Select essays. With an introd. by George Sampson

Contents

PAGE

Introduction .... vii

The Reformation of the Eleventh Century . i Private Judgment . . . . -67

Introduction

- 9^ -

A VOLUME in this series, entitled University Sketches^ by Cardinal Newman, is prefaced by a somewhat lengthy Introduction, designed to arouse the interest of the general reader in tKe work of that great writer. A few of his books are described, and in some cases represented by quotation ; while incidentally there are a few general remarks about his prose and verse. In an essay thus avowedly elementary, I preferred to say little about his life, because I thought my purpose would be better served by dealing with his writings only, and space would not permit a consideration of both. There, too, I stated my belief that a short sketch of his life is bound to be unsuccessful, since that life is not so much a tale of achievements, as the gradual de¬ velopment of a character, under impulses from within and influences from without. Such a life requires for its com¬ plete exhibition, the free space and well-filled stage of a novel; a brief account can do no more than select for notice a few facts and dates, and that is what I shall do here as a preface to this second volume of selections. The present introduction is not meant to be an integral part of the former, which, indeed, was out of my hands before this volume was even thought of. However, as I wrote there about Newman chiefly as a man of letters, and intend here to consider very briefly his life, the two together may serve

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INTRODUCTION.

s-ome modest purpose of use, in guiding onwards those readers, who find these selections from a great man’s work attractive enough to encourage further explorations.

The life of John Henry Newman was almost coeval with the century that is just dead. He was born on the 21st of February 1801, in Old Broad Street, E.C. His father was a banker, his mother descended from a family of Huguenots. His bringing up was strictly religious, and sorted well with his disposition; but the future Cardinal was fed with strange food. The Calvinism of Scott’s Bible^ of JSewton on the Prophecies^ of Milner’s Church Histofj^ can scarcely be said to point towards Rome; but all these writers had their great share in moulding his plastic youth. What that share was cannot be better told than in his own words : —

“The writer who made a deeper impression on my mind than any other, and to whom (humanly speaking) I almost owe my soul [was] Thomas Scott of Aston Sandford. . . . He followed truth wherever it led him, beginning with Unitarianism, and ending in a zealous faith in the Holy Trinity. It was he who first planted deep in my mind that fundamental truth of religion. . . . And for years I used almost as proverbs what I considered to be the scope and issue of his doctrine, ‘ Holiness rather than peace,’ and ‘ Growth the only evidence of life.’ ... I read Joseph Milner’s Church History^ and was nothing short of en¬ amoured of the long extracts from St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and the other Fathers which I found there. I read them as being the religion of the primitive Christians; but simultaneously with Milner I read Newton on the Prophecies^ and in consequence became most firmly convinced that the Pope was the Antichrist predicted by Daniel, St. Paul, and St. John. My imagination was stained by the effects of this doctrine up to the year 1843; it had been obliterated from my reason and judgment at an earlier date; but the thought remained upon me as a sort of false conscience.”

Here, too, we must notice another most important state¬ ment: —

INTRODUCTION.

IX

“ When I was fifteen (in the autumn of i8i6), a great change of thought took place in me. I fell under the influences of a definite Creed, and received into my intellect impressions of dogma, which, through God’s mercy, have never been effaced or obscured.”

I called this statement important, because of what is implied in the notion of dogma, or definite crede^ida of religion. From the fundamental truths of revealed religion spring forth other doctrines, and it soon becomes necessary to say which of various interpretations or developments is the right one. The shocks and storms that have raged round the almost innumerable heresies are part of the pro¬ cess of “natural selection in dogma; and it is claimed that the doctrines which survive do so because they have in them the principle of true life, which the others, called heresies, have not. Let us consider such a passage as “ The Word became Flesh and dwelt among us” (John i. 14).^ What is the Word? Why so called? How “became”? What was the nature of this Incarnate Word? Was it both God and Man separately? Was it God and Man mingled in some Singular Nature? Was the Word always Human? Was the Humanity retained after the Resurrection ? Ques¬ tions of this sort make it plain that if there is to be a definite Creed, there must be infallible power of defining, some individual or body that, on the appearance of contro¬ versy, shall say finally, “This is right; that is wrong.” And so, when Newman received into his intellect the notion of a definite Creed, he made unawares his first great step towards Rome; for the Anglican Church has not many unmistakable credenda^ nor has it the power or right of defining them more exactly. It was the gradual discovery of this that shattered

^ I am indebted to some one for this illustration, I fancy to Newman himself, but I cannot give a reference.

