'^^.1 "^ '"' *4,., PRINCETON, N. J. % Shelf BL 85 .L7 1885 Lilly, William Samuel, 1840- 1919. Ancient religion and modern thminht ■ ■.:<■<■}'■■- ■ . ^ ANCIENT RELIGION MODERN THOUGHT WESTMINSTER : NICHOLS AND SONS, PEINTEES, 25, PARLIAMENT STREET. ANCIENT RELIGION AND MODERN THOUGHT BY WILLIAM SAMUEL LILLY. SECOND EDITION. 1st nicht der Kern der Natur Menschen im Herzen ? Goethe. LONDON : CHAPMAN and HALL, LIMITED. 1885. {All rights reserved.) TO THE MAEQUIS OF EIPON, K.G. My dear Lord Ripon, I HAD hoped to dedicate to you this volume when it was originally published, in the spring of last year. The accidental delay of a letter deprived me of that pleasure. I regret the accident the less, now that, with your kind per- mission, I am able to write your name upon the first page of this second edition, because the favour with which the book has been received encourages me to think that what I am offering you is not wholly worthless. You return to us from a country where you have had abundant opportunities of observing the actual working of more than one of those vast non-Christian religious systems whose claims upon the attention of every student of man and society are just now of such pressing interest and import- ance. And it is a satisfaction to me to know that you judge the brief account which I have given of them in these pages to be just and true, and Hkely to help towards the recognition of the divine ele- ments which they contain. Such recognition, surely, is essential, if we would apprehend the true bearing of the great ethical and spiritual problems confronting us in our Indian Empire. I well remember how intolerable I used to think the supercilious contempt which, during my resi- dence in that country, I too frequently heard ex- pressed by young European officials for the cults ,and customs of the people of Hindustan : yes, and not by young European officials only, but by many a veteran public servant to whom, unfortunately, years had not brought the philosophic mind. The creeds, the rituals, the institutions in which the highest conceptions, the deepest yearnings, the most sacred ties of millions of our native fellow- subjects are embodied, surely deserve from us far other treatment than that. Nothing would be more fatal to the highest interests of India than the solution of social and religious continuity, which contact with European thought and Euro- pean thoughtlessness unquestionably threatens. It is a commonplace, that one chief effect of British rule in Hindustan has been to induce a moral and political revolution, which is even now in fiill progress. But woe to India and to England too, if the issue of that revolution is to sap all belief in supersensuous truth, and in the ethical obligations which find in supersensuous truth their only real sanction. Terrible for both countries will be the catastrophe if we have no higher message to proclaim than the Gospel of Ma- terialism, the expression of which, in the public order, is the doctrine of the sole supremacy of brute force. During the last two years that doctrine has been loudly preached, as the one great formula of our Indian policy, by some of the leading ex- ponents of English public opinion. It has been your wisdom to insist upon a nobler teaching, and to give it practical expression. I remember how at a public meeting which we both happened to address, shortly before your departure to assume the Yiceroyalty, you insisted with much earnest- ness that there are not two moralities, one for individuals and another for races, for nations: that nation owes to nation and race to race the same even justice and fair dealing and considerate treatment and appreciation of responsibilities that man owes to man ; that immutable principles determine what is just and true and pleasing to God in public as in private life : and that other sound and solid foundation of politics than this doctrine there is none. I find in these words the thought which has dominated your mind and informed your administration for the last four years and a half. The preachers of that vulgar and debased Positivism which lies at the root of so much in contemporary ways of thinking and acting, are contemptuously impatient of what they deehi the sentimentalism of " a creed out- worn." They might have learnt from Comte himself, had they been willing to apprehend the higher elements of his philosophy, that ''une experience decisive a maintenant prouve I'insta- bilite necessaire de tout regime purement materiel, fonde seulement sur des interets, inde- pendamment des affections et des convictions." That is the great, the primary verity of the political order to which you have been unswerv- ingly loyal. Half a century ago Lord William Bentinck's celebrated Resolution declared, that " the great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science amongst the natives of India," and directed the employment of public money for that end. Since then Western thought has been slowly accomplishing its inevitable work in Hindustan : the seed of light which for fifty years we have been steadily sowing has taken deep root, and is growing into an abundant crop of new sentiments, new aspirations, new necessities. These are signs of the times which you have beheld on all sides in India, for your " open eyes desire the truth." And the passionate display of popular affection of which you have so recently been the object is signal evidence of the correctness of your political vision. It is no great wonder that those of the non-official classes in India who have gone there simply to make money, and who are interested in their native fellow- subjects solely as a means to that end, should resent the recognition of facts which hamper their operations, and condemn legislation which restricts their privileges. It is not surprising that many of the servants of the Government, trained in bureaucratic traditions, should regard with distrust and dislike a policy which, as they perceive, points to great changes in the public administration. Nor do those who are behind the scenes of the London and Calcutta press, and who know how powerful are personal and sectarian motives with some of its leading organs, experience the least astonishment that you have been systematically misrepresented and vilified ; but Time — . who solves all doubt By bringing Truth, his glorious daughter, out, will vindicate your title to fame as a Statesman who discerned clearly that the great problem before us in India is, how to reconcile the races of that Empire to acquiesce in, to cherish, to be proud of the English connection : and who dis- cerned no less clearly that there is one way only of solving that problem : the way which this country, to its irreparable loss, has for centuries declined to pursue in Ireland. I am, my dear Lord Ripon, Very truly yours, W. S. LILLY. January 10, 1885. PKEFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. In this Second Edition a few changes have been made, not in the matter, but in the text, to meet suggestions for which I am indebted to various reviewers. W. S. L. London, January 1st, 1885. PEEFACE TO THE FIKST EDITION. The subject of this book is, I think, sufficiently indicated by its title. But it may be well that I should here briefly set down the main outlines of my argument, since, for a reason which I shall presently give, I have preferred not to present it in the form of a systematic treatise. viii F HE FACE. First, then, I ask my readers to look in the face the issue of that great intellectual movement in the European world which is usually termed Modern Thought : a vague term, indeed, although, I suppose, we all know well enough what is meant by it. An essentially negative movement it is — its ultimate message to mankind the philosophy of Schopenhauer and his school : and to an examination of that philo- sophy my First Chapter is devoted. But the view of life put before us by the Pessimists is, after all, to a large extent true, nor is it easy to see what answer can be given to their argument save that supplied by religious faith. Is religious faith, then, any longer possible ? or has Modern Thought been so fatal to it as is commonly asserted ? I proceed in my Second Chapter to consider how that question has been answered, for himself, by a thinker, for sixty years contemporary with Schopen- hauer, and certainly not inferior to the prophet of Pessimism in keenness, subtlety, or breadth, of intel- lect, while far superior to him in those ethical qualities which are no less necessary than intellectual, to the seeker after truth in any department higher than that of physical science. As the founder of a religious movement, the philosophical basis of which was in- PREFACE. ix directly derived from Kant,^ John Henry Newman's spiritual history is peculiarly worthy of attention in view of the great question which Modern Thought so imperiously raises. To that history, and to tlie phase of religion which is so inseparably con- nected with it, and which is best studied in the person and action of its originator and leader, I have given my Second Chapter. Cardinal Newman, like Schopenhauer, has looked in the face '' the heart-piercing, reason-bewildering " mystery of life : the result being to bring him, not to Atheistic Nihilism, but to the acceptance of the most dogmatic form of Christianity. Using informal inference as his method, and following conscience as the great internal teacher of religious truth, he finds himself able to believe in God, and in a God who has revealed Himself in facie Jesu Christi, and to submit to the claim of that Ancient Religion, which, as the Spiritual Kingdom set up by Christ, requires the allegiance of mankind. But Jesus Christ came into the world late in its history. And His is but one form of Ancient lieli- gion. What of the others? In my Third Chapter 1 See pp. 59-61, PREFACE. I answer that question. Pirst I pass in review the great non-Christian systems of the world, and then I indicate their position in respect of Christianity. And now I come to the root of the matter — the question of supersensible existence. After all, have we sufficient warrant for asserting the being of God and the soul ? In my Fourth Chapter I examine the arguments for and against belief in Deity, and especially that form of it which is of most practical importance, the form in which it is presented by Christianity, and, to be precise, by the very version of Christianity to which Modern Thought is supposed to be most fatal : the creed of the Catholic Church. In the Fifth Chapter I deal with the subject of im- mortality, and inquire whether the existence of an immaterial principle within ourselves, surviving the death of the body, is, as a brilliant and popular writer assures us, "a vapid figment," or whether all science, and not merely physical, does not testify, if rightly interrogated, to the incorporeal nature, the independent action, the distinct personality, and the indestructibleness of the soul. PEEFACE. xi Such, in brief outline, is the scope of this volume. The five chapters of which it consists have already, to some extent, been given to the world : the first in the Nineteenth Century, the second and fifth in the Fortnightly Hevieiv, the fourth in the Contemporary Heview, where, too, a joart of the third chapter has appeared, another portion of it having been pub- lished in the Dublin Hevieto. My thanks are due to the Editors of those journals for their kind per- mission to use for my present purpose these contri- butions to their pages. But this book is not a mere reprint. It contains a considerable amount of new matter, while the old has been carefully revised, and, more or less, rewritten, to fit it for its present place. I have, however, retained the separate form originally given to the several studies now brought together, and herein, I believe, I have consulted the conve- nience of my readers. Each chapter deals with a special subject, and is, in a sense, complete in itself, while again, each has its proper position in the book as part of an organic whole, for, as I have explained, one argument runs through it. Each chapter, I may add, might easily have been exj)anded into a volume. But in writing for the general reader it is necessary to write short. My design has been rather to indi- cate lines of thought than to follow them out : and I xii PREFACE. have sought to view things, as far as possible, in the concrete. An admirable critic has well said of the greatest master of romantic fiction, ''II a saisi la verite parcequ'il a saisi les ensembles." It is the only way of grasping higher truth in any depart- ment of human thought, and I have endeavoured to follow it in this work. That must be my excuse, if excuse be wanted, for the vast extent of the ground over which I have travelled. There are yet a few words which I must say, and for which this seems to be the proper place, to obviate misconceptions that I should much regret. First let me enter a caveat against the supposition that I commit myself irrevocably to the scientific hypotheses of Damon in the Fifth Chapter, where much that he says is by way of argumentum ad hominem, much more by way of suggestion, for the purpose of elicit- ing the thought of others, and of gaining further light. Again, it must be remembered that in his attempt to harmonize his view of life and death with the doctrine of progressive evolution, Damon emj^loys, not the precise terminology of the schools, but the vaguer language of modern speculative thought. When he says "there is only one substance," what PREFACE. xiii he means is, " spirit alone is substance, and matter is a manifestation of spirit" ; when he says " God will know Himself," he uses the future not as indicating change in the Unchangeable, but in view of that '' far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves," and he does not in the least forget that Grod is the Eternal Now : ^ when he speaks of the illusori- ness of matter as distinct from spirit, he does little else than echo, or translate into the speech of our own day, the teaching of the Angelic Doctor, that matter, materia prima ^ is not a substance, cannot exist by itself, is pmne nihil, and is susceptible of endless transformations, all of which are due to higher and immaterial energies. His argument must not be judged of by isolated phrases ; it must be viewed as a whole — its main steps are indicated in the summary of the Fifth Chapter — and I am very confident that, if so viewed, it will be found to supply the true answer to that capital error which identifies God with the world, by recognising and applying to the proper use the element of truth latent and distorted therein : the truth taught by Plato to the men of Athens, iravTa TrXrjpr) Oecov, 77X17/317 xjjvx^^, and recalled to them by St. Paul in his sermon on Areopagus : In ipso vivimus et movemur et sumus. Damon takes tlie 1 See page 233. xiv PREFACE. problem as the materialists state it, but proposes for it an entirely different solution. While they explain everything- by ultimate matter, he explains everything by ultimate spirit. For them superior forms are only combinations of inferior. For him inferior forms are but manifestations of superior. In his hypothesis, as in theirs, Nature is a scale of gra- duated forms passing from one to another by a continued progress. But for them this progress is only a complication of fortuitous changes : for him it is the operation of a Divine Law governing '' the ascension of the -E'^o," " the metamorphosis by which the I]go comes to know itself." " Certains esprits timor^s pourraient reprocher aux vues pr^ce- dentes de cotoyer de tres pres le panth^isme, de si pr^s memo que parfois on croit y etre ; mais nous sommes d'avis de ne pas abuser de ce spectre du pantheisme, qui finit par paralyser toute philosoj^hie, A force de ne voir plus que des trappes autour de soi, on n'ose plus ni parler, ni penser, ni bouger. Expri- mez-vous sincerement quelques doutes, comme le faisait Socrate, vous etes un sceptique. Accordez- vous quelque chose aux sciences de la matiere, vous etes mat^rialiste. Essayez-vous de concilier le deter- minisme et la liberte, vous etes un fataliste. Voyez- vous Dieu en toutes choses, vous etes un pantheiste. PREFACE. XV En verite, cette perpetuelle evocation des mauvaises doctrines est quelque chose d'irritant, et finirait pres- que par vous en donner le gout, comme en politique on deviendrait revolutionnaire a force d' entendre per- petuellement denoncer par un fanatisme absurde la revolution." This warnino: of a vio'orous French thinker is worthy of being deeply pondered. For the rest, we may insist upon the solid and profound distinction drawn by Krause between Pantheism and what he calls Panentheism. It is one thing to say that the All is God (eV /cat irav), it is quite another to say that all is in God {jrav iv ©e&>). Perhaps the great work which lies before Christian philosophy at the present day is to enforce and to develope this distinction. St. Athanasius would not have adopted the " Omnia, diversis tamen gradibus, animata sunt " of Spinosa. But, most assuredly, he would have granted the existence of a spiritual element in all things, animate as well as inanimate. He would even say that the law which shows itself in the inorganic world finds its perfection — among created things — in man as \oyiK6<^, whereb)^ he reflects, in varying degrees of perfection, the Divine AOFOS. Compare St. Athanasius with Heraclitus and you will discover the true limit of the doctrine of progressive evolution : the key to the enigma with which we find the late xvi PREFACE. Professor Green struggling, when he talks about, not the Absolute, but the " eternal consciousness " passing from potentiality into act, until in man it recognises itself. Mr. Herbert Spencer would make short work with this '' eternal consciousness." So, in a different way, would Hegel, whom, I suspect, Mr. Spencer has never read, although he does but say, in the language of physical science, what the Teutonic thinker had said in the language of metaphysics. Both would pronounce it a survival of a theological belief, hardly disguised in philosophical terms : both would maintain that an eternal consciousness is an impossibility unless there is something else eternal from which it is distinguished. Well, whatever tlie criticism may be worth — a question too large to be considered here — this is certain, that the Catholic doctrine is untouched thereby, since in its forefront it carries the recognition of God, not as a Unit without differentiation, but as a Unity including eternal distinctions in Itself. The Trinity is not only the most august, but the most fruitful of mysteries, bear- ing as It does, in numberless ways, upon the pro- foundest problems of metaphysics : a truth which should never be lost sight of in any attempt to har- monize, as far as may be, the old and new philosophies. " Ilia est igitur plena satietas animorum, hsec est beata PREFACE. xvii vita, pie perfecteque cognoscere a quo inclucaris in veritatem, qua veritate perfruaris, per quid connectaris summo modo. Quse tria uuum Deum intelligentibus unamque substantiam, exclusis vanitatibus varise super- stitionis, ostendunt." W. S. L. London, April 7th, 1884. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. THE MESSAGE OF MODERN THOUGHT. PAGE The Pessimistic Sentiment in the literature of the nineteenth cen- tury ........ 1 This, as the century advances, becomes more objective . . 4 It is formulated by Schopenhauer . . . . .5 The aim of this chaj^ter : to give some account of Schopenhauer's philosophy, and to estimate its significance as the ultimate Message of Modern Thought . . . . .5 A Philosophy is best judged of in connection with other manifesta- tions of its author's personality . What manner of man was Arthur Schopenhauer ? Sketch of Schopenhauer's Philosophy. — His first position, the Ideality of the World . . . . . .11 His second position — Will, the thing-in-itself . . .13 Will manifests itself in the phenomenal world as the Will-to-Live . 