Cardinal Newman

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Title:     Cardinal Newman
Author: William Ralph Inge [More Titles by Inge]

(1912)

The life of Newman was divided into two nearly equal portions by his change of religion in October 1845. For the earlier half of his career we have long had his own narrative; and Newman is a prince of autobiographers. It was his wish that the 'Apologia' should be the final and authoritative account of his life in the Church of England, and of the steps by which he was led to transfer his allegiance to another communion. The voluminous literature of the Tractarian movement, which includes large collections of Newman's own letters, has confirmed the accuracy of his narrative, and has made any further description of that strange episode in English University life superfluous. With the 'Apologia' and Dean Church's 'Oxford Movement' before him, the reader needs no more. Mr. Wilfrid Ward has therefore been well advised to adhere loyally to the Cardinal's wishes, by confining himself to the last half of Newman's life, after a brief summary of his childhood, youth, and middle age till 1845. Nevertheless, it is misleading to give the title 'The Life of Cardinal Newman' to a work which is only, as it were, the second volume of a biography. There are very few men, however long-lived, who have not done much of their best work before the age of forty-five, and Newman was certainly not one of the exceptions. From every point of view, except that of the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical historian, Newman's Anglican career was far more interesting and important than his residence at Birmingham. He will live in history, not as the recluse of Edgbaston, nor as the wearer of the Cardinal's hat which fell to his lot, almost too late to save the credit of the Vatican, when he had passed the normal limit of human life, but as the real founder and leader of nineteenth century Anglo-Catholicism, the movement which he created and then tried in vain to destroy. The projects and failures and successes of his later life seem very pale and almost petty when compared with the activities of the years while he was making a chapter of English history. His greatest book, though it was written many years after his secession, is the record of a drama which ended in the interview with Father Dominic the Passionist. It is 'The History of my Religious Opinions'; and after 1845 his religious opinions had, as he says himself, no further history. The incomparable style which will give him a permanent place among the masters of English prose was the product of his life at Oxford, where he lived in a society of highly cultivated men, whose writings show many of the same excellences as his own. Newman's English is only the Oriel manner at its best. Such an instrument could hardly have been forged at the Birmingham Oratory, where his associates, who had followed him from Littlemore, were of such an inferior type that Mark Pattison, who knew them, was surprised that he could be satisfied with their company. His best sermons and his best poetry belong to his Anglican period. 'The Dream of Gerontius,' with all its tender grace, is far less virile than 'Lead, kindly Light,' and other short poems of his youth. Moreover, his record as a Roman ecclesiastic is one of almost unrelieved failure. If he had died eighteen years after his secession, when he already looked upon himself as an old man whose course was nearly run, he would have been regarded as one who had sacrificed a great career in the Church of England for neglect and obscurity. From the first he was distrusted by the 'Old Catholics' (the old Roman Catholic families in England), and suspected at the Vatican, where Talbot assiduously represented him as 'the most dangerous man in England.' When Manning, Archdeacon of Chichester, followed his example and joined the Roman Church, Newman was confronted with a still more subtle and relentless opponent, whose hostility was never relaxed till the accession of a Liberal Pope made it no longer possible to resist the bestowal of tardy honours upon a feeble octogenarian. The recognition came in time to soothe his decline, but too late to enable him to leave his mark upon the administration of the Roman Church.

The main events in a very uneventful career are narrated at length in Mr. Ward's volumes. After his 'conversion' Newman first resided in a small community at Maryvale (Oscott) but soon left it on a journey to Rome, where he spent some time at the Collegio di Propaganda, and had a foretaste of the distrust with which Pius IX and his advisers always regarded him. His plan at this time was to found a theological seminary at Maryvale; and in this scheme he had the support of Wiseman, the ablest Roman ecclesiastic in the United Kingdom. But the 'Essay on Development,' with its unscholastic language and unfamiliar line of apologetic, seriously alarmed the theologians at Rome; and Newman, accepting the first of many rebuffs, abandoned this project in favour of another. He resolved to join the Oratorians, an order founded by St. Philip Neri, and obtained permission to modify, in his projected establishment, the rules of the Order, which, among other things, prescribed frequent floggings in public. He visited Naples, and came back a believer in the liquefaction of the saint's blood. The amazing letter to Henry Wilberforce, writter from Santa Croce, shows that he was the most docile and credulous of converts. Even the Holy House at Loreto caused him no difficulty. 'He who floated the ark on the surges of a world-wide sea, and inclosed in it all living things, who has hidden the terrestrial paradise, who said that faith might remove mountains ... could do this wonder also.' It 'may have been'; 'everybody believes it in Rome'; therefore Newman 'has no doubt'!

The new Oratory was placed by Papal brief at Birmingham. The first members of it were his friends who had left the English Church with him. Recruits soon came in, and branch houses were talked of. But for many years Newman had reason to complain of neglect and want of sympathy. He even found empty churches when he preached in London. In conjunction with Faber, he next started a series of 'Lives of the Saints,' in which the most absurd 'miracles' were accepted without question as true. The 'Old Catholics,' who had no stomach for such food, protested; and Newman, this time thoroughly irritated, had to admit another failure. The Oratory, however, and its London offshoot under Faber were prosperous, and the churches where Newman preached were not long empty. In 1850 we find him in better spirits. He employed his energies in a series of clever lectures on 'Anglican Difficulties,' in which he ridiculed the Church of his earlier vows with all the refined cruelty of which he was a master. But he was soon in trouble again. One Dr. Giacinto Achilli, formerly a Dominican friar, gave lectures in London upon the scandals of the Roman Inquisition, which had imprisoned him for attacking the Catholic faith and fomenting sedition. The temper of the British public at this time made it ready to believe anything to the discredit of the Roman Church, and Achilli became a popular hero. Wiseman published a libellous article upon him in the Dublin Review, which passed unnoticed. But when Newman repeated the charges of profligacy in a public lecture, Achilli brought an action for libel, which in costs and expenses cost Newman £12,000. The money however was paid, and much more than paid, by his co-religionists. This trial was quickly followed by the inauguration of a scheme for founding a Catholic University in Ireland, the avowed object of which was to withdraw young Catholics from the liberalising influences of mixed education. This scheme was sure to appeal strongly to Newman. Liberalism had come in with a rush at Oxford, after the dissipation of the 'long nightmare' (as Mark Pattison calls it) while the University was dominated by religious medievalism. The Oxford of Newman had become the Oxford of Jowett. The ablest of Newman's young friends and disciples, such as Mark Pattison and J.A. Froude, were now in the opposite camp, full of anger and disgust at the seductive influences from which they had just escaped. Newman, as might be expected, was anxious to protect Catholic students from similar dangers, and accepted the post of Rector of the proposed Catholic University. He intended it to provide 'philosophical defences of Catholicity and Revelation, and create a Catholic literature.' The lectures in which he expounded his ideals at Dublin were a great success, and he returned to England full of hope. With a curious inability to read the character of one who was to be his worst enemy, he offered Manning the post of Vice-Rector. Manning's refusal was followed by his failure to obtain the support of Ward, Henry Wilberforce, and others; and Catholic opinion in Ireland was much divided. For three or four years Newman was engaged in ineffectual efforts to push his scheme forward. At last, in 1855, he was installed as Rector, and began his work at Dublin. A fine church was built at St. Stephen's Green with the surplus of the Achilli subscriptions, and Newman produced some excellent literary work in the form of University lectures and sermons. But the whole movement was viewed with distrust by the Irish ecclesiastics, who, as he said in a moment of impatience, 'regard any intellectual man as being on the road to perdition.' There was a cloud over his work from first to last. He had been promised a bishopric, without which he was made to feel himself in an inferior position by the Irish prelates; but the promise was not fulfilled. The Irish objected to one or two English professors on his staff, because they were English. Dr. Cullen, the ruling spirit in the Irish hierarchy, was a narrow conservative, who wished to use Newman merely as an instrument against progressive tendencies in Church and State. In 1857 he resigned an impossible task, and returned to Birmingham.