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INTRODUCTION.

his belief in the Church of his birth, and brought him, after a long struggle, into the Church of Rome.

In 1808 he was sent to Ealing School, famous in its day. He was very sharp, and quickly ran from bottom to top. His tastes were literary. He began writing in prose and verse at the age of eleven, and “took much pains in matter of style.” To this labour he devoted his play time, and he was never known to take part in any games. He read the tales of Miss Porter, Mrs. Radcliffe, and, above all. Sir Walter Scott, and from these, no doubt, got his first scent of a Catholic atmosphere. Music, too, was not forgot¬ ten. To the end of his days Newman was a good violinist; and it is pleasant to think of such a man playing for hours at a stretch in the quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and Beet¬ hoven, the last of whom he thoroughly appreciated, a point of taste not too common in the early years of the nineteenth century.

From Ealing he went to Oxford, and was entered at Trinity before the end of his sixteenth year. In the follow¬ ing June he went into residence, and made the acquaintance of J. W. Bowden, a friendship that lasted unimpaired till Bowden’s death in one of the darkest years of Newman’s life. In 1820 he attempted to take his B.A. degree with honours, but to the astonishment of every one, himself included, he broke down, and barely gained the pass degree. However, he had his revenge. He resolved to become a candidate for an Oriel fellowship. Every one thought he was mad ; but he succeeded. Oriel was at this time the leading college at the University, and here Newman met most of those who, in different ways, were to influence him so deeply. First there was Richard Whately — the archiepiscopal Christopher North, as I remember seeing him called— whose vigorous, boisterous personality shook out

INTRODUCTION.

XI all Newman’s diffidence and shyness. Here is Newman’s verdict on him : —

“ I owe him a great deal. . . . He, emphatically, opened my mind, and taught me to think and to use my reason. . . . He had done his work towards me, or nearly so, when he taught me to see with my own eyes and to walk with my own feet.’’

Writing, in i860, a note on an early letter of his to Whately, Newman puts the matter more bluntly by saying : —

“ I used to propose to myself to dedicate a work to him, if I ever wrote one, to this effect : ‘ To Richard Whately, D.D., etc., who, by teaching me to think, taught me to differ from himself.’ Of course more respect¬ fully wrapped up.”

Another man who helped to shape Newman’s life was Dr. Hawkins, Vicar of St. Mary’s, and afterwards Provost of Oriel. Of him Newman writes : —

‘•He was the first who taught me to weigh my words, and to be cautious in my statements. He led me to that mode of limiting and clearing my sense in discussion and in controversy, and of distinguishing between cognate ideas, and of obviating mistakes by anticipation, which, to my surprise, has since been considered, even in quarters friendly to me, to sa.vour of the polemics of Rome. . . .

“There is one other principle which I gained from Dr. Hawkins, more directly bearing upon Catholicism than any I have mentioned, and that is the doctrine of Tradition. . . . He lays down a proposition, self-evident as soon as stated to those who have at all examined the structure of Scripture — viz., that the sacred text was never intended to teach doctrine, but only to prove it, and that if we would learn doctrine, we must have recourse to the formularies of the Church, for instance, to the Catechism and to the Creeds.”