14 Consequences of this Will Theory . . . . .15 His third position — that the deepest cause of suffering lies in the WUl itself and that existence is essentially an evil His doctrine of Ideas ...... His doctrine as to Pleasures ..... The Pessimistic Outlook ..... All higher knowledge rests on comparison Buddhism is the true counterpart of modern reasoned Pessimism The story of Buddha Gotania .... Sketch of the Buddha's doctrine. Ignorance the fundamental error The Four Noble Truths Karma — A man's works are himself The Buddhist Plan of Salvation Nirvmm The Buddhist Reformation 17 18 18 19 20 21 22 25 26 27 29 30 31 CONTENTS. "Radical difference between Buddhism and Schopenhauerism Schopenhauer's doctrine issues in Atheistic Materialism Schopenhauer's philosophy is worthy of attention as a sign of the times if not for its intrinsic merits The Medieval Order was permeated by the thought of God . The tendency of Modern Thought is to eliminate the idea of God Locke's experimental psychology issues in Materialism Kant's "Pure Reason," taken apart from the rest of his teaching issues in Niliilism ..... And Nihilism resolves itself into Pessimism . Pessimism therefore is the last word of Modern Thought There is no answer to the Pessimistic ai"gument save that supplied by religious faith ....... PAGE 32 36 37 38 38 39 41 42 43 44 CHAPTER II. THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. The Tractarian Movement is not without a bearing on the problems raised by Modern Thought . . . . .47 Aim of this chapter : to inquire what it was in itseK and what is its significance to us . . . . . , .47 It is best studied in the person and action of its leader . . 48 Strong individuality of Cardinal Newman's works . . .48 Condition of religious thought in England in Cardinal Newman's early days . . . . . . .49 John Wesley and his work . . . . . .52 The Evangelical party . . . . . .53 Cardinal Newman's first I'eligious impressions . . .54 The gradual opening of his mind . . . . .55 The nucleus of the Tractarian party . . . . ,57 The Intellectual Revokition in England . . . .58 The influence of Coleridge . . . . . .59 The phUosop'hical basis of the Tractarian Movement. . . 61 John Keble and the Christian Year . . . . .62 HheTrchcts for the Times . . . . . .65 The Idea of the Tractarian Movement . . . .67 The Progress of the Tractarian Movement . . . .68 Cardinal Newman's Defence of the Tractarian Movement . . 69 National feeling and the Tractarian Movement . . .70 The Anglican Bishops and the Tractarian Movement . . 71 The Collapse of the Tractarian Movement . . . .72 CONTENTS. XXI John Henry Newman's Secession .... Thomas Arnold ...... Wliat Tractarianism has done for the Church of England What it has done for the Catholic Church Cardinal Newman's work in the Catholic Church Cardinal Newman's controversial activity His consistency from first to last .... Tractarianism m relation to the great question of the day Cardinal Newman holds informal inference to be the true mAhod in religious as in other inquiries .... Conscience the gi-eat internal Prophet of Theism The No of the world and human history Difficulties of Theistic belief ..... The Probability of a Revelation .... If there is a Revelation, where should we look for it ? The Claim of the Catholic Church .... The chief significance of Tractarianism PAGE 73 78 80 81 83 80 90 94 95 96 97 99 100 101 101 102 CHAPTER HI. KELIGIONS AND RELIGION. There are other forms of Ancient Religion, besides Christianity claiming the allegiance of mankind. How are we to account of them 1 ....... Vast extent of the non-Christian systems The best means of understanding them Two classes of Religions — National and Universal . The Religions of Cliina .... Confucius and his work .... Laotze and his work ..... The Great Flan ..... The Religion of the Magi .... Fiist translation of the Zeml-Avesta by Anquetil Duperron Labours of later Zend Scholars The Sacred Books of the Parsis Zoroaster and his teaching Hinduism The Rig-Veda . The Upariisliads The Bhagavat-GUa The Crita and the Veddnta 103 104 106 108 109 110 113 116 121 123 124 125 126 131 132 133 139 143 CONTENTS. Buddhism .... The Pali PitaJcas The Buddlia's First Sermon , His Sermon on Pain and the Origin of Pain " Life According to the Truth " Islam ..... The character of Mohammed . Muslim Mysticism The FoundeiB of Islamite Asceticism . The Early Sufis Faridu-'D-Din, 'Attar The Pend Ndnia The Mantiqio-'t-Tayr . The Allegorical Veil . SMsm and Non-Islamite Religions . The Pantheism of Sufism The character and influence of the Sufis Jelalu-'D-Din .... Christianity and Non-Christian Creeds Revelation, an universal, not a local, gift All Religions are to be approached with r- divine element in them . A Lesson for Christian Missionaries . because of the PAGE 146 148 149 158 160 162 163 165 167 168 172 174 178 181 182 183 185 186 188 189 191 192 CHAPTER IV. NATURALISM AND CHRISTIANITY. Religion the substance of humanity ..... 194 The contemporary movement of hostility to all religions . . 195 The immediate outlook is dark and discouraging . . . 197 A suggested substitute for Christianity .... 198 The scope and aim of ' ' Natural Religion, by the author of Ecce Homo" . . . . . . . .198 This author's account of the two opposite theories of the Universe — the Christian and the Naturalistic .... 199 His description of the progress of the Naturalistic theory in the Intellectual Order . . . . . .201 And in the Political . . . . . . .202 His view — that religion in some form is essential to the world . 205 His inquiry — whether Nature and Physical Science — apart from the Supernatural — can furnish a religion .... 206 CONTENTS. XXlll Such a religion would be culture in the individual and civilization in the community . . . . • . 209 The God of this Natural Religion . . . . .210 The Church of this Natural Religion . . . . .213 The Clergy of this Natural Religion ..... 214 Will this Natural Religion satisfy human needs? . . - 215 The experiment has been tried by the Theophilanthropists . , 216 Its failure . . . . . . . .219 But does the need for a substitute for Christianity exist 1 . . 222 The argument drawn from Physical Science, adverse to a Personal Will as the cause of the Universe, rests upon the enoi'mous assumption that causation is merely order . , . 2/?3 The argument against Christianity from the incredibility of miracles rests upon an maccurate conception of Law and the Order of the Universe ........ 227 The argument against Christianity from the pam in the Universe tells theologians nothing which they did not know before . 233 The case of Modern Thought against Christianity does not, however, rest merely upon Physical Science, properly so called, but upon the extension of its methods to the whole domain of knowledge 237 That case will now be considered as it is urged against Catholicity, the most precise and definite form of Christianity . . 239 Belief in God is less difficult than disbelief .... 246 Theistic Proofs . . . . . . .247 Is conscience the voice of man or of God ? . . . . 248 The bearing of the Doctrine of Evolution on this question . . 249 Can the God of Nature and of the Moral Law be identified with the Christian God ? . . . . . . . 255 The Mystery of Sin and Suffering ..... 257 Our ignorance here is the measure of our knowledge of all the pro- founder problems of existence ..... 258 Is the Christian revelation a failure ? . . . . . 260 The objection to it amounts to this — that it does not correspond with our a priori notions, which is not a weighty objection . . 261 Divine Goodness and Retributive Punishment . . . 262 The Inexorableness of Law ...... 264 Historical Difficulties ....... 267 Difficulties as to the Sujiematural . . . . . 270 Biblical Difliculties . . . . . . .273 A Short and Easy Method with Catholicity .... 281 Superstition ........ 283 The one Message of the Church is variously apprehended . . 286 xxiv CONTENTS. PAGE Singular Defenders of the Faitli ..... 288 Old World Legislation for the preservation of religious uniformity . 290 Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus ...... 291 Catholicity inclusive as well as exclusive .... 293 The Will and the Reason ... . . 294 The Heart and the Mind . . . . . .295 If Christianity is not discredited, the choice of men between it and Naturalism is likely to be guided by the consideration whicli system best corresponds with the facts of human nature and the facts of human life ...... 296 The great facts of human nature ..... 297 The great facts of human life ..... 299 Dieu se retrouve a la fin de tout ..... 306 CHAPTER V. Matter and Spirit. The case as to belief in Deity having been considered in Chap. IV. this chapter deals with the question of the Soul and its immor- tality ........ 308 The question stated— Is man wholly of the material order ? — -Has he a self over which the death of the body has no power 1 . . 310 First, looking at the question from the point of view of physical science, we know nothing of matter but its qualities, and we know these only through mind; but our knowledge of mental states and processes is direct ..... 312 The first fact about us is our personal unchanging identity, which cannot be referred to the material organism, for all matter is in constant flux ....... 313 This applies equally to the lower animals, and the true self of every animate being is spiritual ..... 314 The fact of the close connection between the brain and thought does not prove that "what is called a soul " is the cerebral sub- stance : " The breath is not the flute " .... 317 The existence of psychical states in which the laws of the physical universe are transcended is indubitable, and is strong evidence against the Materialistic Theory ..... 318 A.nd if the soul is something more than a simple function of the nervous system, since it is certain that life is not the result of any combination of material atoms, no consideration is so reason- CONTENTS. XXV PAGE able, as that it depends upon an immaterial something which vivifies the bodily frame ...... 321 Death does not destroy an atom of the physical organism. How much less should it have power over the vivifying principle of that organism ? . . . . . . . 323 But physical science is not the only instrument of knowledge. In- tuitions, not dependent upon sense, are the first of facts. There is an essential difference between spiritual facts and physical ........ 323 We have a guarantee from nature that the something permanent, which is ever active, which experiences our successive feel- ings, and which is not a phenomenon, will not be quenched in death . . . . . . . .324 The argument against personal immortality drawn from the consi- deration of what the vast majority of men, in fact, have been, is simply vitiated by our ignorance of the conditions of extra- physical existence ...... 325 Life cannot arise out of death, and to say that existence is a thing self-born and self-devouring is to deny the primal intuition whereby we know the diflference between is and is not . . 326 Objection : that the teaching of Christianity about the after-life has done most to cloud the subject for our minds . . . 327 Reply : Christianity is very commonly identified with some vulgar corruption of it, or one of its doctrines is taken apart from the totality, which is to caricature the whole ; or its economic and symbolic character is forgotten ..... 335 The doctrine of Evolution in no wise conflicts with belief in spirit- uality, for development must be subject to the law of causation: hence not-mind cannot result in mind .... 336 If the fact of spontaneous generation should be established, as it per- haps may be, matter cannot be the base thing of the medico- atheistic school, but must be ' ' a double-faced somewhat, having a spiritual and physical side " . . . . . 337 Matter may well be the resultant of the relations of a finite spiritual energy to space, or a non-extended principle of energy, mani- festing itself under dimensions, and the universe cognisable by the senses only the manifestation of spiritual being in space . 339 Thought, then, will be the foundation, not the resultant ; and life, if first latent in things, or manifested only in the lowest energy — the material — may have passed from the unconscious to the conscious, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from the less to the more determinate .... 340 xxvi CONTENTS. PAGE There is but one real substance, the soul : matter as distmct from spirit is an abstraction, and if taken to be real an illusion ; and evolution, or the history of the world, is only the continued metamorphosis by which the Ego comes to know itself . . 342 The Destiny of Matter . . . . . .345 What warrant have we for affirming that the downward progress of evil will not continue indefinitely ? . . . . ■ 347 The Saints are the true judges in religion .... 347 Domine, ad quern ihimus? ...... 348 ANCIEXT RELIGION AND MODERN THOUGHT. CHAPTER I. THE MESSAGE OF MODERN THOUGHT. Geoege Sand, in her History of my Life, tells us liow during the solitude of her early womanhood at Nohant she had yielded to the taste of the century, which was to shut oneself up in an egoistic sorrow, to imagine oneself Ren^ or Obermann, to at- tribute to oneself an exceptional sensibility, by reason of sufferings unknown to the vulgar herd. When she was thirty her horizon enlarged. She came to Paris, the blissful Promised Land of her waking dreams, to live that artist life in which she had ho23ed, above all things, to find peace with her- self. Her illusion was soon dispelled. It was then that she was brought, for the first time, face to face with the darker problems of existence, and saw the world as it is. And in the view of its great objective evil her merely subjective sorrow was merged, as a rivulet lost in ocean. 2 THE MESSAGE OF MODERN THOUGHT. [Chap. I. One quickly tires (she writes) of contemplating oneself. We arc sucli limited beings, so soon exliansted, the little romance of each is so quickly gone over in one's memory ! Except one really believes oneself sublime, how can self-examination, self- contempla- tion, occupy us long? But who is there that, in real good faith, thinks himself sublime ? The poor lunatic who takes himself for the sun, and who, from his sad domicile, calls out to the passer-by to have a care of the brilliancy of liis rays. When the sadness, the want, the hopelessness, the vice, of which human society is full, rose up before me, when my reflections were no longer bent upon my proper destiny, but upon that of the world, of which I was but an atom, my personal despair extended itself to all creation, and the law of fatality arose before me in such appalling aspect that my reason was shaken by it. There is no pride, no egotism, which will console us when we are absorbed in that idea. . . . The general evil poisons the individual good.^ The strange and fascinating book from which these extracts are taken must of course be read with a judicious reserve and a limited scepticism. Let us not, however, make it a reproach to George Sand if she has idealised a little in her self-delinea- tion. Who is there that could bear to be drawn in the hard lines of a pitiless realism ? Some fig-leaf of the ideal has been indispensable to us since the day, now grown so dim and very far off, when the eyes of the "snow-limbed Eve" and her too com- plaisant partner " were opened, and they knew that they were naked." It is the ofiice of language, as of raiment, both to express us and to conceal us. And there can be no question that the portrait given to us in the History of my Life does, to a ^ Histoirc de ma Vic, 5'"^' partie, c. 2. Chap, I.] PESSIMISM OF THE CENTURY. 3 very great extent, really express its author. It lives not more by its artistic merit than by the truth that is in it. George Sand's intellectual history, as she has observed in an earlier portion of her Autobiography, is, to a certain extent, the intellectual history of her age. The century opens with a passionate cry from a band of poets, who sing, to divers tones, the same sad song of disenchantment, life- weariness, despair. It was Lord Byron who, as their Choregus, bore, With haughty scorn which mock'd the smart, Through Eurojje to the ^tolian shore, The pageant of his bleeding heart. In Italy, Leopardi's deeper note had for its theme " the unblessed and terrible secret of life " — Nostra vita a che val ? solo a spregiarla, Heine, '' bitter and strange," is aptly termed by his countrymen ''the singer of the world-pain," Alfred de Musset's burden is ever — que le bonheur sur terre Pent n'avoir qu'une nuit, connue la gloire uu jour. Even Wordsworth, in the •'' sweet calm " which he had made for himself among his hills and streams — Mourns less for what life takes away Than what it leaves behind. While the eupeptic cheerfulness of Scott is darkened by the shadow of what Schelling finely calls "that sadness which cleaves to all finite life," as the day B 2 4 THE MESSAGE OF MODERN THOUGHT. [CiiAi'. I. dying on ''the broad lake and mountain side" suggests the unanswerable reflection — thus pleasures fade away, Youth, talent, beauty, thus decay. And leave us dark, forlorn, and grey. And it will be found, for that is my present point, that, as the century advances, this pessimistic vein in the literature of Europe becomes more objective; that the general thought travels the same melancholy road as George Sand's particular thought, from the single to the universal, from the person to the race. But more than this, "years that bring the philosophic mind " lead not only individual men, but the collec- tion or rather flock of individual men which we call an age, from sentiments to systems, which, after all, are only sentiments formulated. Man is a me- taphysical animal, whatever else he may or may not be. No gay Voltairean banter, bidding him concentrate his energies on the cultivation of his garden, will ever tie him down to the seen and V actual ; no fork of positivism will expel his innate tendency to look behind phenomena and to pry into the great darkness which encompasses human life. The earlier generations of the nineteenth century gazed, appalled, at the vision of the woe In which mankind is bound. Our own generation seeks men of excellent spirit Cifvr. T.] THE PITTLOSOrTIER OF PESSIMISM. 5 and knowledge and understanding, interpreting of dreams, and showing of hard sentences, and dissolving of doubts, to show the interpretation of the vision, and turns to Grermany for the new Daniel of whose soothsaying it has need. We have passed from Shelley to Schopenhauer, from The Bevolt of Islam to The World as Will and Idea. I propose to consider the explanation of the enigma of life which is offered us by the great prophet of pessimism, and the later writer upon whom has fallen his mantle, if not a double portion of his spirit. The new pessimistic philosophy is a fact, and a very significant fact, in the world's history. I shall endeavour, in the first place, to give, in as plain and untechnical language as is possible, some account of its main outlines, and then to estimate its significance, as a fact, in the annals of our time. Although it is only of late years that Schopen- hauer has acquired his high position among "the kings of modern thought," he belongs chronologi- cally to the earlier part of the century. Born in 1788 and dying in 1860, he lived through the age whose sentiment he was to translate into philosophy, but it was so long ago as 1819 that he published his principal work, on The JForld as Will and Idea. For forty years, however, this treatise was buried in obscurity. It was not until 1851 that his f) TJIE MESSAGE OF 3fOT)ERX TIIOUGJTT. [Chap. T. countrymen were aroused by the publication of his Farerga und Faralijmmena to a dim ^^erception that the Prophet of a new Gospel had arisen among them ; and I believe I am well warranted in saying that it was an English man of letters, Mr. Oxenford, who, writing in the Westminster Keview in ]853, first displayed a clear appreciation of his true rank in the province of speculative thought. From that date until the present day Schopenhauer's teaching has attracted ever-increasing attention, and the pessimistic school of which he is the founder and chief doctor now occupies a very prominent position in Germany. Von Hartmann, the most consider- able member of it, claims, indeed, to rank as an independent thin]5:er, and maintains that the doc- trine set forth in the two ponderous volumes wherein he unfolds his Thilosojphy of the Unconscious is connected with Schopenhauer's teaching only by very slight ties. It seems to me that the claim is ill-founded, that the variations of Von Hartmann from the earlier teacher are superficial and unessen- tial, and that the message which the two deliver to the world is manifestly, in the main, the same. And the world has given heed to it. The Fhilosophy of the Unconscious has gone through seven editions, and is now stereotyped and commands a large sale, while Schopenhauer's own works, collected and carefully edited by Prauenstiidt, occupy a secure place among the classics of his country. In England the new philosophy has been discussed in Mr. James Chap. I.] PHILOSOPHY AND THE PHTLOSOPHEU. 