceeded to make distinctions," -^ of which the upshot 
 was Tract 90, the tract which practically determined 
 that the goal of what Newman calls " The Providential 
 Movement of 1833," was not to be in a Branch Church. 
 Newman held (1) that the Articles were really drawn up 
 against the political supremacy of the Pope much more 
 than against the doctrines of the Church of Rome, and 
 he himself did not favour the supremacy of the Bishop 
 of Rome over foreign Churches. (2) He held that the 
 Articles were expressly intended by the Government of 
 the day which prepared them, to gain over the moderate 
 
 ^ Apologia, pp. 158-9. 
 
ADVANCING ESTKANGEMENTS. 143 
 
 Romanists, and that they were therefore intentionally 
 so drawn up that " their bark should prove worse than 
 their bite." ^ And (3) he insisted that in recognizing 
 the doctrine of the Homilies as " godly and wholesome," 
 and insisting on subscription to that proposition, they 
 virtually declared themselves Roman Catholic in spirit, 
 for they treat several of the Apocryphal books as in the 
 highest sense authoritative; they treat the Primitive 
 Church for nearly seven hundred years as quite pure ; 
 they recognize six councils as allowed and received by 
 all Christians ; they speak of the Bishops of the first 
 eight centuries as of good authority and credit with the 
 people ; they speak of many of the Fathers as endowed 
 with the Holy Ghost ; they quote from the Fathers the 
 teaching that the Lord's Supper is " the salve of immor- 
 tality, the sovereign preservative against death ; " they 
 speak of the meat received in the Sacrament as an " in- 
 visible meat and a ghostly substance ; " they speak of 
 Ordination and Matrimony as Sacraments, and expressly 
 say that there are other Sacraments besides Baptism 
 and the Lord's Supper; they speak of " alms-deeds " as 
 purging the soul from sin ; they talk of fasting, used 
 with prayer, as of great efficacy with God. All these 
 doctrines are then promulgated in a book, whose general 
 teaching is declared in the Articles to be godly and 
 wholesome, so that it is hardly possible that they were 
 really meant to effect a complete breach with Roman 
 Catholic doctrine. And (4) Newman urged that when 
 the Articles were drawn up the Council of Trent was 
 not over, and its decrees were not promulgated, and 
 this showed that the Articles were not directed against 
 
 1 Apologia, p. 163. 
 
144 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 the Council of Trent, but against something else. In- 
 deed the Homilies, which are the best commentaries on 
 the Articles, being recommended to us by the Articles, 
 teach us clearly enough what the object of the compilers 
 of the Articles was, namely, to get rid of the popular 
 corruptions practically sanctioned in the Church of 
 Rome, though not for the most part supported by any 
 dogmatic decrees. Again, (5) the Convocation of 1571 
 enjoined that nothing should be preached except what 
 could be proved from the Old and New Testament, and 
 what " the Catholic Fathers and ancient Bishops have 
 collected from that very doctrine." Here is clear evidence, 
 in Newman's opinion, that the Convocation which 
 imposed the Articles was very jealous of any attempt 
 to break with Catholic antiquity. No wonder that 
 Newman believed that wherever the Articles are vague, 
 and do not define what they mean, their vagueness was 
 intentional, and was to be interpreted in the most com- 
 prehensive and not in the most narrow and exclusive 
 sense. 
 
 But what Newman did not sufficiently consider was, 
 that the Anglican Church; partly in consequence of 
 its alliance with the State, and the consequent loss of 
 individual energy, and partly in consequence of the 
 temper of the people among whom it ministered, and 
 their inclinations to distrust Rome both for its political 
 and for its hierarchical tendencies, had become identified 
 more and more in popular estimation with the Protestant 
 aspects of its teaching, and less and less with the views 
 dear to the moderate Romanizers, whom the ecclesiastical 
 authors of the Articles had felt so anxious a desire to 
 win. The prevalent impression certainly was that the 
 Articles had effected a breach with Rome, and though 
 
ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS. 145 
 
 there was plenty of room for a sincere interpretation 
 of them in Newman's sense, there can be no doubt at 
 all that to the world at large that interpretation was 
 a shock and a surprise, and a clear evidence that the 
 aim of the Tractarians was gradually to reconcile the 
 two Churches, one of which had been often denounced 
 by the other as the true Antichrist. Ward at any rate 
 hailed Trad 90 not so much as explaining a legitimate 
 interpretation to be put on the Articles, still less as 
 explaining the true sense in which they were conceived 
 and imposed, but rather as finding for them a non- 
 natural sense indeed, but still a sense not at all more 
 non-natural than that which would have to be put on 
 many portions of the Prayer-book by anybody who 
 regarded the natural sense of the Articles as expressing 
 his real faith, and whose difficulty would therefore lie 
 in the straightforward and candid use of the liturgy of 
 the Church. Ward's view was, I think, the true one, 
 that either the Articles must be strained very hard 
 to reconcile them with the Prayer-book, or the Prayer- 
 book must be strained very hard to reconcile it with 
 the Articles, and that this being once admitted, New- 
 man's arguments were sufficient to justify the choice 
 of the Articles as the more proper of the two docu- 
 ments to be furnished with a non-natural meaning. 
 
 There was, as I have shown, real ground for suppos- 
 ing that those who framed the Articles were not anxious 
 to offend the more moderate Romanists ; there was / 
 no pretext for supposing that those who drew up the 
 Prayer-book were not genuinely opposed to the Puritan 
 theology ; so that if one of the two had to be wrested 
 from the meaning that plain men would naturally put 
 upon it, Ward saw every reason why it ought to be the 
 
 L 
 
146 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 Articles and not the Prayer-book. But Newman would 
 not so much as admit that the sense he preferred to 
 give to the Articles was a non-natural sense at all. I 
 believe that he sincerely thought it the most natural 
 sense of which, all things considered, they admitted, 
 and was astonished and indignant at the outcry which 
 Tract 90 raised. Ward must have kicked violently 
 against the naturalness of Newman's interpretation of 
 the Eleventh Article, "that we are justified by faith 
 only, is a most wholesotne doctrine." This meant, said 
 Newman, that we are justified by faith only as being 
 the only intoiial instrument of justification, but not that 
 Baptism is not necessary — as of course he held it to be 
 — as an external instrument of justification. Nor does 
 the Article exclude even " works " as a means of justifi- 
 cation, if these works are done under the prompting of 
 Divine influence, for it is Newman's very wholesome 
 doctrine that there are Divine influences at work all 
 over the world, amongst those who neither have re- 
 ceived Baptism nor can be said to have faith in any 
 full sense, and that the works which are done in obedi- 
 ence to these sporadic Divine influences do dispose 
 men to receive that fuller grace which brings with it 
 a justifying faith. " Such," he says, " were Cornelius's 
 alms, fasting and prayers, which led to his baptism ; " 
 so that, according to Newman, the Eleventh Article 
 neither makes faith the sole instrument of justification 
 (but only the sole internal instrument), nor even the 
 sole internal instrument which prepares the way for 
 justification, since works done in deference to Divine 
 promptings prepare the way for the gift of justifying 
 faith. 
 
 All this diplomatic concession to the doctrine of 
 
ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS. 147 
 
 Justification by Faith, and elaborate limitation of it, 
 was wormwood to Mr. Ward, and no doubt induced him 
 to write a kind of defence of Tract 90, which was, in its 
 tone, decidedly displeasing to Newman, who had no wish 
 at all to see his view of the Articles treated as a mere 
 pis-alle7% excusable only because on any other view of 
 them some still more weighty expression of the Church's 
 faith must have been sacrificed. Still more questionable 
 was Newman's mode of explaining away the Twenty- 
 second Article on " Purgatory, Pardon, Images, Relics, 
 and Invocation of Saints," so as to admit all these 
 though not in the form in which " the Romish doc- 
 trine " admits them. For example, Invocation of Saints 
 is, Newman thinks, admissible, so long as it is not the 
 kind of invocation proper to prayers addressed to God. 
 I think this view would have been altogether over- 
 strained and inadmissible if the Books of Homilies had 
 not been sanctioned by the Articles ; but as these 
 Books — of which the English people virtually know 
 nothing — do distinguish between invoking the aid of 
 angels and saints,, and giving them the sort of worship 
 "due and proper unto God," Newman had a case for 
 insisting on this distinction, though it must be ad- 
 mitted that the article on the subject, if it intended 
 to allow that distinction, was one of the most misleading 
 Articles of Religion ever devised. 
 
 On the whole. Tract 90 certainly gave a very false 
 impression of Newman's mind and genius to the English 
 people, and yet for a long time it was the one publication 
 with which his name was chiefly associated. Oxford men 
 indeed knew what he was as a preacher, and how deep 
 as well as justly grounded was his spiritual influence 
 over men. But for a long time the only conception of 
 
148 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 Newman in the minds of the English middle-class was 
 the conception of a subtle-minded ecclesiastical special 
 pleader, who could explain away the force of the most 
 unmistakable language, and show how to drive a coach- 
 and-six through the accidental gaps in a Protestant 
 formula. As a matter of fact, nothing less deeply 
 characteristic of Newman than Tract 90 has ever been 
 issued by him. It was very far indeed from an in- 
 sincere document; it expressed, as I have said, what 
 he thought to be tlie almost inevitable interpretation 
 to be put on a far from straightforward ecclesiastical 
 manifesto, looking to the time when it was drawn up, 
 the persons on whose behalf it was put forth, and the 
 Convocation by which it was promulgated. But though 
 Newman really thought it the best interpretation of 
 which the Articles admitted, that was only because, 
 looked at from the historical point of view, they ad- 
 mitted of no very natural or straightforward interpret- 
 ation at all. And it is never a very pleasant office for 
 a man who is himself in passionate earnest, as Newman 
 was, to take refuge behind the ambiguities of a creed 
 artfully devised to suit the views of two very distinct 
 parties, whose whole drift was at bottom irreconcilable. 
 I have never quite understood how, with Newman's 
 view of the Church, he was willing to belong to one 
 which had gone so far in the direction of superficially 
 at least disavowing doctrines which he himself was 
 disposed to hold very sacred. 
 
 It is not necessary to describe what has been de- 
 scribed hundreds of times — the storm of indignation 
 which Tract 90 aroused. Newman, as he tells us in 
 his Apologia, was quite unprepared for it, and startled 
 by its violence, but his feeling on the whole was one 
 
ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS. 149 
 
 of relief that he was so distinctly pointed out as unfit 
 to retain any longer his place at the head of the move- 
 ment. He says in his Apologia, in relation to the 
 attack upon Tract 90, "I recognize" [in it] "much of 
 real religious feeling, much of honest and true principle, 
 much of straightforward, ignorant common -sense." But 
 his Oxford leadership was gone for ever. "It was 
 simply an impossibility that I could say anything 
 henceforth to good effect when I had been posted up 
 by the marshal on the buttery-hatch of every College 
 of my University, after the manner of discommoned 
 pastry-cooks; and when in every part of the country 
 and every class of society, through every organ and 
 occasion of opinion, in newspapers, in periodicals, at 
 meetings, in pulpits, at dinner-tables, in coffee-rooms, 
 in railway carriages, I was denounced as a traitor who 
 had laid his train, and was detected in the very act of 
 firinof it as^ainst the time-honoured Establishment." ^ 
 
 But what affected Newman more profoundly than the 
 popular stir and indignation, was the evidence given in 
 episcopal charges, that the ecclesiastical leaders of his 
 Church utterly disowned the principles which attributed 
 to them so much higher a function as the channels of 
 Divine grace than was attributed to them by any other 
 Church party. " A bishop's lightest word ex cathedra 
 is heavy," he had written. And an archbishop an- 
 swered to the effect, that neither a bishop's lightest 
 word nor his gravest word is of any special account at 
 all. " Many persons look with considerable interest to 
 the declarations on such matters that from time to time 
 are put forth by bishops in their charges, or on other 
 
 * Apologia^ p. 173. 
 
150 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 occasions. But on most of the points to which I have 
 been aUuding, a bishop's declarations have no more 
 weight, except what they derive from his personal 
 character, than any anonymous pamphlet would have. 
 The points are mostly sucli as he has no official power 
 to decide, even in reference to his own diocese ; and as 
 to legislation for the Church, or authoritative declar- 
 ations on many of the most important matters, neither 
 any one bishop, nor all collectively, have any more right 
 of this kind than the ordinary magistrates have to take 
 on themselves the functions of Parliament." ^ 
 
 And how did the bishops' charges in general deal with 
 the Tracts ? One of them replied in the words of the 
 Homily, " * Let us diligently search the well of life, and 
 not run after the stinking puddles of tradition devised 
 by man's imagination.' A second, 'It is a subject of 
 deep concern that any of our body should prepare men 
 of ardent feelings and warm imaginations for a return 
 to the Roman mass-book.' And a third, * Already are 
 the foundations of apostasy laid ; if we once admit 
 another Gospel, Antichrist is at the door. I am full 
 of fear : everything is at stake ; there seems to be 
 something judicial in the rapid spread of these opinions.* 
 And a fourth, ' It is impossible not to remark upon the 
 subtle wile of the adversary ; it has been signally and 
 unexpectedly exemplified in the present day by the 
 revival of errors which might have been supposed buried 
 for ever.' And a fifth, * Under the specious pretence 
 of deference to antiquity, and respect for primitive 
 models, the foundations of our Protestant Church are 
 undermined by men who dwell within her walls, and 
 
 ^ Lectures on Anglican Difficulties, p. 93, 1st edition, 
 
ADVANCING ESTEANGEMENTS. 151 
 
 those who sit in the E/cformers' seat are traducinig: the 
 Reformation.' ' Our glory is in jeopardy/ says a sixth. 
 'Why all this tenderness for the very centre and core of 
 corruption ? ' asks a seventh. * Among other marvels 
 of the present day/ says an eighth, ' may be accounted 
 the irreverent and unbecoming language applied to the 
 chief promoters of the Reformation in this land. The 
 quick and extensive propagation of opinions tending to 
 exalt the claims of the Church and of the clergy can 
 be no proof of their soundness/ ' Reunion with Rome 
 has been rendered impossible/ says a ninth, ' yet I am 
 not without hope that more cordial union may in time 
 be effected among all Protestant Churches/ ' Most of 
 the bishops,' says a tenth, 'have spoken in terms of 
 disapproval of the Tracts for the Times, and I certainly 
 believe the system to be most pernicious, and one 
 which is calculated to produce the most lamentable 
 schism in a Church already fearfully disunited.' 
 * Up to this moment/ says an eleventh, ' the movement 
 is advancing under just the same pacific professions, 
 and the same imputations are still cast upon all who 
 in any way impede its progress. Even the English 
 bishops who have officially expressed any disapprobation 
 of the principles or proceedings of the party have not 
 escaped such animadversions/ ' Tractarianism is the 
 masterpiece of Satan,' says a twelfth." ^ 
 
 This was exactly the sort of testimony which Newman 
 wanted to convince him that the life of the Anglican 
 Church rejected the teaching of the Tracts, as every 
 living organism will reject that which is alien to it, and 
 inappropriate for its nourishment. 
 
 ^ Lectures on Anglican Difficulties^ pp. 92-3, 
 
152 CAKDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 Nothing seems to me a greater proof of Newman's 
 sincerity and fidelity to his own intellectual convictions 
 than the long period of hesitation through which he 
 passed between 1841, when Tract 90 was condemned 
 by the almost unanimous acclamation of the Anglican 
 Church, and 1845, when he joined the Church of Rome. 
 Even as early as 183T he had received his first shock 
 as to the tenability of the Via Media. In that year 
 he was struck by the similarity between the position 
 of the Monophysites of the fifth^ century — who denied 
 the human nature in Christ, and who leaned on the 
 Emperor, just as the Anglican Church leans on 
 the State' — and the Anglicans of our own time, who 
 have so little of an independent doctrinal position, and 
 who would have no popular strength at all if they 
 did not receive help from their connection with the 
 State, which always prefers a religious party that cannot 
 stand alone, that is not stronger than itself, to a religious 
 party which has so clear a doctrinal basis as to appear 
 in no need of the sustaining power of the State. This 
 impression Newman got rid of for a time, but it 
 returned upon him after the outbreak against Tract 90. 
 He had always ridiculed and denounced the notion of 
 taking his stand on moderation alone. Before 1839 he 
 took his stand upon antiquity. Between 1841 and 1845 
 he grounded his position on the impossibility of joining 
 a Church which tolerated so many popular corruptions 
 as that of Rome ; but he never ceased to think and 
 speak with scorn of those who balanced one admission 
 against another without putting forward one clear prin- 
 ciple, the men who held "that Scripture is the only 
 authority, yet that the Church is to be deferred to ; 
 that faith only justifies, yet that it does not justify 
 
ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS. 153 
 
 without works; that grace does not depend on the 
 sacraments, yet is not given without them ; that bishops 
 are a Divine ordinance, yet those who have them not 
 are in the same religious condition as those who have." 
 " This," he said, " is your safe man, and the hope of the 
 Church ; this is what the Church is sure to want, not 
 party men, but sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging 
 persons, to guide it through the channel of no-meaning 
 between the Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and No." ^ 
 
 For while Newman could rely on antiquity, — on his 
 belief that the Roman Church had departed from the 
 faith of the Apostles, — he was comparatively at ease in 
 denouncing this meaningless moderation. But when he 
 had convinced himself that Rome had only proceeded 
 on the same principle in condemning those who denied 
 the reality of Christ's human nature, on which she now 
 proceeds in condemning the hesitating and half-and- 
 half doctrine of the Anglican Church, he was no longer 
 easy in his mind, and fell back on the negative position 
 that it was impossible to join hands with a Church 
 that tolerated so many popular frivolities, and that 
 welcomed the aid of such unscrupulous controversialists. 
 He said of Rome in 1840, " * By their fruits ye shall 
 know them.' . . . We see it attempting to gain converts 
 among us by unreal representations of its doctrines, 
 plausible statements, bold assertions, appeals to the 
 weakness of human natiire, to our fancies, our eccen- 
 tricities, our fears, our frivolities, our false philosophies. 
 We see its agents smiling, and noddino^, and duckinof 
 to attract attention, as gipsies make up to truant boys, 
 holding out tales for the nursery, and pretty pictures, 
 
 * Apologiaj p. 193. 
 
]54 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 and gilt gingerbread, and physic concealed in jam, 
 and sugar-plums for good children. . . . We English- 
 men like manliness, openness, consistency, truth. Rome 
 will never gain on us till she learns these virtues, and 
 uses them ; and then she may gain us, but it will be 
 by ceasing to be what we now mean by Kome, by 
 bavinor a rio-ht, not to * have dominion over our faith/ 
 but to gain and possess our affections in the bonds of 
 the Gospel. Till she ceases to be what she practically 
 is, a union is impossible between her and England ; but 
 if she does reform (and who can presume to say that 
 so large a part of Christendom never can ?), then it 
 will be our Church's duty at once to join in communion 
 with the continental Churches, whatever politicians at 
 home may say to it, and whatever steps the civil power 
 may take in consequence." ^ 
 
 In July 1841 came the still-birth of a Bishopric of 
 Jerusalem, the bishop to have jurisdiction over such other 
 Protestant congregations as might desire to accept the 
 bishop's authority, and this without any condition that 
 such Protestants should renounce their errors and accept 
 Baptism and Confirmation, where there was any doubt 
 of their formal baptism. This seemed to Newman as 
 decisive an admission that the Anglican Church did 
 not insist on her Church principles, as the repudiation 
 of Tract 90 had been that she did insist on her 
 Protestant principles. 
 
 With reference to this matter, Newman says in 
 the Apologia, " The Anglican Church might have the 
 Apostolical succession, as had the Monophysites ; but 
 such acts as were in progress led me to the gravest 
 
 1 Apologia^ pp. 227-8. 
 
ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS. 155 
 
 suspicion, not that it would soon cease to be a Church, 
 but that it had never been a Church all along." For 
 the following four or five years Newman calls himself 
 "upon his death-bed" as an Anglican. Like Heine's 
 very different and much more penal sufferings in his 
 Mattrass-Gruft, the experiences through which New- 
 man went on his long death-bed certainly could not be 
 said to constitute a euthanasia. He found many of his 
 intimate friends very much disposed to take lightly 
 the repudiation of the Tracts by all the chief authorities 
 of the Church of England, and to go on much as before 
 pleading the claims of the Church of England to the 
 faith of baptized Anglicans on the old grounds. He 
 himself could not do this. He regarded what had taken 
 place as a virtual rejection of Church doctrines by the 
 Church, and as practically confessing that the Anglican 
 Church did not wish to be in communion with the Catholic 
 Church. He accordingly fell back upon a new theory 
 of his position — a new and weaker theory. He could 
 not join the Church of Rome while it tolerated what he 
 still thought such abuses as giving to the Virgin Mary 
 and to the Saints a worship that he thought incom- 
 patible with the worship due to God, and therefore he 
 held that he had no choice but to stay by the old 
 Church in which he was born, and to justify that course 
 as best he could. And the new defence was this. He 
 observed that the Church of Israel from the time of 
 Jeroboam was definitely excommunicated by the Church 
 of the other two tribes, which remained the only Church 
 of the true worship ; but yet, in spite of this, two great 
 prophets, Elijah and Elisha, were sent to this excom- 
 municated Church, and moreover, the whole history 
 assumes that Samaria was still under the Divine care. 
 
156 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 and that too without any condition being imposed on 
 her people that they should submit to the Church whose 
 worship was in the Temple of Jerusalem. 
 