New undertakings followed, no more successful than the abortive university scheme. There was to be a new translation of the Bible, and a new Catholic magazine called the Rambler. The former enterprise was already well advanced when the general indifference of the Catholic public caused it to be abandoned. The Rambler, the contributors to which used a freedom of discussion unpalatable to Roman ecclesiastics, struggled on amid a storm of criticism till 1859, when Newman, who was then himself editor, resigned, and one more humiliating failure was registered. The management of the magazine passed into other hands. The Oratory School at Birmingham, a much less contentious undertaking, was successfully launched in the same year.

In 1860 came the emancipation of the States of the Church by Cavour and Victor Emmanuel. Newman referred to the Piedmontese as 'sacrilegious robbers,' but his advocacy of the temporal power was not strong enough to please the Vatican, while the strength of Manning's language left nothing to be desired. Newman became more unpopular than ever. His reputation suffered by his former connection with the Rambler and his supposed connection with the Home and Foreign Review, which Acton intended to represent the views of progressive Catholics, till it also was snuffed out by the hierarchy. The five years from 1859 to 1864 are considered by Mr. Ward to have been the saddest in Newman's life. He felt, truly enough, that the dominant party had no sympathy with his aims, and that he was treated as 'some wild incomprehensible beast, a spectacle for Dr. Wiseman to exhibit to strangers, as himself being the hunter who captured it.' 'All through my life I have been plucked,' he writes to an old Oxford friend. There was even in his mind at this time a wistful yearning after the friends and the Church that he had left--a feeling, doubtless transient, but significant, which his biographer has allowed to show itself in a few pages of his book. After reminding himself, in his diary, of the warning against those who, after putting their hand to the plough, 'look back,' he proceeds to look back, because he cannot help it.

'I live more and more in the past, and in hopes that the past may revive in the future.... I think, as death comes on, his cold breath is felt on soul as on body, and that, viewed naturally, my soul is half dead now, whereas then [in his Protestant days] it was in the freshness and fervour of youth.... I say the same of my state of mind from 1834 to 1845, when I became a Catholic. It is a time past and gone--it relates to a work done and over. "Quis mihi tribuat, ut sim iuxta menses pristinos, secundum dies, quibus Deus custodiebat me? Quando splendebat lucerna eius super caput meum, et ad lumen eius ambulabam in tenebris?" ... I have no friend at Rome; I have laboured in England, to be misrepresented, backbitten and scorned. I have laboured in Ireland, with a door ever shut in my face.... Contemporaneously with this neglect on the part of those for whom I laboured, there has been a drawing towards me on the part of Protestants. Those very books and labours which Catholics did not understand, Protestants did. I am under the temptation of looking out for, if not courting, Protestant praise.... What I wrote as a Protestant has had far greater power, force, meaning, success, than my Catholic works.'

Such reflections might seem to indicate a disposition to return to the Anglican fold. But a man must have vanquished pride in its most insidious form before he can leave the Church of Rome for any other. The aristocratic hauteur of the civis Romanus among barbarians lives on in the sentiment of the Roman Catholic towards Protestants. When Newman was publicly charged with intending to return to Anglicanism, this spirit broke out in a disagreeable and insulting manner.

The bitterness of these five years of neglect, in which he had been eating his heart in silence, must be remembered in connexion with the famous Kingsley controversy, which in 1864 roused him to put on his armour and fight for his reputation. There had always been an element of combativeness in Newman's disposition. 'Nescio quo pacto, my spirits most happily rise at the prospect of danger,' he wrote early in life. And when he could persuade himself that not only his honour but that of the Church was at stake, he could feel and show the true Catholic ferocity, the cruellest spirit on earth. 'A heresiarch,' he had written even in his Anglican days, 'should meet with no mercy. He must be dealt with by the competent authority as if he were embodied evil. To spare him is a false and dangerous pity. It is to endanger the souls of thousands, and it is uncharitable towards himself'! This was the temper, soured by defeat and not mellowed by age, which Charles Kingsley in an evil moment for himself chose wantonly to provoke. At Christmas 1863 there appeared in Macmillan's Magazine a review of Froude's 'History of England,' in which Kingsley wrote 'Truth for its own sake has 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.' This charge was in fact based on a careless reading, or an imperfect recollection, of the twentieth discourse in 'Sermons on Subjects of the Day.' The discourse in question is a somewhat nauseous glorification of the servile temper, but it only says that the meekness of the saints is (by Divine providence) so successful that it is always mistaken for craft. The imputation of cunning is therefore a note of sanctity in its victim. Kingsley ought to have read the sermon again, and withdrawn unreservedly from an untenable position. But he thought that something less than a complete apology would serve; and so gave Newman the opportunity of his life. When the withdrawal which he offered was rejected, Kingsley made matters ten times worse for himself by an ill-considered pamphlet called 'What then does Dr. Newman mean?' In this effusion he vents all his scorn and hatred for Catholicism--for its tortuous tactics, its monstrous credulity and appetite for miracles, which must proceed, according to him, either from infantile folly or from deliberate imposture. Forgetting altogether that he has to defend himself against a specific charge of slander, he offers his great opponent the choice between writing himself down a knave or a fool--a knave if he pretends to believe in the Holy Coat and the blood of St. Januarius, a fool if he does believe in them.

The coarseness of this attack upon an elderly man of saintly character and acknowledged intellectual eminence, who had to all appearance blighted a great career by honestly obeying his conscience, offended the British public, which was now fully disposed to give a respectful and favourable hearing to whatever Newman might care to say in reply. In a Catholic country it would have been useless for a Protestant, however falsely attacked, to appeal to Catholic public opinion for justice; but Newman understood the English character, and saw his splendid chance.