7 Sully's Pessimism, a thoughtful work, not imcler- valued by many who, like myself, differ widely from its conclusions. In France, M. Ribot and M. Caro have made it the subject of carefully written and eminently readable books, and M. Challemel- Lacour has ' contributed to the Heoue des Deux Mondes an extremely interesting sketch both of the philosopher and his system in a paper entitled Un Bonddhiste Conteynporain. M. Challemel-Lacour has done wisely, I think, in prefacing his account of Schopenhauer's specu- lations by an account of Schopenhauer himself, and I shall follow his example. No kind of ratio- cination, indeed, is more vicious than that which seeks to draw conclusions as to the soundness or unsoundness of any philosophical or religious system from the merits or demerits of particular persons who happen to profess it. But the founders of religions and philosophies are in a very different position in this respect. Their teaching is but one expression of themselves — a reflection of their OAvn individuality, or, as Aristotle speaks, an external embodiment of their inner being,^ and is best judged of, when that is possible, in connection with other manifestations of their personality. Their lives often throw a flood of light upon their doctrines. Let us therefore consider briefly what manner of man Arthur Schopenhauer was. His life may be read at large in the pages of Gwinner^ 1 iveoyi'ia 0)) o Troiijrrnc ru tpyov Inri TTUQ.^—Etn, 1. IX, C. 7. 8 THE MESSAGE OE MODERN THOUGHT. [Chap. I. Frauenstiidt, and Lindner, and in the instructive little English work which Miss Zimmern has com- piled from these and other som^ces. As to its external incidents, it is soon told. The son of a wealthy and well-educated merchant of Dantzig, for whom he claimed Dutch descent, and of a clever and vivacious woman, he lost his father at the age of eighteen. Soon after, he abandoned the com- niercial career upon which he had entered, and, after passing a short time at Gotha, betook himself to Weimar, where his mother was residing. She however stipulated that he should not live with her. " Your way of living and of regarding life, your grumbling at the inevitable, your sulky looks, your eccentric opinions, which you deliver oracularly and without appeal — all this disquiets, fatigues, and saddens me. Your mania for disputation, your lamentations over the folly of the world and the misery of mankind, prevent my sleeping and give me bad dreams." On attaining the age of twenty he entered at the University of Gottingen, where, besides the humane letters, he studied chemistry, medicine, natural history, and the religions and philosophies of the East. In 1811 he quitted the university of Gottingen for that of Berlin. Thence he went to Dresden, and in 1818 he paid his first visit to Italy. In 1820 he returned to Berlin, and began to lecture as a Frivat-docenf, but attracted no audience. In 1823 he went to Italy again, and again came back to Berlin in 1825, and remained Chap. I.] SCHOPENIIAUER'S LIFE. 9 there until 1830, when he fled at the approach of cholera, and took up his abode in Frankfort, at- tracted thither by its reputation for sakibrity. It was in that city that he finally fixed his residence. He never left it from 1833 until his death. Such are the principal landmarks in his lonely, self-engrossed career. His life, through all that tract of years, was led in a routine of study, table cl^hole, flute-playing, walking, and sleeping. He never mar- ried, and appears to have declined, as far as possible, all the ordinary duties of life. His chief amusements were the theatre and music, and the contemplation of works of plastic and pictorial art. The picture which Miss Zimmern, a professed admirer of him, gives of his manners is not winning. She attributes to him "boisterous arroo^ance " ^ and " vanitv in the worst sense of the word."^ "Neglect ex- asperated him, he was easily angered, suspicious and irritable." ^ " The heavy artillery of abusive utterance characterised his speech."* "Loss of fortune was of all ills most dreaded by him." ^ " The slightest noise at night made him start and seize the pistols that always lay ready loaded. He would never trust himself under the razor of a barber, and he fled from the mere mention of an infectious disease." He j)rofessed a great respect for the memory of his deceased father, but to his living mother he exhibited "a shocking want of 1 Life, Pref. p. vii. 2 /^/^/^ p, gl. '^ Ihid. p. 89. 4 lUd. p. 28. 5 /i,v/. p. 130. 10 THE MESSAGE OE MODFAIX TTfOFOnr. \Qb\v. I. filial piety." In politics lie was a stenuous advocate of absolutism. Patriotism he judged "the most foolish of passions and the passion of fools." Like Voltaire, he held the people to be "a collection of bears and swine," and he regarded all pleadings for their liberty, freedom, and happiness as hollow twaddle.^ Naturally, therefore, the great uprising of 1848 against the crowned oppressors of Germany was detested by him. How strong wete his sympathies on the other side may be inferred from the fact that all his fortune was bequeathed to the survivors or representatives of the troops who carried out the murderous task of re-establishing the tottering edifice of Teutonic despotism. In the pleasures of the senses he indulged freely. Wine, indeed, soon mounted to his head. He was obliged therefore to content himself with shallow potations. But he was a great eater, and, as Miss Zimmern euphemistically expresses it, ''he was very sus- ceptible to female charms," " with a preference, as that lady is obliging enough to note, for brown women. His landlady at Berlin, it may be assumed, either was not charming or was not brown, as he distinguished himself by kicking her downstairs with such violence as permanently to cripple her, and was in consequence condemned by the proper tribunal to maintain her for the rest of her natural life. He appears in practice to have approximated » Z?/e, p. 201. - Thill \K 70. Chap. I.] THE IDE A LIS. V OE SCJIOPEXTTArE'R. 11 to the Byronic standard of tlie whole duty of man • — Lord Byron, indeed, was one of his favourite poets — ''to hate your neighbour, and to love your neighbour's wife." " The more T see of men," he writes, " the less I like them. If I could but say so of women, all Avould be Avell."^ His constant aim, as he says in many places, was to acquire a clear view of the utter despicability of mankind, and it must be allowed that he supplied in his own person a strong argument in favour of that doctrine. The sole virtues, using the word in its most elastic sense, with which I find him credited, were love of his spaniel and occasional doles to his poor relations, which, however, could have been no great tax upon his fortune for at his death his patrimony, in spite of sundry bad investments, had nearly doubled. And now let us turn from the man to his philosophy. The first position of Schopenhauer's system is the ideality of the world. The external universe as it ap23ears, as it j^resents itself to the senses, he holds to have no real existence, but to be merely a cerebral phenomenon. The visible forms of things, which seem to us the necessary and absolute con- ditions of all real existence, he considers inherent in 1 Life, p. 1 30. 12 THE MESSAGE OE MODERN THOUGHT. [Chap. T. the human intellect. There is a passage in the Memorabilien in which he brings out this view with great clearness and force. Two things were before me, two bodies, ponderable, regular in form, fair to behold. One was a vase of jasper with a rim and handles of gold; the other an organised body, a man. After having long admired their exterior, I begged the genius who accompanied me to let me look inside them. He consented, and in the vase I found nothing save the pression of the weight, and I know not what obscure reciprocal tendency between its parts which I have heard called cohesion and affinity. But, when I looked into the other object, what a surprise was there in store for me ! How can I rehearse Avhat I saw ? No fairy tale, no fable, relates any- thing so incredible. Within it (or rather in the upper part of it), called the head, which, viewed from without, seemed an object like the rest, circumscribed by dimensions, weight, &c., I found — what? The world itself, with the immensity of space in which the All is contained, and with the immensity of time in which tlie All moves, and with the prodigious variety of things which fill space and time ; and, Avhat sounds almost absurd, I saw myself there coming "and going. Yes, all that I saw in that object, hardly as big as a large fruit, which the executioner can with one blow sweep off, plunging into darkness the whole world therein contained. And this world would have no existence if objects of this kind did not sprout up continually, like mushrooms, to receive the world ready to sink into nothingness, and bandy about among them, like a football, this great image, which is identical in all, and whose identity they express by the word '• object." Such is the starting-point of Schopenhauer's doctrine — that ''the world of phenomena, known in sensuous perception, exists only for our percipient minds, and that its essential nature therefore is mental representation." It depends upon mental activity, and ceases to exist when the percipient Chai>. I.] WILL, THE THIXG-IN-ITSELF. 13 mind ceases. He next proceeds to inquire whether there is behind this phenomenal world a Reality, an Absolute Existence, an Ultimate Fact. He holds tliat there is, and that Reality, that Absolute Existence, that Ultimate Fact, he designates Will. This is the "universal and fundamental essence" of all activities, both of the organic and the inorganic world, "the primordial thing whence we and every- thing proceed."^ "It is that of which all idea, all object, is the phenomenal appearance, the visibility, the. objectification." " It appears in every blind force of nature, and in the preconsidered action of man." But this Will is not personal. Far from it. It is primarily unconscious, but attains knowledge of itself in the world of representation. "The in- nermost consciousness of every animal and of man lies in the species." It is the Will of the species that manifests itself both in actions which tend "to the conservation of the individual and in those which tend to prolong the life of the species." " The Will, which regarded purely in itself is un- ^ This is admirably put by Mr. Oxenford. " Gravitation, elec- tricity, and, in fact, every form of action, from the fall of an apple to the foundation of a republic, is an expression of the Will, and nothing more. The world is essentially Will, and nothing more, developing itself in a series of manifestations, which rise in a gradu- ated scale from the so-called laws of matter to that consciousness Avhich in inferior animals reaches the state of sensibility and under- standing (in Schopenhaiier's sense), and in man reaches that higher state called Reason."' — Westminster Review, New Series, vol. iii. p. 40o. U THE MESSAGE OF MODERN THOUGHT. [Cii.u'. I. conscious and only a blind irrestrainable impulse, as we see it manifested in organic and vegetable nature and its laws, and in the vegetative part of our own life, receives through the added world of representation, which is developed for its service, a knowledge of its own volition and of what it is that it wills : a knowledge, namely, that what it wills is nothing else than this world, life exactly as it stands.''^ In short, Will, according to the pessi- mistic doctors, manifests itself as the Will-to-live. " Life is that for which everything j)ants and labours," and sexual love,^ with whatever trappings of poetry or sentiment it may be adorned, is merely a manifestation of this blind striving after the life of the species. This is a point which Schopenhauer regarded as " the pearl of his system," to quote his own expression, and he enlarges upon it much and forcibly, and with a wealth of humour reminding us now of Swift and now of Rabelais. His humour, indeed, like that of those masters, is as broad as it is keen, and it must suffice here to quote his dictum, that " the growing passion of two lovers for one another is nothing else, properly speaking, but the Will-to-live already manifested, of the new being 1 Sammtlkhe Werke, vol. ii. p. 323. - He writes: "The state of being in love, however ethereally the feeling may comport itself, is rooted solely in the sexual impulse ; nay, it is throughout only a sexual impulse more closely determined, specialised, in the strictest sense individualised." — Scimmtliche Werle, vol. iii. p. . 245. Immortality mnst not be taken in the sense of endless life, but in the very different sense of deliverance from " the load of death called life": cessation of individual existence : or, in the words of the Sutta Nipdta, " not going to rebirth," " leaving death behind." The passage the Chinese poet has reproduced will be found in Sacred Books, vol. xiii. p. 88, § 12. " The late excellent Bishop of Calcutta, Dr. Milman, writes : " Among the heathen precursors of the truth I feel more and more that Sakya-Muni was the nearest in character and effect to Him v/ho is 'the Way, the Truth, and the Life.'" — Memoir of Bishop Milman, p. 203. Chap. I.] THE DOCTRINE OF THE BUDDHA. 25 ing him than the facts themselves. It is a profound saying of Plato, and very pertinent to this subject, that poetry comes nearer vital truth than history. I shall have occasion to touch again upon this 23oint. I now proceed to glance at the doctrine of the Buddha, the gospel which he spent his life in preaching. Its foundation is the illusoriness of the world, the subjection of all that is to the great law of mutability, the misery inseparable from the condition of man so long as he remains in ''the whirlpool of existence." In the account which is given of the workings of his mind in the first watch of the great night which he spent under the Bo-tree, he is represented as going through the chain of " the Twelve Causes and Effects," and tracing back ail the evil that is in the world to Ignorance,^ the prime illusion, the fundamental error of those who cling to individual existence. And in his sermon to the seventy Brahmins he declares " to know as truth that which is true, and to regard as false that which is false, this is perfect rectitude, and shall bring true profit." And then he goes on to point out as the primary truth. — " Everywhere in the world there is death : there is no rest in either of the three worlds. The gods indeed enjoy 1 They cling to individual existence, because they know not the Four Noble Truths, which are enumerated on the next page, and of which a detailed exposition will be found at pp. 151-154. This Ignorance is the source of all evil and of all suffei'ing. See Sacred Books, vol. xiii. p. 75 : Bishop Bigandet's Life or Legend, vol. i. p. 93. 2(i THE MESSAGE OF MODERN THOUGHT. [Chav. I. a period of bliss, but their happiness must also end, and they must also die. To consider this as the condition of all states of being, 'that there is nothing born but must die, and therefore to desire to escape birth and death, this is to exercise oneself in religious truth." ^ For death is in itself no deliver- ance from the burden of being. To die is merely to pass from one state of existence to another. So long as tcmhd — thirst, passion, desire — remains, the source of being remains. To root out tanlid is the only way of escaping " the yawning gulf of conti- nual birth and death." It is this which is expressed in the Four Truths, thought out by the Buddha, in that great night, after he had followed the sequence of the Twelve Causes and Effects— the Four Noble Truths, as they are called, regarding Suffering, the Cause of Suffering, the Cessation of Suffering, and the Path which leads to the Cessation of Suffering, which may be reckoned great fundamental doc- trines of the Buddhist Church. But there are two other tenets of no less importance. In common with almost all oriental thinkers, the Buddha believed in Transmigration — an hypo- thesis in support of which a certain amount of evidence ^ may be adduced, and w^liich, as Mr. 1 Beal's Dhammaimda,]). 65. I translate " Devas " by "gods." 2 I refer, of course, to " Those shadowy recollections " of which Wordsworth speaks, and " Whicli, be they what they may," are an indubitable fact of man's mind ; a fact affording, as Words- Chap. I.] KARMA. 27 Rhys Davids observes, " is incapable of disproof, while it affords an explanation, quite complete, to those who can believe in it, of the apparent anomalies and wrongs in the distribution of happi- ness or woe."^ The doctrine of Karma, which plays so great a part in Buddhism and which is the main source of its moral excellence, is the comple- ment of the doctrine of Transmigration, and the link which connects it with the " Four Noble Truths." It is the teaching of the Buddha that there is no such thing as what is commonly called a soul. The real man is the net result of his merits and demerits, and that net result is called Karma: A god, a man, a beast, a bird, or a fish — for there is no essential difference between all living beings — is what he does, what he has done, not only during his present existence, but very far more, during his countless previous existences in various forms. His actual condition is the result of the deeds done in his former births, and upon his present deeds, plus the past, will depend his destiny in future ex- istences, divine, human, or animal. And the character of his acts depends upon his intention. '' All that we are," the Teacher insists, '' depends worth judged, " presumptive evidence of a prior state of existence," See the very interesting note prefixed by him to the magnificent ode in which, he tells us, " I took hold of the notion of pre-existence as having sufficient foundation in humanity for authorising me to make, for my purpose, the best use of it I could as a poet." ' Buddhism, p. 100. 28 THE MESSAGE OF MODERN THOUGHT. [CHAr. I. ujDon what we have thought." ^ Thus life in all its grades, from the highest to the lowest, is, in the strictest sense, a time of probation. " Two things in this world are immutably fixed," the Buddha is reported to have said upon another occasion — " that good actions bring happiness, and that bad actions bring misery."'^ In the pregnant Buddhist phrase, " we pass away, according to our deeds," to be reborn in heaven, or in hell, or upon the earth, as man or animalj according to our Karma. To say that a man's works follow him when he dies, that what he has sown here he shall reap there, falls far short of this tremendous doctrine. His works are himself, he is what he has sown. All else drops from him at death. His body decays and falls into nothingness ; and not only his material properties (Bilpa), but his sensations {Vedand), his abstract ideas (Sannd), his mental and moral predispositions (Sankhdrd), and his thought or reason [Vinndna) — all these constituent elements of his being pass away. But his Karma remains, unless he has attained to the supreme state of Arahat — the crown of Buddhist saintship — when Karma is extinguished and Nirvdna is attained. Such is Karma — 2i great mystery, which the limited intellect of ordinary man can but contem- plate as it were 'through a glass darkly": only 1 Professor Max Miiller's Dhammapada in Sacred Books of the East, vol. X. p. 3. ^ Beal's Dhammapada, p. 75. CHAr. I.] THE BUDDHIST WAY OF SALVATION. 