 Under the awkward circumstances of the case, being 
 unable to deny that his own Church strenuously repudi- 
 ated what he thought the true principles of Catholicity, 
 and yet unable to retreat to any Church that asserted 
 them, Newman comforted himself by declaring that 
 England was in truth in the position of Samaria, and 
 that it was the duty of true Anglicans to remain where 
 they were, waiting for light, making the most of their 
 Apostolical succession and their private right to cherish 
 the doctrinal truth ofwhich they had possessed themselves, 
 in spite of the admission they were compelled to make, 
 that their Church as a whole rejected that true doctrine. 
 
 This position Newman set forth in four sermons, 
 preached in 1841, on the duty of remaining Anglicans 
 under the great discouragement, as he held it to 
 be, of the Jerusalem bishopric and the condemna- 
 tion of Tract 90, Sermons 21 to 24 inclusive, of the 
 volume on Subjects of the Bay. They are amongst the 
 most touching he ever preached, expressing with his 
 usual pathos the pain of his position as a member of a 
 Church whose mission appeared to have "failed," who 
 "honoured not the precept of unity," who "had no 
 heart for that outward glory of older times," but who, 
 like Elijah fleeing to Horeb, the sacred mountain of the 
 older covenant, " fled to Antiquity, and would not stop 
 short of it," and " so heard the words of comfort which 
 reconciled him to his work and to its issue." The 
 comfort consisted in the assurance that after all, out- 
 ward signs like tempest, and earthquake, and fire, 
 even though the fire be the fire of cloven tongues such 
 
ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS. 157 
 
 as descended at Pentecost, are not the final signs of 
 God's presence, which is most truly discerned in a 
 " still small voice," such as that which the prophet, even 
 of a nation in apostasy, was permitted to hear. 
 
 Nothing could express more powerfully the mixture of 
 ansfuish and of faith which filled Newman's heart at this 
 time than the conclusion of the last of these sermons — 
 " What want we then but faith in our Church ? With 
 faith we can do everything ; without faith we can 
 do nothing. If we have a secret misgiving about her 
 all is lost ; we lose our nerve, our powers, our position, 
 our hope. A cold despondency and sickness of mind, a 
 niggardness and peevishness of spirit, a cowardice and a 
 sluggishness envelop us, penetrate us, stifle us. Let 
 it not be so with us ; let us be of good heart ; let us 
 accept her as God's gift and our portion ; let us imitate 
 him who, ' when he was by the bank of Jordan, . . . 
 took the mantle of Elijah that fell from him, and smote 
 the waters, and said, Where is the Lord God of Elijah ? ' 
 She is like tlie mantle of Elijah, a relic from Him who 
 is gone up on high." 
 
 Newman had thus already come to consider his 
 Church a " relic " of older and better days. Evidently 
 he had that secret misgiving about his Church which he 
 here condemns, and it was a misgiving which grew upon 
 him steadily. His resolve to remain in the Anglican 
 Church was really hanging by a thread, though it hung by 
 this thread for a considerable time, for even the threads 
 of Newman's nature are very tenacious threads. In the 
 four sermons from which I have just quoted he made 
 it clear that in his belief Elijah and Elisha could only 
 have acted as they did under explicit Divine instruction, 
 —explicit instruction which he assumes but of course 
 
158 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 could not prove to have been given, — and that it is only 
 right for men to remain in their original communion after 
 they have once been compelled to entertain doubts of 
 the grace vouchsafed to that communion, so long as they 
 are in serious doubt of the claim of any other Church 
 on their allegiance. So long as his conviction lasted 
 that the corruptions of Rome were too serious to admit 
 of his passing into her fold, he stayed in the communion 
 in which he was born — so lonor and no longrer. But the 
 language which he had used against Rome was, as he 
 afterwards said, rather the lansfuao^e he had learned 
 from the Anglican divines of the seventeenth century 
 than the language which he himself had felt it his 
 personal duty to apply to her. When he retracted that 
 language in 1843, he declared that he had not been 
 speaking his own words, but had been following '' almost 
 a consensus of the divines of my own Church;" and in 
 the Apologia — treating of these charges against Rome 
 and their retractation — he likened his position to that 
 of the convict who on the scaffold bit off his mother's 
 ear, on the ground that her indulgence of him as a child 
 had brought liim to the scaffold at last. So Newman 
 accused the Fathers of the Church in which he was 
 born of having misled him into language against Rome 
 which, on thorough examination, he found himself unable 
 to justify, but which he had accepted in a filial spirit. 
 Apparently he felt disposed to bite off the ear of his 
 own Anglican mother for having taught him to revile 
 her whom he found to be worthy of all honour. 
 
 But while he was slowly finding this out in his retire- 
 ment at Littlemore, — he had resigned his living at St. 
 Mary's on the 18th September, 1843, — he became the 
 object of unbridled curiosity, and the subject of an 
 
ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS. 159 
 
 unlimited number of rumours. " I cannot walk into or 
 out of my house," he said, " but curious eyes are upon 
 me. Why will you not let me die in peace ? Wounded 
 brutes creep into some hole to die in, and no one 
 grudges it them. Let me alone; I shall not trouble 
 you long. This was the keen, heavy feeling which 
 pierced me, and I think these are the very words that 
 I used to myself. I asked, in the words of a great 
 motto, ' Ubi lapsus ? quid feci ? ' One day Avhen I 
 entered my house I found a flight of undergraduates 
 inside. Heads of Houses, as mounted patrols, walked 
 their horses round those poor cottages ; Doctors of 
 Divinity dived into the hidden recesses of that private 
 tenement uninvited, and drew domestic conclusions from 
 what they saw there." ^ 
 
 In fact, the Bishop of Oxford (Dr. Bagot) was pelted 
 with complaints that Newman was erecting an Anglo- 
 Catholic monastery at Littlemore, and that the cells, 
 chapel, dormitories belonging thereto were all advancing 
 rapidly to completion. This was in 1842, before 
 Newman had resigned the vicarage of St. Mary's. It 
 was even alleged that Newman had already been 
 received into the Catholic Church, and was foundinof 
 a pseudo-Anglican monastery, which was really to be 
 under the guidance of Rome; but this calumny the 
 then Bishop of Oxford — a very excellent man — did not 
 think it worth while even to repeat to Newman, in 
 order that it might be contradicted. The charge that he 
 was erecting an Anglo-Catholic monastery without even 
 asking the consent of his bishop was mentioned, and 
 was contradicted. Newman merely said that he was 
 
 1 Apologia^ p. 289. 
 
160 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 building a parsonage for Littlemore, which it much 
 needed, without a chapel, by connecting together a few 
 cottages, and that for himself he intended to devote 
 himself more and more to religious meditation, though 
 not at the expense of the parish work, which he 
 zealously attended to ; and that so far as regarded like- 
 minded friends, he was of course glad that they should 
 share his mode of life if they wished, but that no sort 
 of institution of any kind was in process of formation. 
 " I am attempting nothing ecclesiastical," he said, " but 
 something personal and private, and which can only 
 be made public, not private, by newspapers and letter- 
 writers, in which sense the most sacred and con- 
 scientious resolves and acts may certainly be made 
 the objects of an unmannerly and unfeeling curiosity."^ 
 Newman was even accused of recommending those 
 who had already become Roman Catholics to retain 
 their preferment in the Church of England, and the 
 Bishop of Oxford was even misled into believing for a 
 time this accusation against him. This of course he 
 did not do, and indignantly resented the imputation 
 of doing, for he himself had set the example of resign- 
 ing^ his livinor lonsf before he became a convinced 
 Roman Cathohc. For more than two years after feel- 
 ing something approaching to a belief that the Church 
 of Rome was the only Catholic Church of Christ, 
 though he still held it to be corrupted by a devotion 
 to the Virgin and the saints which amounted to a grave 
 unfaithfulness to the primitive teaching, Newman 
 remained in lay communion with the Anglican Church, 
 though he would not remain a clergyman of that 
 
 ^ Apologia, pp. 294-5. 
 
ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS. 161 
 
 Church, and this was the course which he also recom- 
 mended to those who consulted him on such subjects. 
 His own state of mind and feeling during these last 
 two years of hesitation was very painful. One of his 
 most intimate friends, an Anglican to the last, died in 
 1844, and he had expected, he says, that his death 
 would have brougrht lio^ht to his mind as to what he 
 ought to do. It did not. He wrote in his diary, " I 
 sobbed bitterly over his coffin, to think that he left me 
 still dark as to what the way of truth was, and what 
 I ought to do in order to please God and fulfil His will." ^ 
 In such anxieties, hesitations, and doubts the period 
 wore away during which Newman was on what he 
 called his Anglican death-bed. There were many 
 miserable searchings of heart, many seemingly un- 
 answered prayers for more light, many slanders to be 
 repelled, many unmerited but not unkind reproaches 
 to be borne. And then at last the end came. The 
 Essay on Development, of which I must speak next, 
 written while Newman was nominally an Anglican, 
 though substantially a Roman Catholic, was nearly 
 finished, when in October, 1845, he felt that his 
 conversion was really complete, and that he should 
 imperil his salvation by remaining longer outside the 
 communion of the Roman Catholic Church. But before 
 I come to his reconciliation to Rome I must give some 
 account of the remarkable essay with the composition 
 of which his Anglican life terminated. 
 
 * Apologia, p. 359. 
 
 M 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE, AND 
 RECONCILIATION TO ROME. 
 
 Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian 
 Doctrine may be regarded either as the first of his 
 Roman Catholic or as the last of his Anglican pro- 
 ductions. In point of time it was the latter ; in point 
 of substance it was the former. Speaking of the last 
 year of his life at Littlemore, he says, *'A11 this time 
 I was hard at my Essay on Doctrinal Development. As 
 I advanced my view so cleared, that instead of speaking 
 any more of 'the Roman Catholics,' I boldly called 
 them Catholics. Before I got to the end I resolved 
 to be received, and the book remains in the state in 
 which it was then, unfinished."^ Why the unfinished 
 essay of which Newman thus speaks was never finished 
 after he joined the Roman Catholic Church I have 
 never been quite able to understand, unless it be that 
 his fine sense of fitness discerned something appropriate 
 in an abrupt termination to such a task, which he was 
 unwilling to disturb. Although first published as the 
 effort of one outside the Church to explain the apparent 
 
 1 Apologia, p. 366. 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 163 
 
 changes which took place in the form of primitive 
 Christianity, an effort which resulted in the writer's 
 identification of that primitive Christianity with the 
 Christianity of the Roman Church, there seems to be 
 no reason at all, apart from reluctance to turn a 
 tentative experiment in investigation into a formal 
 demonstration, why the line of thought which was 
 commenced while Newman was still in uncertainty as 
 to its tendenc}^, should not have been pursued and 
 completed as a definite apology for the theology of the 
 Church he has since joined. Of course he would have 
 had to submit any book written by him as a Roman 
 Catholic to the authorities of his Church, as he offered 
 to do the Essay on Development in its present condition, 
 — an offer which was refused, — but there is no ground 
 at all for supposing that that necessity would have 
 interfered substantially with the general drift of his 
 argument. Even as it stands, the Essay on Development 
 has, so far as I can hear, been adopted with enthusiasm 
 by the most orthodox school in the Roman Catholic 
 Church, and it is now usually regarded by Roman 
 Catholics as one of the most powerful of modern apologies 
 for their specific theological doctrines. 
 
 It is clear that what Newman was in search of, was 
 a principle which should at once vindicate his life-long 
 devotion to primitive Christianity, and yet discover in 
 primitive Christianity signs of that capacity for growth 
 which he had early learned from Scott, the commen- 
 tator on the Bible, to regard as the true test of life. 
 Primitive Christianity as a mere fossil, as a *' deposit " 
 which liad to be kept apart from all the transforming 
 change into which living principles blossom when they 
 enter into combinations with so changeful and elastic 
 
164 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 a universe as ours, and with a nature so full of all 
 sorts of potentialities as man's, had become nearly 
 inconceivable to Newman. He had begun to see that 
 even though principles remain the same, doctrines must 
 expand, must become explicit where they had been 
 only implicit, must assert themselves under new condi- 
 tions which shed new light upon them, must explain 
 themselves, must illustrate themselves by giving birth 
 to moral consequences, to customs, to institutions, to 
 devotional forms ; and that without such a developing 
 power as this, the primitive teaching, the deposit given 
 once for all, would be a dead formula, and not a living 
 power. The doctrine of the triune Deity must explain 
 itself. In what sense is God Three and yet One ? The 
 doctrine of the Incarnation must explain itself. In 
 what sense was Christ both God and man ? Was His 
 humanity real or only apparent ? Was His personality 
 both human and Divine ? or if Divine only, how was that 
 to be reconciled with a real humanity, if real it was ? 
 Again, if sin is the fearful evil which primitive Chris- 
 tianity teaches it to be, what forces would be the most 
 suitable for stemming the torrent of this evil ? To 
 what institutions should the penitent be submitted ? 
 What are the emotions, and fears, and hopes with which 
 his weak nature may be legitimately aided to keep this 
 evil at a distance ? And if the primitive revelation is to 
 be susceptible of this sort of moral development, what is 
 to be the check on this development ? who is to prevent 
 it from so combining with the desires and hopes of our 
 nature as to degenerate from its former purity, and from 
 popularizing itself by virtue of that very degeneration ? 
 Must there not be some guiding power which resists the 
 tendency of man's intellect, either to rationalize it, or 
 
Development of christian doctrine, ies 
 
 to cover it with parasitic superstitions, or perhaps to 
 injure it in both ways at once ? If Christ provided by 
 the apostolate for authorities who represented Him when 
 He had ascended into heaven, was it not probable that 
 the Apostles had left behind them some successor to 
 their authority, when they too, one by one, disappeared 
 from the scene of their labours ? Such were the 
 questions which Newman set himself to answer in his 
 Essay on Develo'pme.nt, and the answers he found for 
 them were answers full of devout subtlety, as well as 
 answers in sympathy with the principle of what was to 
 be the great scientific conception of the century. 
 
 When we consider that the Essay on Development was \^ 
 written in 1844 and 1845, many years before the scien- 
 tific conception of biological evolution had been ex- 
 plained and illustrated by Darwin and Wallace, and 
 a host of other writers, it appears to me that this essay, 
 with its many admirable illustrations from biology, 
 demonstrates that Newman's genius is not simply, as 
 has been often asserted, a special gift for the vindication 
 of authority in religion, and for the revivification of the 
 past, since it betrays so deep an insight into the gener- 
 ating thoughts which are transforming the present and 
 moulding the future. His discussion of the true tests of 
 genuine development is marked by the keenest pene- 
 tration into one of the most characteristic conceptions 
 of modern science. Seven tests of a true development, 
 as distinguished from a corruption, are given : (1) preserv- 
 ation of type, as the type of the child is preserved, 
 though altered and strengthened in the man ; (2) con- 
 tinuity of principles, in the sense in which the principle 
 of one language favours compound words, while that 
 of another does not; (3) the power of assimilating 
 
166 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 apparently foreign material, as a plant will grow luxuri- 
 antly in one habitat and only sparely in another, but 
 assimilates more or less foreign material in any habitat 
 in which it will grow at all ; (4) " early anticipation " 
 of the mature form, as the Russian nation began to aim 
 at Constantinople centuries before they were a great 
 power even on the Black Sea, and as Athanasius was 
 made a bishop by his playfellows in anticipation of his 
 genius for ecclesiastical government, or as Sir Walter 
 Scott delighted his schoolfellows by relating stories to 
 them when he was a mere child ; (5) " logical sequence " 
 of ideas, as when Jeroboam, in his anxiety to prevent 
 a return of the ten tribes to their old allegiance, set 
 up a worship that might wean them from their attach- 
 ment to Jerusalem, on the express ground that if he 
 did not, their religious instinct would be taking them 
 back to their great Temple ; (6) *' preservative ad- 
 ditions," such, for instance, as Courts of Justice, to 
 the authority of government, which strengthen the 
 government by protecting the obedient and punishing 
 the rebellious ; and finally, (7) " chronic continuance," 
 as the chronic continuance of the American Union 
 shows that the republican principle is still alive, where- 
 as the gradual engrafting of imperial institutions on 
 Republican forms, showed that the Republican principle 
 was dying out in ancient Rome. 
 
 All these tests of true, as distinguished from corrupt 
 or deteriorating, development are discussed by Newman 
 with admirable subtlety, and a very fine sense for the 
 scientific character of the conception of evolution itself, 
 which would not be remarkable now, but was certainly 
 very remarkable in the year 1845. He illustrates his 
 first test — " preservation of type or idea " — by collecting 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 167 
 
 the descriptions given of Christianity in the first three 
 centuries by independent observers, and putting it to 
 his readers what form of Christianity it is that now 
 most closely corresponds to the type so described. He 
 gives the account of Tacitus, of Suetonius, of Pliny, 
 shows how all these writers describe Christianity as 
 something subversive of both political and social peace, 
 as of the nature of a secret conspiracy, as possessed 
 by a spirit of obstinacy, as insisting on the duty of 
 addressing to Christ a certain form of words (carmen), 
 and as even more mischievous and contagious through 
 the inflexible resistance it inspired to any State decree 
 which interfered with its rites, than through the 
 morality it enforced, which is described as intrinsically 
 unobjectionable, though tending to the break-up of the 
 structure of human society as it was then understood 
 by these writers. He runs through the story of the 
 divisions in the early Church, the Arian and semi-Arian, 
 the Nestorian and Monophysite controversies, and shows 
 how these divisions were caused by thinkers who 
 rebelled against mystery in theology, and tried to 
 simplify the truth handed down ; how, after the emperors 
 became Christian, the heresiarchs almost uniformly 
 sought, and often — like Arius, the semi-Arians and 
 the Monophysites — found, help from the State, which 
 naturally disliked the dogmatic independence and 
 tenacity of the Church; and how it became almost 
 one of the chief indications of heresy to lean on the 
 civil power instead of on the doctrinal tradition of the 
 Fathers. And then he asks if there is no Church in 
 modern times which excites the suspicion and jealousy 
 of the world and the State, just as the Church of the 
 first six centuries excited it, and yet stands alone and 
 
168 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 unawed when it finds the powers of this world ranged 
 against it. Newman's conclusions are stated in a few 
 pithy paragraphs, first as to the Church of the first 
 three centuries, next as to the Church of the fourth 
 century, finally as to the Church of the fifth and sixth 
 centuries, and as they show the drift of his thought 
 very clearly, these conclusions I must quote. In sum- 
 ming up his review of the first three centuries he says — 
 " If there is a form of Christianity now in the world 
 which is accused of gross superstition, of borrowing its 
 rites and customs from the heathen, and of ascribing 
 to forms and ceremonies an occult virtue; — a religion 
 which is considered to buiden and enslave the mind 
 by its requisitions, to address itself to the weak-minded 
 and ignorant, to be supported by sophistry and impos- 
 ture, and to contradict reason and exalt mere irrational 
 faith ; — a religion which impresses on the serious mind 
 very distressing views of the guilt and consequences 
 of sin, sets upon the minute acts of the day, one by 
 one, their definite value for praise or blame, and thus 
 casts a grave shadow over the future ; — a religion which 
 holds up to admiration the surrender of wealth, and 
 disables serious persons from enjoying it if they would ; — 
 a religion, the doctrines of which, be they good or bad, 
 are to the generality of men unknown ; which is con- 
 sidered to bear on its very surface signs of folly and 
 falsehood so distinct that a glance suffices to judge of it, 
 and careful examination is preposterous; which is felt 
 to be so simply bad that it may be calumniated at 
 hazard and at pleasure, it being nothing but absurdity 
 to stand upon the accurate distribution of its guilt 
 among its particular acts, or painfully to determine how 
 far this or that story is literally true, what must be 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 169 
 
 allowed in candour, or what is improbable, what cuts 
 two ways, or what is not proved, or what may be 
 plausibly defended ; — a religion such that men look at 
 a convert to it with a feeling which no other sect raises 
 except Judaism, Socialism, or Mormonism, with curiosity, 
 suspicion, fear, disgust, as the case may be, as if some- 
 thin-g strange had befallen him, as if he had had an 
 initiation into a mystery, and had come into communion 
 with dreadful influences, as if he were now one of a 
 confederacy which claimed him, attested him, stripped 
 him of his personality, reduced him to a mere organ 
 or instrument of a whole ; — a religion which men hate 
 as proselytizing, anti-social, revolutionary, as dividing 
 families, separating chief friends, corrupting the maxims 
 of government, making a mock at law, dissolving the 
 empire, the enemy of human nature, and * a conspirator 
 against its rights and privileges'; — a religion which 
 they consider the champion and instrument of darkness, 
 and a pollution calling down upon the land the anger 
 of heaven; — a religion which they associate with in- 
 trigue and conspiracy, which they speak about in 
 whispers, which they detect by anticipation in what- 
 ever goes wrong, and to which they impute whatever 
 is unaccountable; — a religion the very name of which 
 they cast out as evil, and use simply as a bad epithet, 
 and which from the impulse of self-preservation they 
 would persecute if they could; — if there be such a 
 religion now in the world, it is not unlike Christianity 
 as that same world viewed it when first it came forth 
 from its Divine Author." ^ 
 
 It is worth notice, perhaps, that in this passage 
 
 1 Essay on Development, pp. 240-2, 1st edition. James Toovey. 
 
170 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 Newman makes the suspicion, distrust, and almost 
 disgust with which what he regards as the true 
 Cliristianity was viewed, to be one of the main " notes " 
 of the Church ; and that if that be so, the better Roman 
 Catholics are treated, the less conspicuous, according 
 to this passage, will be the " note " of authenticity in 
 the Roman Catholic Church. In a world which humbles 
 itself before such men as Father Damien, the apostle 
 and martyr who gave up his life for the lepers of the 
 Sandwich Islands, this " note " of the Church on which 
 Newman insists so emphatically can hardly be called 
 conspicuous. 
 