The famous defence was, from every point of view except the highest, a complete triumph. And although Hort was strictly accurate in describing the treatment of Kingsley as 'horribly unchristian,' it is demanding too much of human nature to expect a master of fence, when wantonly attacked with a bludgeon, to abstain from the pleasure of pricking his adversary scientifically in the tender parts of his body. The bitterest passages were excised in later editions; and the 'Apologia' remains a masterpiece of autobiography, and a powerful defence of Catholicism. To Newman this appeared to be the turning-point in his fortunes. He felt strong enough to administer a severe snub to Monsignor Talbot, his old enemy, who, hearing of the success the 'Apologia,' invited him to preach at Rome. Then at once he threw himself into a great scheme for founding an Oratory at Oxford. Eight and a half acres were bought between Worcester College, the Clarendon Press, the Observatory, and Beaumont Street, a magnificent site, which the Oratorians acquired for only £8400. But here again he was thwarted. W.G. Ward opposed the scheme with all his might, insisting on the necessity of 'preserving the purity of a Catholic atmosphere throughout the whole course of education.' The whole tendency of the Ultramontane movement was to secure, before all other things, a body of militant young Catholics to fight the battles of the Church. Newman was willing to support the English Church in its warfare against unbelief; to the Ultramontane a Protestant is as certainly damned as an atheist, and is more mischievous as being less amenable to Catholic influence. Manning and Talbot seem to have given the project its coup de grâce at Rome, and Newman sold the land which he had bought. He was bitterly disappointed; but the growth of public esteem had given him self-confidence, and he did not again fall into despondency, though he had a strange presentiment of approaching death, which prompted his last famous poem, 'The Dream of Gerontius.' A second attempt to go to Oxford was thwarted by enemies at Home and in England in 1866-7. The extreme party, with Manning, now Archbishop, at their head, seemed to be victorious all along the line. They were able to proceed to their supreme triumph in the Vatican Council which issued the dogma of Papal Infallibility. Newman, while others were intriguing and haranguing, was quietly engaged in preparing his subtlest and (on one side) his most characteristic work, 'The Grammar of Assent,' an attempt at a Catholic apologetic on a 'personalist,' as opposed to an 'intellectualist' basis. He declined to take an active part in the theological conferences about infallibility, being by this time well aware how little weight such arguments as he could bring were likely to have at Rome. He was disgusted at the insolent aggressiveness of the Ultramontanes, but he had no wish to combat it. The situation was hopeless, and he knew it. The death of several friends increased the sense of isolation, and during the years 1875 to 1879 his silence and depression were very noticeable to those who lived with him. His dearest friend, Ambrose St. John, was one of several who died about this time. But Trinity College, Oxford, made him an honorary fellow in 1877, an honour which seemed to prognosticate the far higher distinction which was soon to be conferred upon him.

The death of Pius IX in 1878 brought to an end the long reign of obscurantism at the Vatican, and with the election of Leo XIII Newman emerged from the cloud under which he had remained for more than a generation. The new Pope lost no time in making him a Cardinal, though even now the prize seemed to be on the point of slipping through his fingers. He valued the honour immensely as setting the official seal of approbation on his life's work, and the last ten years of his life were quietly happy. He was able to mingle actively in affairs of public interest, and to write long letters, till near the end. He died on August 11, 1890, in his ninetieth year, and was buried, by his own request, in the same grave with his friend Ambrose St. John.

Why is it that this sad, isolated, broken life, in which the young man renounces the creed of the boy, and the elder man pours scorn upon the loyalties of his prime; which found its last haven in a society which wished to make a tool of him but distrusted him too much for even this pitiful service, has still an absorbing interest for our generation? For it is not only in England that Newman's fame lives and grows. In France there is a cult of Newman, which has produced biographies by Bremond and Faure, as well as a history of the Catholic Revival in England by Thureau-Dangin. In England, besides Dean Church's 'Oxford Movement,' we have biographies by R.H. Hutton and W. Barry, and appreciations or depreciations by E. Abbott, Leslie Stephen, Froude, Mark Pattison, and several others.

The interest is mainly personal and psychological. Newman's writings, and his life, are a 'human document' in a very peculiar degree. Bremond is right in calling attention to the autocentrism of Newman. 'Although (he says) the words "I" and "me" are relatively rare in Newman's writings, whether as preacher, novelist, controversialist, philosopher, or poet, he always reveals and always describes himself.' Even his historical portraits are reconstructed from his inner consciousness; hence their historical falsity--all ages are mixed in his histories--and their philosophical truth. In a sense he was the most reserved of men. We do not know whether he had any ordinary temptations; we do not know whether he ever fell in love. But the texture of his mind and the growth of his opinions have been laid bare to us with the candour of a saint and the accuracy of a dissector or analyst. He reminds us of De Quincey, who also could tell the story of his own life, but no other, and whose style, like his own, was modelled on the literary traditions of the eighteenth century.

He has left us, in the 'Apologia,' a picture of his precocious and dreamy boyhood, when he lived in a world of his own, peopled by angels and spirits, a world in which the supernatural was the only nature. He was lonely and reserved, then as always. It is not for nothing that in his sermons he expatiates so often on the impenetrability of the human soul. A nature so self-centred has always something hard and inhuman about it; he was loved, but loved little in return. And yet he craved for more affection than he could reciprocate. 'I cannot ever realise to myself,' he wrote once, 'that anyone loves me.' It is a common feeling in imaginative, withdrawn characters. Deepseated in his nature was a reverence for the hidden springs of thought, action, and belief. When he spoke of 'conscience,' as he did continually, he meant, not the faculty which decides ethical problems, but the undivided soul-nature which underlies the separate activities of thought, will, and feeling. In this sense the epigrammatist was right who said that 'to Newman his own nature was a revelation which he called conscience.' He 'followed the gleam,' uncertain whither it would lead him. The poem 'Lead, kindly Light' is the most intimate self-revelation that he ever made. This mental attitude, which he took early in life, became the foundation of his 'personalist' philosophy, and of the anti-intellectualism which was the negative side of it. But this reliance on the inner light, which nearly made a mystic of him, was clouded by a haunting fear of God's wrath, which imparts a gloomy tinge to his Anglican sermons, and which, while he was halting between the English Church and Rome, plied him with the very unmystical question 'Where shall I be most safe?' an argument which he had used repeatedly and without scruple in his parochial sermons.[82]