29 the perfectly enlightened mind of a Buddha can fully fathom it. As I have observed, it is closely connected with the Four Noble Truths. The cause of demerit is tanhd, which appears to present some analogy to concupiscence, as Catholic theologians define it : ''a certain motion and power of the mind whereby men are driven to desire pleasant things that they do not possess." That is the cause of sin, of sorrow, and of suffering. To root out this thirst is the only way to obtain salvation, release from the evil which is of the essence of existence : and, as the fourth of the Noble Truths teaches, " the means of obtaining the individual annihilation of desire" is supplied by the eight-, fold Path of Holiness.^ Abolition of self, living for others, is the substance of the Buddhist plan of salvation. " Scrupulously avoiding all wicked actions, reverently performing all virtuous ones, purifying our intentions from all selfish ends — this is the doctrine of all the Buddhas.^ Thus does man conquer himself : and, '' having conquered him- self, there will be no further ground for birth." And so the Chinese poet commenting upon the I*ratimoksha : — The heart, scnipnlonsly avoiding all idle dissipation, Diligently applying itself to the holy law of Buddha, Letting go all lust and consequent disappointment. Fixed and unchangeable, enters on Nirvchia.'^ ^ As to which see p. 152. - Beal's Catena oj Buddhist Scriptures, p. 15G ''Ibid. p. 159. 30 THE MESSAGE OF MODERN THOUGHT. [Chap. i. This is the blissful state which results from the extinction of desire : this is the highest conquest of self ; ^ it is the fulness Of deep and liquid rest forgetful of all ill. Those who have attained to this "peace which passeth understanding-," ^ even the gods envy, we are told. "" Their old Karma is being exhausted ; no new Karma is being produced ; their hearts are free from the longing after future life ; the cause of their existence being destroyed, and no new yearn- ings springing up within them, they, the wise, are extinguished like this lamp." ^ Such are the leading features of the doctrine contained in Buddhist canonical books, and, whether it proceeded to a greater or less extent in this form from the Master's lips, it may safely be regarded as a correct representation of his mind. When not 1 " When Buddha had arrived at complete enlightenment, he thought within himself, the perfect Rest which results from the extinction of desire — this is the highest conquest of self." — Beal's Catena of Buddhist Scriptures, p. 190. 2 " Most difficult for the people to understand will be the extinction of all Samkharas (tendencies or potentiahties), the o-etting rid of the substrata (of existence), the destruction of desire (tanha), the absence of passion, quietude of heart, Nirvana.'' Mahavagga, I. 5. 2. Sacred Books of the East, vol. xiii. p. 85. » Kattana ^'w^a, quoted by Mr. Rhys Davids, Buddhism, i). 111. Chap. I.] THE BUDDHA'S REFORMATION. 31 directly referable to him, it is a legitimate expli- cation of liis teaching. The possession of a power of development is necessary to the vitality of any religious system ; here, as elsewhere, growth, assimi- lation, change, are the condition and the evidence of life. Nor if we once know the essential idea or type of doctrine — and in the case of Buddhism we undoubtedly do possess that knowledge — is there much difficulty in distinguishing between its true developments and the corruptions by which it is sure to be overlaid when it is received into the popular mind. It must be remembered, too, that the Buddha's reformation was chiefly moral and social, that his message to the world was for the most part no new thing. His mission was not to destroy the existing belief but to develop and quicken what in it was real, spiritual, and earnest. I do not know that there is any portion of his teaching which may not be more or less clearly traced in the older systems. Even his dogma of Karma — the fount of the moral purity, the humility, the self-conquest, the universal charity, which are stamped upon his system, and which have won for him the praise of being the first of Indian sages to give a universal character to morality — is but a modification of a doctrine which he found ' ' deeply rooted in the popular conscience." ^ ^ In the view of the authors of the Upanishads the separated condition of the soul, which is the cause of mental error, is also the cause of moral evil. Ignorant of its true nature, the soul attaches 32 THE MESSAGE OE MODERN THOUGHT. [Chai-. I. And now it is time to return to Sclio^ienhauer. I have said enough to show how much his doctrine has in common with that of Gotama. The founder of modern " reasoned pessimism " leaves out in liis new edition of Buddhism for the use of itself to objects unworthy of it. Every act \vliich it performs to gratify this attachment entangles it deeper in the perishable world ; and, as it is itself imperishable, it is condemned to a perpetual series of changes. Once dragged into the samsdra, into the vortex of life, it passes from one existence into another, without respite and without rest. This is the twofold doctrine of the Izarman., i.e. the act by which the soul determines its own destiny, and of the ■punarbhava, i.e. the successive re-births in which it undergoes it. This doctrine, which is henceforth the fundamental hypothesis common to all the religions and sects of India, is found formulated in the Upanishads for the first time. In the most ancient portions of the Brdhmanas it appears of small account, and with less range of application. The faith we find there seems simply to be that the man who has led an immoral life may be condemned to return into this world to undergo here an existence of misery. Ee-birth is only a form of punishment ; it is the opposite of the celestial life, and tantamount to the infernal. It is not yet what it is here, and what it will continue to be eventually, the state of personal being, a state which may be realised in endlessly diverse forms of being, from that of the insect up to that of the god, but all of equal instability and subject to relapse. It is impossible to fix the period at which' this old belief found in the new metaphysical ideas the medium favourable to its expansion; but it is certain that from the end of the sixth century before our era, when ^Jiikyamuni was meditating his work of salvation, the doctrine, such as it appears in the Upanishads, was almost complete, and already deeply rooted in the popular conscience. Without this point dhippui the spread of Buddhism would hardly be in- telligible. Earth, The Religions of India, p. 78, Authorised Trans- lation by the Eev. J. Wood in Trii])ner's Oriental Series, p. 78. Chap. I.] THE TRUEST PARTS OF BUDDHISM. 33 the nineteenth century its poetry and its meta- physics, and these are precisely the two elements which are the source of its greatness and of its stu23endous triumphs, and which, therefore, we may take to be its truest j^arts ; for it is by what is true in it that a religion, a philosophy, lives in the world, and subdues the minds of men. " Man con- sists in truth," Novalis finely remarks. And more than this, it is only when truth is "embodied in a tale, that it enters in " at lowly doors," only when it is "linked to flesli and blood," that it wins its way among the vast majority of our race, who, busy, sensual, dull as they are, yet by a true instinct confess and worship the something more than human which shines forth in the teachers and patterns of holiness, and truth, and self-denial. The life of the Buddha has given vitality to his precepts : to imitate him has been the higher law which has transformed the lives of his disciples. The poetry of Buddhism — and is not religion the sublimest expression of poetry ? — centres round his noble figure, instinct with the supernatural, revela- tory of the unseen, ai^pealing not to men's lower natures but to that which, according to the wisdom of the ancients,^ marks us off from the beasts ; the power of looking up for something higher than 1 avOpM-!TOQ wfis explained to mean o avio aOpCJVj the looker-up ; the other animals being, in Sallust's phrase, " proua utque veiitri obedientia." D 84 THE MESSAGE OF MODERN- THOUGHT. [Chap. I. sense or reason suiDplies. The Buddha is no mere man, as other men are, to the countless millions who have believed on him, but a great being, who, moved with compassion for mankind, left the glory- he had among the gods to redeem the world by his "most excellent law" and his perfect example. It is not the philanthropic philosopher, but the legen- dary Saviour, who had lived in the hearts of his votaries for so many ages, calling up in them some image, however faint, of himself; some reflection, however dim, of his unearthly majesty. Schopenhauer's version of Buddhism leaves out this superhuman ideal around which it centres : leaves out, too, its metaj^hysics, upon which its noble and severe morality depends. For those metaphysics Schopenhauer substitutes speculations still more vain, fantastic, and arbitrary. The doctrines of Karma and Transmigration may be dark and difficult enough ; but they are rational and winning beside Schopenhauer's Will theory. His fundamental conception of a (f)vcn<; without a vov<; involves, theoretically, an absurdity which Aristotle has unanswerably pointed out ;^ while its practical effect would be to overthrow the only bases upon which any ethical system has ever existed in the world as a living power. It is a simple fact that every code of morals by which the unruly wills and affections of men have been ^ See ehapters 3 and 4 of the first book of the Metaphijsica. Chap. I.] THE BUDDHA AND SCHOPENHAUER. 35 governed has derived its sanctions from the in- visible, the supersensual. And so the corner-stone of the Buddha's teaching is that there rules in the universe a supremely just law, *' a power not ourselves, a stream of tendency that makes for righteousness." And it is to man's conscience, free will, and instinct of retribution, that he appeals when he preaches the "Five Aversions obligatory on all men, "^ and " the Six Transcendent Virtues whereby a man passes to the other shore." " To Schopenhauer all this is the idlest of verbiage. The more closely the Buddha's sj^stem is compared with his, the more radical will their difference be seen to be. The one unfolds the royal law of universal pity, the other proclaims, by way of gospel, the utter despicability of mankind. The one law raised woman to an elevation never before attained by her in the Oriental world : the other degrades her to a merely noxious animal. The one is the widest emancipatory movement the human race has ever known : the other issues in the despotism of sheer force. The one teaches that a man is what he does : the other that a man is what he eats. " The words of the Buddha are holy words ;"^ the ^ Not to kill, not to steal, not to commit adultery, not to lie, not to become intoxicated. 2 Almsgiving, charity, purity, patience, courage, and wisdom shown in contemplation and science. ^ Chinese translator of the Dhammapada. See Beal's Dhanima- paf/a, p. 30. D 2 36 THE MESSAGE OF MODERN THOUGHT. [Chap. I. mouth of the Aj^ostle of modern pessimism is full of cursing and bitterness : the doctrines of the Gotama are the purest emanations of Aryan religious thought : ^ the speculations of Schopenhauer issue in atheistic materialism. This may seem a hard saying regarding a system in which the idealistic view of the world is made a leading principle, and materialism is refuted — successfully refuted — in so many words. But the fact remains that whoever heartily accepts Schopenhauer will find himself, like Professor Huxley and Professor Tyndall, expressing a universal nescience in terms of materialism. Now it is easy to forget — I had almost said to burke — the nescience, but impossible not to be more and more affected by the materialism. In the great masters, materialism may have its ^ It is matter of much surprise to me that so many accomplished scholars have spoken of Buddhism as Atheistic. It seems to me to be clear from the canonical books that Gotama, a Hindu of the Hindus, recognised all the innumerable deities of the BrahminiCal Pantheon ; and his followers have adopted, or at the least have respected, the gods of the countries they have evangelised. I cannot help thinking that, when Buddhism is called Atheistic, all that is meant is that it does not possess the conception of the personal creative God of Monotheism. This is undoubtedly true. Buddhism, like all Aryan religions, is Pantheistic, with at the least a tendency to Acosmism, and the notion of creation is foreign to the Aryan mind; there is, I believe, no word, either in Sanskrit or Pali, which properly expresses it. The conception of emanation takes its place. Fichte maintains that " the arrangement of the moral sentiments and relations, that is, the moral order of the universe, is God," and this seems pretty much to express the Buddhist view of the Supreme Power ruling over gods and men. Compare Lord Tennyson's verses The Higher Pantheism. Chap. I.] SIGNIFICANCE OF SCIIOPENHAUERISM. 37 subtleties and graces not its own. In the multitude it speedily sinks to its proper level and becomes a crude disbelief in whatever lies out of the senses' grasp ; which disbelief, appearing in a positive form, is the ancient doctrine that ginger is hot in the mouth, or what Mr. Carlyle has called Pig Philosophy. It is as a sign of the times, then, rather than on account of any intrinsic merits which it possesses, that Schopenhauerism deserves our attention. It is curious and significant that the latest word of Western speculative thought should be of this kind ; that it should account of human life, not only as not worth living, but as supremely and irremediably evil ; that it should explain the universe as the sport of a malign, irrational power, and hold out annihilation as the only hope of humanity. Still such is the fact. What is its meaning ? One great note of the modern world is its intense self- consciousness. It is a characteristic which specially distinguishes it both from classical antiquity and medieval Christendom. Ancient Greece and Rome hated and proscribed the Ugo, and — what is more important for my present pur- pose — the Catholicism of the Middle Ages, although recognising the supreme value of the individual soul, and addressing itself primarily to the in- dividual conscience, yet by no means left men in 38 THE MESSAGE OF MODERN THOUGHT [Chap. I. introspective subjectivity, a chaos of disconnected atoms, but drawing them together by the strongest principle of cohesion the world has ever known, a belief in a divine fraternity, worked, according to the Evangelical similitude, as leaven upon the mass of humanity. The conception of the family, the gens, which had been the unit of archaic society, remained, although enlarged and spiritualised. The Catholic Church was the Christian family, a gens sancta, and its members were domestici Dei. The great thought by which Christendom was permeated and knit together was the thought of God, the beginning and final end of each soul, but apprehended in the household of faith in which each soul had its fellowship of sacred things. And more than this, participation in religious rites was the great tie, also, of associations whose characters were most distinctly secular, such as military orders, municipal corporations, and trade guilds. This, then, was the organisation of human society in the Middle Ages — an organisation based on the father- hood of God and the brotherhood of Christians as the great objective facts of life. And this organisa- tion remained long after the medieval period had closed. " Dieu seul est Ic lien de notre soci^te," Malebranche could still write in the seventeenth century. The whole tendency of what is specifi- cally denominated " modern thought," whether as formulated in the eighteenth century or in the nine- teenth, has been to eliminate the idea of God. Chap. L] LOCKE AND KANT. i'-^ This was manifestly the issue of that '' experimental psychology " of which Locke was the most popular exponent in this country, and which, receiving from the Frendi intellect a comjolete and logical develo2:)mentj soon became predominant throughout Eurojje. And it is also the issue of the vastly different doctrine which was originated by Kant, and formulated by him in the Critique of JPure Reason — that wonderful book, which, whatever may be our feelings towards it, is certainly one of the profoundest things that ever issued from the human intellect. Of course Kant differed toto ccelo from the French philosophes as to his fundamental principles. Holbach and Cabanis, who said the last word of their school, reduce everything to physics. They maintain that tliere is no thing-in- itself behind phenomena ; that the phenomenon is the thing-in-itself. Kant judges that the distinction between physics and metaphysics is the distinction between that which appears and that which is, the latter being the only reality, the only '' thing-in- itself," but being, also, unknowable. Hence, he concludes, ontology is impossible. He does not allow to the speculative reason any power by which, penetrating through the phenomenal, it may reach the noumenal. He holds it to be restricted to the region of the relative : bounded by the Forms and Categories and whatever they reveal; so that propositions about God, the soul, immortality, are 40 THE MESSAGE OF MODERN TIIOUGIJT. [Chap. I. incapable of being either proved or disproved by it.