 After his review of the Church of the fourth century 
 Newman concludes, " On the whole, then, we have 
 reason to say that if there be a form of Christianity at 
 this day distinguished for its careful organization and 
 its consequent power; if it is spread over the world; 
 if it is conspicuous for zealous maintenance of its own 
 creed ; if it is intolerant towards what it considers error ; 
 if it is eno^aored in ceaseless war with all other bodies 
 called Christian ; if it, and it alone, is called ' Catholic ' 
 by the world, nay, by these very bodies, and if it makes 
 much of the title ; if it names them heretics, and warns 
 them of coming woe, and calls on them, one by one, 
 to come over to itself, overlooking every other tie; 
 and if they, on the other hand, call it seducer, harlot, 
 apostate, Antichrist, devil; if, however they differ one 
 W'ith another, they consider it their common enemy; 
 if they strive to unite together against it, and cannot ; 
 if they are but local ; if they continually subdivide, and 
 it remains one ; if they fall one after another, and make 
 way for new sects, and it remains the same; such a 
 form of religion is not unlike the Christianity of the 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 171 
 
 Nicene era."^ There again I should say that the 
 Roman Catholic Church of Pio Nono is much better 
 described than the Eoman Catholic Church of Leo XIII. 
 Neither does the Church of Leo XIII. denounce external 
 heresy with anything like the same verve as the Church 
 of Pio Nono ; nor do the Christian Churches outside the 
 pale of the Papal Church denounce the Papal Church 
 with anything like the same vivacity. Indeed, there 
 is something like an entente cordiale between the Roman 
 Catholic Church of to-day and various other Churches — 
 an alliance against scepticism. 
 
 After Newman's review of the fifth and sixth cen- 
 turies, in which the Nestorian and Monophysite heresies 
 flourished, he concludes thus — ''If, then, there is now 
 a form of Christianity such that it extends throughout 
 the world, though with varying measures of prominence 
 or prospeiity in separate places; that it lies under the 
 power of sovereigns and magistrates, in different ways 
 alien to its faith; that flourishing nations and great 
 empires, professing or tolerating the Christian name, 
 lie over against it as antagonists ; that schools of 
 philosophy and learning are supporting theories or 
 following out conclusions hostile to it, and establishing 
 an exegetical system subversive of its Scriptures ; that 
 it has lost whole Churches by schism, and is now 
 opposed by powerful communions once part of itself; 
 that it has been altogether or almost driven from some 
 countries ; that in others its line of teachers is overlaid, 
 its flocks oppressed, its churches occupied, its property 
 held by what may be called a duplicate succession; 
 that in others its members are degenerate and corrupt, 
 
 ^ Essay on Development^ p. 269. 
 
172 CARDI^TAL NEWMA]^. 
 
 and surpassed in conscientiousness and in virtue, as 
 in gifts of intellect, by the very heretics whom it 
 condemns ; that heresies are rife and bishops negligent 
 within its own pale; and that amid its disorders and 
 fears there is but one Voice for whose decisions its 
 people wait with trust, one Name and one See to which 
 they look with hope, and that name Peter, and that see 
 Rome ; — such a religion is not unlike the Christianity 
 of the fifth and sixth centuries." ^ 
 
 Is not that almost equivalent to making partial and 
 local degeneracy of the Church, when it occurs without 
 derogating from the authority of the Central See, one 
 of the "notes" of the Church? Is it not almost 
 equivalent to ratifying the judgment of that German 
 monk in the Lutheran period, who was said to have 
 been converted from his doubts by a visit to Rome, 
 because he found the Church of Rome so corrupt and 
 yet so powerful; his view being that no Church not 
 divinely sustained could survive such corruptions ? No 
 doubt our Lord distinctly anticipates unfaithful stewards 
 in His Church, but He certainly does not speak of them 
 as being, even involuntarily, witnesses to the truth He 
 had revealed. Such is the mode in which Newman 
 deals with his first and chief test of a true development, 
 the " preservation of type or idea." 
 
 In dealing with the second test of a true develop- 
 ment, the continuity of the principles under which 
 the development proceeds, Newman illustrates that 
 continuity first by the resolute adhesion of the early 
 and the later Church alike to the mystical as dis- 
 tinguished from the exclusively literal interpretation 
 
 1 Essay on Developmenti pp. 316, 317. 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 173 
 
 of Scripture ; and next by the resolute assertion of the 
 early and the later Church alike, that faith is a better 
 attitude of mind than doubt; that the highest mind 
 inclines to take on trust what lower minds challenge 
 till they have an adequate proof that their trust is 
 legitimate — in a word, that the philosophy which (like 
 Locke's in modern times) insisted on what is called 
 evidence that a revelation was Divine, before reposing 
 any trust in it, was the kind of philosophy which would 
 have undermined all the greatest spiritual movements 
 that the world has ever experienced, and extinguished 
 all noble enthusiasm in the very moment of its birth. 
 
 As regards the first of these illustrations, the in- 
 clination to connect a mystical wdth a literal inter- 
 pretation of Scripture, often attaching more importance 
 to the mystical than to the literal interpretation, 
 Newman shows that very early in the history of the 
 Church Irenseus treats the account of the Annunciation 
 to the Virgin Mary as in some sense a fulfilment of the 
 prophecy in Genesis concerning the seed of the woman 
 bruising the serpent's head, and argues for the dignity 
 of the Virgin Mary as a nobler Eve, on the strength of 
 that mystical fulfilment of prophecy. From Polycarp 
 to St. Alfonso Liguori, according to Newman, the Church 
 has steadily insisted on attaching the greatest possible 
 importance to the mystical interpretations of Scripture. 
 I do not suppose that any one who really enters at 
 all into the spirit of Scripture ventures to deny the 
 obviously mystical signification of many passages, nor 
 the double current of meaning in others. It is hardly 
 possible not to see the connection between the willing- 
 ness of Abraham to give up his son to death on Mount 
 Moriah, and the willingness of the Father to give up 
 
174 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 His Son to death on Mount Calvary, though the one 
 sacrifice was not completed, while the other was. It is 
 hardly possible not to assign a prophetic and mystical 
 meaning to Isaiah's prophecy as to the Son who should 
 be called "Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God." 
 It is hardly possible not to regard such a psalm as the 
 104th, when it speaks of God sending forth His Spirit, — 
 after He had withdrawn it, — '' to renew the face of the 
 earth," as an inspired anticipation of the sending forth 
 of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost to renew the 
 earthly life of man. But many of the mystical inter- 
 pretations of the Fathers are altogether different, and 
 seem to be even distinct perversions of Scripture. For 
 example, Isaiah's prophecy as to a child not yet born, 
 before whose maturity the lands of Syria and Israel 
 should be forsaken, appears to admit of no double 
 current of meaning at all. The date is fixed at which 
 it is to be fulfilled, and that an early date ; and the 
 event prophesied is not of a kind admitting of a larger 
 fulfilment in the future. Of course the reason for 
 giving the passage a mystical interpretation was the 
 apparent prediction of a supernatural birth, though 
 that is a point on which the best modern Hebrew 
 scholars are very doubtful ; and as no supernatural birth 
 is even alleged to have taken place within the limits of 
 time assigned, the pious imagination identified the pre- 
 diction with the supernatural birth of the Saviour of the 
 world. That, however, is quite illegitimate while the 
 strict limit of time exists, and cannot be explained away. 
 The child's birth was to be a sign of the judgment 
 coming upon Israel and Syria, and that judgment was 
 to be fulfilled before he could choose for himself between 
 good and evil. If the sign is to be disconnected with 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 175 
 
 the conquest of Syria and Israel, the prophecy as a pro- 
 phecy disappears. Yet the supernatural birth (if the 
 Hebrew word indicates a supernatural birth) cannot 
 be pushed forward many centuries without disconnect- 
 ing the sign from the event which was to follow it. 
 Mystical interpretation in the sense of catching eagerly 
 at one single word in a sentence, and ignoring the whole 
 drift of the sense, is surely not so much mystical as 
 perverse. The objections reasonably urged against 
 such interpretations are not really objections to recog- 
 nizing one event as a sign of another and greater event 
 of the same type, but objections to the practice of 
 subordinating the plain sense of an explicit statement 
 to the desire to discover a supernatural meaning, which 
 can only be squeezed into the language by a tour de 
 force. Religious mystery is not enhanced, but brought 
 into disrepute in the estimation of men, by the habit 
 of discovering it where it is not, as freely as where it is. 
 In relation to his second illustration of the test of con- 
 tinuity of the principle of development, Newman has 
 no difficulty in showing that the early Church and the 
 mediaeval Church were equally eager to encourage that 
 forwardness to believe which springs rather from the 
 liveliness of the affections when the grace of God 
 touches them, than from reasoning. The New Testa- 
 ment is full of the censure of the unbelieving spirit, and 
 later theologians, like St. Thomas Aquinas and Suarez, 
 confirm its teaching. The real difficulty, I imagine, is 
 to distinguish between superstitious readiness to believe 
 and generous readiness to believe — the readiness which, 
 like Louis XL's, arose from selfish fear, and the readiness 
 which, like St. Francis of Assisi's, arose from generous 
 hope. 
 
176 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 Then Newman goes on to show how the second test 
 of sound development — the continuity of the principles 
 by which development is regulated — blends with the 
 third test, the power to assimilate and transform alien 
 material, till the new life imparted to that alien material 
 brings about a complete transformation in the character- 
 istic influence which that foreign material is made 
 the medium of diffusing. Sacraments of evil are 
 exchanged for sacraments of grace, and the very same 
 class of rites and practices which under a false religion 
 had degraded men, under a true religion purifies and 
 exalts them. Here he approaches, of course, the most 
 disputable of the positions of the Ronian Catholic 
 Church, which has avowedly adopted the pagan ex- 
 ternality of ceremony with a freedom and a readiness 
 that has justified the suspicion with which it is viewed 
 as a compromise with superstition rather than a triumph 
 over it. Thus, as Newman quotes from the life of St. 
 Gregory of Nyssa, that saint " increased the devotion 
 of the people everywhere by instituting festive meetings 
 in honour of those who had fought for the faith. The 
 bodies of the martyrs were distributed in different 
 places, and the people assembled and made merry, as 
 the years came round, holding festival in their honour. 
 This indeed was a proof of his great wisdom, .... for 
 perceiving that the childish and untrained populace 
 were retained in their idolatrous error by sensual 
 indulgences, in order that what was of first importance 
 should at any rate be secured to them, — viz. that they 
 should look to God in place of their vain rites, — he 
 allowed them to be merry, and solace themselves at the 
 monuments of the holy Martyrs, as if their behaviour 
 would in time undergo a spontaneous change into greater 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 111 
 
 seriousness and strictness, and faith would lead tliem to 
 it ; which has actually been the happy issue in that 
 population, all sensual gratification having turned into 
 a spiritual form of rejoicing." ^ In one of his Roman 
 Catholic books Newman returned to this subject again, 
 and somewhat developed his view that Christianity had 
 assimilated pagan practices, and turned them from 
 sacraments of evil into sacraments of good. He ad- 
 mitted that besides exerting a spiritual influence on 
 the men of good will, these transformed sacraments, 
 which were originally concessions to childishness of mind, 
 often familiarize the evil-minded with sacred objects and 
 associations, which they learn to treat almost with 
 contempt, though, as he maintained, without any abate- 
 ment of their faith in the Divine power of the religion 
 they thus ignore. The character of all these popular 
 external observances of religion is, he declared, " pretty 
 much the same as St. Jerome and St. Gregory Nyssen 
 bear witness in the first age of the Church. It is a 
 mixed multitude, some most holy, perhaps even saints ; 
 others penitent sinners ; but others, again, a mixture of 
 pilgrim and beggar, or pilgrim and robber, or half- 
 gipsy, or three-quarters boon companion, or at least 
 with nothing saintly and little religious about them. 
 They will let you wash their feet and serve them at 
 table, and the hosts have more merit for their minis- 
 try than the guests for their weariness. Yet one and 
 all, saints and sinners, have faith in things invisible, 
 which each uses in his own way." ^ 
 
 Newman's apology for all this mixture of careless or 
 
 1 Essay on Development, 1st edition, chapter vi. section 2, pp. 
 358-9. 
 
 2 Lectures on Anglican DifficKlties, 2nd edition, lecture ix. pp. 
 231-2. 
 
 N 
 
178 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 even deliberate evil with faith, is, that even if the faith 
 aggravates the responsibihty for the evil, which I 
 assume that he would admit, though he does not say so, 
 it leaves the way open to a much less embarrassed path 
 of repentance than is available for evil done in unbelief. 
 He holds that it is not the general tendency of moral 
 evil in Roman Catholic countries to disturb faith. The 
 faith remains through even many of the worst stages of 
 corruption of the will, and he thinks this a preferable 
 state of mind for the mass of men, to the unbelief into 
 which moral evil almost always plunges a Protestant. 
 But by the necessity of the case it is not possible to 
 show that this power of assimilation, in the sense of 
 a half-compromise with pagan rites, was ever really ex- 
 hibited and sanctioned in the earliest age of the Church; 
 nor even, I think, that in the apostolic age faith was 
 thus retained in its vividness, in separation from 
 holiness and love. That the Church showed great 
 power of assimilating pagan habits of thought, and of 
 leavening them more or less — often rather less than 
 more — with her own higher purposes, is obvious enough ; 
 but whether that did not involve a kind of toleration 
 of what is unholy, which the Apostolic Church would 
 have thought most reprehensible, is extremely doubtful. 
 I can hardly conceive an Apostle acquiescing in New- 
 man's vivid presentation of super naturally-minded but 
 pagan-hearted believers, as he afterwards gave it in his 
 lecture on " The religious character of Catholic countries 
 no prejudice to the sanctity of the Church." I should 
 have thought that Christ not only taught that " If any 
 man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine 
 whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself;" 
 but also implied the converse — namely, "If any man 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 179 
 
 will not do His will, he shall cease to know of the 
 doctrine whether it be of God or not." At all events, 
 I cannot help thinking that the state of a population 
 absolutely believing in sacred truths which they openly 
 disregard, is even more morally hopeless than that of a 
 population which has gradually lost faith in the truths 
 it has practically ignored. 
 
 Newman's fourth test of a sound development is the 
 " early anticipation " of characteristics not fully de- 
 veloped till much later; just as we find in great men's 
 childish character an early anticipation of their most 
 striking mature characteristics. Goethe, for instance, 
 often displayed as a child that deep sense of personal 
 dignity and of something like authority which was so 
 characteristic of his maturity and old age ; and Sir Walter 
 Scott as a child used to delight his schoolfellows by 
 telling them stories of his own invention, just as thirty 
 years later he delighted the whole world. Just so 
 Newman shows that in the first age of the Church 
 there is the most remarkable evidence of that con- 
 ception so fully developed and so elaborately applied 
 in the Catholic Church in later centuries, which treats 
 material things as susceptible of being made the channels 
 of Divine grace. We are specially taught that the 
 body as such, far from being evil, was like the whole 
 material creation, a Divine work and " very good," that 
 the Gnostic dislike to admit that Christ had come " in 
 the flesh " was a fatal heresy — " Every spirit that con- 
 fesseth not that Christ Jesus is come in the flesh is 
 the spirit of Antichrist." As a consequence, even the 
 mere earthly remains of good men were treated with 
 a spirit the very opposite of pagan shrinking — with a 
 passionate reverence and belief in their sanctifying 
 
 \ 
 
180 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 influences. The very wood of the cross on which 
 Christ suffered was regarded as full of virtue. And the 
 feeling for relics, for sacraments, and indeed for all the 
 physical objects which the Church consecrates, a feeling 
 which Protestants regard as superstitious, was, in New- 
 man's belief, a mere development of these early indications 
 of respect for the material channels of Divine grace. 
 Newman treats the cultus of the Virgin Mary as only 
 one of the most remarkable developments of this creed, 
 of which we have the anticipation in the account of the 
 Annunciation, and of the visit of Mary to Elizabeth, in 
 the early chapters of Luke's gospel. Another illustration 
 of the early anticipation of a form of Church activity 
 which assumed its fullest development centuries later, 
 is the systematic and almost scientific treatment of 
 theology to be found in the Ignatian epistles at the 
 opening of the second century. Thus Ignatius speaks 
 of Christ as " perfect man " as well as God, and therein 
 anticipates the very formula of that later creed which 
 bears (of course improperly) the name of Athanasius. 
 
 The fifth test of true development, " logical sequence," 
 is the one which is, I fancy, most open to abuse in 
 dealing with matters so much above us as theology. 
 To infer correctly, the mind should be able to take in 
 the full scope of a premiss. Even in mathematics it 
 is always unsafe to treat inferences, which are correct 
 when applied to ordinary cases, as justified when ap- 
 plied beyond the limits of quantitative measurement. It 
 is true, as a rule, that if axx = axy, x must be = 2/, but 
 the inference is quite false if a happens to be zero; 
 otherwise every number would be equal to every other 
 number, inasmuch as 2x0 = 1000x0, but yet it does 
 not in the least follow that 2 = 1000. Just so inferences 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF CHEISTIAN DOCTRINE. 181 
 
 from principles which appear true when we are dealing 
 with finite minds, are very apt to be quite false when 
 applied to an infinite mind. Indeed, all the juggling 
 with "the Absolute" and "the Infinite" which made 
 so much show of scientific reasoning in the late Dean 
 Mansel's Bam^ton Lectures, was really founded on the 
 fallacy that what would be a legitimate inference from 
 any statement as to a finite mind, would be an equally 
 legitimate inference from the same statement as to an 
 infinite mind. 
 
 Newman's chief illustration of the principle of " logical 
 sequence" as the test of a true development, is the 
 inference drawn from the condemnation of Arian forms 
 of doctrine, that there is so infinite a gulf between any 
 creature and God, that when once the true adoration of 
 any creature has been condemned, it becomes perfectly 
 safe to render homage to the saints and the Virgin 
 Mary, since it is no longer possible to suppose that they 
 are reverenced on their own account, but solely on 
 account of their close union with their Divine Master. 
 The charge of idolatry, he says, becomes unmeaning 
 after the condemnation of Arius. All good Catholics 
 know that the cults of the Virgin and the saints are 
 cults totally different in principle from religious worship. 
 They are far less to be called idolatrous than the homage 
 paid to a constitutional minister for his influence with 
 a monarch is to be called disloyal, whereas it is really 
 an implicit recognition of the true claim of loyalty. 
 The orthodoxy of the subordinate kind of homage is 
 a " logical " inference from the Church's anathema on 
 the proper adoration of a created being of any kind; 
 that is Newman's illustration of the test of " logical 
 sequence." But is it trustworthy ? Is it true that the 
 
182 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 anathema on Arianism rendered it safe to make so 
 much of the intercession of the saints and the mother 
 of Jesus Christ ? Are not finite minds very apt to 
 accept in the abstract a principle which they find it 
 very difficult to realize in the concrete? Is it any 
 less possible to preoccupy our minds with the influence 
 and benevolence of beings like ourselves, to the virtual 
 exclusion of the higher acts of worship, solely because 
 we recognize in the abstract the infinitely superior 
 power and love of God, than it is to fill up our minds 
 with "the care of this world and the deceitfulness of 
 riches," only because we recognize fully in the abstract 
 that these have the power to choke the word and to 
 suffocate its growth in the heart ? Surely the real 
 danger of the immense development which the Roman 
 Catholic Church has given to the intercession of the 
 Virgin Mary and the saints, is, that it tends to present 
 to us the wills of beings who in knowledge and limit- 
 ations are like ourselves, and who are supposed, at 
 least by ignorant people, to be more influenced by our 
 pertinacity of entreaty than God would be, as likely 
 to urge upon God what He would otherwise refuse to 
 do, and to try to impose upon Him by their entreaties 
 their weaker forms of good-will ; whereas, what ought 
 to be impressed on the ignorant is, that the more com- 
 pletely any finite being has conformed himself to the 
 will of God, the more resolutely would he refuse to 
 intercede for any favour not intrinsically in harmony 
 with the Divine providence. " Logical sequence " may 
 be one test of true development, but unless you know 
 that it has been faithfully apphed to the higher and 
 severer as well as the easier and milder aspects of 
 the original teaching, it may be a test that leads 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 183 
 
 you into all manner of worldly and degenerate de- 
 velopments. 
 
 The sixth test of true development, "preservative 
 additions," corresponds in theology to the doctrine of 
 the Law Courts, that they may assert their dignity 
 and authority by punishing severely any " contempt 
 of Court," or to the amendments adopted in some of 
 the republican constitutions of the present day, which 
 provide safeguards tending to prevent representative 
 bodies from arrogating to themselves too much of the 
 power of the whole people, of which a good example 
 is the Swiss referendum, which overrules the action 
 of the representative bodies by a census taken of 
 the wishes of the whole people on some individual 
 issue. 
 