It is nevertheless true that this self-centred spirit was, at least in early life, impressionable and open to the influence of others. His friendship with Hurrell Froude and Keble affected his opinions considerably: and still more potent was the pervading intangible influence of Oxford--the academic atmosphere. It cannot indeed be said that the University was at this time in a healthy condition. Mark Pattison has described with caustic contempt the intellectual lethargy of the place, and the miserable quality of the lectures. Oxford was still de facto a close clerical corporation, and in most colleges 'clubbable men' rather than scholars were chosen for the fellowships. Oriel won its unique position by breaking through this tradition, and also by making originality rather than success in the university examinations the main qualification for election. But even at Oriel, and among the ablest men, there was great ignorance of much that was being thought and written elsewhere. Knowledge of German was rare. Even the classics were not read in a humanistic spirit. 'Of the world of wisdom and sentiment--of poetry and philosophy, of social and political experience, contained in the Latin and Greek classics, and of the true relation of the degenerate and semi-barbarous Christian writers of the fourth century to that world--Oxford, in 1830, had never dreamt.[83] Theological prejudice in fact distorted the whole outlook of the resident fellows, and confounded all estimation of relative values. Newman never, all through his life, took a step towards overcoming this early prejudice. He imagined a golden age of the Church, or several golden ages, and found them in 'the first three centuries,' in the time of Alfred the Great or of Edward the Confessor, or in the seventeenth century. He was only sure that the sixteenth century was made of much baser metal. This unhistorical idealisation of the past, even of a barbarous past, was very characteristic of Newman and his friends. They bequeathed to the Anglican Church the strange legend of an age of pure doctrine and heroic practice, to which it should be our aim to 'return.' The real strength of this legend lies in the fact that it has no historical foundation. The ideal which is presented as a return or a revival is nothing of the kind, but a creation of our own time, projected by the imagination into the past, from which it comes back with a halo of authority. Newman had his full share of these illusions. In his youth and prime he was more of an Englishman than an Anglican. He despised foreigners, unless they were Catholic saints, could not bear the sight of the tricolor, and hated all the 'ideas of the Revolution.' His dictum, 'Luther is dead, but Hildebrand and Loyola are alive,' throws a flood of light upon the contents of his mind, as does the truly British prejudice which caused him to be horrified at the sight of ships coaling at Malta 'on a holy day.' His range of ideas was so much restricted that Bremond, a sincere admirer, says that his imagination lived on 'une poignée de souvenirs d'enfant.' How tragic was the fate which caught this loyal Englishman and more than loyal Oxonian in the meshes of a cosmopolitan institution in which England counted for little and Oxford for nothing at all!

The Reform of 1832 seemed to threaten the English Church with destruction. Arnold in this year wrote 'The Church, as it now stands, no human power can save.' The bishops were stunned and bewildered by the unexpected outbreak of popular hostility. Old methods of defence were plainly useless; some new plan of campaign must be devised against the double assault of political radicalism and theological liberalism. To Newman both alike were of the devil; theological liberalism especially was only specious infidelity. He never had the slightest inkling that a deep religious earnestness and love of truth underlay the revolt against orthodox tradition. His fighting instincts were aroused. When Keble attributed the scheme for suppressing some Irish bishopries to 'national apostasy,' he rushed to arms in defence of Church privileges and property. In the first Tract (1833) he says:

'A notion has gone abroad that the people can take away your power. They think they have given it and can take it away. They have been deluded into a notion that present palpable usefulness, produceable results, acceptableness to your flocks--that these and such-like are the tests of your Divine commission. Enlighten them in this matter. Exalt our holy fathers the Bishops, as the representatives of the Apostles, and the Angels of the Churches, and magnify your office, as being ordained by them to take part in their ministry.'

That was the keynote of the whole Tractarian movement. A weapon was needed to smite liberalism. Nothing but a compact and powerful organisation could repel the foe. God must have provided such an organisation: a Divine society, certain of ultimate victory, must exist somewhere. Newman and his friends hoped to find it in the Anglican Church; and such was the power of their contagious zeal and confident enthusiasm, that the immediate danger was actually staved off, and the Establishment was allowed a new lease of life. But the national Church of England was not constituted to resist the national will, and the attempt to reorganise it on Catholic lines was fore-doomed to failure. And so, since the assumption that a great institutional fighting Church must exist was never even questioned, when Anglicanism failed him there was no other refuge but Rome.

He was certainly more logical than his friends who remained behind. Anglo-Catholicism has its theoretical basis in a definition of Catholicity which is repudiated by all other Catholics; its traditions are largely legendary. But it is an eclectic system well suited to the English character, and the distorted view of history which Newman bequeathed to the party has enabled it to borrow much that is good from different sides, without any sense of inconsistency. The idea of a Divine society has been and is the inspiration of thousands of ardent workers in the Anglican Church. It lifted the religion of many Englishmen from the somewhat gross and bourgeois condition in which the movement found it, to a pure and unworldly idealism. And, unlike most other religious revivals, especially in this country, it has remained remarkably free from unhealthy emotionalism and hysterics. The social atmosphere of Oxford, always alien to mawkish sentiment, penetrated the whole movement, and maintained in it for many years a certain sanity and dignity which, while they doubtless prevented it from spreading widely in the middle class, made the Tractarians respected by men of taste and education. But these influences could not be permanent. The goodwill of the Tractarian firm (if we may so express it) has now been acquired by men with very different aims and methods. The ablest members of the party are plunging violently into social politics, while the rank and file in increasing numbers are fluttering round the Roman candle, into which many of them must ultimately fall.

The progress of the movement between 1833 and 1845 was almost entirely in the direction of teaching the clergy to 'magnify their office.' The other part of the scheme, the combat against theological liberalism, fell quite into the background. The main reason for this was that during those strange years the theologians so completely dominated Oxford that liberalism could hardly raise its head, and was despised as well as hated. Only after Newman's secession could the regeneration of the University begin. Then indeed liberalism came in like a flood, though it was a very shallow flood in some cases. This was the day of the self-satisfied young rationalist, 'ecarté par une plaisanterie des croyances dont la raison d'un Pascal ne réussit pas à se dégager,' as Renan says--an orgy of facile free thought which after a generation was chastised by another clerical reaction.

If Newman could have foreseen the victory of his party in the English Church, he might perhaps have been content to remain in it. We cannot tell. But it is doubtful whether he would have taken Pusey's place as leader of the party. Newman's influence was disturbing and subtly disintegrating to every cause for which he laboured. His startling candour often seemed like treachery. He could not work with others, and broke with nearly all his friends, retaining only his disciples. He confessed himself a bad judge of character. It is doubtful, after all, whether he was much injured by the jealousy and almost instinctive fear which he inspired among the Roman Catholic hierarchy. If he had been allowed to take the place due to his abilities, his character, and his reputation, what could he have done that he was unable to do at Edgbaston? We cannot fancy him plunged in crooked ecclesiastical intrigue, like that Inglese italianato, Cardinal Manning. Still less can we fancy him haranguing strikers, and stealing the credit of composing a trade dispute. No doubt he suffered under the sense of injury; but probably he did what was in him to do. If the Roman Church would not use him as a tool, it was probably because he would not have been a good tool. There are some mistakes which that Church seldom makes; it knows how to choose its men.

What will be the verdict of history on the type of Catholicism which Newman represented? He was kept out in the cold by a conservative Pope, and honoured by a liberal Pope. Which was right, from the point of view of Catholic interests and policy? This is perhaps the most important question which the life of Newman raises; for it affects our anticipations of the future even more than our judgments of the past. Is Newman a safe or a possible guide for Catholics in the twentieth century?