^ Thus does the Critique of jPure Reason make a tabula rasa, not only of what the vi^orld once called the Supernatural Order, but of the Natural Order also, except so far as regards phenomena ; while even with regard to phenomena it allows only of a conditional certitude, for phenomena are but the phantasmagoria of sense. The result, as Heine has finely said, is that men find themselves much in the condition of the prisoners described by Plato at the beginning of the seventh book of his Republic. It is an underground, cavernous chaml)er which we are there asked to picture to ourselves, l3ut with an opening above towards the light. In it sit, and have sat from childhood, a number of men fast bound in misery and iron, not able so much as to turn their heads round, and so seeing nothing but what is straight before them. At a distance above and behind them a bright fire burns, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way, with a low wall built along it, like the screens which the marionette-players put up in front of their audience, and above which they display their puppets. Behind this wall walk a number of persons, bearing vessels and images of wood and 1 It is, of course, only of the sinculative reason that Kant sajs this. But I am throughout speaking not of his teaching as a whole, but of one part of it, the Critique of Pure Reason, which is commonly, but improperly, taken apart from the totality. Chap. I.] THE NIHILISM OF " FUEE REASON:' 41 stone, and various other materials. The captives, sitting without the power of turning their heads, see their own shadows — which are all they see of themselves and each other — and the shadows of the objects carried past, upon the part of the cavern facing them, and hear the voices thence reverbe- rated, for there is an echo in their prison-house. And they refer these sounds, not to the unseen passers-by, of whom they have no knowledge, but to the passing shadows, which are all they can see, and which they take for realities. Strange and weird conception ! Apt image of the phantasmal and disinherited world to which we are reduced by the sage of Konigsberg. The Critique of Fure Reason has given the tone to the speculative thought of the century, and has infiltrated itself into the minds of millions who have never read one line of it. Nor can there be any doubt that if taken by itself — Kant, we should always remember, did not mean it to be so taken — it issues in Nihilism, or, in Heine's phrase, puts a knife to the throat of Theism. Thus, as I have said, the result of "modern thought" has been to dissolve the great idea which in the time of Malebranche was still, as it had been for a thousand years, the bond of society in every department of human activity ; to unloose that bond and to throw men back upon themselves. It has been observed by Richter, " No one in Nature is so alone as the denier of God. He mourns with an orphaned 42 THE MESSAGE OF MODERN THOUGHT. [Chai-. I. heart that has lost its great Father, by the Corpse of Nature which no World-Spirit moves and holds together, and which grows in its grave ; and he mourns by that Corpse until he himself crumble off it."i To this terrible feeling of loneliness is clearly traceable that intense self-consciousness of which I just now made mention, as being a special note of the modern mind, and which is the necessary pro- duct of its all-absorbing scepticism, and the very source and fount of its profound despondency. The world has not for a long time witnessed such a spectacle as that which is presented in the present age, of a vast number of men and women, possessing a certain amount of intellectual cultivation, endowed witli a sufficiency of the gifts of fortune to disj^ense them from that necessity of daily toil which assuages, if it does not heal, the malady of thought;-* and quite devoid of first principles of faith and action. For a parallel to it we must go back to the days of Seneca and Petronius, of Tacitus and Marcus Aurelius ; and indeed the tone of sentiment characteristic of the decadent and moribund Eoman Empire presents a curious affinity to that which finds expression in the literature of the nineteenth century : it is sicklied o'er with the same pale cast of thought, the same morbid self-introspection 1 I borrow Mr. Carlyle's translation, Mis. Essays, vol. ii. p. 164, 2 It is hardly necessary to quote Candide : " Travaillons sans raisonner," dit Martin ; " c'est le seul moyon do rendre la vie sup- portable." Chap. I.] SCHOPENHAUER AND KANT. 43 and egoistic melancholy. It is the doom of this generation, and its special misery, To know the change and feel it, "When there is none to heal it, Nor numbed sense to steel it. No: not nmnbed sense, but the vastly enhanced capacity of suffering wliich the increase of know- ledge and the amelioration of the physical conditions of existence have developed. In this hopelessness and desolation, Schopenhauer arises to solve the terrible enigma of life, and he offers the solution which we have seen. Claiming to be the true successor of Kant, and to continue and comj)lete the doctrine of the Critique of Fure Reason, he expounds the thing-in-itself which his master had left unexplained, and tells us that the reality behind the phenomenal world is — not God, but — that irrational demoniacal entity, ''that power not ourselves, that stream of tendency that makes for " evil, which he calls Will. Such is the message of modern thought : the last word of the movement which, as M. Caro truly observes, has '' destroyed everything, the reality of God, the reality of duty, the reality of man's personality, the morality of science." ^ Making all deductions which may fairly be made for ex- aggerations due, whether to an atrabilious tempera- ment or to mortified vanity, the picture which 1 Le Pcssimisme, p. 292. 44 THE MESSAGE OF MODERN THOUGHT. [CnAr. I. Schopenhauer draws of human existence with the void thus caused in it seems to me to be unques- tionably true. He raises directly the question, with a vigour, a clearness, a logical incisiveness, j)eculiarly his own, whether life shorn of its theistic basis is worth living. Nor is it easy to see what answer can be given to the pessimistic argument save that supplied by religious faith. " How can I hold myself up in this miserable life, unless Thou strengthen me with Thy mercy and Thy grace ?"^ asks the medieval mystic, and the nine- teenth century echoes back the How ? " Un monde sans Dieu est horrible," M. Renan confesses. To Schopenhauer belongs the merit of having exhibited that horror in its fulness. A thing may be horrible and yet true. Its horror supplies no sufficient reason for pronouncing it to be false, but does sup^^ly a very strong reason for searching inquiry as to its truth, by those whom it concerns. If nihilistic pessimism flows naturally from the negation of God, and if the negation of God is involved in the theory of human know- ledge presented in the CrUiqne of Fure Reason, taken by itself, we are imperiously led to inquire whether that theory is complete, as Schopenhauer 1 De Imitatione Christi, lib. iii. c. 3. Compare tlie noble lines in book iv. of The Excursion, One ad(xpiaie support For the calamities of mortal life, &c. Chap. I.] SCHOPENHAUER AND RELIGION. 45 alleged it to be. Does it not leave out of sight a whole as^oect of man's nature, and that the most important aspect ? Are not spiritual facts and spiritual faculties as indubitable as those wherewith the physicist is concerned? These are questions worthy surely of deeper consideration than they apparently receive from the majority of the ready writers and fluent speakers who most confidently meet them with a negative reply. There is a cm^ious passage in Gwinner, where we are told how Schopenhauer, upon one occasion, was deeply moved upon seeing a picture of Ranee, the saintly founder of La Trappe. He gazed upon it for a long time, and then, turning away with a pained look, said, "That is a matter of grace." Strange words in such a mouth ! and in an age which among its many manifold discoveries has lighted, as we are assured, upon the true method of "finding out" religions. I suppose that, in the judgment of the highly-gifted persons who value themselves upon their proficiency in that art, the spectacle of this latest master of modern thought adopting the language of an exploded superstition is but a melancholy token how difficult it is for the strongest intellect to gain complete emancipation. They may say so if they will. It is a characteristic of their school to be " tres affirmatif dans la l /■>» o V-> ^ X^a,\^ 'l 4G THE MESSAGE OF MODERN THOUGHT. Chap. I.] negation." Still there is another explanation, which will require something more than the con- temptuous dogmatism of contemporary finders-out of religion to discredit it, for many minds not ashamed to avow themselves followers of St. Augus- tine and St. Thomas Aquinas, of Pascal and Butler, of Maine de Bii-an and Cardinal Newman. That explanation is, that in this moment, at least, of his dark and ignoble existence, Religion had found out Schopenhauer ; that the light which, beaming from the holy ascetic's face, dazzled and dismayed him, was in truth a reflection of that uncreated light — " aiternum atque indeficiens " — which the pure in heart see, and which is "the life of men." " Beata quippe vita est gaudium de veritate. Hoc est enim gaudium de Te qui Veritas es, Deus illumi- natio mea, salus faciei mese, Deus mens. Ipsa est beata vita, gaudere ad Te, de Te, propter Te. Ipsa est ; et non est altera." ^ 1 St. Angus. Confes. lib. x. CHAPTER II. THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. I PROPOSE in this chapter to consider a Religious Movement of the nineteenth century, specially interesting to Englishmen, and by no means with- out a bearing upon those great fundamental ques- tions wliicli modern philosophical speculation, as I have pointed out,^ so directly and so imperiously raises. I shall inquire what Tractarianism was in itself, and Avhat is its significance for us. The time has perhaps now come when this can be done without exciting those polemical passions which the bare mention of Tractarianism was once sure to arouse. Most of the learned and zealous men who took part in the great controversy enkindled by the publication of the Tracts for the Times have passed away : and those of them who remain, and are still with us, have, for the most part, been carried by the tide of time into positions whence they may retrace their ancient struggles in the calm spirit of the Grecian warrior describing his Trojan campaign : Hie ibat Simois : liasc est Sigeia tellus; Pingit ct exiguo Pergaiua tota mero. The Tractarian Movement has become matter of history : and, like all great moral, intellectual, and 1 iSee pp. 43-45. 48 THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. [Chap. II. spiritual movements, is most accurately and most fruitfully studied in the person and action of its leader. Nor can there be any doubt who its true leader was. Tlie judgment of our own day is in accord with the judgment of Cardinal Newman's contemporaries, in regarding him as its originator, so far as its origin can be referred to any one man, in fastening upon him the main responsil)ility for all that has come out of it. I shall have to touch upon this point again. For the moment it will be sufficient to observe, that, in what I am about to write regarding the real character and more notable results of the Tractarian Movement, I shall seek my main documents in Cardinal Newman's works. Now one special note of those works which renders them of the utmost value for my present purpose is their strong individuality. They are all instinct with that egotism which, to use a happy expression of their author, is, in some cases, the truest modesty. Each in its different way and in its varying degree has for us its revelation about him. Thus the Grammar of Assent does for us objectively what the Apologia does subjectively. The Ussay on Development is confessedly a chapter — the last — in the workings of the author's mind which issued in his submission to Rome. There is perhaps not one of his Oxford Sermons which, as he has told us of the famous discourse on Wisdom and Innocence, was not written with a secret reference to himself. His verses are the expression of personal feelings Chap. II. J THE FOUNDER OF TRACTARIANISM. 49 the greater part of them, to give his own account, growing out of that religious movement which he followed so faithfully from first to last.' And, further, we have his present criticism upon his former self, his ultimate judgments upon his early- views, in the prefaces and notes with which he has enriched the new editions of his old works. Thus we possess in his volumes not only the story of his life, but, in some degree, his comment thereon. llle velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim Credebat libris, neque si male cesserat iinquam Decurrens alio, neque si bene, quo fit ut omnis Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella Vita senis. Cardinal Newman's life runs with the century. It is to the age of Pitt and Fox, of Napoleon and Pius VII., of Scott and Byron, of Coleridge and Kant, that we must go back to survey the moral, political, and religious surroundings of his early years — surroundings which largely influence every man, and the more largely in proportion to the receptivity and retentiveness of his intellectual constitution. To form some apprehension of the spiritual element in which Cardinal Newman lived and moved during the time when his character was matured and his first principles were formed, is a ^ Dedication to Mr, Badeley of Verses upon Various Occasions, p. vii. E 50 THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. [Chai-. II. necessary condition precedent to any true under- standing of what he is and of what he has wrought. Let us therefore glance at the condition of English religious thought at that period. Perhaps it is not too much to say that never, during its course of well-nigh two thousand years in the world, has Christianity presented less of the character of a spiritual religion than during the last half of the eighteenth century. Not in England only, but throughout Europe, the general aim of its accredited teachers seems to have been to explain away its mysteries, to extenuate its super- natural character, to reduce it to a system of ethics little differing from the doctrines of Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius. E-eligious dogmas were almost openly admitted to be nonsense. Religious emo- tion was openly stigmatized as enthusiasm. The- ology, from being "the science of things divine," had sunk into apologies opposing too often weak answers to strong objections, and into evidences endeavouring, for the most part with the smallest result, to establish the existence of a vague possible Deity. Even the sanctions of morality were sought in the lowest instincts of human nature, the reason for doing good assigned in the received text-books of philosophy being, in effect, ' ' that God is stronger than we are, and able to damn us if we do not." The prevailing religion of the day may be accurately judged of from the most widely popular of its homiletic works, those thrice-famous sermons of Chap. II.] CARDINAL NEWMAN'S EARLY DAYS. 51 Blair's, which were at one time to be found in well- nigh every family of the upper and middle classes of this country, and which may still be discovered in the remoter shelves of the libraries in most country-houses. No one can look into these dis- courses without admitting the truth of Mr. Leslie Stephen's trenchant criticism that "they represent the last stage of theological decay." ^ For unction there is mere mouthing; for the solid common sense of earlier writers, an infinite capacity for repeating the feeblest platitudes ; the morality can scarcely be dignified by the name of prudential, unless all prudence be summed up in the command, ''Be respectable"; the pages are full of solemn trifling — prosings about adversity and prosperity, eulogies upon the most excellent of virtues, Modera- tion, and proofs that religion is, upon the whole, productive of pleasure. As Mr. Mill accurately sums the matter up — " The age seemed smitten with an incapacity of producing deep or strong feeling, such at least as could ally itself with medi- tative habits. There were few poets and none of a high order ; and philosophy had fallen into the hands of men of a dry prosaic nature, who had not enough of the materials of human feeling in them to imagine any of its more complex and mysterious manifestations ; all of which they either left out of 1 English Thought in the Eighteenth Centura/, vol. ii. p. 346. The remarks in my following sentence are an abridgement of an admirable page — the next — of Mr. >Ste[)hcn's book. 52 THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. [Chap. II. their theories, or introduced them with such ex- planations as no one who had experienced the feel- ings could receive as adequate." ^ Such was the dominant school of English thought about the time when Cardinal Newman was born. But beside it there was another which exercised a strong influence over a not inconsider- able number of adherents, and which potently affected the growth of his character and the forma- tion of his opinions. Among the figures conspicuous in the history of England in the last century tliere is perhaps none more worthy of careful study than John Wesley. Make all deductions you please for his narrowness, his self-conceit, his extravagance, and still it remains that no one so nearly approaches the fulness of stature of the great heroes of Cliristian spiritualism in the early and middle ages. He had more in common with St. Boniface and St. Ber- nardine of Sienna, with St. Vincent Ferrer, and Savonarola, than any teacher whom Protestantism has ever produced. Nor is the rise of the religious body commonly known by his name— the "people called Methodists " was his way of designating his followers — by any means the most important of the results of his life and labours. It is not too much to say that he, and those whom he formed and influenced, chiefly kejjt alive in England the idea of a supernatural order during the dull materialism and selfish coldness of the eighteenth century. To ^ Discussions and Dissertations, vol. i. p. 430. CiiAP. II.] THE EVANGELICAL SCHOOL. 53 liim the rise of the Evangelical party in the National Church is undoubtedly due. Romaine and Newton, Venn and Jowett, Milner and Simeon, differing as they did from him on particular doctrines, derived from him that fundamental tenet of religious conversion which they termed "the new birth." It is easy now, as it ever was, to ridicule the grotesque phraseology of these teachers, to make merry over their sour superstitions, their ignorant fanaticism, to detect and pillory their intellectual littleness. It is not easy to estimate adequately the work which they did by reviving the idea of Grace in the Established Church. They were not theologians, they w^ere not philosophers, they were not scholars. Possibly only two of them, Cecil and Scott, can be said to rise above a very low level of mental mediocrity. But they were men who felt the powers of the world to come in an age when that world had become to most little more than an unmeaning phrase ; who spoke of a God to pray to, in a generation which knew chiefly of one to swear by ; who made full proof of their ministry by signs and wonders parallel to those of the prophetic vision. It was in truth a valley of dry bones in which the Evangelical clergyman of the opening nineteenth century was set ; and as he prophesied there was a noise, and behold, a shaking, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood up upon their feet, an exceednig great army. 54 THE CLAIM OF AXCIEXT nELTGTOX. [Chap. II. In this army John Henry Newman was led to enrol himself in early youth. He has himself told ns hoWj in the autmnn of 1816, he fell mider the influence of a definite creed, and received into his intellect impressions of dogma which have never been effaced nor obscured ; how " the conversations and sermons of that excellent man, long dead, the Rev. Walter Mayers, of Pembroke College, Oxford," were " the human means of the beginning of this divine faith" in him ; how he is '' still more certain of the inward conversion of which he was then con- scious, than that he has hands or feet."^ Cardinal Newman's earliest religious reading was of authors such as Romaine, Thomas Scott, Joseph Milner, whose works were then the text -books of the Evangelical school. But he also studied attentively two writers of very different characters, both of whom made a deep impression upon his mind : William Law, the non-juror, whose Serious Call, it will be remembered, was such a ]30werful agent in John Wesley's spiritual history, and Bishop Newton, whose work upon the Prophecies is the very fount and source of an "expository" literature, still dearly cherished by Exeter Hall. In 1816 he was entered at Trinity College, Oxford, and during the whole of his undergraduate course he adhered rigidly to the straitest sect of the Evangelicals. It was not till 1822 that his spiritual horizon began to widen. In that year he came under the influence ^ Apologia pro Vita Sua, p. 4. CriAr. II.] A WTDENTNG SPiniTUAL TTOniZON. 55 of Dr. Whately, who, he tells us, '' emphatically opened my mind and taught mo to think, and to use my reason." ^ It is curious to find him par- ticularly specifying among his obligations to Dr. Whately this : — " What he did for me in point of religious opinion was to teach me the existence of the Church as a substantive l^ody or corporation ; next to fix in me those anti-Erastian views of Church polity which were one of the most prominent features of the Tractarian movement." At the same time he formed a friendship with a worthy representative of the classic High Church school of Anglicanism, Dr. Hawkins, then Vicar of St. Mary's, who was the means of great additions to his belief. From him he derived directly the doctrine of Tradition, and indirectly the doctrine of Baptismal Eegeneration ; while Mr. James of Oriel taught him the dogma of Apostolical Succession, and Mr. Blanco White led him ''to have freer views on the subject of inspiration than were usual in the Church of England at that time." " Still more important were his obligations to Butler, whom he began to read about the year 1823. He regards the study of the Analogy as an era in his religious opinions, and refers to it the underlying principles of a great portion of his teaching : Sacramentalism and Pro- bability.'