 Newman gives as his first example of the " preservative 
 additions " of religious development, one which seems 
 to be hardly a very good example, because instead of its 
 intention being to safeguard what has been already re- 
 vealed, its intention is to reveal something fresh. " We 
 know," he says, "that no temper of mind is acceptable 
 in the Divine Presence but love ; it is love which 
 makes Christian fear differ from servile dread, and true 
 faith differ from the faith of devils ; yet in the be- 
 ginning of the Christian life fear is the prominent 
 evangelical grace, and love is but latent in fear, and 
 has, in course of time, to be developed out of what 
 seems its contradictory. Then when it is developed it 
 takes that prominent place which fear held before, yet 
 protecting, not superseding it. Love is added, not fear 
 removed, and the mind is but perfected in grace by 
 what seems a revolution. They that sow in tears reap 
 in joy ; yet afterwards still they are ' sorrowful,' though 
 
184 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 * alway rejoicing.' " ^ That is exquisitely put, but surely 
 it degrades love to speak of its revelation as a mere 
 *' preservative addition" to a Gospel of fear. I think, 
 perhaps, the best illustration which Newman gives of 
 the " preservative addition " is thre foundation of the 
 Society of Jesus, for the protection and development of 
 the Catholic Church as it was in the century in which 
 Ignatius Loyola founded it, for it was clearly an addition, 
 and it did tend to preserve the Church as the Church 
 then was. Or perhaps his illustration of the use of the 
 cross as a symbol of holy war, to safeguard the Gospel of 
 peace, may be considered a still better instance in the 
 minds of those who regard the society founded by 
 Ignatius Loyola as preservative chiefly of existing 
 abuses. "If light has no communion with darkness, 
 or Christ with Belial, what has He to do with Moloch, 
 who would not call down fire on His enemies, and came 
 not to destroy but to save ? Yet this seeming anomaly 
 is buji.'€)ne instance of a great law which is seen in 
 developments generally, that changes which appear at 
 first sight to contradict that out of which they grew, 
 are really its protection or illustration. Our Lord Him- 
 self is represented in the Prophets as a combatant 
 inflicting wounds while He received them, as coming 
 from Bozrah with dyed garments, sprinkled and red in 
 His apparel with the blood of His enemies ; and whereas 
 no war is lawful but what is just, it surely beseems 
 that they who are engaged in so dreadful a commission 
 as that of taking away life at the price of their own, 
 should at least have the support of His Presence, and 
 fight under the mystical influence of His Name." ^ 
 
 1 Essay on Development^ chap. viii. section 2, p. 429, 1st edition. 
 2 Ibid. chap. viii. section 2, p. 431. 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 185 
 
 I need give no illustration of Newman's seventh test 
 of a true development, " chronic continuance." No one » 
 denies the historical continuity of the Roman Catholic ' 
 Church. The question raised about her is not that, but / 
 whether she has fundamentally changed her type, her / 
 ideal. That she is, as the Protestants say, "incor- 
 rigible," is the best evidence that whether she has 
 changed her type or not, she has continued to defy all 
 the assaults made upon her. 
 
 This remarkable book in which the doctrine of 
 development, treated many years afterwards so elabor- 
 ately on its physiological side by Darwin, was antici- 
 pated in a theological treatise, concluded abruptly with 
 a postscript evidently written after October 9th, 1845, 
 when Newman was received at Littlemore by the 
 Passionist Father Dominic into the Roman Catholic 
 Church, The Oxford tradition says, that as Newman, 
 month after month, stood at his desk writing the Essay 
 on Development, he grew ever thinner and more„trans- 
 parent, till at last, when he suddenly dropped his pen 
 and made up his mind that he had attained the fullest 
 conviction that he must no longer delay his submission 
 to Rome, on peril of sinning against light, you could 
 almost have seen through him. The postscript to which 
 I refer is one of those most characteristic passages by 
 which Newman will be remembered as long as the 
 English language endures. It is hardly as well known 
 as the close of the last sermon which he preached as an 
 Anglican, the sermon on " The Parting of Friends." 
 Nor is it so exquisite in its pathos. But its absolute 
 simplicity and appropriateness to the close of such an 
 argument as this is most impressive. " Such," he wrote, 
 " were the thoughts concerning ' The Blessed Vision of 
 
186 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 Peace * of one whose long-continued petition had been 
 that the Most Merciful would not despise the work of 
 His own Hands, nor leave him to himself; while yet 
 his eyes were dim, and his breast laden, and he could but 
 employ Reason in the things of Faith. And now, dear 
 reader, time is short, eternity is long. Put not from 
 you what you have here found ; regard it not as mere 
 matter of present controversy ; set not out resolved to 
 refute it, and looking about for the best way of doing 
 so; seduce not yourself with the imagination that it 
 comes of disappointment, or disgust, ox restlessness, or 
 wounded feeling, or undue sensibility, or other weak- 
 ness. Wrap not yourself round in the associations of 
 years past, nor determine that to be truth which you 
 wish to be so, nor make an idol of cherished anticipa- 
 tions. Time is short, eternity is long. Nunc dimittis 
 servum tuum, Domine, secundum verbum tuum in pace, 
 quia viderunt oculi mei salutare tuum." But the " nunc 
 dimittis" was premature. Not the half of Newman's 
 earthly career was run, though the portion of it most 
 interesting to the non -Catholic world was at an end. 
 
 The late Canon Oakeley has given an account of the 
 last day of Newman's Anglican life, which he calls the 
 9th October, 1845. Dr. Newman himself writes on the 
 8th October from Littlemore, that he is expecting the 
 Passionist Father Dominic to arrive on that evening to 
 receive him into the Catholic Church. Either Father 
 Doininic was delayed a day, or Canon Oakeley was a 
 day wrong ^ in his reckoning, for according to him it was 
 the 9th October, a day of wild wind and pouring rain, 
 on which Father Dominic, shabbily dressed in black, 
 
 1 I see by a letter of Newman's to Mr. Allies, dated 9th October, 
 1845, that Canon Oakeley was a day wrong. 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTEINE. 187 
 
 and dripping wet, arrived at Littlemore; and it was 
 the 10th October, the day following his arrival, on which 
 Newman was received into the Roman Catholic com- 
 munion. On the evening of the Passionist father's 
 arrival, Newman, as the story goes, flung himself at his 
 feet, saying that he would not rise till the father had 
 blessed him and received him into the Church of Christ. 
 If so, his mind must have been wound up to a very high 
 pitch of excitement before he could thus have thrown 
 off the air of reserve and reticence so specially his own. 
 The whole night was spent in prayer, and on the follow- 
 ing day " the long gestation was accomplished," and New- 
 man was born into the communion of the one Christian 
 Church which has a historical continuity and an external 
 organization as impressive and conspicuous as even his 
 heart could desire for the depository of revealed truth. 
 
 Before I pass on to treat (very much more shortly) 
 the story of Newman's life after the long period of 
 doubt and hesitation was passed, and he had secured 
 for himself the greater freedom of a position in the 
 strength of which he had full confidence, I must make 
 one remark on the general upshot of the essay which 
 contained the fruits of his long hesitation and his 
 elaborate research. What is the value of this Essay on 
 Bemlo'pment for the world at large ? I think it has 
 done a great deal towards showing that many of the 
 later developments of the original teaching of Christ 
 and His apostles are the genuine and natural outcome 
 of the supernatural teaching given to the primitive 
 Church, but that none the less the disposition to assert 
 on the part of one branch of the Church too high a 
 claim for its own infallibility and certainty of provi- 
 dential guidance, has always been visible. Newman's 
 
188 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 own semion, insisting on the great prophets granted to 
 a Church in open schism with the Jewish Church, the 
 Church of Samaria, is the most instructive illustration 
 of this disposition to over-estimate the infallibility of the 
 Church, which the Jewish revelation could supply. It 
 is hardly possible to conceive that the Church of 
 Samaria could have been what the latest Jewish teach- 
 ing held it to be, and could yet have been the Church 
 of such a prophet as Elijah. And it is hardly possible 
 to conceive that the Church of England could be what 
 the Roman Catholic doctors describe it as being, and yet 
 the Church of such teachers as Bishop Butler or New- 
 man himself. Does not Newman throughout exaggerate 
 the claims of the Church to unity and infallibility ? In 
 every age throughout the history of revelation there 
 are distinct traces of the precipitation of the orthodox 
 leaders of the Church in these matters. In the Essay 
 on Development, Newman himself concedes to M. Guizot 
 that dogmatic principles were " not so well understood 
 and so carefully handled at first as they were after- 
 wards. In the early period we see traces of a conflict, 
 as well as of a variety, in theological elements, which 
 were in course of combination, but which required 
 adjustment and management before they could be used 
 with precision as one. In a thousand instances of a 
 minor character, the statements of the early Fathers are 
 but tokens of the multiplicity of openings which the 
 mind of the Church was making into the treasure-house 
 of Truth ; real openings, but incomplete or irregular. 
 Nay, the doctrines even of hereticaTlBodies^ are indices 
 and anticipations of the mind of the Church. As the first 
 step in settling a point of doctrine is to raise and debate 
 it, so heresies in every age may be taken as the measure 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 189 
 
 of the existing state of thought in the Church, and of 
 the movement of her theology ; they determine in what 
 way the current is setting, and the rate at which it 
 flows." ^ Does not that apply as truly to the present 
 day as to any past day ? Can it be doubted for a 
 moment that the Roman Catholic Church's definitions 
 on the subject of the inspiration of Scripture have been 
 " incomplete and irregular," and, as I should say, directly 
 misleading ? Do not the most learned Catholics admit 
 and even maintain that "inspiration" must be taken 
 in quite a new sense before the inspiration of the 
 Scriptures ''in all their parts" can be asserted with 
 even a semblance of truth ? Yet if that be so, that 
 means that the Roman Catholic Church has over- 
 leaped the truth in her deliberate definitions and formal 
 decrees, as well as in her ad interim pronouncements, 
 and that just as Elijah was taught that God had not 
 deserted the Church of Samaria in spite of schism and 
 idolatry, so God has not abandoned Churches which 
 Rome treats with mere contempt, in spite of their often 
 cold and degenerate worship. Nevertheless, I sincerely 
 believe that Newman has shown that many of the 
 practices which were thought mere superstitions in the 
 Roman Catholic worship are natural developments of 
 the belief of the primitive Church, and not in the least 
 inconsistent with the pure rapture of the primitive 
 worship. Is there truer Christian worship anywhere 
 than in the Church of Rome, in spite of the almost 
 greedy traditionalism with which her most famous 
 teachers seize upon doubtful and legendary elements of 
 pious rumour in bygone times to feed the appetite of 
 her contemplative orders ? 
 
 1 Essay an Development^ p. 349, 1st edition, chap. vi. section 2. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 
 
 From the moment when Newman became a Roman 
 Catholic, the freest and happiest, though not perhaps 
 the most fascinating, epoch of his life may be said to 
 have commenced. I do not know that he ever again 
 displayed quite the same intensity of restrained and 
 subdued passion as found expression in many of his 
 Oxford sermons. But in irony, in humour, in eloquence, 
 in imaginative force, the writings of the later and, as 
 we may call it, the emancipated portion of his career 
 far surpass the writings of his theological apprentice- 
 ship. As my object has been to sketch the growth of 
 his convictions with much more care than their out- 
 come, I will compress greatly my account of this second 
 half of Newman's life, which comprehends, however, the 
 most effective book he ever wrote, and certainly the 
 most remarkable of his controversial writings. For four 
 months after his conversion he continued to reside 
 generally at Littlemore, visiting Oscott at Cardinal 
 Wiseman's invitation in November 1845, only to be 
 confirmed, and not leaving Littlemore and the Uni- 
 versity of Oxford fully till February 1846. It was a 
 great wrench to him to separate himself from the 
 University to which he had always been warmly attached, 
 
NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 191 
 
 and where he had pleased himself by thinking that he 
 should live and die. And it was all the greater wrench 
 that his course was at this time so gravely misunder- 
 stood and so widely misrepresented amongst his old 
 friends and former colleagues. Indeed it was twenty 
 years after his conversion before he got the opportunity 
 of persuading the world that he had acted only on 
 conviction, and on conviction very slowly formed, very 
 anxiously reviewed, and indeed for a considerable time 
 deliberately suspended in order that he might adequately 
 test its force. For many years after his conversion 
 " the Protestant tradition," as he called it in his lectures 
 on "Catholicism in England," treated his conversion 
 as a sort of conspiracy deliberately devised for the sub- 
 version of the truth. In the first book which Newman 
 published after he became a Roman Catholic, Loss and 
 Gain, the story of a conversion to the Church of Rome, 
 he describes the effect produced by the rumours circu- 
 lated against his young hero's Protestantism on the Vice- 
 principal and Principal of his College. He is refused 
 permission to reside in lodgings for the two terms before 
 he takes his degree on the ground of his suspected 
 Tractarianism ; and on remarking to the Principal, Dr. 
 Bluett, that he cannot see what harm he could do by 
 residing in Oxford lodgings till Easter, Dr. Bluett cries 
 out in astonishment, " What, remain here, sir, with all 
 the young men about?" And on Charles Reding's 
 answering that he does not see why he should be unfit 
 company for them, " Dr. Bluett's jaw dropped, and his 
 eyes assumed a hollow aspect. ' You will corrupt their 
 minds, sir,' he said; *you will corrupt their minds.' 
 ^hen he added in a sepulchral tone, which came from 
 the very depth of his inside, ' j^ou will introduce them 
 
192 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 to some subtle Jesuit, to some subtle Jesuit, Mr. 
 Reding.'" This was very much the view taken for a 
 long time of Dr. Newman's own proceedings by those 
 who professed the "Protestantism of the Protestant 
 Religion." It Avas part of a dark and deliberate plot 
 against English Protestantism which had been long 
 hatching, and would take long to expose. Newman 
 went to Rome in October 1846, and returned to England 
 on Christmas Eye, 1847. He soon determined to 
 join the community of St. Philip Neri, the genial saint 
 of the sixteenth century, who was called the Apostle of 
 Rome during the earliest years of the Reformation. 
 St. Philip was a saint of the world. It was a saying of 
 his, " Oh, God, seeing that Thou art so infinitely lov- 
 able, why hast Thou given us but one heart to love 
 Thee with, and this so little and so narrow ? " What 
 the ideal was which Newman set before himself on 
 becoming an Oratorian of St. Philip's we can judge best 
 from the character of St. Philip, which he afterwards 
 quoted in the conclusion of his Dublin lectures on " the 
 idea. of a University," from Bacci, the biographer of 
 St. Philip Neri. " He was all things to all men. He 
 suited himself to noble and ignoble, young and old, 
 subjects and prelates, learned and ignorant, and re- 
 ceived those who were strangers to him with singular 
 benignity, and embraced them with as much love and 
 charity as if he had been a long while expecting them. 
 When he was called upon to be merry he was so; if 
 there was a demand upon his sympathy he was equally 
 ready. He gave the same welcome to all : caressing 
 the poor equally with the rich, and wearying himself 
 to assist all to the utmost limits of his power. In conse- 
 quence of his being so accessible and willing to receive 
 
NEWMAN AS EOMAN CATHOLIC. 193 
 
 all comers, many weDt to him every day, and some con- 
 tinued for the space of thirty, nay forty years to visit 
 him very often both morning and evening, so that his 
 room went by the agreeable nickname of the home of 
 Christian mirth." In his own Verses on Various 
 Occasions'^ Newman has given a similar character of 
 " St. Philip in his school," drawn in words of his own — 
 
 " This is the saint of gentleness and kindness, 
 Cheerful in penance, and in precept winning, 
 Patiently healing of their pride and blindness, 
 Souls that are sinning. 
 
 This is the saint who, when the world allures us, 
 Cries her false wares, and opes her magic coffers, 
 Points to a better city, and secures us 
 With richer offers." 
 
 It was evidently the naturalness, the geniality, the 
 innocent mirth, and the social charm of St. Philip Neri 
 that made Newman so anxious to found an Enghsh 
 branch of the same order. His one idea, no doubt, both 
 in founding the order and in organizing it, was to get 
 a special hold on educated minds in religious perplexity, 
 but though when the Brompton Oratory was founded 
 as a branch from the Oratory at Birmingham, the 
 Brompton Oratorians made it more of their special work 
 to attack the slums of that part of London, Newman 
 in his work at Birmingham never in the least neglected 
 the poor. Indeed when in 1849 cholera broke out in a 
 severe form at Bilston, he and the late Father Ambrose 
 St. John undertook the work of visiting the sick and 
 dying in the most dangerous of the infected districts, 
 and discharged that difficult duty with the utmost zeal. 
 Still he never forgot that his special experience at 
 Oxford indicated that he was more likely to affect 
 1 Page 306. 
 
 O 
 
194 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 deeply the cultivated than the ignorant, and every- 
 thing he published from the time of his conversion 
 to the present day has been almost exclusively ad- 
 dressed to minds of the same calibre and culture as 
 those with which he was familiar at Oxford. 
 
 Of his experience as a Catholic, Loss and Gain, 
 published in 1848, was the first fruit. It is hardly to 
 be called a story, and Newman stated when he gave it 
 to the public that it was " not founded upon fact." The 
 hero of it, who is converted from the English to the 
 Roman Catholic Church in the course of it, was not 
 meant for any living person, nor were any of the other 
 characters sketches from life. But the book has been 
 a great favourite with me, almost ever since its first 
 publication, partly for the admirable fidelity with which 
 it sketches young men's thoughts and difficulties, partly 
 for its happy irony, partly for its perfect representation 
 of the academical life and tone at Oxford. Charles 
 Reding, who is the hero of it, is delineated as a religious- 
 minded young man, who is eager for some credible and 
 definite assurance of what he ought to believe and what 
 he ought not. He is sure that there must be some final 
 authority as to what has been revealed, but he is utterly 
 perplexed by the conflict of views on the subject in his 
 own communion. " Wouldn't you be glad," says Reding 
 to a college friend, *' if St. Paul could come to life ? I've 
 often said to myself, ' Oh that I could ask St. Paul this 
 or that ! '" " But the Catholic Church isn't St. Paul quite, 
 I guess," said Sheffield. " Certainly not ; but supposing 
 you did think it had the inspiration of an Apostle, as 
 the Roman Catholics do, what a comfort it would be to 
 know beyond all doubt what to believe about God, and 
 how to worship and please Him. I mean yoio said, * I 
 
NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 195 
 
 can't believe this or that ; ' now you oiigJit to have said, 
 ' I can't believe the Pope has 'power to decide this or 
 that.' If he had, you ought to believe it, whatever it 
 is, and not to say, ' I can't believe.' " Here we see the 
 reflection of Newman's view of revelation as a coherent 
 system far above man's intellectual apprehensions, which 
 he is to believe as a matter of duty rather than for 
 its fascinating or subduing power over his mind. When 
 to this predisposition, which was certainly Newman's 
 own, we add Reding's craving for penance and ascetic 
 practices generally as at least a sort of satisfaction for 
 the deep sense of detestation with which he regarded 
 sin in himself, we need not feel at all surprised that 
 even though Reding is very far indeed from a duplicate 
 of Newman, he becomes gradually more and more re- 
 pelled from the sober Anglican communion, and drawn 
 towards that which does lay down absolutely the dogmas 
 which it expects its children to accept, and does supply 
 them with penances and ascetic discipline in plenty. In 
 the course of the story there are many happy sketches 
 of Oxford society, such as, for example, the sketch of the 
 evangelical pietism which Mr. Freeborn pours forth at 
 Bateman's breakfast, or the sketch of the Rev. Dr. Brown- 
 side's prim and pompous Broad Church University 
 sermon, which said " one word in favour of Nestorius, 
 two for Abelard, three for Luther, that great spirit who 
 saw that churches, creeds, rites, forms, were nought in 
 religion, and that the inward spirit of faith, as he him- 
 self expressed it, was all in all." Again, there is one 
 very impressive passage not taken from Oxford life, in 
 which Newman makes the young Oxford convert who 
 precedes Reding in passing over to the Roman Catholic 
 Church insist on the vast difference between the 
 
196 CAKDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 Protestant and the Roman Catholic conception of 
 worship, the former consisting in the pouring forth of 
 the human desire for Divine help, the latter in the 
 Mass, which is the "evocation" rather than the "in- 
 vocation " of the Eternal, while the worshippers all 
 watch for a great event, indeed for a great advent, 
 waiting, like the paralytics beside the pool of Bethesda, 
 for "the moving of the water." Very striking and 
 beautiful too in its tenderness, and knowledge of human 
 nature, is Newman's delineation of the manner in which 
 Reding's mother takes leave of him when he announces 
 that he is going to join the Roman Catholic Church. 
 She holds out her hand coldly to him at first, reproaches 
 him with leaving his early friends, reproaches herself for 
 having made too much of him, and intimates that he is 
 leaving his own communion only because he likes leaving 
 it. When Charles replies, that in the Apostles' time 
 men were expected to give up all for Christ, she retorts 
 that this means that they of the English Church are 
 heathens, and she thanks him in a frigid manner for 
 such a comparison. Then she begins to refer to his 
 " dear father," her dead husband, and breaks down, and 
 he throws himself on his knees and lays his head in 
 her lap. The feelings of the mother altogether ex- 
 tinguish the hurt pride of the woman, and the scene 
 ends with her stroking his hair as she used to do when 
 a child, and letting her tears stream over his face. 
 Except in Callista, Newman has written nothing in the 
 form of fiction more touching than this passage. The 
 close of the book, where all the religious impostors 
 crowd into Charles's lodging, one after another, as 
 candidates for his adhesion, when it is rumoured that 
 he is dissatisfied with the Church of England, and is 
 
NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 197 
 
 leaving it for another communion, is a shade too farcical. 
 It may perhaps represent some portion of Newman's 
 personal experience, but then Newman was a distin- 
 guished man before he left the Anglican communion, 
 and his movements would be watched by all sorts of 
 religious speculators. Charles Eeding could not possibly 
 have been known to all these vigilant touters for 
 religious adherents. He was a young Oxonian, and 
 nothing more. 
 