Newman was no metaphysician; he confesses it himself. 'My turn of mind,' he says, 'has never led me towards metaphysics; rather it has been logical, ethical, practical.'[84] For metaphysics requires an initial act of faith in human reason, and Newman had not this faith. Even in his Anglican days he uttered many astonishing things in contempt of reason. 'What is intellect itself (he asks) but a fruit of the Fall, not found in paradise or in heaven, more than in little children, and at the utmost but tolerated by the Church, and only not incompatible with the regenerate mind?... Reason is God's gift, but so are the passions.... Eve was tempted to follow passion and reason, and she fell.'[85] 'Faith does not regard degrees of evidence.'[86] 'Faith and humility consist, not in going about to prove, but in the outset confiding in the testimony of others.' 'The more you set yourself to argue and prove, in order to discover truth, the less likely you are to reason correctly.'[87] The amazing crudity of this avowed obscurantism is likely to make the orthodox apologist writhe, and to move the rationalist to contemptuous laughter. In this and many other cases, Newman seems to love to caricature himself, and to put his beliefs in that form in which they outrage common sense most completely. We can imagine nothing more calculated to drive a young and ingenuous mind into flippant scepticism than a course of Newman's sermons. The reductio ad absurdum of his arguments is not left to the reader to make; it is innocently provided by the preacher.

And yet Newman's central position is not absurd, or only becomes absurd when it is applied to justify belief in gross superstition. He holds that what he calls 'reasoning' deals only with abstractions, and is not the faculty on which we rely in forming 'judgments.' These judgments, to which we give our 'assent,' and by which we regulate our conduct, are affirmations of the basal personality. And these have an authority far greater than can ever arise out of the logical manipulation of concepts. 'There is no ultimate test of truth besides the testimony borne to the truth by the mind itself.' The 'mind itself,' the concrete personality, is concerned with realities, while the intellect, which for him corresponds very nearly with the discursive reason (dihanoia) of the Greek philosophers, is at home only in mathematics and, up to a certain point, in logic. The concepts of the intellect have no existence outside it. 'The mind has the gift, by an act of creation, of bringing before it abstractions and generalisations which have no counterpart, no existence, out of it.'[88] Parenthetically, we may remark that passages like this show how wide of the truth Mr. Barry is when he speaks of Newman as a 'thorough Alexandrine.' To deny the existence of universals, to regard them as mere creations of the mind, is rank blasphemy to a Platonist; and the Alexandrines were Christian Platonists. No more misleading statement could be made about Newman's philosophy than to associate him with Platonism of any kind, whether Pagan or Christian. Newman adopts the sensationalist (Lockian) theory of knowledge. Ideas are copies or modifications of the data presented by the senses; 'first principles are abstractions from facts, not elementary truths prior to reasoning.' This is pure nominalism, in its crudest form. It makes all arguments in favour of the great truths of religion valueless; for if there are no universals, rational theism is impossible. It follows that the famous scholastic 'proofs of God's existence' have for Newman no cogency whatever; indeed it is difficult to see how he can have escaped condemning the whole philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas as a juggling with bloodless concepts. Newman himself pleaded that he had no wish to oppose the official dogmatics of his Church. But protestations are of no avail where the facts are so clear. 'The natural theology of our schools,' says a writer in the Tablet, quoted by Dr. Caldecott in his 'Philosophy of Religion,' 'is based frankly and wholly on the appeal to reason.' This is notoriously true; and what Newman thought of reason we have already seen. His extreme disparagement of the intellect seems to preclude what he calls 'real assent' to the creeds and dogmas of Catholicism; for these clearly consist of 'notional' propositions. But Newman would answer that the Church is a concrete fact, to which 'real assent' can be given; and the Church has guaranteed the truth of the notional propositions in question. But since reason is put out of court as a witness to truth, on what faculty, or on what evidence, does Newman rely? Feeling he distrusts; that side of mysticism, at any rate, finds no sympathy from him. Nor does he, like many Kantians and others, make the will supreme over the other faculties. Rather, as we have seen, he bases his reliance on the verdicts of the undivided personality, which he often calls conscience. This line of apologetic was at this very time being ably developed by Julius Hare. It is in itself an argument which has no necessary connexion with obscurantism. 'Personalism,' as it is technically called, reminds us that we do actually base our judgments on grounds which are nob purely rational; that the intellect, in forming concepts, has to be content with an approximate resemblance to concrete reality; and that the will and feelings have their rights and claims which cannot be ignored in a philosophy of religion. But while it is compatible with a robust faith in the powers of the constructive intellect, personalism is beyond question a self-sufficient, independent, individualistic doctrine. When it is combined with a nominalist theory of knowledge, it naturally suggests that every man may and should live by the creed which bests suits his idiosyncrasies. Now there was much in Newman's temperament which made him turn in this direction. 'Lead, kindly Light' has been the favourite hymn of many an independent thinker, to whom the authority of the Church is less than nothing. But on another side Newman was all his life a fierce upholder of the principle of authority. His reason for accepting the dogmas of the Church, and for wishing to destroy heresiarchs like wild beasts, was certainly not that his basal personality testified to the truth and value of all ecclesiastical dogmas. He believed them 'by confiding in the testimony of others'--in other words, on the authority of the Catholic Church. If we push back the enquiry one step further, and ask on what grounds he chooses to prefer the authority of the Catholic Church to other authorities, such as natural science or philosophy, we are driven again to lay great stress on the almost political necessity which he felt that such a Divine society should exist. In accepting the authority of the Church, he accepted the authority of all that the Church teaches, in complete independence of human reason. But the Roman Church never professes to be independent of human reason. The official scholastic philosophy claims to be a demonstrative proof of theism.

Newman, then, was only half a Catholic. He accepted with all the fervour of a neophyte the principle of submission to Holy Church. But in place of the official intellectualist apologetic, which an Englishman may study to great advantage in the remarkably able series of manuals issued by the Jesuits of Stonyhurst, he substituted a philosophy of experience which is certainly not Catholic. The authority claimed by the Roman Church rests on one side upon revelation, on the other upon an elaborate structure of demonstrative reasoning, which the simple folk are allowed to 'take as read,' only because they cannot be expected to understand it, but which is declared to be of irresistible cogency to any properly instructed mind. To deny the validity of reasoning upon Divine things is to withdraw one of the supports on which Catholicism rests. Subjectivism, based on vital experience, mixes no better with this system than oil with water. Scholasticism prides itself on clear-cut definitions, on irrefragable logic, on using words always in the same sense. For Newman, as for his disciples the Modernists, theological terms are only symbols for varying values, and he holds that the moment they are treated as having any fixed connotation, error begins. It is no wonder if learned Catholics thought that Newman did not play the game. Father Perrone, in spite of his friendship for the object of his criticism, declared that 'Newman miscet et confundit omnia.'

The accusation of scepticism, which was not unnaturally brought against him, was hotly resented by Newman, and with some justice. Of the intensity of his personal conviction there can be no doubt whatever. Indeed, it was just because his faith was in no danger that he cared so little for any intellectual defence of it. He might have made his own the lines of Wordsworth:

'Here then we rest; not fearing for our creed
The worst that human reasoning can achieve
To unsettle or perplex it.'

Wordsworth too, it may be remembered, speaks of 'reason' with hardly more respect than Newman himself as:

'The inferior faculty that moulds
With her minute and speculative pains
Opinion, ever changing.'