The Analogy of Butler, read in the early ’twenties, had a marked effecFon Newman’s religious opinions: it gave him the notion of a visible Church and the duty of external religion ; but, above all, it strengthened his youthful belief, that the visible world was an “Economy,’' a type,

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INTRODUCTION.

almost sacramental, of the real unseen world. Then, too, Butler’s doctrine that Probability is the Guide of Life took a strong hold on his mind, so strong, indeed, that hundreds of his pages are devoted in one way or another to develop¬ ments of this doctrine, one book. An Essay in Aid of a Grarmnar of Assent^ being concerned practically with nothing else. All this, first thoroughly learned from Butler, was driven home by the writings and teachings of a new friend, John Keble, whose Christian Year was the first visible sign of that ecclesiastical revival with which the names of New¬ man and Keble will always be connectedf Another dear friend of these years, bright, alert, versatile Hurrell Froude, helped to lessen his dislike for Rome, and to increase his dislike for violent Protestantism. However, what may be called Newman’s period of passivity came to an end in 1828, when he became Vicar of St. Mary’s. “It was to me,” he said, “like the feeling of spring weather after winter; and, if I may so speak, I came out of my shell. I remained out of it till 1841.”

In 1830 he began to work at his book on the Arians. This led him to the Fathers, who in time led him to Rome. In 1832 he set out on a European tour with the Froudes, father and son, and during this voyage many of the poems used as numbers of the Lyra Apostolica were written. After voyaging to the Archipelago and back to Italy, he separated from the Froudes and went to Sicily, and there, stricken with fever, alone in a strange land, he was mysteriously sustained by a belief that he had “a work to do in England,” the work of teaching the English Church that it was really a Church, the work of waking the living meaning that lay slumbering and unsuspected beneath the words of its formularies. At last he recovered, and crossed to France. While becalmed, he wrote the immortal “ Lead, Kindly Light,” a poem that

INTRODUCTION.

xiii

brings with it a sense of tears and of joy, for it is a true cry of the heart.

“ At length I got to Marseilles, and set off for England. The fatigue of travelling was too much for me, and I was laid up for several days at Lyons. At last I got off again, and did not stop, night or day (except a compulsory delay at Paris), till I reached England, and my mother’s house. My brother had arrived from Persia only a few hours before. This was on the Tuesday. The following Sunday, July 14th, Mr. Keble preached the Assize Sermon in the University Pulpit. It was published under the title of ‘National Apostasy.’ I have ever considered and kept the day as the start of the religious movement of 1833.”

What was the Oxford Movement of 1833? That is a question impossible to answer in a short article, nor would these pages be a fit place for the attempt. I endeavour to indicate it briefly, by saying that it was an attempt to make Anglicans think rather of the “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church’’ of the Nicene Creed, than of the “Church of England as by Law Established”; to lead them to trace their ecclesiastical descent, not from Queen Elizabeth, but from the Church of the Apostles, and the great Saints and Doctors of the early Christian centuries. It was an attempt to awaken a puissant and vigorous Christian life, by calling into being a sort of ecclesiastical patriotism, that sense of Church life which the Establish¬ ment has certainly never had at any time in its history. As I do not wish to be misunderstood, I will remark that Christian life and Church life are not the same thing; that one does not imply the other, though it is probable that a sense of Church life will have its effect on the religious life. Nothing is clearer than the pressing need in those days for some invigoration of the English Church. Against the advantages won by separation from Rome, must be set the miserable lethargy induced by the new order of

XIV

INTRODUCTION.

things. Earnestness seemed to die with the Non-jurors, and a complete arrest of life and function set in with the Hanoverian monarchs. The need for reform brought forth Wesley at Oxford, whose attempt to Protestantise the Church still further, ended in the definite separation of the Methodists from the decayed body of the Establishment. Then came Simeon at Cambridge ; but the evangelicalism of this school obviously affected, not the Church as a whole, but that part of it lying nearest to Dissent, so that it tended to create further division, to drive people out of the Church rather than waken the whole mass into new life. In the days of Newman’s youth the air was thick with plans of political reform, and it did not escape notice that the Church, too, had its Rotten Boroughs and its Virtual Representation. The union of Church and State had not been particularly successful for the Church as such ; and so the hint of further interference brought into prominence a new High Church party, that looked with longing eyes back to the Church of the past, and prepared to meet further advances of Parliament in Church affairs with vigorous, Primitive opposition. Protestantism, they said in effect, has been tried and found wanting; it has seriously impaired the very life of the Church ; let us go back, then, to Antiquity, to Catholicity. Now it should be clearly understood that Newman had nothing at all to do with the rise of this idea. It began to spring up before 1833, and its beginnings were felt at first in schools of thought with which Newman had little sympathy. He, as the foregoing pages have surely shown, w^as caught into the new" movement: he did not begin it; but such a man as he could not stay long in the rear. The force of personality brought him to the front, and the Oxford Movement was thereafter associated chiefly with his name. It grew with