 The next indication we have of the movements of 
 Newman's mind after he joined the Roman Catholic 
 communion, was the volume of Sermons addressed to 
 Mixed Congregations, first published in 1849, and dedi- 
 cated to the Right Rev. Nicholas Wiseman, not as yet 
 at that time made a cardinal. These sermons have a 
 definite tone and genius of their own ; they have more 
 in them of the enthusiasm of a convert than any other 
 of Newman's publications, and altogether contain the 
 most eloquent and elaborate specimens of his eloquence 
 as a preacher, and of his sense, if I may so call it, of the 
 religious advantages of his position as a spokesman of 
 the great Church of Rome. They represent more 
 adequately Dr. Newman as he was when he first felt 
 himself " unmuzzled " (to use the phrase wired by Mr. 
 Gladstone after the University of Oxford had rejected 
 him, and he was no longer bound by the special 
 etiquettes of a University representative), than any 
 other of his writings ; and though they have not to 
 me quite the delicate charm of the reserve, and I might 
 almost say the shy passion, of his Oxford sermons, they 
 represent the full-blown blossom of his genius, while 
 the former show it only in bud. 
 
 There, as in almost all his subsequent works, he gave 
 
198 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 full rein to his wonderful power of irony, and even the 
 passages of tender eloquence, exquisite as they are, seem 
 to me inferior in force to the passages of scornful irony 
 in which he analyzes the worldly view of worldly things. 
 Take, for instance, the second sermon, that on " Neglect 
 of Divine Calls and Warnings," and compare the passage, 
 powerful and fearful as it is, in which he delineates 
 the agony of a soul which finds itself lost, with the 
 passage in which he delineates what the world is 
 meantime saying of the person "now no more," who 
 is undergoing the first pangs of this dreadful and end- 
 less suffering. " Impossible ! " he supposes the lost one 
 to exclaim on hearing the Judge's sentence ; " I a lost 
 soul ! I separated from hope and from peace for ever I 
 It is not I of whom the Judge so spake ! There is 
 a mistake somewhere ; Christ, Saviour, hold Thy hand 
 — one minute to explain it ! My name is Demas ; I 
 am but Demas, not Judas, or Nicholas, or Alexander, 
 or Philetus, or Diotrephes. What ! Eternal pain for 
 me ! Impossible ! it shall not be." And so he goes 
 on till the reader drops the book in horror and sickness 
 of heart. 
 
 Now take the suggestion of what the world may be 
 saying of him who is thus helplessly wrestling against 
 unendurable anguish, and refusing to believe in its 
 reality. " The man's name, perhaps, is solemnly chanted 
 forth, and his memory decently cherished among his 
 friends on earth. His readiness in speech, his fertility 
 in thought, his sagacity or his wisdom, are not for- 
 gotten. Men talk of him from time to time ; they 
 appeal to his authority ; they quote his words ; perhaps 
 they even raise a monument to his name, or write his 
 history. * So comprehensive a mind ! such a power of 
 
NEWMAN AS EOMAN CATHOLIC. 199 
 
 throwing light on a perplexed subject, and bringing 
 ideas or facts into harmony ! * * Such a speech it was 
 that he made on such and such an occasion; I hap- 
 pened to be present, and never shall forget it ' ; or, * It 
 was the saying of a very sensible man ' ; or, ' A great 
 personage whom some of us knew ' ; or, ' It was a rule 
 with a very worthy and excellent friend of mine, now 
 no more ' ; or, ' Never was his equal in society, so just 
 in his remarks, so versatile, so unobtrusive' ; or, * I was 
 fortunate to see him once when I was a boy ' ; or, ' So 
 great a benefactor to his country and to his kind'; or, 
 'His discoveries so great'; or, 'His philosophy so pro- 
 found.' vanity, vanity of vanities, all is vanity ! 
 What profiteth it, what profiteth it, his soul is in hell." 
 Or take the passage in the sixth sermon, on "God's 
 Will the end of Life," in which Dr. Newman paints the 
 vulgar social ambitions of a citizen's life. " You think it 
 the sign of a gentleman to set yourselves above religion; 
 to criticize the religious and professors of religion ; to 
 look at Catholic and Methodist with impartial contempt; 
 to gain a smattering of knowledge on a number of 
 subjects ; to dip into a number of frivolous publications, 
 if they are popular ; to have read the latest novel ; to 
 have heard the singer, and seen the actor of the day ; 
 to be up to the news; to know the names and, if 
 so be, the persons of public men; to be able to bow 
 to them; to walk up and down the street with your 
 heads on high, and to stare at whatever meets you, and 
 to say and do worse things, of which these are but the 
 symbol. And this is what you conceive you have come 
 upon earth for ! The Creator made you, it seems, O my 
 children, for this work and office, to be a bad imitation 
 of polished ungodliness, to be a piece of tawdry and 
 
200 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 faded finery, or a scent which has lost its freshness and 
 does but offend the sense." ^ 
 
 The extraordinary wealth of detail with which New- 
 man conceives and realizes the various sins and miseries 
 of the human lot has, perhaps, never been illustrated in 
 all his writings with so much force as in the wonderful 
 sixteenth sermon on " The Mental Sufferings of our Lord 
 in His Passion " — a sermon before which even the rich- 
 ness and wealth of Jeremy Taylor's imagination looks 
 poor in the comparison. '' It is the long history of a 
 world, and God alone can bear the load of it. Hopes 
 blighted, vows broken, lights quenched, warnings scorned, 
 opportunities lost ; the innocent betrayed, the young 
 hardened, the penitent relapsing, the just overcome, 
 the aged failing ; the sophistry of misbelief, the wilful- 
 ness of passion, the obduracy of pride, the tyranny of 
 habit, the canker of remorse, the wasting fever of 
 care, the anguish of shame, the pining of disappoint- 
 ment, the sickness of despair ; such cruel, such pitiable 
 spectacles, such heartrending, revolting, detestable, mad- 
 dening scenes; nay, the haggard faces, the convulsed 
 lips, the flushed cheek, the dark brow of the willing 
 victims of rebellion, they are all before Him now, they 
 are upon Him and in Him. They are with Him 
 instead of that ineffable peace which has inhabited His 
 soul since the moment of His conception. They are 
 upon Him ; they are all but His own ; He cries to His 
 Father as if He were the criminal, not the victim; His 
 agony takes the form of guilt and compunction. He is 
 doing penance, He is making confession. He is exer- 
 cising contrition with a reality and a virtue infinitely 
 
 ^ Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations y 3rd edition, pp. 
 132, 133. 
 
NEWMAN AS EOMAN CATHOLIC. 201 
 
 greater than that of all saints and penitents together ; 
 for He is the One Victim for us all, the sole Satisfaction, 
 the real Penitent, all but the real sinner." ^ 
 
 There you see the Catholic system taking full hold 
 of Newman, and inspiring him with a sense of its 
 authority and grandeur. Certainly no one could ever 
 have gathered from the Gospels or Epistles that all this 
 infinitude of anguish, quite alien to the special agony of 
 the situation, and gathered out of all lands, from the 
 east and from the west, from the north and from the 
 south, and from all forms and phases of human trans- 
 gression, piled itself up in the spirit of our Lord, and 
 pressed upon Him, during His Passion, with the close- 
 ness of almost personal remorse. Yet so the Fathers of 
 the Church had analyzed the mystery of the Passion, 
 and so Newman unquestioningly accepted it. What- 
 ever he has thought that he " ought " to believe, he has 
 always found the means, not only to believe, but to 
 interpret to himself with a unique vivacity and intensity 
 of conception. 
 
 Never again did Newman give the rein so fully to 
 what we may call the pious impressions, by the aid of 
 which the Catholic Fathers have interpreted and illus- 
 trated the theology of the Church, as he did in this 
 volume. In the sermons, for example, exquisite, even 
 if too elaborate, as compositions, on The Glories of Mary 
 for the sake of her Son, he almost rivalled the passion 
 of Italian and French devotion to the mother of our 
 Lord, and anticipated the dogma of the Immaculate 
 Conception of the Virgin, some years before it had been 
 defined. I know no passage in Newman which so 
 
 ^ Discourses addressed to Mixed Co7igregations, 3rd edition, pp. 
 394, 395. 
 
202 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 thoroughly bewilders the Protestant imagination, in its 
 unwillingness to accept vague tradition of the most 
 distant and uncertain origin, as evidence for historic 
 fact, as that in which he deals with the death of the 
 mother of Christ. " Though she died as well as others, 
 she died not as others die ; for through the merits of 
 her Son, by A\liom she was what she was, by the grace 
 of Christ which in her had anticipated sin, which had 
 filled her with light, which had purified her flesh from 
 all defilement, she had been saved from disease and 
 malady, and all that weakens and decays the bodily 
 frame." Then he goes on to say: — "She died, but 
 her death was a mere fact, not an effect; and when 
 it was over, it ceased to be. She died that she might 
 live; she died as a matter of form or (as I may call 
 it) a ceremony, in order to fulfil what is called the 
 debt of nature — not primarily for herself, or because 
 of sin, but to submit herself to her condition, to glorify 
 God, to do what her Son did ; not, however, as her Son 
 and Saviour, with any suffering for any special end ; 
 not with a martyr s death, for her martyrdom had been 
 in living ; not as an atonement, for man could not make 
 it, — and One had made it, and made it for all, — but in 
 order to finish her course and to receive her crown. 
 And therefore she died in private. It became Him 
 who died for the world to die in the world's sight ; it 
 became the great Sacrifice to be lifted up on high as a 
 light that could not be hid. But she, the lily of Eden, 
 who had always dwelt out of the sight of man, fittingly 
 did she die in the garden's shade, and amid the sweet 
 flowers in which she had lived. Her departure made 
 no noise in the world. The Church went about her 
 common duties — preaching, converting, suffering ; there 
 
NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 203 
 
 were persecutions, there was fleeing from place to place, 
 there were martyrs, there were triumphs; at length 
 the rumour spread through Christendom that Mary was 
 no longer upon earth. Pilgrims went to and fro ; they 
 sought for her relics, but they found them not. Did 
 she die at Ephesus ? or did she die at Jerusalem ? 
 Accounts varied, but her tomb could not be pointed 
 out, or if it was found, it was open ; and instead of her 
 pure and fragrant body, there was a growth of lilies 
 from the earth which she had touched. So, inquirers 
 went home marvelling, and waiting for further light. 
 And then the tradition came wafted westward on the 
 aromatic breeze, how that when the time of her dis- 
 solution was at hand, and her soul was to pass in 
 triumph before the judgment-seat of her Son, the 
 Apostles were suddenly gathered together in one place, 
 even in the Holy City, to bear part in the joyful cere- 
 monial ; how that they buried her with fitting rites ; 
 how that the third day when they came to the tomb, 
 they found it empty, and angelic choirs with their glad 
 voices were heard singing day and night the glories of 
 their risen Queen. But however we feel towards the 
 detail of this history (nor is there anything in it which 
 will be unwelcome and difficult to piety), so much cannot 
 be doubted, from the consent of the whole Catholic 
 world and the revelations made to holy souls, that, as 
 is befitting, she is, soul and body, with her Son and God 
 in heaven, and that we are enabled to celebrate, not 
 only her death, but her Assumption." ^ 
 
 I gather from this, that Newman thinks the story 
 of the apostolic gathering to bury the Virgin Mary a 
 
 1 Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations, 3rd edition, 
 pp. 437—439. 
 
/ 
 
 204 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 pious opinion "not unwelcome or difficult to piety" 
 (though I should have supposed that a very great deal 
 which it is not unwelcome to pious people to believe 
 is yet very difficult for them to believe on what 
 amounts to hardly any evidence at all), but that he 
 regards the Assumption of her body to heaven as a 
 fact sufficiently attested by " the consent of the whole 
 Catholic world, and the revelations made to holy souls." 
 How does " the consent of the whole Catholic world " 
 to a tradition of which we cannot in the least trace the 
 origin, hidden as it is in the obscure depths of the first 
 century, justify us in accepting as historic fact that 
 of which there is absolutely not a morsel of historic 
 evidence ? Does the consent of the whole heroic 
 age of Greece guarantee the historic truth of the 
 labours of Hercules? or the consent of the whole 
 mediaeval age of Europe prove the historic truth of 
 the existence of fairies ? And have we any reason 
 to suppose that the assent of the Church of one century 
 to belief in a fact which could only have had any legiti- 
 mate attestation in another century, is a good ground 
 for accepting that fact ? The '* revelations given to 
 holy souls" might of course be evidence if there were 
 proof of the perfect truthfulness and sobriety of these 
 individual seers, and independent evidence of their 
 supernatural discernment of other facts, which at the 
 time at which they were discerned were beyond the 
 range of their senses, but afterwards verified. But what 
 is to ordinary minds marvellous in this passage is the 
 apparent acquiescence of so great a thinker as Newman 
 in the doctrine that "the mind of the Church" is not 
 only empowered to develop doctrine, but to attest minor 
 historic facts of which it has had no evidence apparently, 
 
NEWMAN AS EOMAN CATHOLIC. 205 
 
 and this on no better ground than that such facts would 
 not be unwelcome to it if the evidence were forthcoming^. 
 Surely the readiness, and even eagerness, with which 
 it assimilates a tradition of which no one can find the 
 smallest trace in the only age in which, if a genuine 
 tradition at all, it must have originated, is a ground for 
 distrust rather than for trust. How can Newman say 
 that a good Catholic " ought " to believe a fact of this 
 kind, — not even a " dogmatic fact," not even a fact in- 
 timately bound up with a cardinal doctrine of the 
 Church, — on the strength merely of the consent of the 
 Church in a devotional but uncritical age, to celebrate 
 a festival of the Assumption ? One might as well say 
 that an Oxonian of University College "ought" to 
 believe that King Alfred founded that college, because 
 such a belief is grateful to the minds of University 
 College men, though the best historians regard it as 
 quite baseless. To me this is just the most suspicious 
 of all the aspects of Roman Catholicism, that the Church 
 shows such avidity in accepting as facts, devotional 
 dreams of apparently very late and ambiguous origin. 
 Some French Roman Catholics use a devotion to St. 
 Mary Magdalene which contains entreaties for her 
 intercession addressed in the following terms, — " Vous 
 qui avez pass^ de long jours dans une solitude affreuse 
 vivant miraculeusement — vous qui sept fois par jour, 
 ^tiez port^e par les anges au sommet du ciel," &c. 
 Now I do not suppose for a moment that these devotions 
 have the authority of the Church, in the sense in which 
 the teaching that the body of the mother of our Lord 
 was raised on the third day and ascended to heaven 
 has that authority. But I do say that utterly 
 unauthentic statements of this kind are welcomed 
 
206 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 generally in Catholic devotion, and that, though they 
 may contain harmless as well as baseless assertions 
 considered in themselves, it is not a perfectly harmless 
 state of mind to be eager to feed the imagination on 
 dreams of which there is no evidence at all, beyond the 
 readiness of popular assemblies to adopt as serious truth 
 the statements made in picturesque legends of which 
 the origin is entirely lost. I can understand, and to a 
 certain extent I believe, that inspiration not only guides 
 and overrules our ideal of the spiritual life, but moulds 
 the attitude of the Church to whom it is revealed, and 
 guards the development of its mind in bringing out 
 the meaning of doctrine to questioning believers. 
 But the contention that the Church may bear authori- 
 tative witness for the first time in a late age to facts 
 of which no early trace remains, to facts not only not 
 admitting of the smallest comparison in the amount of 
 evidence producible for them with the facts of the 
 Gospel, but, on the contrary, having upon them the 
 most marked characteristics of popular legends, seems 
 to me one of the most startling to which Newman ever 
 gave cordial assent. We might almost as well regard 
 the old village plays on St. George and the Dragon 
 as satisfactory evidence of that mythical contest. Is 
 it not true that the Roman Catholic disposition to treat 
 opinions as "pious" for which there is nothing approach- 
 ing to evidence, lends sanction to the doctrine that 
 " the wish to believe " in the reality of a certain event 
 is a good reason for actually believing in it ? This is 
 the side of Newman's mind with which the greater 
 number of his fellow - countrymen feel the greatest 
 possible difficulty in sympathizing. 
 
 The next landmark in Newman's history as a Roman 
 
NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 207 
 
 Catholic was his delivery and publication in 1850 of 
 the Lectures on Anglican Difficulties, delivered in the 
 Oratory in King William Street, Strand, where Toole's 
 Theatre now stands, at all or almost all of which I 
 was present as a young man. In matter and style 
 alike these lectures were marked by all the signs of 
 his singular literary genius. They were simpler and less 
 ornate than the Sermo7is addressed to Mixed Congregations, 
 and more exquisite in form as well as more complete 
 in substance than the Essay on Development, which 
 was written under the heavy pressure of the dreaded 
 and anticipated rupture between himself and the Church 
 of his baptism. I think the Lectures on Anglican 
 Difficulties was the first book of Newman's generally 
 read amongst Protestants, in which the measure of his 
 literary power could be adequately taken. In the 
 Oxford sermons there had been of course more room 
 for the expression of religious feeling of a higher type, 
 and frequently there had been more evidence of 
 depth and grasp of mind ; but here was a great subject 
 with which Newman was perfectly intimate, giving the 
 fullest scope to his powers of orderly and beautiful 
 exposition, and opening a far greater range to his 
 singular genius for gentle and delicate irony than any- 
 thing which he had previously written. It is a book, 
 however, which adds but little to our insight into his 
 mind, though it adds much to our estimate of his 
 powers, and I must pass it by with only brief notice. 
 I shall never forget the impression which his voice and 
 manner, which opened upon me for the first time 
 in these lectures, made on me. Never did a voice 
 seem better adapted to persuade without irritating. 
 Singularly sweet, perfectly free from any dictatorial 
 
208 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 note, and yet rich in all the cadences proper to the 
 expression of pathos, of wonder, and of ridicule, there 
 was still nothing in it that any one could properly 
 describe as insinuating, for its simplicity, and frank- 
 ness, and freedom from the half- smothered notes which 
 express indirect purpose, was as remarkable as its 
 sweetness, its freshness, and its gentle distinctness. As 
 he described the growth of his disillusionment with the 
 Church of England, and compared it to the trans- 
 formation which takes place in fairy tales when the 
 magic castle vanishes, the spell is broken, " and nothing 
 is seen but the wild heath, the barren rock, and the 
 forlorn sheep-walk," no one could have doubted that 
 he was describing with perfect truth the change that 
 had taken place in his own mind. " So it is with us," 
 he said, " as regards the Church of England, when we 
 look in amazement on that we thought so unearthly, 
 and find so commonplace or worthless. Then we 
 perceive that aforetime we have not been guided by 
 reason, but biased by education, and swayed by 
 affection. We see in the English Church, I will not 
 merely say, no descent from the first ages, and no 
 relationship to the Church in other lands, but we see 
 no body politic of any kind; we see nothing more or 
 less than an establishment, a department of govern- 
 ment, or a function or operation of the State — without 
 a substance, — a mere collection of officials, depending on 
 and living in the supreme civil power. Its unity and 
 personality are gone, and with them its power of 
 exciting feelings of any kind. It is easier to love or 
 hate au abstraction than so tangible a frame-work or 
 machinery." ^ 
 
 ^ Lectures on Anglican Difficulties, p. 7, 2nd edition. 
 
NEWMAN AS KOMAN CATHOLIC. 209 
 
 This is, of course, an exaggerated view. It is not 
 true that the State can do what it pleases with the 
 English Church, can modify its theology or change its 
 liturgy at will ; but it is still less true that the Church 
 can do as she will without the consent of the State. 
 The English Church is an amalgam of two alien 
 organizations, not the organized form of a religious 
 society. "Elizabeth," said Newman, "boasted that 
 she * tuned its pulpits ' ; Charles forbade discussions on 
 predestination; George on the Holy Trinity; Victoria 
 allows differences on Holy Baptism." The dialogue 
 which Newman constructed in his fourth lecture 
 between the Tractarian and the State, to illustrate 
 this view, was one of the most effective pieces of irony 
 I ever heard. I may briefly condense it. "Why should 
 any man in Britain," asks a Tract, " fear or hesitate 
 boldly to assert the authority of the Bishops and 
 pastors of the Church on grounds strictly evangelical 
 and spiritual ? " " Reverend Sir," answered the Primate 
 to a protest against a Bishop elect accused of heresy, 
 '• it is not within the bounds of any authority possessed 
 by me to give you an opportunity of proving your 
 objections; finding therefore nothing in which I could 
 act in compliance with your remonstrance, I proceeded, 
 in the execution of my office, to obey her Majesty's 
 mandate for Dr. Hampden's consecration in the usual 
 form." " Are we contented," asks another Tract, " to 
 be accounted the mere creation of the State, as school- 
 masters and teachers may be, as soldiers or magistrates, 
 or other public officers ? Did the State make us ? 
 Can it unmake us ? Can it send out missionaries ? 
 Can it arrange dioceses ? " " William the Fourth," 
 answers the first magistrate of the State, *' by the grace 
 
 P 
 
210 CARDINAL NEWMAlJ. 
 
 of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and 
 Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, to all to whom 
 these presents shall come, greeting; we having great 
 confidence in the learning, morals, and probity of our 
 well-beloved and venerable William Grant Broughton, 
 do name and appoint him to be Bishop and ordinary 
 pastor of the See of Australia." " Confirmation is an 
 ordinance," says the Tract, " in which the Bishop wit- 
 nesses Christ. . . . The Bishop is His figure and likeness 
 when he lays his hands on the heads of children. 
 Then Christ comes to them to confirm in them the 
 grace of baptism." " And we do hereby give and grant 
 to the said Bishop of Australia," proceeds his Majesty, 
 " and his successors, Bishops of Australia, full power and 
 authority to confirm those that are baptized and come 
 to years of discretion." "Moreover," says the Tract, 
 " the Bishop rules the Church here below, as Christ rules 
 it above. . . . He is Christ's instrument." " And we 
 do by these presents give and grant to the said Bishop 
 and his successors. Bishops of Australia, full power and 
 authority to admit into the holy orders of deacon and 
 priest respectively any person whom he shall deem 
 duly qualified." " The Bishop speaks in me," says the 
 Tract, "as Christ wrought in him, and as God sent 
 Christ. Thus the whole plan of salvation hangs together 
 — Christ the true mediator ; His servant the Bishop, His 
 earthly likeness; mankind the subjects of His teaching; 
 God the" author of salvation. And the Queen answers, 
 * We do hereby signify to the most reverend Father in 
 God, William, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, our 
 nomination of the said Augustus, requiring, and by the 
 faith and love whereby he is bound unto us, command- 
 ing the said most reverend Father in God to ordain 
 
NEWMAN AS EOMAN CATHOLIC. 211 
 
 and consecrate the said Augustus.' And the con- 
 secrated prelate echoes from across the ocean against 
 the Catholic pastor of the country, ' Augustus, by the 
 grace of God and the favour of Queen Victoria, Bishop.'"^ 
 Indeed this whole lecture delivers one of the most 
 powerful attacks ever opened on_the Anglican theory 
 of the Church as independent of the State. INot less 
 powerful was Newman's delineation, in the fifth lecture, 
 of the collapse of the Anglican theory of the Church 
 when applied to practice. The Anglicans, he said, 
 " had reared a goodly house, but their foundations were 
 falling in. The soil and the masonry both were bad. 
 The Fathers would protect ' Romanists ' as well as 
 extinguish Dissenters. The Anglican divines would 
 misquote the Fathers and shrink from the very doctors 
 to whom they appealed. The Bishops of the seven- 
 teenth century were shy of the Bishops of the fourth, 
 and the Bishops of the nineteenth were shy of the 
 Bishops of the seventeenth. The Ecclesiastical Courts 
 upheld the sixteenth century against the seventeenth, 
 and, unconscious of the flagrant irregularities of Pro- 
 testant clergymen, chastised the mild misdemeanours 
 of Anglo-Catholic. Soon the living rulers of the 
 Establishment began to move. There are those who, 
 reversing the Roman maxim, are wont to shrink from 
 the contumacious, and to be valiant towards the sub- 
 missive ; and the authorities in question gladly availed 
 themselves of the power conferred on them by the 
 movement against the movement itself. They fear- 
 lessly handselled their Apostolical weapons against the 
 Apostolical party. One after another, in long succession, 
 
 ^ Lectures on Anglican Difficulties, pp. 89—91, 2nd edition. 
 