Robert Browning also, especially in his later years, uses anti-intellectualist language equally uncompromising. 'Wholly distrust thy reason,' he says in 'La Saisiaz.' Coleridge's distinction between 'understanding' and 'reason,' or Westcott's distinction between 'reason' and 'reasoning,' might have saved these great writers from the appearance, and perhaps more than the appearance, of blaspheming against the highest and most divine faculty of human nature. For the reason is something much higher than logic-chopping; it can provide, from its own resources, a remedy for the intellectual error which is just now miscalled intellectualism; it is the activity of the whole personality under the guidance of its highest part; and because it is a real unification of our disordered nature, it can bring us into real contact with the higher world of Spirit. Newman's scepticism was not doubtfulness about matters of faith; it was only a wholly unjustifiable contempt and distrust for the unaided activity of the human mind. This activity, as far as he could see, produced only various forms of 'liberalism,' which he strangely enough regarded as a kind of scepticism. Thus he retorted, with equal injustice, the unjust charge brought against himself.

Newman has often been suspected or accused of quibbling and intellectual dishonesty. Kingsley, whose healthy but somewhat rough English morality and common sense were revolted by Newman's whole attitude to life and conduct, was unable to conceive how any educated man could believe in winking Virgins and liquefying blood, and thought that Newman must be dishonest. More recently Dr. Abbott has accused him of being a philomythus. Judged by ordinary standards, Newman's criteria of belief do seem incompatible with intellectual honesty. Locke, whom Newman resembles in his theory of knowledge, lays down a canon which condemns absolutely the Cardinal's doctrine of assent. 'There is one unerring mark,' he says, 'by which a man may know whether he is a lover of truth in earnest, namely, the not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built on will warrant.' Newman himself quotes this dictum, and argues against it that men do, as a matter of fact, form their judgments in a very different fashion. To most people, however, the fact that opinions are so manufactured is no proof that they ought to be so. To most people it seems plain that the practical necessity of making unverified assumptions, and the habit of clinging to them because we have made them, even after their falsity has been exposed, is a satisfactory explanation of the prevalence of error, but not a reason for acquiescing in it. It is useful, they hold, to point out how assumption has a perilous tendency to pass for proof, not that we may contentedly confuse assumption with proof, but that we may be on our guard against doing so. But such is Newman's dislike of 'reason' that he rejoices to find that the majority of mankind are, in fact, not guided by it. And then, having made this discovery, he is quite ready to 'reason' himself, but not in the manner of an earnest seeker after truth. Reason, for him, is a serviceable weapon of attack or defence, but he is like a man fighting with magic impenetrable armour. He enjoys a bout of logical fence; but it will decide nothing for him: his 'certitude' is independent of it. It is easy to see that such an attitude must appear profoundly dishonest to any man who accepts Locke's maxim about truth-seeking. It is equally easy to see that Newman would spurn the charge of dishonesty as hotly as the charge of scepticism. His principles made it easy for him to adopt the characteristic Catholic habit of 'believing' anything that is pleasing to the religious imagination. His sermons are full of such phrases as 'Scripture seems to show us'; 'why should we not believe ...'; 'who knows whether ...,' and the like, all introducing some fantastic superstition. He deliberately accepts the insidious and deadly doctrine that 'no man is convinced of a thing who can endure the thought of its contradictory being true.' To which we may rejoin that, on the contrary, no man has a right to be convinced of anything until he has fairly faced the hypothesis of its contradictory being true. So long as Newman's method prevailed in Europe, every branch of practical knowledge was condemned to barrenness.

For what kind of knowledge is it which is acquired, not by the exercise of the discursive intellect, or by the evidence of our senses, but by the affirmations of our basal personality? Surely the legitimate province of 'personalism' lies in the region of general ideas, or rather in the Weltanschauung as a whole. Our undivided personality protests against any philosophy which makes life irrational, or base, or incurably evil. It claims that those pictures of reality which are provided by the intellect, by the æsthetic sense, and by the moral sense, shall all have justice done to them in any attempted synthesis. It rejects materialism, metaphysical dualism, solipsism, and pessimism, on one or other of these grounds. Such a final interpretation of existence as any of these offers, leaves out some fundamental and essential factor of experience, and is therefore untenable. If no metaphysical scheme can be constructed which is at once comprehensive and inwardly consistent, personalism insists that we must acknowledge defeat for the time, rather than take refuge in a logical system which may be free from inner contradictions but which does not satisfy the whole man as a living and active spiritual being. This is a sound argument. But it is absurd to suppose that our personality, acting as an undivided whole, can decide whether the institutional Church, or one branch of it, is the Body of Christ and the receptacle of infallible revelation; whether Christ was born at Bethlehem or Nazareth; or whether Nestorius was a heretic. We have no magical sword for cutting these knots, and no miraculous guide to tell us that authority A is to be believed implicitly, while the possibility of authority B being right is not to be entertained even in thought. Newman as usual supplies us with the best weapons against himself. It startles us to find, even in 1852, such a sentence as this: 'Revealed religion furnishes facts to other sciences, which those sciences, left to themselves, would never reach. Thus, in the science of history, the preservation of our race in Noah's ark is an historical fact, which history never would arrive at without revelation.' The transition from belief on the purely internal ground of personal assent to belief on the purely external ground of Church authority is certainly abrupt and hard to explain; but Newman makes it habitually, without any consciousness of a salto mortale. In the 'Apologia' he even says that the argument from personality is 'one form of the argument from authority.' The argument seems to be--'There is no third alternative besides Catholicism or Rationalism. But "personality" will not accept the dictation of reason; therefore it must accept the authority of the Church.' It is a strange argument. All through his life he enormously exaggerated the moral and intellectual weight which should be attached to Church tradition. 'Securus judicat orbis terrarum' were the words which rang in his ears at the supreme moment of his great decision. His 'orbis terrarum' was the Latin empire. And when even in those countries the authority of the Pope is rejected, he condemns modern civilisation as an aberration. This however is a complete abandonment of his own test. He first says 'The judgment of the great world is final'; and then 'If the world decides against Rome, so much the worse for the world.' After all, Newman had no right to complain if his opponents found his reasoning disingenuous. To make up our minds first, and to argue in favour of the decision afterwards, is in truth to make the reason a hewer of wood and drawer of water to the irrational part of our nature.