INTRODUCTION.

XV

I his growth, and began to die at his secession from the English Church.

It seems to me quite plain that the Oxford Movement did not last, and did not directly begin a new order of things. The extreme High Churchman of to-day has very little in common with the “Tractarian” of the ’thirties. The Oxford leaders tried to follow the path of the Primitive Church; the modern party runs parallel with modern Rome; [and, just as the Oxford Movement led straight to Rome, [and there only, so the extreme party of to-day, if it conitinue in its present course, will find nothing before it but separation into a new sect. It seems odd that the Oxford leaders did not see the futility of their retrogresision. The Church of the second, third, fourth, even of jthe fifth century, may seem at first sight to differ in many [.ways from the Church of Rome as we know it to-day ; but we cannot shut our eyes to history, and the fact remains I that Leo the Thirteenth stands in the twentieth century, swhere in the fifth stood Leo the First. To go back to the yCouncil of Nicaea is merely to postpone, and not to evade,

i return to the Council of Trent. Still, though the logic )f the Oxford Movement was Rome and nothing ej^e, the Dhurch of England gained something from it. There was

ii stir, there was indeed a “movement”; and out of the itress of it all, that enfeebled Church drew in new interests,

(lew vigour, almost new life.

The members of the new party had set themselves a |)ig task. On one side they were ranged against the Lrastian or “ Church and State ” principle, while on the l)ther they were opposed to “ Liberalism ” in religion — the

Inti-dogmatic principle, the notion that the actual credenda f faith were of little importance — a foe infinitely more langerous, because such was and is the spirit of the last

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INTRODUCTION.

hundred years. The Movement was quite informal. There was no organisation, no leader; there was not even agreement. Newman, it is clear, was the life and soul of the work. His energy was amazing. His letters written during these years stand by themselves ; they seem to come from another, more vigorous, more hard-framed man. He began the Tracts for the Times^ designed to diffuse the work of the party; he visited the country clergy, wrote letters to persons and papers. Very thoroughly did he realise the rather truculent motto of the Lyra Apostolica^ “ You shall know the difference now that I am back again.’^ The milder men in the movement began to be alarmed, but Newman, encouraged by Keble, Froude, and Pusey (who came later into the work), went on, and carried numbers with him. His magical personality brought round him admiring disciples from young Oxford, so that, although he was by title a parish priest, his influence was chiefly at work amongst members of the University. The cry of Popery was raised against the Movement, but as a matter of fact Newman’s “false conscience” made him so vehement against Rome, that Froude had to rebuke him for his “ cursing and swearing.” Newman, however, felt that they ought to define clearly their attitude towards Rome, and for this purpose set about his Prophetical Office of the Churchy the indication of a Via Media between Rome and Pro¬ testantism. Indeed, he laboured with mind and pen almost without ceasing. The Tracts went on ; sermons were preached and published, and his reading of the Fathers was widened and deepened. In 1839, he began to study the Monophysite controversy, the heresy that rose out of the doctrine implied by Eutyches that Christ had only one nature, a controversy that threatened to shatter Christ¬ endom, until the magnificent intervention of St. Leo

INTRODUCTION.

xvii restored order if not peace. It was during a study of this question that he felt his first doubt about the soundness of Anglicanism.

“ I have described in a former work how the history affected me. My stronghold was Antiquity; now here, in the middle of the fifth century, I found, as it seemed to me, Christendom of the sixteenth and nine¬ teenth centuries reflected. I saw my face in that mirror, and I was a Monophysite. The Church of the Via Media was in the position of the Oriental communion ; Rome was where she now is ; and the Protestants were the Eutychians.”