21^ CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 they took up their song and their parable against it. 
 It was a solemn war-dance which they executed round 
 victims, who, by their very principles, were bound hand 
 and foot, and could only eye, with disgust and per- 
 plexity, this most unaccountable movement on the 
 part of these ' holy Fathers, the representatives of the 
 Apostles and the Angels of the Churches.' It was the 
 beginning of the end." ^ 
 
 The lectures were much more powerful in attack than 
 in defence. Those of which it was the object to show 
 that the Anglican Church was essentially Erastian, and 
 was not one which could ever satisfy the ideal of the 
 Tractarians, were simply demonstrative ; the lectures of 
 which it was the intention to remove the objections felt 
 towards the Roman Catholic communion were partly 
 defective, partly inadequate. They did not deal at all 
 with what seems to me the greatest of all objections 
 to the Roman Catholic Church, the indifference she 
 shows to reasonable criticisms, even in her most solemn 
 acts, such as the sanction given to utterly unhistorical 
 facts in the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, 
 and the sanction given to the doctrine of the plenary 
 inspiration of the Scriptures in the decrees of the 
 Council of Trent and (subsequently) of the Council of 
 the Vatican. On the other hand, the eighth and ninth 
 lectures on the " Political state of Catholic countries no 
 prejudice to the sanctity of the Church," and the 
 "Religious character of Catholic countries no prejudice 
 to the sanctity of the Church," raise, I think, at least as 
 many difficulties as they remove. And in effect they 
 almost concede that comparative want of self-reliance 
 
 * Lectures on Anglican Difficulties, pp. 125-26, lecture V. 
 
NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 213 
 
 and self-control in matters both political and religious 
 which certainly characterizes Catholic countries, as 
 distinguished from those Catholic communities which 
 exist in the heart of Protestant countries, and which 
 are surrounded on all sides by religious opponents. 
 Newman's apology for the political and religious state 
 of Ireland as given in 1850 seems even less effective, 
 indeed much less effective, when read in 1890 than it 
 seemed then. Almost all that Ireland has gained 
 since 1850, she has gained by the resolute ignoring 
 of Catholic principles ; and all that she has lost, she 
 has lost by the resolute ignoring of Catholic principles. 
 And though the gain may be considerable politically, 
 I fear the moral loss far outweighs the political gain. 
 
 The Lectures on Catholicism in England^ delivered 
 and published in the year of the first great Exhibition, 
 1851, need not detain me for more than a few lines. 
 They represent very effectively the force of the " Pro- 
 testant tradition" as it was in 1851, though what was 
 truly enough said then, now enormously exaggerates 
 the force of that tradition, the difference being largely 
 due to Newman's personal influence, exerted partly 
 through the publication of these lectures, though in a 
 far greater degree through the publication of his religious 
 autobiography thirteen years later. The Lectures on 
 Catholicism in England depicted very powerfully the 
 nonsensical and fanatical side of Protestantism, though 
 they did not do justice to the grounds of offence found 
 by sober and accurate-minded men in the teaching of 
 the Roman Catholic Communion. There are passages 
 in these lectures which pass the limits of irony, and 
 approach the region of something like controversial farce, 
 yet farce of no common order of power. Where, for 
 
214 CAKDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 example, could we find a more exquisitely humorous 
 and yet a truer description than Newman gives of 
 the mode in which the re-establishment of the Roman 
 Catholic hierarchy in this country had been received by 
 English Protestants in the preceding year ? " Heresy, 
 and scepticism, and infidelity, and fanaticism may 
 challenge" the Established Church, he said, "in vain; 
 but fling upon the gale the faintest whisper of Catholic- 
 ism, and it recognizes by instinct the presence of its 
 connatural foe. Forthwith, as during the last year, 
 the atmosphere is tremulous with agitation, and dis- 
 charges its vibrations far and wide. A movement 
 is in birth which has no natural crisis or resolution. 
 Spontaneously the bells of the steeples begin to sound. 
 Not by an act of volition, but by a sort of mechanical 
 impulse, bishop and dean, archdeacon and canon, rector 
 and curate, one after another, each on his high tower, 
 off they set, swinging and booming, tolling and chiming, 
 with nervous intenseness, and thickening emotion, and 
 deafening volume, the old ding-dong which has scared 
 town and country this weary time ; tolling and chiming 
 away, jingling and clamouring, and ringing the changes 
 on their poor half-dozen notes, all about * the Popish 
 aggression,' 'insolent and insidious,' 'insidious and in- 
 solent,' * insolent and atrocious,' ' atrocious and insolent,' 
 * atrocious, insolent, and ungrateful,' * ungrateful, in- 
 solent, and atrocious,' ' foul and offensive,' * pestilent and 
 horrid,' ' subtle and unholy,' ' audacious and revolting,' 
 ' contemptible and shameless,' * malignant,' ' frightful,' 
 *mad,' 'meretricious,' bobs (I think the ringers call 
 them), bobs, and bobs royal, and triple bob-majors and 
 grandsires — to the extent of their compass, and the full 
 ring of their metal, in honour of Queen Bess, and to 
 
NEWxMAN AS EOMAN CATHOLIC. 215 
 
 the confusion of the Pope and the j)rinces of the 
 Church." ' 
 
 Probably the most important of the immediate results 
 of this course of lectures was the action for libel brouirht 
 by Dr. Achilli against Newman, for the picture painted 
 of him in the fifth lecture on " The Popular Inconsistency 
 of the Protestant View." Dr. Achilli, who professed to 
 be a convert from Komanism, was accused by the Papal 
 Government of a grossly irregular life, and Newman 
 used the offences of which that Government believed 
 him to be guilty as illustrations of the sources from 
 which the Protestant tradition derives its knowledge of 
 the Catholic faith. The charges were flatly denied by 
 Dr. Achilli, who declared that his real sin in the eyes of 
 the Papal Government was his heterodoxy, and though 
 Newman brought a large number of witnesses to support 
 his statements, the British jury, directed by the late 
 Lord Campbell, was not disposed to be satisfied with 
 evidence which ran counter to the Protestant tradition 
 of the day. The general impression even of non- 
 Catholic culture at the time was not favourable to the 
 impartiality of Lord Campbell's charge, but it fell in 
 with the temper of the middle classes of that day, and 
 gave the jury a good excuse for their verdict, that the 
 main accusations had not been justified to their 
 satisfaction. The costs amounted to £12,000, and 
 were paid by a Catholic subscription from all parts of 
 the world; even the soberer view among Protestants 
 was not for the most part in harmony with the verdict 
 or with the attitude of the judge. Nevertheless, 
 another period of eleven years elapsed before an attack 
 
 1 Lectures on Catholicism in England, 1st edition, lecture ii., 
 
 pp. 73, 74. 
 
216 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 of a different character, proceeding from the pen of a 
 very different assailant, gave Dr. Newman the oppor- 
 tunity of achieving the greatest triumph of his life, so 
 far as regards his influence over men of theological 
 tendencies quite different from his own. 
 
 In 1852 Newman was sent to Dublin, to inaugurate 
 there the Roman Catholic University teaching, which 
 has been struggling into existence — more or less feebly 
 — ever since. The lectures, or " Discourses " rather, 
 on The Idea of a University, which he delivered and 
 published on this occasion, are full of graceful and in- 
 structive thought; and indeed gave an impulse to the 
 comprehension of true University culture, which had, I 
 believe, a very great effect in stimulating the reforms 
 which soon afterwards took place in the Universities 
 of Oxford and Cambridge, though they have not often 
 been traced home to this origin. The reason why the 
 influence of these remarkable " Discourses " (they were 
 too much of academical " Discourses," to my mind, and 
 therefore did not do full justice to that exquisite ease 
 of manner which is usually the greatest literary charm 
 of Dr. Newman's writings) on the movements which 
 so soon afterwards took place at Oxford and Cambridge 
 was missed, was that their chief design — namely, to bring 
 out the importance of Theology as the uniting bond of 
 all the sciences — was directly in antagonism to the 
 reforming movement in the English Universities, where 
 theological considerations — and those of a dry and 
 formal kind — had long been more mixed up with the 
 motives determining the choice of teachers in other 
 branches of study, than they ought to have been. But 
 what is forgotten is, that these discourses enforced with 
 the utmost power the true purpose of liberal education. 
 
NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 217 
 
 that it is a pursuit of knowledge for the sake of 
 knowledge, and not for the value of any of the fruits 
 or applications of knowledge, however important. 
 Newman earnestly repudiated the notion that the 
 acquisition of knowledge is merely subsidiary even 
 to religion. On the contrary, his general position 
 throughout these discourses is, that Theology is essential 
 to true University study, because it is a branch of true 
 knowledge, and indeed the most real and the most 
 important of all the branches of true knowledge, since 
 it harmonizes and connects all the other studies and 
 sciences, and gives them their due subordination in 
 relation to the purposes of life. 
 
 At that time Newman had a difficult task to achieve 
 in persuading the Roman Catholic prelates of Ireland 
 that University teaching, in the sense in which Newman 
 understood and advocated it, was of the greatest possible 
 importance to all true Catholics who had to deal with 
 the greater intellectual forces of the world, besides that, 
 in fact, such culture gives them for the first time true 
 possession of their own minds. The Catholic prelates 
 knew how much there is in liberal education, of a 
 tendency to subvert faith, and this they justly feared. 
 They did not know how much there is in the world, 
 without liberal education, that has the same tendency in 
 a still higher degree ; they had not grasped the fact that 
 the uneducated mind is utterly unable to understand 
 the true proportions of things, and magnifies immensely 
 the significance of the first difiiculties or paradoxes with 
 which, in the study of religion, it is brought face to face. 
 To prelates in such a state of mind as this there must 
 have been food for very useful and perhaps rather 
 painful reflection in such considerations as these which 
 
218 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 the Rector of their infant University pressed upon them 
 with his wonted vivacity and energy. "Even if we 
 could, still we should be shrinking from our plain duty, 
 gentlemen, did we leave out literature from education. 
 For why do we educate except to prepare for the 
 world ? Why do we cultivate the intellect of the 
 many beyond the first elements of knowledge, except 
 for this world ? Will it be much matter in the world 
 to come whether our bodily health, or whether our in- 
 tellectual strength, was more or less, except of course as 
 this world is in all its circumstances a trial for the next ? 
 If then a University is a direct preparation for this 
 world, let it be what it professes. It is not a convent ; 
 it is not a seminary ; it is a place to fit men of the 
 world for the world. We cannot possibly keep them 
 from plunging into the world, with all its ways and 
 principles and maxims, when their time comes ; but 
 we can prepare them against what is inevitable ; and it 
 is not the way to learn to swim in troubled waters never 
 to have gone into them. Proscribe, I do not merely say 
 particular authors, particular works, particular passages, 
 but Secular Literature as such; cut out from your 
 class-books all broad manifestations of the natural man ; 
 and these manifestations are waiting for your pupil's 
 benefit at the very doors of your lecture-room in living 
 and breathing substance. They will meet him there in 
 all the charm of novelty, and all the fascination of 
 genius or of amiableness. To-day a pupil, to-morrow 
 a member of the great world ; to-day confined to the 
 lives of the Saints, to-morrow thrown upon Babel — 
 thrown on Babel without the honest indulgence of wit 
 and humour and imagination having ever been per- 
 mitted to him, without any fastidiousness of taste 
 
NEWMAN AS KOMAN CATHOLIC. 219 
 
 wrought into him, without any rule given him for 
 discriminating *the precious from the vile/ beauty 
 from sin, the truth from the sophistry of nature, what 
 is innocent from what is poison. You have refused him 
 the masters of human thought, who would in some 
 sense have educated him, because of their incidental 
 corruption ; you have shut up from him those whose 
 thoughts strike home to our hearts, whose words are 
 proverbs, whose names are indigenous to all the world, 
 who are the standard of the mother tongue, and the 
 pride and boast of their countrymen. Homer, Ariosto, 
 Cervantes, Shakespeare, because the old Adam smelt 
 rank in them ; and for what have you reserved him ? 
 You have given him a ' liberty unto ' the multitudinous 
 blasphemy of his day ; you have made him free of its 
 newspapers, its reviews, its magazines, its novels, its 
 controversial pamphlets, of its Parliamentary debates, 
 its law proceedings, its platform speeches, its songs, 
 its drama, its theatre, of its enveloping, stifling atmo- 
 sphere of death. You have succeeded but in this — in 
 making the world his University."^ 
 
 I have often wished that we could have had as 
 frank an account of the impression made upon Newman 
 by his continuous residence in Dublin for several years, 
 and his intercourse with the Irish prelates, as we have 
 of that little tour of Carlyle in Ireland, which took place 
 about the time of Newman's first residence there. Of 
 course we never shall have any such record, for Newman 
 was too prudent as well, I imagine, as too modest to 
 write down cursory impressions of the value of which 
 he himself would have been no doubt extremely sceptical. 
 
 ^ Discourse IX, § 8. 
 
220 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 But if we could have such a record, it might, I think, 
 considerably outweigh the value of Carlyle's brilliant 
 but inconsiderate and rather violent characterizations 
 of the Irish people and Irish scenes. 
 
 It was while he was still in Ireland that Newman 
 finished the little work which seems to me the most 
 perfect and singular in spiritual beauty, excepting 
 perhaps the Dream of Gerontius, that he has written, 
 Callista. " It is an attempt," he said in his preface, " to 
 imagine and express the feelings and mutual relations 
 of Christians and heathens at the period to which it 
 belongs,^ and it has been undertaken as the nearest 
 approach which the author could make to a more 
 important work suggested to him from a high ecclesi- 
 astical quarter." Callista was begun, he tells us, in the 
 early spring of 1848, probably soon after Loss and Gain 
 was finished ; but after sketching the character and 
 fortunes of Juba, the half- African youth (whose father, a 
 Roman soldier, is a languid Christian, while his mother 
 is a heathen sorceress), in whom Newman made a 
 powerful attempt to realize the significance of demoni- 
 acal possession as it was conceived and held in the 
 early centuries of the Christian era, he stopped, as he 
 says, " from sheer inability to devise personages or 
 incidents." " He suddenly resumed the thread of his 
 story shortly after St. Mary Magdalene's day," in 
 1855, and when it was finished it v/as published anony- 
 mously. The secret of the authorship, however, oozed 
 out, and an edition was soon published with Newman's 
 name. It has never attained the popularity which 
 it seems to me to deserve, partly perhaps because the 
 framework of the story involves a certain amount of 
 
 1 The middle of the third century. 
 
NEWMAN AS KOMAN CATHOLIC. 221 
 
 antiquarian disquisition, which fatigues ordinary readers 
 — Hke the idol-seller's discourse to his nephew on the 
 different kinds of Roman marriage — and partly because 
 the sentiment of the book is of too exalted a kind to 
 make its way to the heart of a hasty reader in search of 
 exciting incident. Yet it is not wanting in very striking 
 and even sensational incidents. The invasion of the 
 locusts is described with all the imaginative power of a 
 great genius; the sudden madness which seizes upon 
 Juba when his mother curses and bewitches him, is 
 painted with extraordinary force ; and it would be 
 hard to delineate a popular riot involving persecution 
 and martyrdom with more strength and pathos. 
 
 After all, however, the great triumph of the book is 
 the delineation of the fair Greek, herself a sculptor of 
 idols, who has so passionate a love of Greek idealism, 
 and so deep a sense that there is some vision of truth 
 beyond the Greek idealism for which her heart yearns 
 in vain. The strange and apparently almost capricious 
 resentment with which she meets Agellius's offer of 
 marriage, because it lowers him in her eyes by making 
 it evident that his Christian faith was but an unreal 
 affair, and quite consistent with the ordinary devotion 
 to the passions and affections of time and sense of 
 which she had seen so much, is painted with the full 
 force of Newman's genius. I know nothing in all 
 fiction more delicate, more spiritual, more fascinating 
 than the story of Callista's conversion and death. The 
 reproaches she heaps on Agellius for not clearly dis- 
 criminating between his love for her and his wish for 
 her conversion, — which she calls "speaking one word 
 for his Master and two for himself," — and the deep 
 disappointment with which she discovers, or fancies she 
 
222 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 discovers, that Agellius is after all a good deal more 
 taken up with her and her beauty than with the faith 
 which she had hoped to have found the one great reality 
 of his existence, seem to me in many respects better ex- 
 pressions of the true passion and significance of New- 
 man's own unique and single-hearted life, than anything 
 else which he has written. "'If, as you imply,' she 
 says, ' my wants and aspirations are the same as yours, 
 what have you done towards satisfying them ? What 
 have you done for that Master towards whom you now 
 propose to lead me ? No,' she continued, starting up, 
 'you have watched those wants and aspirations for 
 yourself, not for Him; you have taken interest in 
 them, you have cherished them, as if you were the 
 author, you the object of them. You profess to believe 
 in One true God, and to reject every other; and now 
 you are implying that the Hand, the Shadow of that 
 God is on my mind and heart. Who is this God ? 
 where ? how ? in what ? Oh, Agellius, you have stood 
 in the way of Him, ready to speak of yourself, using 
 Him as a means to an end.' ' 0, Callista,' said Agellius 
 in an agitated voice, when he could speak, ' do my ears 
 hear aright ? do you really wish to be taught who 
 the true God is ? ' ' No ; mistake me not,' she cried 
 passionately, ' I have no such wish. I could not be 
 of your rehgion. Ye gods, how have I been deceived ! 
 I thought every Christian was like Chione. I thought 
 there could not be a cold Christian. Chione spoke as 
 if a Christian's first thoughts were good-will to others, 
 as if his state were of such blessedness that his dearest 
 heart's wish was to bring others into it. Here is a 
 man who, so far from feeling himself blest, thinks I 
 can bless him ; comes to me, me,^CalIista, a herb of the 
 
NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 223 
 
 field, a poor weed exposed to every wind of heaven 
 and shrivelling before the fierce sun — to me he comes 
 to repose his heart upon. But as for any blessedness 
 he has to show me, why, since he does not feel any 
 himself, no wonder he has none to give away. I 
 thought a Christian was superior to time and place, 
 but all is hollow. Alas ! alas ! I am young in life to feel 
 the force of that saying with which sages go out of it, 
 "Vanity and hollowness!" Agellius, when I first heard 
 you were a Christian, how my heart beat ! I thought 
 of her who was gone ; and at first I thought I saw her 
 in you, as if there had been some magical sympathy 
 between you and her; and I hoped that from you I 
 might have learned more of that strange strength which 
 my nature needs, and which she told me she possessed. 
 Your words, your manner, your looks were altogether 
 different from others who came near me. But so it 
 was; you came and you went, and came again; I 
 thought it reserve, I thought it timidity, I thought it 
 the caution of a persecuted sect ; but oh ! my dis- 
 appointment when first I saw in you indications that 
 you were thinking of me only as others think, and felt 
 towards me as others may feel ; that you were aiming 
 at me, not at your God ; that you had much to tell of 
 yourself, but nothing of Him ! Time was I might have 
 been led to worship you, Agellius ; you have hindered 
 it by worshipping mej " ^ 
 
 And when she is in prison on suspicion of being a 
 Christian, and has refused, she hardly knows why, to 
 burn incense to the Emperor, and a Greek philosopher 
 has been persuaded to come to her cell to convince 
 
 ^ Chapter xi. 
 