^ It is manifest that while acquiring these 1 Apologia pro Vita Sua, pp. 11, 12. ^ /j^v?. pp. 8, 9. ^ By tlie sacramental system, in tlie large sense of the word, Cardinal Newman means " the doctrine that material phenomena 56 THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. [CiiAr. II. new views he was widely diverging from the standards of orthodoxy of his Evangelical friends. Among the many legends which have grown up about him is one attributing his final separation from them to the rejection in 1826 of two hundred and fifty amendments said to have been moved by him to the draft of the annual report of the Oxford Bible Society, of which body, according to the story, he was "third secretary": amendments directed to the purgation of that document from the strange verbiage which was the outward visible sign of the Low Church spirit. Unfortunately a word from Cardinal Newman has dispelled this amusing myth. '' I never was any kind of secre- tary to the Bible Society," he tells me, " and I never moved any amendments at all." ^ There is, however, one grain of trutli in the story. It was, indeed, about the year 1826 that John Henry Newman's ties with the Evangelical party were finally severed. But though no longer of them, as a professed adherent, he retained much that he had learned from them. In particular their fundamental doctrine of Grace, that is, of a sensible, supernatural, and direct divine influence are both the types and the instruments of real things unseen.'' — Ajjologia, p. 18. Butler's teaching, " that probability is the guide of life," he considers to have originally led him to " the question of the logical cogency of faith," on which he has " written so much.'' —Ibid. p. 11. 1 Upon this subject see some remarks in Cardinal N'ewman's Via Media, vol. ii. pp. 4-7, ed. 1884. Chap. IL] NUCLEUS OF THE TRACTARIAN PARTY, hi upon the soul of man, remained, and has remained up to this day, with him as a prime and vital verity. For some little time from 1826 he continued un- attached to any theological section or school. The old high and dry party, the two-bottle orthodox, then predominant in the university, were little to his taste, although he sympathised vehemently with their political opinions ; and for the first few years of his residence as a fellow at Oriel — he had been elected in 1822 — he lived very much alone. In 1826 he began a close and tender friendship with Richard Hurrell Froude, never dimmed nor interrupted during the short career of that many-sided and highly -gifted man. Robert Isaac Wilberforce, who, like Froude, was then a Probationer Fellow of Oriel, was also among his most intimate com- panions, and there were others — their names need not be enumerated here — who were drawn to him by the strong ties of kindred minds, like aspira- tions, and the many inexpressible influences en- gendered by community of academical life. One thing which especially bound together the little knot of men who constituted the original nucleus of the futare Tractarian party was an irrepressible dissatisfaction with the religious schools of the day ; an eager looking out for deeper and more definite teaching. It may be truly said — the phrase I think is Cardinal Newman's— that this feeling was in the air of the epoch. The French Revolution, shatter- ing the framework of society throughout Europe, ')S THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT KELIGIOX. [Chap. TI, was but the manifestation in the public order of great intellectual and spiritual changes. England, indeed, shut off from the Continent by her insular position, and by the policy of the great minister whose strong hand guided her destinies for so many perilous years, was exempt, to a great extent, from the influence of the general movement of European thought. Still, in England too there arose the longing — vague, half-expressed, not half under- stood — for some better thing, truer and higher and more profound than the ideas of the outworn world could yield : a longing which found quite other manifestations than the Evangelical. Striking evidence of this feeling is afforded by the reception siven to the delineation of the fuller life of a simpler age, which was attempted in the poetry and prose fictions of Sir Walter Scott. " The general need of something more attractive than had offered itself elsewhere" — Cardinal Newman remarks --''led to his popularity, and by means of this popularity he reacted on his readers, stimulating their mental thirst, feeding their hopes, setting before them visions which when once seen are not easily forgotten, and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might afterwards be ap- pealed to as first principles." ^ Byron and Shelley too bear witness in a different way to the working in the English mind of the ferment with which the 1 "Essay on the Prospects of the Anglican Church," reprinted in Essays Critical and Historical, vol. i. p. 2G7. CiiAP. II.] NEW INFLUENCES. 59 European intellect was leavened. But of the actual movement of contemporary tliought and feeling upon the Continent little was definitely understood in England. The great reaction in France against the eighteenth century, the initiation of which will be in the event, and, indeed, even now is, Chateau- briand's best title to fame, was very faintly appre- ciated among us, and the masters of the new litera- ture in Germany were scarcely even heard' of. Eor long years Goethe was known in this country only by Sir Walter Scott's translation of one of his earliest and least significant works ; and of Lessing, Schiller, Tieck, Richter, Novalis, the two Schlegels, it might be said, with almost literal truth, that they were not known at all. Kantism was an epithet significant of '' absurdity, wickedness, and horror," and was freely used to label any "frantic exaggeration in sentiment," or "crude fever dream in opinion," which might anywhere break forth.* Slowly, however, but surely, did the new critical philosophy infiltrate itself into this country, through the most metaphysical head which this country has ever produced. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the first among English thinkers to study and under- stand Kant, to assimilate his teaching, and to re- produce it in a new form.'"^ Rejecting with disgust 1 Carlyle's Miscellaneous Essays, vol. i. p. 5G. 2 I find the late Professor Green stating this fact in a some- what different way : " The last generation took its notions about Kant chiefly from Coleridge, and though Coleridge, if he would GO THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. [Chap. II. the physical method which he found predominant in English speculation, he discerned in the transcen- dentalism of Kant a higher and nobler system than the materialism of Locke or the utilitarianism of Paley. Coleridge, indeed, was no blind disciple of his Teutonic master. It may be truly said of him that he was Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri. His mind was too original to allow him to be a mere echo of other men's thoughts. It is, however, as he used to insist, to Kant that he owes, with much else, that distinction between the Under- standing and the Reason — Verstand and Vernunft — which is one of his fundamental positions ; which, indeed, he considered essential to any profitable study of psychology. But the philosophy of Coleridge is too great a subject to be dealt with here. I can only observe that its influence upon the mind of his age was far more potent than is generally understood. In my judgment he is to English thought of the nineteenth century pretty much what Locke is to English thought of the eighteenth century. I am, however, immediately concerned with his effect upon that particular intellectual and spiritual phase represented by the liave taken the necessary trouble, could have expounded him as no one else could, he in fact did little more than convey to his country- men the grotesquely false impression that Kant had sought to establish the existence of a mysterious intellectual faculty called Reason, the organ of truth inaccessible to the Understanding." Academy, Sept. ^I'l, 1877. Chap. II.] COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH. 61 Tractarian Movement. Cardinal Newman, in a paper published in the British Critic in 1839, reckons him one of its precursors, as " providmg a philosophical basis for it, as instilling a higher philosophy into inquiring minds than they had hitherto been accustomed to accept." The action of this great thinker's doctine was, indeed, to a large extent, indirect. It is through the poetry of his friend and disciple Wordsworth that his meta- physics, stripped of its technicalities, and presented in a popular form, has won the widest acceptance and exercised the deepest influence. " I wish to be considered a teacher or nothing," Wordsworth wrote to his friend Sir George Beaumont. His age had need of his teaching, bewitched as it was by the Circean strains of Byron's morbid egotism, and the irresistible charm of the splendid verse in which Shelley clothed his passionate dreams, soar- ing like his own skylark away from this working- day world until he is lost in the clouds of his ecstatic idealisations. How many felt in Words- worth's own generation, how many more have felt since, the healing influence of his poetry, as of Nature herself ! As snow those inward pleadings fa]], As soft, as bright, as pure, as cool, With gentle weight and gradual, And sink into the feverish soul.^ 1 I trust Cardinal Newman will pardon the application here made of these lines from his raagnificeut religious poem St. Philh) in his God. G2 THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. [Chap. II. " I have not written for superficial observers and unthinking minds," the poet explained to his friend. But from the first he drew to him the more thoughtful and true-hearted of his age, " non solum dulcissimse poeseos, verum etiam divinse veritatis antistes : "^ and among those who were most deeply influenced by him was John Keble. The Christian Year, which appeared in 1827, marks an epoch in the religious history of the century. Cardinal Newman, writing of it nineteen years later, and looking back upon it and its influ- ence from an external point of view, observes — Much certainly came of tlie Christian Year Coming from one who had such claims on his readers, from the weight of his name, the depth of his devotional and ethical tone, and the special gift of consolation of which his poems were the evidence, it wrought a great work in the Establishment, It kindled hearts towards his Church ; it gave something for the gentle and forlorn to cling to; it raised up advocates for it among those who, if God and their good angel had suffered it, might have wandered away into some sort of philosophy and acknowledged no Church at all.2 It did all this certainly, and there can be no question that it acted as a powerful instrument in drawing together those who subsequently con- stituted the Tractarian party. It is, however, very difiicult for men of the present generation to under- 1 Dedication to William Wordsworth — " viro vere philosopho et vati sacro" — of Keble's Pndectiones Academicce . - Essays Critical and Historical^ vol. ii. }». 245. Chap. II.] JOHN KEBLE. 63 stand the sort of influence exercised by this volume of devotional poetry when it first appeared more than half a century ago. It is not hard to account for its popularity ; but it is hard to conceive now how it could have been an important factor in a great movement of religious thought. Judged coldly and by the ordinary canons of criticism the book may be justly praised for delicacy and refinement of style, for smoothness and harmony of numbers, for correctness of taste, for a sweet and gentle mysticism, and a kind of natural sacra- mentalism. But there is no trace of the fine frenzy which, according to the Aristotelian dictum, is the chief note of high poetic inspiration. Nor do we find in it the keenness of vision, the intensity of feeling, the passion of appeal, by which the souls of men are wont to be kindled, and which we are led to look for in compositions playing an important part in a religious revival. If we compare Mr. Keble with the poets of the previous century, whose hymns were such a living power, it must be allowed that, though he never sinks to their lowest level, he certainly never rises to their highest. There is nothing in the Christian Year which for grandeur of conception, splendour and fire of diction, natural freedom, easy grace, and strong upwelling of religious emotion, can be ranked with some of Charles Wesley's best verses : verses which perhaps have more in common with the masterpieces- of Adam, of St. Victor, and St. Bernard, than any 64 THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION . [Chap. II. other in our language. Indeed John Keble's pro- fessed purpose was to exhibit the soothing tendency of the Prayer Book, and that this purpose was accomplished with rare skill and beauty who can doubt ? The curious thing is that the volume achieved so much beyond what its author aimed at ; and that this was so is an emphatic testimony to the needs of the age in which he wrote. The high and dry school had little to offer in satis- faction of spiritual aspirations. In place of living bread — panis vivus et vitalis — it had nothing to set before the hungry soul but the stone of theo- logical petrifactions. Evangelicalism was in its decadence. It was perishing of intellectual inani- tion. Beginning, in Apostolic wise, with " the foolishness of preaching," it had ended unapostoli- cally in the preaching of foolishness. Its divinity was confined to a few isolated dogmas, which, torn from their place in systematic theology, had no enduring principle of life. For scholarship it had unctuous pulpit platitudes ; for philosophy, the deliramenta of apocalyptic tea-tables. From art it turned away with comminatory references to ''texts" in Exodus and Leviticus. To those who like John Henry Newman had made trial of it, and had found it wanting, and to those who like Hurrell Froude had never been drawn by it from conventional orthodoxy, the Christian Year came as "a new music, tlie music of a school long un- known in England, when the general tone of Chap. IL] ''THE CHRISTIAN YEAR:' , 65 religious literature was so nerveless and impotent."^ Cardinal Newman judges that the two main in- tellectual truths which it brought home to him were the priaciple of sacramentalism and the doctrine as to certitude which he had already learned from Butler. Such was the influence of the Christian Year. Cardinal Newman reckons it the original bond of those who were to become the leaders of the Oxford movement, the formal start of which he dates from Mr. Keble's once famous discourse on National Apostacy, preached at St. Mary's in 1833. It was in that year that Cardinal Newman began, ''out of his own head," the series of papers from which the movement received its truest and most character- istic name of Tractarian. There can be no room for doubt that its chief springs of action are to be found in the Tracts for the Times, and in those Oxford Sermons, which, as their recent editor says, produced ''a living effect" upon their hearers. The importance of the part played in the move- ment by Cardinal Newman admits of an easy test. Is it possible to conceive of it without him ? We can conceive of it without the two Kebles, without Isaac Williams, without Dr. Pusey, who did not join it until 1836. They are, if we may so speak, of its accidents ; Cardinal Newman is of its essence. It grewj indeed, out of the occult sympathies of 1 Apologia, p. 18. G6 THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. [Chap. II. kindred minds, and was the issue of manifold causes, long working according to their own laws. But the objective form which it assumed was due, principally, to Cardinal Newman's supreme confi- dence, irresistible earnestness, absolute fearlessness, and to the unique personal influence which accom- panied, and in part sprang from, these endowments. The specific danger, as it was judged, which supplied the occasion for its initiation was the Bill for the suppression of certain Irish Bishoprics. But this measure was an occasion merely. To Cardinal Newman, since at the age of fourteen he first looked into Voltaire and Hume, the primary fact of the age had been what he denominates Liberalism, by which term, as he explained upon a memorable occasion, he means "the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another." ^ To this he sought to oppose the principle of dogma — from the first until now the basis of his religion. He endeavoured to meet the new spirit with a definite religious teaching as to a visible Church, the kingdom in this world of a present tliough invisible King, a great supernatural fact among men, represented in this country by the Anglican establishment, and speaking through its formularies and the living voice of its episcopate, and to him, as to each man 1 See his luldress delivercil in the Pahazzo delhi Pigna, upon the reception of the biglietto announcing his elevation to the Cardinalate. Chap. II] THE ESSENCE OF TRACTARIANISM. G7 in particular, through his own bishop, to whom he looked M]) as "the successor of the Apostles, the Vicar of Christ."' And so he tells us — [The Oxford] movement started on tlie ground of maintaining ecclesiastical authority, as opposed to the Erastianism of the State. It exhibited the Church as the one earthly object of religious loyalty and veneration, the source of all spiritual power and jurisdiction, and the channel of all grace. It represented it to tie the interest, as well as the duty, of Churchmen, the bond of peace and the secret of strength, to submit their judgment in all things to her decision. And it taught that this divinely founded Churcli was realised and brought into effect, in our country, in the National Establish- ment, Avhich was the outward form or development of a con- tinuous dynasty and hereditary power which descended from the Apostles. It gave, then, to that Establishment, in its officers, its laws, its usages, and its worship, that devotion and obedience which arc correlative to the very idea of tlie Church. It set up on high the licnch of Bishops and the Book of Common Prayer as the authority to which it was itself to bow, with which it was to cow and overpower an Erastian State.^ Such, according to Cardinal Newman, wns the " clear, unvarying line of thought" upon which the movement of 1833 proceeded, and a careful study of the documents in which its history is to be traced amply confirms, if confirmation be wanted, the cor- rectness of this view. The progress of Tractarian- ism, from Tract i to Tract ()0i was the natural growth, the logical development, of the idea of submission to ecclesiastical authority. It was a progress leading ever further from the historical position, the first principles, of the Church of ^ Apologia, p. 51. - Anglican Difficulties, vol. i. p. 130. f2 68 THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. [Chai'. II England, as by law established. The enterprise in which the Tractarians were engaged was, uncon- sciously to themselves, an attempt to transform the character of the Anglican communion, to undo the work of the Reformation, to reverse the traditions of three centuries. " Unconsciously to themselves," indeed. Nor need we wonder at their unconscious- ness. It is, as Clough asks — What do we see ? Each man a space Of some few yards before his face. No man may see more. ^' If we would ascertain the real course of a principle we must look at it at a certain distance and as history represents it to us."