In the same year he read Dr. Wiseman’s article on the Anglican Claims in the Dublhi Review for August, which compared the Anglicans with the Donatists ; but New¬ man did not see the cogency of this ; the Donatists had made a schism in their own African Church, it was not a case of one Church against another. But the sting of the article was in its tail. Dr. Wiseman quoted from St. iVugustine, who wrote against these schismatics; and one of the extracts contained the triumphant judgment that, how¬ ever vigorously heretics and schismatics may call themselves Catholic, the voice of the universal world, given without bias, is emphatically against them. “Securus judicat orbis terrarum !” The words were shown to Newman by a friend, and struck him with new and sudden force.

“ What a light was hereby thrown upon every controversy in the Church! Not that, for the moment, the multitude may not falter in their judgment, — not that, in the Arian hurricane, sees more than can be remembered did not bend before its fury, and fall off from St. Athanasius, — not that the crowd of Oriental Bishops did not need to be sustained during the contest by the voice and the eye of St. Leo; but that the deliberate judgment, in which the whole Church at length rests and acquiesces, is an infallible prescription and a final sentence igainst such porlions of it as protest and secede. Who can account for :he impressions which are made on him ? For a mere sentence, the

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words of St. Augustine struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before. To take a familiar instance, they were like the ‘ Turn again, Whittington ’ of the chime ; or, to take a more serious one, they were like the ‘ Tolle, lege, — Tolle, lege,’ of the child, which converted St. Augustine himself. ‘Securus judicat orbis terrarum!’ By those great words of the ancient Father, interpreting and summing up the long and varied course of ecclesiastical history, the theory of the Via Media was absolutely pulverised.”

I must quote again, this time from an article by H. W. Wilberforce, in the Dublin Review for April 1869: —

“ It was in the beginning of October 1839 that he made the astounding confidence, mentioning the two subjects which had inspired the doubt — the position of St. Leo in the Monophysite controversy, and the principle secnrtis judicat orbis terrarum in that of the Donatists. He added that he felt confident that when he returned to his rooms, and was able fully and calmly to consider the whole matter, he should see his way completely out of the difficulty. But he said, ‘ I cannot conceal from myself that, for the first time since I began the study of theology, a vista has been opened before me, to the end of which I do not see.’ He was walking in the New Forest, and he borrowed the form of his expression from the surrounding scenery. His companion, upon whom such a fear came like a thunder-stroke, expressed his hope that Mr. Newman might die rather than take such a step. He replied, with deep earnestness, that he had thought, if ever the time should come when he was in serious danger, of asking his friends to pray that, if it was not indeed the will of God, he might be taken away before he did it.”

The vehemence of such language is a little astonishing at first, for, thanks in great measure to Newman himself, we have now learned to know Rome a little better, and we find that it smells far less of Tophet than Protestantism had taught us to believe. But the date of this conversation is 1839. Less than sixty years before, London had been in the hands of the “ No Popery ” rioters, headed by the madman Gordon. Only ten years before, the Duke of Wellington had fought a duel with Lord Winchelsea to

INTRODUCTION.

XIX repel the intolerable accusation of harbouring a friendly feeling for Popery. Only ten years before had Catholics igained the elementary rights of citizenship, and that in phe face of the fiercest opposition. The spirit of the age ds manifested in such facts as these; and so the strong I feeling shown in the quotation need not astonish any one. •Newman’s alarm did not lead him to immediate action. tHe became calm again. It was one thing to doubt; it was ) mother to be convinced. There was too much in Rome for him to swallow yet; and in so great a matter, he refused :o be ruled by imagination. Reason must be the only i.:ounselIor.

f “ Meanwhile, so far as this was certain, — I had seen the shadow of a I land upon the wall. It was clear that I had a good deal to learn on ■ he question of the Churches, and that perhaps some new light was |:oming upon me. He who has seen a ghost, cannot be as if he had p lever seen it. The heavens had opened and closed again. The thought for the moment had been, ‘The Church of Rome will be Ipund right after all’; and then it had vanished. My old convicions remained as before.”