224 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 her of the unreasonableness of her proceeding, the 
 same fine passion bursts forth again with still more 
 definiteness and significance. " After a time Callista 
 said, ' Polemo, do you believe in one God ? ' * Certainly/ 
 he answered, 'I believe in one eternal, self-existing 
 something.' ' Well,' she said, ' I feel that God within 
 my heart, I feel myself in His presence. He says 
 to me, " Do this, don't do that." You may tell me 
 that this dictate is a mere law of my nature, as to 
 joy or to grieve. I cannot understand this. No, it is 
 the echo of a person speaking to me. Nothing shall 
 persuade me that it does not ultimately proceed from 
 a person external to me. It carries with it its proof of 
 its Divine origin. My nature feels towards it as towards 
 a person. When I obey it, I feel a satisfaction ; when 
 I disobey, a soreness, just as I feel in pleasing or offend- 
 ing some revered friend. So you see, Polemo, I believe 
 in what is more than a mere " something." I believe 
 in what is more real to me than sun, moon, stars, and 
 the fair earth, and the voice of friends. You will say, 
 Who is He? Has He ever told you anything about 
 Himself ? Alas ! no ! the more's the pity ! But I 
 will not give up what I have because I have not more. 
 An echo implies a voice, a voice a speaker. That 
 speaker I love and I fear.' Here she was exhausted, 
 and overcome too, poor Callista, with her own emotions. 
 
 * O that I could find Him,' she exclaimed passionately. 
 
 * On the right hand and on the left I grope, but touch 
 Him not. Why dost Thou fight against me, why dost 
 Thou scare and perplex me, O, First and only Fair ? I 
 have Thee not and I need Thee.^ She added, * I am no 
 Christian, you see, or I should have found Him ; or at 
 least I should say I had found Him.' ' It is hopeless/ 
 
NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 225 
 
 said Polemo to Aristo, in much disgust, and with some 
 hauteur of manner ; * she is too far gone. You should 
 not have brought her to this place.' " ^ That is, I think, 
 something more than a delineation of " the mutual re- 
 lation of Christians and heathens " in the third century. 
 It is a delineation of that pure flame of passion in 
 Newman's own heart and life which made him "rest 
 in the thought of two, and two only, supreme and 
 luminously self-evident beings — myself and my Creator." 
 To me Callista has always seemed the most com- 
 pletely characteristic of Newman's books. Many of 
 them express with greater power his intellectual 
 delicacy of insight, and his moral intensity, but none, 
 unless it be The Dream of Geroniius, expresses as 
 this does the depth of his spiritual passion, the 
 singular wholeness, unity, and steady concentration of 
 purpose connecting all his thoughts, words, and deeds. 
 And yet it is not, and I think will never be, the most 
 popular of his books. That fate was reserved for his 
 reply to Mr. Kingsley's attack on him on account of the 
 sanction he had lent, or which Mr. Kingsley supposed 
 him to have lent, to the doctrine that " truth is no 
 virtue." I have often wondered that Kingsley had 
 never been sensible of the fascination of Newman's 
 deep religious nature, an intensity of which there was 
 certainly no slight measure in himself. He too, like 
 Newman, was a genuine poet, though a poet of a very 
 different type. Again, he too, like Newman, had felt the 
 deepest interest in " the mutual relations of Christians 
 and heathens " in the early centuries of Christianity, 
 and had attempted, as Newman did, to delineate it in 
 his story of Hypatia. 
 
 1 Callista, chap, xxvii. 
 
 Q 
 
226 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 But there was something headlong about Kingsley, 
 as there is something essentially reserved and reticent 
 about Newman, and there, I fancy, was the secret of 
 the repulsion between them. Kingsley's ideal always 
 tended somewhat towards surrender to the glory of 
 action and passion, towards embodiment in life, towards 
 glow, and emphasis, and self-expansion. He had an 
 odd theory, too, that a hearty English squire who does 
 his duty, not only to the land, but to the tenants and 
 the labourers on his estate, is the nearest thing to a 
 saint which the world can produce, and it is not easy to 
 imagine any ideal more different from Newman's. As 
 far as I can judge, Kingsley and Newman have both 
 been supremely truthful men, and Newman, I should 
 say, though far the subtler and less easily understood 
 of the two, not by any means less truthful than his 
 rather random assailant. 
 
 In Macmillans Magazine for January 1864, which (as 
 usual with January magazines) was published before 
 Christmas 1863, Mr. Kingsley, in a review of Froude's 
 History of England, had written, "Truth for its own 
 sake had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. 
 Father Newman informs us that it need not be, and on 
 the whole ought not to be ; that cunning is the weapon 
 which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to 
 withstand the brute male force of the wicked world 
 which marries and is given in marriage. Whether his 
 notion be doctrinally correct or not, it is at least 
 historically so." The reference, as Mr. Kingsley after- 
 wards stated, was to Newman's sermon on " Wisdom 
 and Innocence," sermon 20 in the Oxford volume on 
 Subjects of the Day, which was preached on Febru-ary 
 19th, 1843, of which the text would certainly have 
 
NEWMAN AS KOMAN CATHOLIC. 227 
 
 been, as I remarked at the time of the discussion about 
 Kingsley's dictum, far more paradoxically open to that 
 imputation than any interpretation of it given by Dr. 
 Newman — " Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the 
 midst of >Yolves ; be ye therefore wise as serpents, and 
 harmless as doves." 
 
 Newman of course noticed that amongst the lower 
 races of animals to which our Lord alluded in this 
 precept, " the weak " are compensated for their weak- 
 ness by fleetness, or by the difficulty of discriminating 
 them from the localities to which they resort, or by 
 **' some natural cunning." " Brute force is countervailed 
 by flight, brute passion by prudence and artifice." But 
 this was said exclusively of the instincts of the weaker 
 animals. Of men he expressly said that all sinful 
 means of defence are forbidden to the weak, and many 
 are forbidden which would not have been sinful had 
 they not been forbidden. He admitted that Christians 
 had been tempted " to the abuse instead of the use of 
 Christian wisdom, to be wise without being harmless," 
 and this he condemned. On the other hand, Christians 
 in times of persecution are perfectly right in observing 
 prudence and reticence. " Other men make a great 
 clamour and lamentation over their idols ; there is no 
 mistaking that they have lost them, and that they have 
 no hope. But Christians resign themselves. They 
 are silent; silence itself is suspicious — even silence is 
 mystery. Why do they not speak out ? Why do they 
 not show a natural, an honest indignation ? The sub- 
 mitting to calumny is a proof that it is too true. 
 They would set themselves right if they could." ^ 
 
 1 Sermons on Subjects of the Day, p. 302. Rivingtons, 1869. 
 
228 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 Mr. Kingsley, who of all things loved the frank ex- 
 pression of indignation, was scandalized at this apology 
 for self-restraint under misrepresentation, — though our 
 Lord commanded it, — and he treated it as an avowal 
 of Newman's adhesion to the doctrine that truth is no 
 virtue. Of course it was nothing of the kind, and 
 when challenged to produce his proof that Newman 
 had ever said anything of the kind, he made no attempt 
 to support his accusation. He only said that he was 
 very glad to know that Newman had not meant what 
 he seemed to mean, and that he withdrew the imput- 
 ations. To this Dr. Newman replied by publishing the 
 correspondence, with the following extremely witty 
 summary of its drift. 
 
 " Mr. Kingsley begins then by exclaiming, * Oh, the 
 chicanery, the wholesale fraud, the vile hypocrisy, the 
 conscience-killing tyranny of Rome ! We have not far 
 to seek for an evidence of it ! There's Father Newman 
 to wit : one living specimen is worth a hundred dead 
 ones. He a Priest, writing of Priests, tells us that 
 lying is never any harm.' I interpose, 'You are taking 
 a most extraordinary liberty with my name. If I have 
 said this, tell me when and where.' Mr. Kingsley 
 replies, ' You said it, Reverend Sir, in a sermon which 
 you preached when a Protestant as vicar of St. Mary's, 
 and published in 1844, and I could read you a very 
 salutary lecture on the effects which that Sermon had 
 at the time on my own opinion of you.' I make 
 answer, ' Oh . . . Not, it seems, as a priest speaking of 
 priests; but let us have the passage.' Mr. Kingsley 
 relaxes : — * Do you know I like your tone. From your 
 tone, I rejoice, greatly rejoice, to be able to believe that 
 you did not mean what you said.' I rejoin, * Mean it 1 
 
NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 229 
 
 I maintain I never said it, whether as a Protestant or 
 as a Catholic/ Mr. Kingsley replies, 'I waive that 
 point.' I object : — ' Is it possible ? What ? Waive the 
 main question ? I either said it or I didn't. You have 
 made a monstrous charge against me — direct, distinct, 
 public; you are bound to prove it as directly, as 
 distinctly, as publicly ; or to own you can't ! ' * Well,' 
 says Mr. Kingsley, * if you are quite sure you did not 
 say it, I'll take your word for it, I really will.' My 
 %vord ! I am dumb. Somehow I thought that it was 
 my loord that happened to be on trial. The word of a 
 Professor of lying that he does not lie ! But Mr. 
 Kingsley reassures me. ' We are both gentlemen,' he 
 says ; ' I have done as much as one English gentleman 
 can expect from another.' I begin to see : he thought 
 me a gentleman at the very time that he said I taught 
 lying on system. After all it is not I but it is Mr. 
 Kingsley who did not mean what he said. Hdbemus 
 confltentem reitm. So we have confessedly come round 
 to this, preaching without practising; the common 
 theme of satirists from Juvenal to Walter Scott. * I 
 left Baby Charles, and Steenie laying his duty before 
 him,' says King James of the reprobate Dalgarno ; ' 
 Geordie, jingling Geordie, it was grand to hear Baby 
 Charles laying down the guilt of dissimulation, and 
 Steenie lecturing on the turpitude of incontinence.' " 
 
 This summary naturally nettled Mr. Kingsley, and 
 he replied in a pamphlet called What then docs Dr. 
 Neivmaii onean? raking up all the evidence he could 
 find that Newman justified, what he has certainly often 
 justified, the guarded and careful mode of doing what 
 Mr. Kingsley might certainly have done in a care- 
 less, headlong, and inpetuous manner, and closing his 
 
230 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 pamphlet with very bitter remarks on Newman's want 
 of straightforwardness, which virtually amounted to an 
 indictment against the honesty of his whole career. 
 This was the attack to which Newman's Apologia pro 
 vitd sud, was the reply — a book which, I venture to 
 say, has done more to break down the English distrust 
 of Roman Catholics, and to bring about a hearty good 
 fellowship between them and the members of other 
 Churches, than all the rest of the religious literature of 
 our time put together. 
 
 I have already made very large use of this singularly 
 frank and straightforward story of the growth of New- 
 man's convictions, on which indeed every student of his 
 life must be dependent for his knowledge of their 
 development. And I do not know that the book 
 requires any further notice here, except in relation to 
 that charge against him of sympathy with indirectness 
 and tortuousness of mind out of which it sprang. As 
 for tortuousness of mind, the charge would now be 
 admitted by all fair judges, to whatever communion 
 they might happen to belong, to be utterly mistaken, 
 as deplorably mistaken as it is well possible for a 
 charge to be. In an appendix to the Apologia, Dr. 
 Newman comments on one of Mr. Kingsley's sentences, 
 in which he said, "Dr. Newman takes a seeming 
 pleasure in detailing instances of dishonesty on the 
 part of Catholics," to which Newman replies, "Any 
 one who knows me well will testify that my ' seeming 
 pleasure,' as he calls it, at such things, is just the im- 
 patient sensitiveness which relieves itself by a definite 
 delineation of what is so hateful to it." 
 
 The number of those persons who " know Dr. New- 
 man well" must have been vastly increased by the 
 
NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 231 
 
 publication of the Apologia, or the History of my Re- 
 ligious Opinions, aa it was called in the later editions ; 
 and every one of them, I suppose, would heartily concur 
 in this observation of the autobiographer. He is the 
 last man in the world to feel the smallest sympathy 
 with untruthfulness or dishonesty, indeed not to feel 
 the utmost repulsion towards it. A man so genuine 
 in character, so ingenuous in judging himself, has hardly 
 ever made himself known to the world. But though 
 Mr. Kingsley never made a greater mistake than when 
 he discerned any tortuousness of mind in Dr. Newman, 
 his excuse was that Newman's conception of the right 
 mode of getting at truth in religious matters, was un- 
 doubtedly what almost all Protestants, and assuredly all 
 Protestants of Mr. Kingsley's rather impatient tempera- 
 ment, would have called eminently complex and in- 
 direct. As we have seen, Newman has never found 
 any simple or easily-applied test of truth. He thinks 
 it much easier to believe anything he " ought " to 
 believe, than to find out what truth is without reference 
 to any command or injunction to which he feels it his 
 duty to submit. 
 
 His first practical conception of what he " ought " to 
 believe was anything inculcated by Scripture ; his next 
 was anything inculcated by the catena of Anglican 
 divines, in whom he supposed that he had found the 
 living voice of the Anglican Church. His last and 
 present test of what he ought to believe, is what the 
 voice of the Koman Catholic Church imposes on him ; 
 and it is obvious enough that none of these tests, unless 
 it be the last, is very distinct in outline, nor any of 
 them one that admits of off-hand practical application. 
 Newman has never had a supreme confidence in 
 
 > 
 
232 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 "common-sense," or "instinct," or "intuition," or any- 
 other short-cut to religious truth. To him rehgious 
 truth has been a highly complex problem from the first, 
 not one to be easily solved, but one that, take what test 
 of it he will, requires the greatest care in statement and 
 the utmost precaution in the method of its application. 
 Of his mind, if of any, it has been true, as I said early 
 in this little book, that — 
 
 "The intellectual power through words and things, 
 Went sounding on a dim and perilous way." 
 
 He has always been disposed to regard the material 
 world as a mere hieroglyphic expression of deeper 
 spiritual meanings. Even in dealing with Scripture, 
 he has from a very early period inclined to mingle the 
 mystical with the more obvious interpretation of the text. 
 And even in accepting the guidance of a Church, he has 
 ever been on his guard against any hasty and inadequate 
 collation of its authoritative definitions. Hence he has 
 vexed all impatient and eager minds, who cut their way 
 to what they deem truth by rough and ready processes, 
 and has laid himself open to the imputation of indirect- 
 ness. There is a striking instance of this in the cele- 
 brated passage in the Apologia in which he contrasts 
 the intimate, irresistible, indissoluble connection between 
 belief in self and belief in God, with the mystery of the 
 world as it actually presents . itself to us in all its 
 godlessness. "The tokens,", he writes, "so faint and 
 broken, of a superintending design, the blind evolution 
 of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the 
 progress of things as if from unreasoning elements, not 
 towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, 
 his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain 
 
NEWMAN AS EOMAN CATHOLIC. 233 
 
 hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the 
 defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental 
 anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the per- 
 vading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary, hopeless 
 irreligion, that condition of the whole race so fearfully 
 yet exactly described in the Apostle's words, ' having no 
 hope, and without God in the world,' — all this is a vision 
 to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind the 
 sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond 
 human solution." ^ It was obvious that a mind which 
 could grasp with such power the paradox of human 
 life in its relation to Divine revelation, could not by any 
 means have presented itself to a vivid and passionate 
 imagination like Mr. Kingsley's as one which he would 
 have called natural and straightforward ; and yet its 
 naturalness is naturalness of a very high order, and its 
 straightforwardness as straightforward as any nature so 
 wide and sensitive to all sorts of delicate attractions 
 and repulsions could possibly be. The simplicity of 
 minds such as Newman's, profound as it is, will seem 
 anything but simplicity, will seem complexity, to other 
 men, while the anxious forecast of it will seem artificial. 
 
 " So dark a foretlionght rolled about his brain, 
 As on a dull day in an Ocean cave, 
 The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall 
 In silence." 2 
 
 And yet this " dark forethought " is in Newman's case 
 completely overruled and subdued by faith and love, y 
 
 I feel no doubt that the preparation of the Ai^ 
 and the attempt to bring out the course of his own 
 
 1 Apologia, pp. 377-8. 
 
 2 Idylls of the King, p. 384 of Macmillan's one volume edition. 
 
234 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 thought in the long series of changes which at length 
 made him a Roman Catholic, set Newman thinking 
 afresh on the general principles of belief, and led to 
 his attempt to give some general account of those 
 principles in the book published in 1870, which he 
 modestly termed A Grammar of Assent. I don't think 
 the title was a very happy one. Whatever the book 
 is, it is not a Grammar of any kind. Instead of dealing 
 with the rationale of language, and the distinctive 
 character of the different parts of speech, its chief 
 epdeavour is to show how much there is in the dif- 
 ferent kinds of assent yielded by the mind to propos- 
 itions, which cannot be reflected in language at all, 
 and to justify in general the feeling of certitude, even 
 while expressly admitting and contending that that 
 feeling of certitude is often wrongly entertained, and 
 misleading to those who so entertain it. 
 
 This is not the place either to analyze or criticize an 
 elaborate and in some respects a technical essay of this 
 kind, but I refer to it for the sake of the light it throws 
 upon the processes of Newman's own mind. I take it 
 that the general drift of the book is to impress on those 
 who read it, that unless the constitution of the human 
 mind may be assumed to be on the whole truthful and 
 trustworthy, all attempts to mend it are simply childish. 
 " If I may not assume," he says, " that I exist, and in 
 a particular way, that is, with a particular mental 
 constitution, I have nothing to speculate about, and 
 had better let speculation alone. Such as I am, it is 
 my all; this is my essential standpoint, and must be 
 taken for granted; otherwise thought is but an idle 
 amusement not worth the trouble. There is no 
 medium between using my faculties, as I have them, 
 
NEWMAN AS KOMAN CATHOLIC. 235 
 
 and flinging myself upon the external world according 
 to the random impulse of the moment, as spray upoji 
 the surface of the waves, and simply forgetting that 
 I am."^ 
 
 As regards belief, Newman shows that man is a believ- 
 ing animal, that he gives credit very easily, and often 
 of course with very unfortunate results, to what he is 
 told ; but that none the less this credulousness, guarded 
 as it usually is in its earlier stages by the surroundings 
 of domestic life, is one of the greatest and most in- 
 estimable of the preparations and disciplines for life. 
 "Of the two," he writes, "I would rather have to 
 maintain that we ought to begin by believing every- 
 thing that is offered to our acceptance, than that it 
 is our duty to doubt of everything. This indeed seems 
 the true way of learning. In that case we soon dis- 
 cover and discard what is contradictory; and error 
 having always some portion of truth in it, and the truth 
 having a reality which error has not, we may expect 
 that when there is an honest purpose and fair talents, 
 we shall somehow make our way forward, the error 
 falling off from the mind, and the truth developing and 
 occupying it." ^ Now as Newman finds that, as a matter 
 of fact, men are very often certain, and are often rightly 
 certain, in spite of the fact that they have not unfre- 
 quently been wrongly certain, he concludes that certitude 
 is a reasonable attitude for human nature, and that 
 though sceptics may try to undermine the feeling of 
 certitude, they will not succeed. We may do something 
 in guarding the mind against precipitate and false 
 certitude, but we shall not root out the confidence that 
 
 1 An Essay towards a Grammar of Assent, p. 340. Burns, Gates, 
 & Co., 1870. 2 Hid, p. 371-2. 
 
236 CAKDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 on a great number of subjects certitude can and ought 
 to be attained. 
 
 " Suppose," he says, " I am walking out in the moon- 
 light, and see dimly the outlines of some figure among 
 the trees; — it is a man. I draw nearer — it is still a 
 man ; nearer still, and all hesitation is at an end — I am 
 certain it is a man. But he neither moves nor speaks 
 when I address him ; and then I ask myself what can be 
 his purpose in hiding among the trees at such an hour ? 
 I come quite close to him and put out my arm. Then 
 I find for certain that what I took for a man is but a 
 singular shadow formed by the falling of the moonlight 
 on the interstices of some branches or their foliage. 
 Am I not to indulge my second certitude because I was 
 wrong in my first ? Does not any objection which lies 
 against my second, from the failure of my first, fade 
 away before the evidence on which my second is 
 founded ? " ^ Whence Newman concludes, that though 
 we are often certain when we ought not to be, there 
 is plenty of room for true certitude in human life, and 
 that there is room for it even in the case of arguments 
 which, so far as you can make out, appear to afford 
 nothing but a great cumulation of probabilities, from 
 which, speaking mathematically, it would be impossible 
 to attain mathematical certainty. 
 