^ But who can project liimself into times to come, and survey the present from the standpoint of the future ? The Tractarians were as men who had launched upon unknown seas, full of strange tides and secret currents, which swiftly and im- perceptibly bore them away, baffling their vain attempts at steerage. Others, however, could see more clearly than was possible to them the direction in which they were drifting. Even so early as the year 1836, Cardinal Newman says, " a cry was heard on all sides of us, that the Tracts and the writings of the Fathers would lead us to become Catholics, before we were aware of it."* It was then that he set about a defence of the movement and its principles, and produced his treaties upon 1 Apologia, p. 263. ^ JUd, p. (jy_ Chap. II.] THE VIA MEDIA. 69 The JProphetical Office of the Church, viewed re- latively to Romanism and JPopular Protestantism. This work appeared in 1837. Its subject was the Via Media, a designation '' which had already- been applied to the Anglican system by writers of repute. Its main object was to furnish an approxi- mation in one or two points towards a correct theory of the duties and office of the Church Catholic." "If we deny that the Roman view of the Church is true," the author says, '^ we are bound in very shame to state what we hold our- selves." The Lectures on the Frophetical Office attempted to put forward such a statement. There was, however, an initial objection, which their author felt keenly, and stated in the Introduction to his work, with his habital candour and peculiar power : — When we profess our Via Media as the very truth of the Apostles, we seem to bystanders to be mere antiquarians or pedants amusing ourselves with illusions or learned subtleties, and unable to grapple with things as they are. Protestantism and Popery are real religions. No one can doubt about them. They have furnished the mould in which nations have been cast, but the Via Media, viewed as an integral system, has never had existence, except on paper. He grants the objection, although he endeavours to lessen it. It still remains to be tried whether what is called Anglo, Catholicism, the religion of Andrews, Laud, Hammond, Butler, and Wilson, is capable of being professed, acted on, and maintained on a 70 THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. [Ciur. II. larci'e sphore of action ami through a sufficient period, or wlicthcr it be a new modification and transition state of Romanism or of popu- hir Protestantism. The trial was made, and we know with what results. In these Lechtres on the Froplietical Office the case stated is put with marvellous dialectic skill and great persuasive power ; but the logic of facts is stronger than the strongest logic of words. And facts were against the Via Media, the facts both of antiquity and of modern times. Its author had taken the historical foundation for granted.^ It was an unfortunate assumption. The national feeling did but assert, with whatever passion and prejudice, the testimony of the national history — of which, indeed, that feeling is to a large extent the outcome — against the ethos of the movement, as alien from tlie established religion. It was nothing to the purpose to show that the views put forward by the Tractarians, with ever-increasing boldness, might be paralleled, one from this Anglican authority, another from that. It was not pretended that any accredited writer of the Establishment had ever ventured to hold such a body of doctrine as was at last set forth in Tract go. The essentially Pro- testant mind of the country was shocked at the attribution of a theology practically indistinguish- 1 Preface to the third edition, p. xxiii. In the Ajoologia, pp. 114-1 20, and p. 139, Cardinal Newman tells us of his dismay when ancient ecclesiastical history disclosed to liim veritable examples ol a Via Media in the Monophysite and Arian heresies. See also the Twelfth Lectiire on Avglican Diffirjilties, Chap. II.] TRACT 90. 71 able from the Tridentine, to a Church whose time- honoured boast was (as South had declared) that '' it alone made Protestantism considerable in Europe." Such was the ultimate resolution of the idea — dogmatic, sacerdotal, hierarchical — of the movement of 1833. To this goal had it conducted its authors. Tract go was received throughout the country with a storm of indignation, and the living rulers of the Establishment began to move. " These are they," Cardinal Newman says, "who reverse the Roman's maxim, and are wont to shrink from the contumacious, and to be valiant towards the submissive." ^ This little touch of bitterness is not unnatural, but, pace tanti viri, I venture to say that Anglican bishops seem to have acted towards Tractarianism with much long-suffering, and in the event to have condemned it only when the primary obligation of fidelity to themselves compelled them to do so. Excellent men, but not heroic ; respect- able, but not sacerdotal ; solidly adhering to things settled, and, in Mr. Carlyle's phrase, mainly occupied in burning their own smoke — what sympathy could they have had with such a movement? Indeed Tract i, in which the author declared that he " could not wish them a more blessed termination of their course than the spoiling of their goods and martyrdom," might reasonably have distressed and alarmed them. But for years they bore and for- ^ " Parcere siibjoctis ct tlebellare snperbos." Anglican Dijji- ailtics, vol. i. p. 152, 72 THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. [Chap. II. bore ; it was difficult to be hard upon men who assured them that they were " Apostles true." And when at length they acted, in obedience to strong- popular pressure, surely no action could have l)een milder. Contrast it with any conceivable action by Catholic bishops in respect of a Protestantising movement within the communion of Rome. Still, in the event, they did undoubtedly pronounce against Tract go in a series of charges lasting through three years. " It was a formal, deter- minate movement," Cardinal Newman says : " 1 recognised it as a condemnation. It was the only one that was in their power.'' ^ It was the begin- ning of the end. To the adverse verdict of public opinion, to the censure of academical boards, he might have been comparatively indifferent. He had not entered upon his course to be turned aside from it arbitrio j^opularis aurce, or to quail before the ardor civiwn prava juhent'mm. But the con- demnation of the episcopate was a fatal blow to the Tractarian party. Its leaders felt that '' their occupation was gone. Their initial principle, their basis, external authority, was cut away from under their feet. Tliey had set their fortunes upon a cast, and they had lost." " Henceforward they had nothing left but to shut up their school and retire into the country, .... unless, indeed, they took up some other theory, unless they changed their 1 Apologia, p. 139. Chap. II.] « THE PARTING OF FRIENDS:' 73 ground, unless they strangely forgot their own luminous and most keen convictions," '' ceased to be what they were, and became what they were not," or, 'Mooked out for truth and peace elsewhere."^ These were, indeed, the three courses open to the adherents of the movement, and some followed one of them, some another. There were those who, withdrawing from the world not moving to their mind, to the seclusion of rural parishes, sought there to reap the reward of "toil unsevered from tranquillity," in the beneficent activity of an English clergyman's life and the soothing influences of his home. Many " vindicated the right of private judgment," modified their views, and cast in their lot with other sections of religious thought. No in- considerable number, after more or fewer years of anxiety and suspense, determined that the Church of Rome was the true home of the theological idea which they could not surrender. Of these was John Henry Newman. It is unnecessary to dwell here upon the workings of his mind which led him to this conclusion. They may be followed, step by stejD, in the Apologia and the Essay on Development. It was on September the 25th, 184^3, that his last words as an Anglican clergyman were spoken to the little knot of friends assembled in the chapel of his house at Littlemore to keep with him the anni- versary of its consecration. There were few dry eyes there save the preacher's, as, from the text whicli 1 Anriliccm Difficulties, vol. i, p. 153. 74 THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. [Chai-. II. had been that of his first sermon nineteen years before, he spoke to them of '' the parting of friends." " Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the evening.'' His sun was set, and even had come. They knew well what he meant when, in the sacred language which " veils our feelings while it gives expression to them," he bade them keep the feast, " even though in haste and with bitter herbs, and with loins girded and with staff in hand, as they who have no continuing city, but seek one to come." The late Earl Russell once spoke of Cardinal Newman's secession from the Church of England as an inexplicable event. It is difficult to understand how any one can desire a clearer explanation than that which Cardinal Newman himself has given of it — an explanation which seems to be of a quite convincing candour and cogency. His logical con- sistency appears to be as much beyond cavil as his perfect sincerity. He started with the assumption that the system finally developed in Tract go was the true system of the Anglican communion. Of that system submission to ecclesiastical authority was the keystone. And when the adverse sentence of such authority proceeded against him he was true to his principles, he accepted it,^ although it 1 In 1843, he wrote to Archdeacon Manning, "If there ever was a case, m which an individnal teacher has been put aside and Chap. II.] '' THE TRAITOR NEWMAN." 75 was to him as the bitterness of death. Never was his loyalty to the Church of England more con- spicuously manifested than in the supreme hour when he left her, ''parting with all that his heart loved, and turning his face to a strange land." At the time indeed, few, very few, could understand this ; and their calmer voices were drowned in the pre- vailing ululation. The secession, at last, of such a man, for years an object of ever-increasing sus- picion and distrust, shocked the public mind of tliat day in a way that can now be hardly realised, and confused the judgments even of the wise. There is nothing which men in general resent so deeply as an action which tends to unsettle their opinions. The utterances of indignation and disgust are seldom weighed with nice discrimination, and an accusation of deceit is the sha^^e in which poj^ular anger most readily finds vent. It was natural that the cry of treachery should go up ; but the cry was as ill-founded as it was natural. If John Henry Newman, and his friends who shared his deep in- eradicable convictions, instead of betaking them- selves whither those convictions logically led and could honestly be held, had retained their places in a communion with whose fundamental positions they were at variance, the accusation of treachery would virtually put away by a community, mine is one . . . It is felt — I am far from denying, justly felt — that I am a foreign material, and cannot assimilate with the Church of England." Apologia, p. 220. 76 THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. [Chap. II. have admitted of no extenuation upon the ground of popular prejudice and the excitement of the hour. To remain in the Church of England, as by law established, while ostentatiously defying that law ; to revile and browbeat ecclesiastical rulers, while professing to reverence them as divinely appointed ; to introduce stealthily the dogmas and the ritual of Rome in a great national institution, whose history, whose formularies, whose Articles of Religion, are a standing protest against Rome; to convulse and bring to the verge of destruction the Anglican spiritual edifice, while bearing its name and eating its bread — such would have been, in truth, the con- duct of traitors. But no one who knows Cardinal Newman, even if such knowledge is derived merely from his writings, can conceive of him as lending the sanction of his unstained character, his clear and disciplined mind, his elevated and elevating personal influence, to a policy of this kind, a policy intellectually as contemptible as it is morally flagitious. Indeed, he has himself told us how such a course was regarded by him. I can understand, I can sympathise with, those old-world thinkers whose commentators are Mant and D'Oyly, whose theo- logian is Tomlin, whose ritualist is Wheatley, and whose canonist is Burns. ... In these days three hundred years is a respectable antiquity, and traditions recognised in law-courts, and built into the structure of society, may well witliout violence be imagined to be immemorial. Those also I can understand who take their stand upon the Prayer-Book; or those who honestly profess to follow the consensus of Anglican divines, as the voice of authority and the Chap. II.] A FANCY RELIGION. 77 standard of faith. Moreover I can quite enter into the sentiment ■with which members of the liberal and infidel school investigate the history and the documents of the early Church. They profess a view of Christianity truer than the world has ever had; nor on the assumption of their principles is there anything shocking to good sense in this profession. . . . Free-thinkers and broad-thinkers, Laudians and Prayer-book Christians, high-and-dry and Establish- ment men, all these [I] understand; but what [I] feel so pro- digious is this . . . that such as you . . . should come forth into open day with your new edition of the Catholic faith, different from that held in any existing body of Christians anywhere, which not half a dozen men all over the world would honour with their im- primatur ; and then withal should be as positive about its truth in every part, as if the voice of mankind were with you instead of being against you. . . , You do not follow the Bishops of the National Church; you disown its existing traditions ; you are dis- contented with its divines ; you protest against its law-courts ; you shrink from its laity ; you outstrip its Prayer-book. You have in all respects an eclectic or original religion of your own. . . . Nearly all your divines, if not all, call themselves Protestants, and you anathematise the name. Who makes the concessions to Catholics that you do, yet remain separate from them? Who among Anglican authorities would speak of Penance as a Sacra- ment as you do ? Who of them encourages, much less insists upon, auricular confession, as you do ? Or makes fasting an obli- gation ? Or uses the crucifix and the rosary ? Or reserves the consecrated bread ? Or believes in miracles as existing in your communion ? Or administers, as I believe you do. Extreme Unc- tion ? In some points you prefer Kome, in others Greece, in others England, in others Scotland ; and of that preference your own private judgment is the ultimate sanction. What am I to say in answer to conduct so preposterous ? Say you go by any authority whatever, and I shall know where to find you and I shall i-espect you. Swear by any school of religion, old or modern, by Eonge's Church, or by the Evangelical Alliance, nay, by yourselves, and I shall know what you mean, and will listen to you. But do not come to me with the latest fashion of opinion the world has seen, and protest to me that it is the oldest. Do nut come to me at this 78 THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. [Chap. II. time of day with views palpably new, isolated, original, sui generis, warranted old neither by Christian nor unbeliever, and challenge me to answer what I really have not the patience to read. Life is not long enough for such trifles. . . . The basis of [the TracLarian] party was the professed abnegation of private judgment : your basis is the professed exercise of it." ^ John Henry Newman's secession from the Chm^ch of England may, then, justly be regarded as the supreme proof of his good faith. It must not, however, be forgotten that it has another bear ing. It was also the seal of the good faith of his opponents. Perhaps the most influential of these — certainly from the historical point of view the most considerable — was Thomas Arnold. And, widely as their views differed, fierce as was the polemical strife between them, profound as was the conviction of each as to the appalling mischief in- herent in the system of the other, we may, at this distance of time, place their names togetlier as amono; the noblest and best adornino; the annals of our country in the nineteenth century. In subtleness of intellect, in dialectical skill, in imaginative co- gency. Dr. Arnold must indeed be judged far in- ferior to his great opponent. As a distinguished French critic has observed: ''His talent was not, perhaps, upon the same level with his character : it was his character which inspired his talent," and was the source of his " extraordinary ascendancy over his pupils." " Passionate alike in his hatred 1 Anglican Difficulties, vol. i. pp. 155-1 Go. 2 Scherer, Melanges cVIIistoire lieiigiense, pp. 219, 220. Chap. II.] THE DISSOLUTION OF TRACTAUIANISM. 79 of ecclesiasticism and in his love of truth, it was not to theology and history, but to his moral symjjathies, that he looked for light to guide him in his spiritual and intellectual difficulties. The theory in wliicli he so earnestly believed, and in the name of which he taught — a theory of a Christian state with the politics of Aristotle and the ethics of St. Paul — was as purely a paper theory as the Via Media which he so detested, and has as utterly passed away. This theory has much in common with that of Hooker ; but it was from Samuel Taylor Coleridge that Arnold derived it in greatest measure. It is a curious testimony to the many-sided genius of that great thinker that his doctrine, while providing, as Cardinal Newman tells us, "a philosophical basis "to the Tractarian movement, should also have sujDplied the in- spiration, and furnished the arms, which were to have so large a share in bringing about its over- throw. The Tractarian party was defeated then, and crumbled into dissolution. Its leader and its most consistent adherents went out of the National Church, because, in truth, they were not of it. The house, which they had reared so laboriously, was built upon the sand ; and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon 80 THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. [Chap. II. that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it. The practical results of Tractarianism have, how- ever, been of the highest importance. Let me now go on to indicate a few of the more obvious of them. And first, as to the Church of England. The Tractarians thought they had failed : and so they had as to the main object which they had at heart. But, as so often happens in the affairs of men, Avhile not accomplishing what they intended, they accom- plished much that they did not intend. The Oxford movement, discredited in its system, lived on in its sentiment. Tract go, which most truly represents its dogmatic teaching, has been forgotten except as a document of history, or a curiosity of literature. It is far otherwise with the various volumes which embody its feeling, practical or emotional. The Christian Year has become a household book. Next to the Bible and Prayer-book it is the most popular religious work in England, and wherever English religion has followed the English flag. Cardinal Newman's Oxford Sermons^ Mr. Copeland has truly said, " have acted like leaven on tlic mind, and language, and literature of the Church in this country." ^ A treasury of all that is delicate and tender in the religious s^^irit, they are, and are long likely to remain, the chosen devotional reading of thousands, who are profoundly indifferent, or actually opposed, to the author's doctrinal views. It 1 Preface to the JN'ew Edition, p. 7. Chap. II.] THE GAIN TO ANGLICANISM. 