It is precisely his sympathy with Catholicism on the religious side, and his alienation from its intellectual method, which makes Newman's apologetic such a two-edged weapon. In attempting to defend Catholicism, he has gone far to explain it. To the historian, there is no great mystery about the growth and success of the Western Catholic Church. Christianity was already a syncretistic religion in the second century. Like the other forms of worship with which it competed for the popular favour, it contained the necessary elements of mystery-cult, of ethical rule, of social brotherhood, and of personal devotion. But besides many genuine points of superiority, it had a decisive advantage over the religions of Isis and Mithra in the exclusiveness and intolerance which it derived from the Jewish tradition. When the failure of the last persecution forced the Empire to make a concordat with the Church, the transformation of the federated but autonomous Christian communities into a centralised theocratic despotism, claiming secular as well as spiritual sovereignty, was only a matter of time. It was inevitable, just as the principate of Augustus and the sultanate of Diocletian were inevitable; but there is nothing specially divine or glorious about any of these phases of human evolution. The revolt of Northern Europe in the sixteenth century was equally inevitable; and so is the alienation of enlightened minds from the Roman Church at the present day. Newman shows with great force and ingenuity that all the developments in the Roman system which Protestantism rejects as later accretions were natural and necessary. But this only means that the Catholic Church, in order to live, was compelled to adapt itself to the prevailing conditions of human culture in the countries where it desired to be supreme. The argument, so far as it goes, tells against rather than in favour of any special supernatural character belonging to that institution. And if the 'orbis terrarum,' which once gave its verdict in favour of Latin Catholicism, is now disposed to reverse its decision, how, on Newman's principle, can its right to do so be denied? The true reasons for the strength and vitality which the Roman Church still retains are not difficult to find. Its system possesses an inner consistency, which is dearly purchased by neglecting much that should enter into a large and true view of the world, but which guarantees to those who have once accepted it an untroubled calm and assurance very acceptable to those who have been tossed upon a sea of doubt. It surrounds itself with an impenetrable armour by persuading its adherents that all moral and intellectual scruples, in matters where Holy Church has pronounced its verdict, are suggestions of the Evil One, to be spurned like the prickings of sensuality. It has succeeded, by long experience, in providing satisfaction for nearly all the needs of the average man, and for all the needs of the average woman. In particular, the æsthetic tastes which, in Southern Europe at any rate, are closely connected with religious feeling, are fully catered for; and those superstitions which the majority of mankind still love in their hearts, though they are somewhat ashamed of them, are allowed to luxuriate unchecked. Further, Catholicism encourages and blesses that esprit de corps which has produced the brightest triumphs of self-abnegation as well as the darkest crimes of cruel bigotry in human history. A Church which unites these advantages is in no danger of falling into insignificance, even if the best intellect and morality of the age are estranged from it. It may even have a great future as the nucleus of a conservative resistance to the social revolution. It is doubtful whether those who wish to preserve the traditions and civilisation of the past will be able to find anywhere, except in the Latin Church, an organisation sufficiently coherent and universal to provide a rallying ground for defence against the new barbarian invasion--proceeding this time not from the rude nations of the North, but from the crowded alleys of our great towns--which threatens to plunge us into a new Dark Age. The menace of the Red Peril will secure, for a long time to come, the survival of the Black.

But the Roman Catholicism which has a future is probably that of Manning, and not that of Newman. A Church which depends for its strength and prestige on the iron discipline of a centralised autocracy, and on the fanatical devotion of soldiers who know no duty except obedience, no cause except the interests of their society, can make no terms with the disintegrating nominalism, the uncertain subjectivism, of a mind like Newman's. It has been the strange fate of this great man, after driving a wedge deep into the Anglican Church, which at this day is threatened with disruption through the movement which he helped to originate, to have nearly succeeded in doing the same to the far more compact structure of Roman Catholicism. The Modernist movement has from the first appealed to Newman as its founder, and has sought to protect itself under his authority. It is necessary to consider, as the last topic of this article, whether this affiliation can be allowed to be true. No one who has read any of Newman's works can doubt that he would have recoiled with horror from the destructive criticism of Loisy, the contempt for scholastic authority of Tyrrell, and the defiance hurled at the Papacy in the manifesto of the Italian Modernists. Newman's doctrine of Development was far removed from that of Bergson's 'L'Évolution Créatrice.' He defended the fact of development against the staticism of contemporary Anglicanism; but his notion of development was more like the unrolling of a scroll than the growth of a tree or the expansion and change of a human character. 'Every Catholic holds,' he says, 'that the Christian dogmas were in the Church from the time of the Apostles; that they were ever in their substance what they are now.' Compare this with the following words from the Italian manifesto: 'The supernatural life of Christ in the faithful and in the Church has been clothed in an historical form, which has given birth to what we might somewhat loosely call the Christ of legend.... Such a criticism does away with the possibility of finding in Christ's ministry even the embryonic form of the Church's later theological teaching.' 'A dogma,' says Le Roy, one of the ablest philosophers of the school, 'proclaims, above all, a prescription of practical order; it is the formula of a rule of practical conduct. Why then should we not bring theory into harmony with practice?'

These extracts mark a much later phase of the revolt against Catholic dogma and scholastic theology than can be found in Newman's writings. They are contemporary with the Pragmatism of James and Schiller, and the Activism of Bergson. So bold a defiance of tradition would have been impossible thirty years earlier. And yet, when Newman pours scorn upon human reason, and when he enthrones the 'conscience' as the supreme arbiter of truth, is he not, in fact, preparing the way for these startling declarations, which imply a complete rupture with Catholic authority? Dogmas are indisputably 'notional' propositions; that is to say, they belong to that class of truths to which Newman ascribes only a very subordinate importance. We cannot, in his sense,'assent' to an historical proposition as such, but only to the authority which has ordered us to believe it. And is there any justification for Newman's confidence that this authority may make apparent innovations, such as he admits to have been made throughout the history of the Church, but no real changes? If he had been able to think out the implications of his doctrine of development with the help of such arguments as those of Bergson, would he not have seen that without change and real innovation there can be no true evolution? Do not the fluidity and pragmatic character of dogma, so much insisted on by Sabatier and Le Roy, follow from the anti-intellectualist personalism which we have seen to be the foundation of Newman's philosophy of religion? The Modernist might argue that he is only extending to the history of the Church the doctrine of education by experience which Newman found to be true in the life-history of the individual. Life itself, with its experiences and its needs, is the revealer of truth. We cannot anticipate the wisdom of the future.

'I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.'

The kindly light leads a man on step by step; it conducts him from experience to experience, not without lapses into error; it reproves him if he desires to 'choose and see his path.' If this is true in the history of the individual, is it not probably also true in the history of the Church? And if it is true in the history of the Church, are not the dogmatists wrong who have tried to legislate not only for the present but the future, and to bind the Church for all time to the formulations which appeared satisfactory to themselves? If Providence is leading the Church through varied experiences in order to teach it greater wisdom, is it not clear that we must not rashly preclude the possibility of future revelation by stereotyping the results of some earlier stage of experience? Thus the empiricism of Newman leads logically to consequences which he would have been among the first to reject.

Some rather shallow thinkers in this country have expressed their surprise and regret that the Vatican has refused to make any terms with Modernism. They have supposed that the fault lies with an ignorant and reactionary Pope. But there are many reasons why this dangerous and disintegrating tendency must be rigorously excluded from Roman Catholicism. In the first place, Modernism destroys the historical basis of Christianity, and converts the Incarnation and Atonement into myths like those of other dying and rising saviour-gods, which hardly pretend to be historical. But it was this foundation in history which helped largely to secure the triumph of Christianity over its rivals. In the place of the historical God-Man, Modernism gives us the history of the Church as an object of reverence. We are bidden to contemplate an institution of amazingly tough vitality but great adaptability, which in its determination to survive has not only changed colour like a chameleon but has from time to time put forth new organs and discovered new weapons of offence and defence. We ask for evidence that the Church has regenerated the world; and we are shown how, by hook or by crook, it has succeeded in safeguarding its own interests. Ecclesiastical historians are ingenious and unscrupulous; but it is impossible even for them to exhibit Church history as the record of a continuous intervention of the Spirit of Christ in human affairs. If any Spirit has presided over the councils of popes, cardinals, and inquisitors it is not that of the Founder of Christianity.