 For instance, to a man who has never been in India, it 
 is but an accumulation of testimonies, which may all be 
 unveracious testimonies, that such a place as Calcutta 
 exists. Yet we are all quite certain that it does exist, 
 and justly certain of it. Hence, according to Newman, 
 there is a margin of conviction over and above any 
 
 1 An Essay toioards a Grammar of Assent, pp. 223-4. 
 
NEWMAN AS EOMAN CATHOLIC. 237 
 
 inferential proof we can give for it in logical form, in 
 most of our legitimate certitudes. And the latter part 
 of his book is occupied in illustrating what he calls the 
 " illative sense," in other words, the power of inferring 
 truth from converging lines of evidence, none of which 
 separately would justify certitude, but all of which, taken 
 together, do justify it, in connection with Christian belief. 
 Newman illustrates the action of what he calls "the 
 illative sense " from the mathematical theory of limits. 
 We know, he says, that the greater the number of the 
 sides of a polygon inscribed in a circle, and the smaller 
 each individual side, the nearer it approaches to the 
 circle itself. Yet as we can never actually deal with a 
 polygon of an infinite number of infinitesimal sides, we 
 have no experience of the truth that such a polygon 
 coincides with the circle. Yet mathematicians do not 
 hesitate to accept as demonstrably true, that what 
 steadily approximates to truth as the limit is approached, 
 is actually true, though we cannot verify its truth, 
 when the limit is actually reached. So it is, in 
 Newman's opinion, with the inference to be drawn from 
 a number of convergent lines of reasoning. Apparently • 
 they only accumulate probabilities, and no mere accumu- 
 lation of probabilites can amount to certainty; yet if 
 a number of different evidences approach the same 
 conclusion from quite different sides of human nature, 
 there is something in the mind which insists on supple- 
 menting the formal deficiency in this accumulation of 
 probabilities, and on concluding, so as to inspire certi- 
 tude, where from the logical point of view there would 
 seem only to be room for a strong presumption. Assent, 
 according to Newman, is an act of the living mind that 
 often passes beyond the formal grounds on which, so far 
 
238 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 as analysis goes, we can alone consciously justify it. It 
 often concludes peremptorily and even effectually on 
 grounds which, so far as we can draw out explicitly 
 the reasons for our conclusion, would furnish us only 
 with a halting and inadequate argument, just as the 
 living hand and foot will achieve a difficult feat in 
 climbing, of which it would have been impossible 
 beforehand to give the rationale. 
 
 It will be seen by what I have said, that Newman's 
 course of thought since he had first joined the Roman 
 Catholic Church had, after a short interval of something 
 like passionate ardour, marked chiefly by the Sermons 
 addressed to Mixed Congregations and Callista, reverted 
 to its older temper, the temper which discouraged any- 
 thing like impulsive action, and which placed large faith 
 in time and the gradual effect produced by the implicit 
 action of honest and anxious reflection on an observant 
 and vigilant mind. The Grammar of Assent, which is a 
 long plea for cautious and deliberate though courageous 
 reasoning on all the various converging lines of consider- 
 ation which bear on the Christian revelation, was pub- 
 lished in 1870, amidst the excitements of the Vatican 
 Council. It was only natural that Newman, whose 
 heart was more or less identified with his Anglican 
 friends, and with those who had followed in the wake 
 of his Anglican friends, should have been profoundly 
 anxious lest anything done in that Council should 
 retard the movement towards Rome, and drive back 
 men with whose general tendencies of thought he was 
 in sympathy, towards Protestantism or a state of help- 
 less vacillation. I have no doubt that his own mind 
 had long accepted something like the doctrine which 
 was defined at that Council as to the centre of the 
 
NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 239 
 
 Church's infallibility; but he did not think that the 
 time was ripe for so great a step forwards in the way 
 of transforming implicit into explicit doctrine, and he 
 knew that in many cases it would repel hesitating 
 Anglicans, and throw them back on what he called 
 "Religious Liberalism," in other words, the doubt 
 whether there was any final guidance to be had in 
 theology at all. He was therefore amongst the most 
 earnest of those who were called the " inopportunists,'* 
 and great was his indignation at the action of Mr. Ward 
 and the Dublin Review in urging on the Ultramontanes, 
 and indeed in presenting the doctrine of the infallibility 
 of the Pope, in a form far more extravagant than that 
 which it ultimately took, 
 
 A private letter to his Bishop, in which he called these 
 Eno^lish Yaticanists "an aoforressive, insolent faction," 
 was by some breach of faith allowed to creep into print, 
 and for a time the quarrel between the Yaticanists and 
 the Inopportunists in England was extremely hot. Dr. 
 Newman held that Rome should speak only when some 
 great heresy or other evil impended, and should speak to 
 inspire hope and confidence in the faithful. " But now," 
 he wrote to Bishop Ullathorne, " we have the greatest 
 meeting which ever has been seen, and that at Rome, 
 infusing into us, by the accredited organs of Rome and 
 of its partisans (such as the Civilta, the Armonia, the 
 Urnvers, and the TaUet), little else than fear and dismay. 
 When we are all at rest and have no doubts, and — at 
 least practically, not to say doctrinally — hold the Holy 
 Father to be infallible, suddenly there is thunder in the 
 clear sky, and we are told to prepare for something, we 
 know not what, to try our faith, we know not how. 
 No impending danger is to be averted, but a great 
 
240 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 difficulty is to be created. Is this the proper work of 
 an (Ecumenical Council? As to myself personally, 
 please God, I do not expect any trial at all ; but I cannot 
 help suffering with the many souls who are suffering, 
 and I look with anxiety at the prospect of having to 
 defend decisions which may not be difficult to my own 
 private judgment, but may be most difficult to main- 
 tain logically in the face of historical facts. What have 
 we done to be treated as the faithful never were treated 
 before ? When has a definition de fide been a luxury 
 of devotion, and not a stern, painful necessity ? Why 
 should an aggressive, insolent faction be allowed * to 
 make the heart of the just sad whom the Lord hath 
 not made sorrowful'? Why cannot we be let alone, 
 when we have pursued peace and thought no evil ? " 
 
 Dr. Newman went on to expatiate on " the blight 
 which is falling on the multitude of Anglican ritualists," 
 who were diffusing Church principles far and wide among 
 Protestants, and concluded by saying, "If it is God's 
 will that the Pope's infallibility is defined, then is it 
 God's will to throw back the times and moments of 
 that triumph which He has destined for His Kingdom, 
 and I shall feel I have but to bow my head to His 
 adorable, inscrutable Providence." Oddly enough, con- 
 sidering that he protested thus passionately against the 
 opportuneness of the decree, it was Dr. Newman who 
 was fixed upon a few years later by the general desire 
 of the English Catholics to answer Mr. Gladstone's 
 criticisms on Vaticanism, in that '' Letter to the Duke 
 of Norfolk " in which he insisted that there was plenty 
 of freedom left to Catholics, after the Vatican decree, 
 and that that decree in no serious way imperilled the 
 loyalty of English Catholics to the sovereign and laws 
 
^ 
 
 NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 241 
 
 of England. But the controversy concerning the Vatican 
 decree throws little light on the history of Dr. Newman's 
 own thought, and I shall leave it with the remark that 
 I do not quite understand his question, " Where has a 
 definition de fide been a luxury of devotion and not a 
 stern, painful necessity ? " Surely the decree on the 
 Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary was precisely 
 " a luxury of devotion," and not " a stern, painful ne- 
 cessity." Was any great and dangerous heresy repressed 
 by that decree ? 
 
 The time came, however, when Newman's " minim- 
 izing " view of the Vatican definition was once more 
 in the ascendant at Rome. Pius IX. died in 1878, and 
 was succeeded by Leo XIII., who is at least as much 
 a statesman as a theologian. It soon became evident 
 that his policy would be to reconcile the European States 
 with the Vatican, except where they were deliberately 
 bent upon a policy of aggression and persecution, and 
 of course his attention was at once turned to the more 
 eminent men in the different Catholic communities 
 who, while faithful to the Church, had yet regarded 
 his predecessor's policy as premature and unfavourable 
 for the spread of the Roman Catholic faith. Early in 
 1879 it was known that he wished especially to do 
 honour to his pontificate by numbering Newman among 
 the Cardinals, and Newman, who fully understood that 
 by declining that distinction he should hurt the feelings 
 of all the moderates who had supported him nine years 
 previously, when he was "in disgrace with fortune" 
 and Ultramontanes' eyes, signified his assent. On the 
 sixteenth of April he left Birmingham for Rome, ar- 
 riving there on the twenty-fourth, and on the twelfth 
 of May, 1879, he received the Cardinal's hat. In his 
 
242 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 manner of expressing his thanks for the honour con- 
 ferred on him, the new Cardinal reminded all those who 
 read his speech of the naturalness, simplicity, and grace 
 of his old Oxford days. " In a long course of years," 
 he said, " I have made many mistakes. I have nothing 
 of that high perfection which belongs to the writings 
 of the Saints, — namely, that error could not be found in 
 them ; but what I trust I may claim throughout all I 
 have written is this — an honest intention, an absence 
 of private ends, a temper of obedience, a willingness to 
 be corrected, a dread of error, a desire to serve the Holy 
 Church, and, through Divine mercy, a fair share of 
 success." He went' on to claim that ever since he 
 began to take a part in ecclesiastical life at all, he had 
 opposed what he called " Liberalism in Religion," which 
 he defined as "the doctrine that there is no positive 
 truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as 
 another." It is of course perfectly true that from 
 the very beginning of his career Newman has been 
 a steady advocate of what is called dogmatic Chris- 
 tianity, that is, Christianity which is not a formless and 
 gelatinous mass of vague sentiment, but which springs 
 from a deeply-planted seed of revealed doctrine, and 
 has been, in his opinion, developed organically and pro- 
 videntially from that original germ. But is " Liberalism 
 in Religion " a happy description of the anti-dogmatic 
 attitude of mind ? I should have thought not. Liberalism 
 is probably oftener used to signify the disposition to 
 make concessions to popular demands than in any 
 other sense, and it is by no means clear that the popular 
 mind does demand the relaxation of dogmatic restraints 
 on the Babel-like confusion of religious opinions. In 
 one sense Newman has been a steady foe of dogmatic 
 
NEWMAN AS EOMAN CATHOLIC. 243 
 
 tyranny ; virtually he received his Cardinal's hat be- 
 cause he had contended so boldly against any attempt 
 to invade freedom of conscience in the Church. His 
 doctrine has always been that private conscientiousness 
 is the first step towards orthodoxy, and that any attempt 
 to interfere with true liberty of conscience, or even to 
 spur and hurry on its natural pace by external pressure, 
 is in the highest degree dangerous to the cause of true 
 belief. If Newman had never been a Liberal in the 
 sense of making a strong fight for those whose slow 
 conscientious advance was threatened by the despotism 
 of impatient and jealous authority, I do not suppose 
 he would ever have been a Cardinal. In 1870 we 
 witnessed the spectacle of " Blind Authority beating 
 with his staff the child that might have led him." In 
 1879 Authority, with his eyes couched, raised him who 
 had thus been singled out for the display of ecclesi- 
 astical displeasure, to the position of one of the Princes 
 of the Church. 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 kewman's chief poem, and the unity of his life. 
 
 I HAVE but little left to say of Cardinal Newman, 
 and that little will be best said in connection with his 
 most remarkable poem, The Dream of Gerontms. Before 
 the Vatican disputes, and shortly after the close of his 
 controversy with Canon Kingsley, Newman had written 
 a poem of which he himself thought so little, that it 
 was, as I have heard, consigned or doomed to the 
 waste-paper basket; and Mr. Jennings, in his very 
 interesting account of Cardinal Newman,^ credits the 
 statement. Some friend who had eyes for true poetry 
 rescued it, and was the means therefore of preserving to 
 the world one of the most unique and original of the 
 poems of the present century, as well as that one of all 
 of them which is in every sense the least in sympathy 
 with the temper of the present century, indeed the 
 most completely independent of the Zeitgeist. 
 
 The Dream of Gerontius is intended to delineate 
 Newman's conception of the last great change through 
 which a faithful Catholic passes, when he exchanges this 
 
 1 Cardinal Newman^ the Story of his Life, by Henry J. Jennings. 
 Birmingham : Houghton & Company. London : Simpkin & 
 Marshall. 
 
NEWMAN'S CHIEF POEM. 245 
 
 world for tlie world of spirits. But it is not merely a 
 poem on death, for it manages to give us in man}^ re- 
 spects a much more adequate impression of the true 
 core of Newman's faith and life than any other of his 
 works. None of his writings engrave more vividly on 
 his readers, the significance of the intensely practical 
 convictions which have shaped his career. And especially 
 it impresses on us one of the great secrets of his in- 
 fluence. For Newman has been a sign to this generation, 
 that unless there is a great deal of the lonehness of death 
 in life, there can hardly be much of the higher equanimity 
 of life in death. To my mind, The Dream of Gcrontius is 
 the poem of a man to whom the vision of the Christian 
 revelation has at all times been more real, more potent 
 to influence action, and more powerful to pre-occupy 
 the imagination, than all worldly interests put together 
 — of a man whose whole horizon has been so taken up by 
 revealed religion that his career embodies a statuesque 
 unity and fixity of purpose, standing out against our 
 confused modern world of highly complex and oftea ex- 
 tremely petty interests, like a lighthouse shining against 
 blurred and lowering masses of town, and shore, and 
 harbour, and sea, and sky. The Dream of Germitms, 
 though an imaginative account of a Catholic's death, 
 touches all the beliefs and hopes which had been the 
 mainstay of Newman's life, and the chief subjects of 
 his waking thoughts and most vivid impressions. It 
 is impossible to read it without recognizing especially 
 that Newman had always and steadily conceived life as 
 a Divine gift held absolutely at God's will, not only in 
 regard to its duration, but ako in regard to the mode 
 and conditions of its tenure\ Death, even to the most 
 faithful, brings home the thinness of the crust which 
 
246 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 separates the personal consciousness from the utter 
 coUapse which follows the withdrawal of God's sustain- 
 iijg power. And death even to the most faithful is the 
 signal for convincing them of their utter impotence, and 
 of the constant guardianship of other mightier beings 
 than ourselves, in the hollow of whose hand we lie as 
 helpless as the chrysalis in the cocoou of silk. It opens 
 with a delineation of that " strange innermost abandon- 
 ment," that "emptying out of each constituent aud 
 natural force," which dismays the soul by fully realiziug 
 to it for the first time its utter incapacity even to clmg 
 fast to that which it supposed to be of its very essence — - 
 
 " 'Tis death — oh, loving friends, your prayers ! — 'Tis lie. 
 As though my very being had given way, 
 As though I were no more a substance now, 
 And could fall back on nought to be my stay, 
 (Help, loving Lord, Thou my sole reluge, Thou), 
 And turn nowhither but must needs decay 
 And drop from out the universal frame 
 Into that shapeless, scopeless, blank abyss, 
 That utter nothingness of which I came." 
 
 Then the horror of this collapse abates sufficiently for 
 Gerontius to make his last confession of faith, and give 
 up his will with hearty fervour to God's; and then it 
 returns, and in his dream he dies — but soon awakes to 
 find himself, as he thiuks, refreshed by a strange sleep, 
 followed by " an inexpressive lightness and a sense of 
 freedom." 
 
 " I had a dream. Yes, some one softly said 
 * He's gone,' and then a sigh went round the room ; 
 And then I surely heard a priestly voice 
 Cry Subvenite; and they knelt in prayer. 
 I seem to hear him still, but thin and low, 
 And fainter and more faint the accents come, 
 As at an ever-widening interval. 
 
NEWMAN'S CHIEF POEM. 247 
 
 All ! whence is this ? What is this severance? 
 
 This silence pours a solitariness 
 
 Into the very essence of my soul ; 
 
 And the deep rest, so soothing and so sweet, 
 
 Hath something too of sternness and of pain. 
 
 For it drives back my thoughts upon their spring 
 
 By a strange introversion, and perforce 
 
 I now begin to feed upon myself, 
 
 Because I have nought else to feed upon. 
 
 Am I alive or dead ? I am not dead, 
 
 But in the body still, for I possess 
 
 A sort of confidence which clings to me, 
 
 That each particular organ holds its place 
 
 As heretofore, combining with the rest 
 
 Into one symmetry, that wraps me round 
 
 And makes me man ; and surely I could move 
 
 Did I but will it, every part of me. 
 
 And yet I cannot to my sense bring home 
 
 By very trial, that I have the power. 
 
 'Tis strange ; I cannot stir a hand or foot, 
 
 I cannot make my fingers or my lips 
 
 By mutual pressure witness each to each, 
 
 Nor by the eyelid's instantaneous stroke 
 
 Assure myself I have a body still. 
 
 Nor do I know my very attitude, 
 
 Nor if I stand, or lie, or sit, or kneel. 
 
 So much I know, not knowing how I know, 
 
 That the vast universe where I have dwelt 
 
 Is quitting me, or I am quitting it ; 
 
 Or I, or it, is rushing on the wings 
 
 Of light or lightning on an onward course, 
 
 And we e'en now are million miles apart. 
 
 Yet ... is this peremptory severance 
 
 Wrought out in lengthening measurements of space, 
 
 Which grow and multiply by speed and time 1 
 
 Or am I traversing infinity 
 
 By endless sub-division, hurrying back 
 
 From finite towards infinitesimal, 
 
 Thus dying out of the expansive world 1 " 
 
 Surely in all literature there has been no more 
 effective effort to realize the separation of soul and 
 body, and the thoughts which might possess a soul 
 separated from the body, than this. But soon the 
 
248 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 spiritual sense opens out. Gerontius becomes aware of 
 the presence of his guardian angel, in the hollow of 
 whose hand he is being borne to judgment, and a 
 conversation ensues in which he is told that in the 
 immaterial world intervals are no longer measured by 
 "the swing this way and that of the suspended rod," 
 but only by the intensity of the living thought. " It 
 is thy very energy of thought which keeps thee from 
 tliy God." Then Gerontius becomes aware of evil 
 beings who are hungering after him, and trying to 
 renew in him the old spirit of rebellion, and he is told 
 by his guardian angel that — 
 
 " It is the restless panting of their being ; 
 Like beasts of prey, who, caged within their Lars, 
 In a deep hideous purring have their life, 
 And an incessant pacing to and fro." 
 
 I know no more powerful conception anywhere of 
 impotent restiveness and restlessness. Though these 
 assailants are now impotent, pain is still before the soul 
 of Gerontius — the pain no longer of temptation and 
 fear, but of what we may perhaps call the fiery and 
 jjurifying despair of love at finding itself so unworthy 
 of God. The whole scenery of redemption is brought, 
 before Gerontius in the songs of the angels, through 
 whose hosts he is borne, till at last he hears once more 
 the prayers of those kneeling around his death-bed, 
 which are borne into the very presence of God ; and 
 the Angel of the Agony, who was sent to strengthen 
 our Lord in Gethsemane, intercedes for the shortening 
 of this fresh penitent's suffering. Then we learn how 
 the eager spirit has dashed from the hold of its guardian 
 angel — • 
 
NEWMAN'S CHIEF POEM. 249 
 
 " And, with intemperate energy of love, 
 Flies to the dear feet of Emmanuel ; 
 But ere it reach them, the keen sanctity, 
 Which, with its effluence, like a glory clothes 
 And circles round the Crucified, has seized, 
 And scorched, and shrivelled it ; and now it lies 
 Passive and still before the awful Throne." 
 
 The dream virtually ends with this passionate 
 expression of heart-rending anguish and heart-healing 
 hope — 
 
 " Take me away, and in the lowest deep 
 
 There let me be. 
 And there in hope the lone night-watches keep, 
 
 Told out for me. 
 There, motionless and happy in my pain, 
 
 Lone, not forlorn, — 
 There will I sing my sad perpetual strain 
 
 Until the morn. 
 There will I sing and soothe my stricken breast, 
 
 Which ne'er can cease 
 To throb and pine and languish, till possest - 
 
 Of its sole Peace. 
 There will I sing my absent Lord and Love : — 
 
 Take me away, 
 That sooner I may rise, and go above. 
 And see Him in the truth of everlasting day." 
 
 The Dream of Gerontius seems to me to contain 
 the happiest summary we could have of the ideal 
 which has pervaded and constituted the significance of 
 the remarkable life I have been trying to review — a 
 life that has fed itself from beginning to end on the 
 substance of Divine revelation, and that has measured 
 the whole length and breadth and depth of human 
 doubt without fascinat'on and without dread — a life 
 at once both severe and tender, both passionate and 
 self-controlled, with more in it perhaps of an ascetic 
 love of suffering than of actual suffering, more of 
 
250 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 mortification than of unhappiness, more of sensibility 
 and sensitiveness than of actual anguish, but still a 
 lonely and severe and saintly life. No life known to 
 me in the last century of our national history can for 
 a moment compare with it, so far as we can judge of 
 such deep matters, in unity of meaning and constancy 
 of purpose. It has been carved, as it were, out of one 
 solid block of spiritual substance, and though there 
 may be weak and wavering lines here and there in 
 the carving, it is not easy to detect any flaw in the 
 material upon which the long indefatigable labour has 
 been spent. 
 
 As I am correcting the last proof-sheets, the news . 
 reaches me that the long and gracious life of which I 
 have been writing has suddenly terminated. Cardinal 
 Newman died at the Edgbaston Oratory on Monday, 11th 
 August^ 1890, after less than two days* illness, from in- 
 flammation of the lungs, and was buried at Rednal by 
 the side of his dear friend Father Ambrose St. John, 
 on Tuesday the 19th. No more impressive testimony 
 could have been afforded to the power, sincerity, and 
 simplicity of the great English Cardinal's life, than the 
 almost unanimous outburst of admiration and reverence 
 from all the English Churches and all the English sects 
 for the man who had certainly caused the defection of 
 a larger number of cultivated Protestants from their 
 Protestant faith, than any other English writer or 
 preacher since the Reformation. Such a phenomenon 
 as this expression of heartfelt English sentiment for 
 a good Roman Catholic would have been impossible 
 a quarter of a century ago ; and that it is possible now 
 is due certainly to the direct influence of Cardinal 
 
PUBLIC FEELII^G ON NEWMAN'S DEATH. 251 
 
 Newman's life and writings. And the honour and 
 reverence paid to him are justly due. In a century 
 in which physical discovery and material well-being 
 have usurped and almost absorbed the admiration of 
 mankind, such a life as that of Cardinal Newman 
 stands out in strange and almost majestic, though singu- 
 larly graceful and unpretending, contrast to the eager 
 and agitated turmoil of confused passions, hesitating 
 ideals, tentative virtues, and groping philanthropies, 
 amidst which it has been lived. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 Richard Clay 8f Sons, Limited, London tfe Bungay. 
 
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