81 is not too much to say that Tractarianism has done for the national religion of England a work similar to that which Le Genie du Chrlstianisme did, some years before, for the national religion of France. It has produced an intelligent and sympathetic study of the art, the institutions, the spiritual history of tlie past ; it has engendered a revival of external reverence in public worship ; it has aroused a deep sense of the sanctity of common life ; it has created a spiritualistic school in striking contrast with the dull, dreary, depressing pietism which, up to the date when it arose, presented the only outlet in the Establishment for devout aspirations and mystical affections. It has cleansed our ancient cathedrals and churches from the squalor of cen- turies, and has clothed them, in some semblance of their pristine magnilicence ; it has erected new religious edifices throughout the land, some hardly inferior in beauty of construction and splendour of decoration to the works of medieval piety. All this, and much more which should be added to make the picture complete, and which each reader may supply for himself, is in large measure due to the movement originated by John Henry Newman. Thus, even now, he is no mere name of the past in the Church of England, but a present power, working, and long to work ; how fruitfully no man can judge. And, if we turn to the Catholic Cliurch, the in- fluence of Tractarianism has been, at the least, as 82 THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. [Chai'. II. important there as in the Ano-lican establishment. Perhaps, it is not too much to say, that to it, in large measure, is due all that most signally distinguishes the present position of Catholics in this country from that which they occupied half a century ago. No doubt the Act of Emancipation rendered pos- sible the change which has come about. But the Catholic body in England in 1829, when the Act was passed, was hardly in a condition to profit, to any large extent, by that great measure of justice. Far be it from me to write one word sounding in disparagement of men for whom I entertain a reverential admiration which no words can adequately express. Who indeed can but revere and admire tlie indefectible fidelity of that heroic band of hereditary confessors ? No Englishman, surely, can fail to be touched by it. But I suppose it is an unquestionable fact of history that the political, educational, and social disabih- ties of centuries had told disastrously upon the CathoHcs of England. How could it have been otherwise V For generations they had dwelt in darkness and in the shadow of death, and the iron had entered into their souls. Sine adjutorio, inter mortuos liher, slcut vulnerati dormientes in sepul- chris, is the true description of the state in which they found themselves when they were once more admitted to their constitutional rights. It was opportune, then, that the fresher zeal, the wider cultivation, the uncram])cd energies of the band of Chap. IL] THE GAIN TO THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. 83 proselytes whom Cardinal Newman headed, were placed, just when they were, at the service of Catho- licity in England. The new blood brought into the Catholic communion is certainly a very important result of the Tractarian Movement ; and its im- portance is not restricted either to the geographical limits of this country or to the chronological limits of this age. Still I do not think I am hazarding a doubtful prediction in saying that, in the long run, the most considerable product of Tractarianism, so far as the Catholic Church is concerned, will be found to be her gain of John Henry Newman, her acquisition of this one mind — a mind upon a level witli that of Pascal or Bossuet, and uniting to much which was highest and best in both great endow- ments that were given to neither. It is very diffi- cult, however, to set down in writing anything that will convey a just impression of the work which Cardinal Newman has done, and is doing, for the Church with which he cast in his lot nearly half a century ago. The works which he has published since his secession, great as tlieir effect has already been, represent only a small portion of it. From his retreat at Birmingham has gone forth through the Catholic world the same subtle influence which once went forth from Oriel and Littlemore, an in- fluence profoundly affecting events, not in their more vulgar manifestations vvhich meet the eye, but in their secret springs and prime sources. To others he left conspicuous positions and Tlio loud ap[)lausi' and aves vehement g2 8i THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. [Chap. II. which have greeted their achievements there, him- self taking unquestioningly that lowest place which his ecclesiastical suj^eriors assigned him, going forth, as of old, to his work and to his labour in his appointed sphere ; and at last, in the " calm sunset of his various day," as unquestioningly obeying the voice of authority bidding him go up higher, and setting him among the princes of his people. His life, since he joined the communion of Rome, has been to a great extent '' a hidden life " ; a life of religious retirement and abstraction, not indeed from the world's thought and great interests, but from its selfish striving and low desires ; that life, as some one has described it, a la fois en nous et hors de nous, which is perhaps the most favourable to the development of high spiritual and intel- lectual gifts. So far as its external surroundings are concerned, it has been spent among a strange people ; a population given up to grimy industrial- ism, to "the dissidence of Dissent and the Protes- tantism of the Protestant religion," and possessing little in common with the visitant who had exchanged the learned leisure and antique beauty of Oxford for the ^'■fumum et opes strepitumque^^ of their modern and unlovely town. There has he passed from mature manhood to green old age, and there he trusts it will be permitted him to die. Thence has gone out his sound into all lands. A simple priest, holding no position of authority, living tranquilly with his brethren, his utterances have sunk into Chap. II.] CARDINAL 2YE]VMAN AS A CATHOLIC. 85 the thinking minds of his communion, throughout the world, as those of no other member of his Church. Not one of his words has fallen to the ground. This must be duly pondered in judging of his life as a Catholic. Not on the vulgar mass Called " work " must sentence pass, Things (lone that took the e3'e and had the price ; O'er which, from level stand, The low world laid its hand, Found straightway to its mind, Could value in a trice ; But all the world's coarse thumb And finger failed to plumb. So passed in making up the main account : all that must be duly reckoned when the time comes to speak fully of his action in the Catholic Church. For the time is not come yet. That history must be left to a future day, when his is done and he is at rest. The world knows enough, however, to trace its main lines, to discern its dominant ideas, to appre- ciate its general significance. His later writings tell us much ; like his earlier, they are true re- velations of himself ; from some points of view, indeed, truer, for in them we have the ultimate resolution of his philosophical and theological opinions, and the mature development of his literary gifts. Thus the Grammar of Assent is the full expansion and orderly arrangement of the philo- sophic system first set forth in his Sermons before the Tlniversitij of Oxford. His Discourses to 8G THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. [Chap. II. Mixed Congregations, and TJpoti Various Occa- sions, certainly surpass in intensity of power any of his former productions, whether in pages of aj^palling description which recall the via terribile of Michael Angelo, or in passages of more than earthly beauty and sweetness, which seem like a translation into words of a picture of Fra Angelico. I am here concerned with them, however, merely as documents of history, as notes and memorials of his work, as serving to shadow forth, however faintly, the more public side of his activity as a Catholic. That activity has been to a large extent of a controversial kind. Cardinal Newman would gladly liave had it otherwise. His ideal of existence would rather have been " to l^ehold tlie bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies." But for him, as for Milton, it was not so ordered. His course has lain " in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes," and in that rough element his endeavour has ever been to do, with all his might, the duty which lay nearest to him. And, when he had himself embraced Catholicism, he felt that his first duty was towards those whom he had left behind. His heart yearned towards his brethren. They had gone one mile with him : he would com- pel them to go twain. That uj^on their own princi- ples they ought to follow him is the scope of most of his earlier Catholic sermons, and of those Lec- tures on Anglican Dijficnlfies, originally delivered Chai". II.] CARDINAL NEWMAN IN CONTROVERSY. 87 in London in 1850, which created so great an im- pression at the time, and which, as years have gone on, have exercised an ever-increasing influence. It does not fall within my present scope to examine in detail the argmnents which he there employs. But I may remark, generally, that the effect of his writings upon what is called the Anglican con- troversy has been to place it upon quite another footing from that on which it formerly stood, and to lift it into a higher sphere. He puts aside, as in the question of Anglican orders, dreary gropings into minute intricate passages and obscure corners of past occurrences, as unsatisfactory except to antiquaries, who delight in researches into the past for their own sake,^ and brings you face to face with " broad visible facts," with great manifest historical phenomena. Thus, if he is treating " De Ecclesia," he inquires what the true logical idea of a Church is, and what is that idea as it has actually lived and worked, as it has from the first been appre- hended by saints and doctors, and received by the orhis t err arum. And he draws it out in its particulars, as a divine creation, a supernatural order in the world, appealing to the human con- science, as the natural order appeals to the human senses, the City of God tabernacling among men, the Living Oracle of God in the earth, the inerrant Judge of Faith and Morals until the consummation ^ See " Letter to Father Coleridge " in Essaijs Critical and Historical, vol, ii. p. 109. 88 THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. [Chap. II. of all things, gathering, in each successive genera- tion, the elect into a polity in belief of the truth, at once a philosophy, and a religious rite, and a political power, as its Divine Author is Prophet, Priest, and King. And then, he asks, can any man believe the Church of England to be this, or in any true sense to represent it ? Not that he is insensible to so much that is excellent and winning in Anglicanism. Its portions of Catholic teachings, its " decency and order," the pure and beautiful English of its prayers, its literature, the piety found among its members, the influence of superiors and friends, its historical associations, its domestic character, the charm of a country life, the remembrance of past years, — there is all this and much more to attach the mind to the national worship. But attachment is not trust, nor is to obey the same as to look up to and to rely upon ; nor do I think that any thoughtful or educated man can simply believe in the ivord of the Established Church. I never met any such person who did, or said he did, and I do not think that such a person is possible.^ The whole matter, as he judges of it, turns upon the question whether there is in the world such a thing as a Church, in the true sense of the word. Throughout his long career the deep underlying convictions which have guided him have been un- changed. Not only is it true of him that " his wandering step" was ever ''obedient to high thoughts," but it is also true that the thoughts have always been, in substance, the same. As an Anglican, his battle was on behalf of the dog- 1 Discoxirses to Mixed Congregations, p. 232. Chap. IL] TRUE HOME OF THE TRACTARIAN IDEA. 89 matic principle. As a Catholic, he has carried on the same battle, under different conditions. He quitted the Church of England when he became convinced that it was in no true sense dogmatic, but merely ' ' a civil establishment daubed with divinity."^ And he says in another place : — There came on me an extreme astonishment that I had ever imagined it to be a portion of the Catholic Chm-ch .... Forth- with I coukl not get myself to see in it anything else than ... . a mere national institntion. As if my eyes were suddenly opened, so I saw it— ' spontaneously, apart from any definite act of reason or any argument; and so I have seen it ever since .... I gazed at [the Catholic Church] almost passively — as a great objective fact. I looked at her ; at her rites, her ceremonial, and her pre- cepts ; and I said, ■' This is a religion": and then when I looked back upon the poor Anglican Church, for which I had laboured so hard, and upon all that appertained to it, and thought of our various attempts to dress it up doctrinally and esthetically, it seemed to me to be the veriest of nonentities." ^ This is the main thesis of Cardinal Newman's earlier Catholic sermons and of his Lectures on Anglican Difficulties; — that the Church of England is not an oracle of religious truth, that Rome is the natural, logical, and true home of the idea of Tractarianism. And the course of events in the Anglican communion has been such as to add much point to his argument. The defeat of Tractarianism was the victory of Liberalism, and Liberalism has reaped the full fruits of its triumph. One judgment 1 Via Media, vol. i. p. 339, note of 1877. 2 Apologia, p. 340. 90 THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. [Chap. II. after another of the Supreme Appellate Court of the Established Church has deprived it of any semblance of dogmatic character which it may once have possessed, and has reduced it to the position of an exponent of the most conflicting opinions on theo- logical subjects. If Bishop Watson has rightly defined Protestantism to be "the right of saying what you think, and of thinking what you please," the Church of England, unquestionably, is the most Protestant of ecclesiastical communities. So much must suffice with regard to Cardinal Newman's action in the Anglican controversy. It is, as I have observed, a continuation of that championship of the dogmatic principle which dis- tinguished him as a Protestant. And the same may be said of the course which he has taken with regard to controversies among Catholics. While he has strenuously combated, on the one hand, the Liberalism which strikes at the root of the dogmatic principle, he has, on the other, been an equally uncompromising opponent of those who, as he judged, sought to overlay the Catholic creed with private interpretation, and to impose their unauthorised shibboleths as authoritative teaching — to impress upon the oecumenical attributes of the Church a partisan character. The doctrines defined of late years, which are popularly supposed to be the greatest stumbling-blocks, never, in themselves, presented any difficulties to him, as a Catholic. The promulgation of the dogma of the Immaculate Chap. II.] CARDINAL NEWMAN S CONSISTENCY. 91 Conception was hailed by liim in a passage not surpassed, perhaj^s, in any of liis writings, for "tender grace" and splendour of diction.' And tlie need which he held to exist, before he joined the communion of Rome, for " an infallible chair" to judge in controversies of faith, supplied one of the arguments which attracted him towards it." But doctrinal teaching is one thing ; the tone and temper of religious factions are quite another. From the day I became a Catholic [he writes in 1875] to this day, now close upon thirty years, I have never had a moment's misgiving that the Communion of Rome is that Church which the Apostles set up at Pentecost. . . . Nor have I ever for a moment hesitated in my conviction, since 1845, that it was my clear duty to join that Catholic Church, as I did then join it, when in my conscience I felt it to be divine. . . . Never for a moment have I wished myself bafrk. But [he adds] I had more to try and afflict me, in various ways, as a Catholic than as an Anglican.^ Nor is the world ignorant as to the causes of these trials and afflictions, in part at least. He has himself told us that there were those whose proceedings upon the occasion of the Vatican Council shocked and dismayed him. Himself hold- ing the infallibility of the Pope, as a matter of ^ In his sermon on the " Glories of Mary," Discourses to Mixed Congregations, p. 359. See also the sermon on the "Fitness of the Glories of Mary" (No. XVIII.), and the " Letter to Dr. Pusey " in vol. ii. of Anglican Difficulties. 2 See Essen/ on Development, chap. ii. sec. 2, p. 90. ^ " Letter to the Duke of Norfolk," Postscript, Anglican Diffi- culties, vol. ii. p. 349. 92 THE CLAIM OF ANCIENT RELIGION. [CnAr. II. theological opinion, ever since he had become a Catholic,^ but doubting the^ opportuneness of its definition, he stood aghast at the virulence dis- played by a small and extreme section among the advocates of the dominant party. It was a party not dominant which commended itself to his judg- ment and instincts, not only in theology but also in politics ; for the old Laudian notion of the inde- feasible divine right of hereditary rulers, and of the absolute passive obedience due to them, had dropped away from him, and had been replaced by the broader doctrine of Aquinas and Suarez. The party of which I speak called itself Liberal. He did not like the name, but he recognised the fact that between the Liberalism against which he has ever warred and the Liberty for which Montalem- bert and Lacordaire so earnestly contended, there was nothing in common but a sound. With the '' general line of thought and conduct " of those illustrious men he " enthusiastically concurred," ~ and he resented as an outrage the invectives with which they and those who thought with them were so persistently pursued : 1 felt deeply, he writes, and shall ever feel while life lasts, the violence and cruelty of journals and other })ublications, whicli, while taking, as they professed to do, the Catholic side, emj^loyed ^ " Letter to the Duke of Norfolk," Anglican Difficulties, vol ii. p. 304. 2 Apologia, p, 285. Chap. II.] THE SYLLABUS. 93 themselves by their rash language (though, of course, they did not mean it) in unsettling the weak in faith, throwing back inquirers, and shocking the Protestant mind.^ Such language, incleed, has ever elicited his strong disapprobation. Thus in another place he observes : There are those among us who for years past have conducted themselves as if no responsibility attached to wild words and over- bearing deeds: who have stated truths in the most paradoxical form, and stretched principles until they were close upon sna})ping.2 There has been a fierce and intolerant temper abroad which scorns and virtually tramples on the little ones of Christ. While I ac- knowledge one Pope, jure divino, I acknowledge no other, and I think it a usurpation too wicked to be comfortably dwelt upon when individuals use their own private judgment in the discussion of religious questions, not simply ahundare in siio sensu, but for the purpose of anathematising the private judgment of others.^ This '' jealous vindication, against tyrannous ipse duvifs, of the range of truths and the sense of propositions, of which the absolute reception may be required," is among the most marked character- istics of his later writings ; and nowhere, perhaps, has he more strongly displayed it than in dealing with a document so much and so ignorantly talked of, both by Catholics and Protestants, the Syllabus JErrorumy issued by command of the late Pope in 1864. Before proceeding to his argument, that this 1 '' Letter to the Diike of Norfulk, Anglican DiJ/iculties, vol. ii. p. 300. - IIn