Further, the religious philosophy of Modernism is bad, much worse than the scholasticism which it derides. It is in essentials a revival of the sophistry of Protagoras. And if it were metaphysically more respectable than it is, it is so widely opposed to the whole system of Catholic apologetics, that if it were accepted, it would necessitate a complete reconstruction of Catholic dogma. Let any man read the Stonyhurst manuals, and say whether the radical empiricism of the Modernists could find a lodgment anywhere in such a system without disturbing the stability of the whole. Catholicism is one of the most compact structures in the world, and it rests on presuppositions which are far removed from those of Modernism. It is one thing to admit that dogmas in many cases have a pragmatic origin, and quite another to say that they may be invented or rejected with a pragmatic purpose. The healthy human intellect will never believe that the same proposition may be true for faith and untrue in fact; but this is the Modernist contention.

Lastly, the subjectivism of Newman and the Modernists is fatal to that exclusiveness which is the corner-stone of Catholic policy. The analogy between the individual and the Church suggests that God may 'fulfil Himself in many ways, lest one good custom should corrupt the world.' As there are many individuals, each of whom is being guided separately by the 'kindly light,' so there may be many churches. The pragmatic proof of the truth of a religion, from the fact of its survival and successful working, does not justify the Roman claim to monopoly. The Protestant churches also display vitality, and their members seem to exhibit the fruits of the Spirit. The condemnations of Modernism published by the Vatican show that the Papal court is quite alive to this danger. To the outsider, indeed, it might seem a happy solution of a long controversy if the Roman Church would be content to claim the gifts of grace which are really hers, without denying the validity of the Orders and Sacraments of other bodies, and the genuineness of the Christian graces which they exhibit. It would then be admitted on all hands that some temperaments are more suited to Catholicism, others to Protestantism, and that the character of each man develops most satisfactorily under the discipline which suits his nature. But we must not expect any such concession from Rome; and in truth such an admission would be the beginning of the end for Catholicism in its present form.

Our conclusion then is that although Newman was not a Modernist, but an exceedingly stiff conservative, he did introduce into the Roman Church a very dangerous and essentially alien habit of thought, which has since developed into Modernism. Perhaps Monsignor Talbot was not far wrong, from his own point of view, when he called him 'the most dangerous man in England.' One side of his religion was based on principles which, when logically drawn out, must lead away from Catholicism in the direction of an individualistic religion of experience, and a substitution of history for dogma which makes all truth relative and all values fluid. Newman's writings have always made genuine Catholics uneasy, though they hardly know why. It is probable that here is the solution.

The character of Newman--for with this we must end--may seem to have been more admirable than lovable. He was more apt to make disciples than friends. Yet he was loved and honoured by men whose love is an honour, and he is admired by all who can appreciate a consistently unworldly life. The Roman Church has been less unpopular in England since Newman received from it the highest honour which it can bestow. Throughout his career he was a steadfast witness against tepid and insincere professions of religion, and against any compromise with the shifting currents of popular opinion. All cultivated readers, who have formed their tastes on the masterpieces of good literature, are attracted, sometimes against their will, by the dignity and reserve of his style, qualities which belong to the man, and not only to the writer. Like Goethe, he disdains the facile arts which make the commonplace reader laugh and weep. 'Ach die zärtlichen Herzen! ein Pfuscher vermag sie zu rühren!' Like Wordsworth, he might say 'To stir the blood I have no cunning art.' There are no cheap effects in any of Newman's writings. He is the most undemocratic of teachers. Such men do what can be done to save a nation from itself, its natural enemy. They are not indifferent to fame, because they desire influence; but they will do nothing to advertise themselves. The public must come to them; they will not go to the public. There have been other great men who have been as indifferent as Newman to the applause of the vulgar. But they have been generally either pure intellectualists or pure artists, in whom

'The intellectual power through words and things
Went sounding on a dim and perilous way.'

Newman's 'confidence towards God' was of a still nobler kind. It rested on an unclouded faith in the Divine guidance, and on a very just estimate of the worthlessness of contemporary praise and blame. There have been very few men who have been able to combine so strong a faith with a thorough distrust of both logic-chopping and emotional excitement, and who, while denying themselves these aids to conviction, have been able to say, calmly and without petulance, that with them it is a very small thing to be judged of man's judgment.

'What (he asks) 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? We pay indeed our superiors full reverence, and with cheerfulness as unto the Lord; and we honour eminent talents as deserving admiration and reward; and the more readily act we thus, because these are little things to pay.'[89]

Such unworldliness as this, in the well-chosen words of R.H. Hutton, 'stands out in strange and almost majestic contrast to the eager turmoil of confused passions, hesitating ideals, tentative virtues, and groping philanthropies, amidst which it was lived.'

Another mark of greatness is unbroken consistency and unity of aim in a long life. There are few parallels to the neglect of his own literary reputation by Newman. Higher interests, he thought, were at stake; and so he had no dream of building for himself 'a monument more durable than brass,' and of claiming a pedestal among the great writers of English prose and verse. He accepted long years of literary barrenness; he wrote historical essays for which he had no special aptitude, and dogmatic disquisitions which even his genius could not save from dulness; he even descended into mere journalism. The 'Apologia' would probably not have been written but for the accident of Kingsley's attack. It has, no doubt, been said with truth that Newman showed great dexterity in choosing opponents with whom to cross swords--Kingsley, Pusey, Gladstone, and his old Anglican self. But this does not alter the fact that a man who must have been conscious of rare literary gifts made no attempt to immortalise himself by them. It was for the Church, and not for himself, that he wrote as well as lived.

That his life is for the most part a record of sadness and failure is no indication that he was not one of the great men of his time. Independence is no passport to success in a world where, as Swift said, climbing and crawling are performed in much the same attitude. And if we are right in our view that there was something in the composition of his mind which prevented him from being either a complete Catholic or a complete Protestant, this too is no obstacle to our recognition of his greatness. He has left an indelible mark upon two great religious bodies. He has stirred movements which still agitate the Church of England and the Church of Rome, and the end of which is not yet in sight. Anglo-Catholicism and Modernism are alien growths, perhaps, in the institutions where they have found a place; but the man who beyond all others is responsible for grafting them upon the old stems is secure of his place in history.

FOOTNOTES:

[82] Cf. e. Parochial and Plain Sermons, vi. 259.

[83] Mark Pattison, Memoirs, p. 97.

[84] Stray Essays, p. 94.

[85] Parochial and Plain Sermons, v. 112.

[86] Ibid. vi. 259.

[87] Ibid. vi. 340.

[88] Grammar of Assent, part i. c. 1 and 2.

[89] Parochial and Plain Sermons, vii. 73.

[The end]
William Ralph Inge's essay: Cardinal Newman

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