Littlemore, not quite three miles from Oxford, was part )f the parish of St. Mary’s. There Newman had built a hurch, and to this he began to pay more attention, leaving the i^ork at St. Mary’s itself more and more to his curate. He dshed, indeed, to give up St. Mary’s and to live entirely at dttlemore. With this object he bought ground there, upon ^hich he designed to build a monastic house. His position 1 Oxford was impossible. His influence over the young len was enormous. They carried admiration to the extent, ven, of imitating his ways. He was the oracle from whom ley sought counsel in all religious and ecclesiastical doubts -he, whose confidence in his own, nay, in the whole inglican position, had received a staggering blow. They

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INTRODUCTION.

came to him to learn how the Apostolical principles of the new school could be reconciled with the English Prayer Book. The Anglican formularies presented little difficulty. They certainly were Catholic enough in spirit; but the Thirty-nine Articles were a rock of offence.

“It was urged that here was a positive Note against Anglicanism: Anglicanism claimed to hold that the Church of England was nothing else than a continuation in this country (as the Church of Rome might be in France or Spain) of that one Church of which in old times Athanasius and Augustine were members. But, if so, the doctrine must be the same; the doctrine of the Old Church must live and speak in Anglican formularies, in the Thirty-nine Articles. Did it ? Yes, it did; that is what I maintained; it did in substance, in a true sense. Man had done his worst to disfigure, to mutilate the old Catholic Truth ; but there it was, in spite of them, in the Articles still. It was there — but this must be shown. It was a matter of life or death to us to show it.”

In order to show it, Newman wrote his Tract 90; and that portentous document appeared in February 1841. The storm that it raised was terrific. That the English Church might show some disinclination to accept his interpretation of the Articles was no more than Newman expected; he certainly did not anticipate the violent repudiation of Catholic, and equally violent affirmation of Protestant principles that the Tract called forth from every part of the country. It had been plain from the first, that the English Church as a whole would have nothing to do with the Catholic doctrines of the Oxford Party; it was now plain that Protestantism, and nothing else, would be tolerated. Newman^s action all through was most proper. He was ready — morbidly anxious, one might almost say — to show obedience to his bishop. The tract was not with¬ drawn, but it was the last of that remarkable series. He

INTRODUCTION.

XXI withdrew from Oxford to Littlemore, and went on with his translation of St. Athanasius.

After all, the hostile reception of Tract 90 was no more than it deserved. It is, I think, the least admirable and least characteristic of all Newman’s productions. It is a laboured piece of “begging the question”; and if it proves anything, it proves that the Thirty-nine Articles cannot and will not bear a Catholic interpretation. Its fumbling logomachies, different entirely from Newman’s excellent precision in definition, created that suspicion of dishonesty which rested on him so long, and which, for some people, is not even yet removed.

And now, to use his own phrase, came three blows that broke him. The first was delivered by St. Athanasius. The ghost had come again ! It had come in his study of the Monophysites ; it rose like a minatory shadow out of 5t. Augustine’s magnificent sentence against the Donatists ; now it hovered over every page of Arian history. The pure Adrians were the Protestants ; the semi-Arians were his own party, the Church of the Via Media; and Rome was — Rome, as ever ! While he was still quivering under this 3low, the second fell, in the shape of an Episcopal chorus denouncing Tract 90. It was not only the rank and file of ;he Church that fell foul of this unfortunate production ; Tom almost every see came official condemnation. This tvas almost enough in itself. A Church that unanimously repudiated Catholic principles was not the Church in kvhich Newman could feel at peace. And upon all this :ame the third blow — the affair of the Jerusalem bishopric. A.n arrangement between England and Prussia was made, ^y which an English archbishop should consecrate a bishop ;o minister to the Protestants in Palestine — Protestants, some 3f them, of dubious baptism and no Confirmation. This