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SOME JHOUGHT^iNlfBE" RECENT -CRITICISM .^.S

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i -A Preface -Newman and The Theory of the Via Media
V :'A' Paper eritltle^ ^WMAN 'aW His DjTkACTp^ " ^Read;h;
^aiforethe NewmaySbciety^Novernber i8th,;i&^ wit,h_a,J^er
- : in explanation of.N ewmanV use of Jhe term^eason j -?- V'- '-1 >""-,
5" A^Rejiew of Dr' Edwin Abbott's PHitOMYTHUS Reprinted:
| .from the Lyceum for July, ' 1891..; ¦ ¦ .. < "j^i'^-^j _ - "J"

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not of one- person' or another, but 'of the generality of. those who"
- have felt it a duty to. animadvert on recent .converts to the Catholic -.'->.'
r. ChurcK.:' /.We;. are riofhere crying, for) mercy, but asking justice, \ -'-..'U v^'5'-
-'"demanding, common' English fairness';, we'have" a right to. expect^'. - ¦-"- ,"-v "^
[but we do not find, that considerate* compassionate, comprehensive^ , ' , ^,. „•
. •¦judgment, upon their conduct] which, instead of fixing on particular""'. '" v"r"'v1
,* isolated points in it* views, it' efs .a- whole) —uses the good, which'-"r^-u-;<7,;vi.
vis its general character, Jo hide.its.in'cidental faults, makes" one part r -.¦ 'z'- r .,
explain another, what is strong here excuse what is weak there, and '<_ -'.-/ ';'- Xi'.*"
evident sincerity'of intention atone; for infirmity of performance ;— . i^'i'ii'^. •?,.';
'which has'a regard to circumstances,- to the trial, of 'an afmost ^<'';.. '.**,.-.> -¦
7 necessary'.' excitement, to', the necessity of actirig beyond criticism,.'-* C-'i'^-^
yet without- precedent, and of reaching, a certain, object when all--- ' .':; v
,; paths to' itrhaye respectively their' owii. difficulties.*. - We are^not*/". t.\jk;.'"=
~r apologizing; for their great 'and momentous . decision itself, but for. 's~:r. '^'jr -^ '¦&>.
the peculiarities "which- have accompanied its execution^ if to do^.'.v'.ii.-'
as' much as this, be considered afterr all asking for mercyj not..Tor.v ;j '': *'£¦.-' -
equity, it 3s. only such' mercy, to say the least; as the.parties censnri.-^ . -"'ix.';
, ing, as: well as the parties, censured, will require themselves "on "-' '"i. *.,"•.¦>/¦;
: a?day to come. In the well-known words of the poet-^ v . , «:,'_. :., ;>• .-;
i-Xy:, ....":.-; . . - , - '"-'I-"- -iJtf? ".-.-''
^\'Zt'' :"••¦' s ' '. , - ( In the course of justice, none of us . - :-, ¦ ; ." -;'l'" ' : . -' .: \'.
".c --' Should see salvation ; we do pray for mercy ; ¦':'. .'I - ~~ ' -^ v
' ^ .. . ¦ ' And that same prayer doth teach us all to render '..' " *¦ '"¦ .,'.
, - The deeds of mercy.1 J " ' ' * ; i .' ^
. '-' . : . :"" ' - '¦"¦-. ' ' . -Newman : ; Essays Critical and Historical, vol. ii;; '< ; •¦ ;. -;•,..

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE RECENT CRITICISM

OF THE

LIFE AND WORKS

OF

JOHN HENRY CARDINAL NEWMAN,

BEING
I. A Preface : — Newman and The Theory of the Via Media.
2. A Paper entitled, "Newman and His Detractors." Read
before the Newman Society, November iSth, 1891, with a Note
in explanation of Newman's use of the term Reason ;
3. A Review of Dr. Edwin Abbott's Philomythus. Reprinted
from the Lyceum for July, 1891. 1

BY
WALTER K. FIRMINGER,
MEE.TON COLLEGE, OXFORD.

¦'iK

fjrinlsii for spfjfe^c- dtrrulatirnt
BY JAMES PARKER AND CO.,
Crown Yard, Oxford.

" Knowledge has two Extremities, which meet and touch each
other. The first of them is pure Natural Ignorance, such as attends
every Man at his Birth. The other is the Perfection attain'd by
great Souls, who having run through the circle of all that Mankind
can know, find at length that they know nothing, and are content
to return to that Ignorance from which they set out. Ignorance
that thus knows itself is a. wise and learned Ignorance. Those
Persons who lie between these Extremities but cannot arrive at
that Ignorance which is the effect of Wisdom, have a tincture of
Science which swells them with Vanity and Sufficiency. These are
the Men that trouble the World, and that make the falsest Judg
ments of all Things in it. The Vulgar, and the truely-knowing,
compose the ordinary Run of Men : those of the middle Character
despise All, and in return are despised of All." — PascaPs Thoughts,
Translated by Basil Kennet, D.D., 1731.

REVISIONS.
Page ix. Passage commencing in line 15 : — "We claim no present, &c,"
to line 23 : "perfected into one."
Please remember that we are not discussing the undoubted infallibility of
the One Episcopate (on which see St. Cyprian's treatise De Unitate Ecclesice, and
the note on the forgeries appended to the Oxford Translation of the same),
but of those dioceses which are collectively known as the English Church.
Baptism is the great symbol of our Unity, but Unity must be preserved, and
consequently there is a possibility of our ceasing to be in vital communion
with the Church of our Baptism. Hence adhesion to the One Episcopate
is an extension of the Baptismal obligation. This Unity is, however, organic
rather than mechanical — of nature rather than will. Cf. St. Cyril on S. John
xvii. 21 : St. Hilary, De Trin. viii. 13, et al loc. As regards " the search for
truth," it must be remembered that for the Christian the phrase means
nothing more than the devout investigation of Revelation.
Page xi. Twelve lines from bottom I wrote the sentence commencing
" But facts are prior, &c," under the influence of Dr. Salmon's Infallibility
of the Church. The statement is of course deistic and untrue.
Page 15. To note d add this quotation from Mark Pattison's Essay, " Phi
losophy at Oxford " {Mind, Vol. I. No. 1, p. 85) :— " Long before Dr. New-
man gave in his adhesion to the Papal Church, the philosophic basis of his
mind had anticipated the Syllabus and the Encyclical."
Page 23, note k- For " p. 125 " read <' 112- 116 (Popular Edition)."
Page 24, line 1. For " was of the kind " read "was not of the kind."
Page 38, note '. For "pp. 34-35" read "pp. 46-47 (Popular Edition).
pp. 116— 118 (First Edition, Part IV.)."
Page 42, six lines from bottom. On this point may I refer to my pub
lished essay, " What then did Dr. Newman do ? "

PREFACE.

TN reading through the proofs of the first essay in this
1 pamphlet, it occurred to me that the remarks I have
made on the subject of the Via Media ought not to find
their way to the press unaccompanied by a few words of
explanation, and I feel all the more bound to add this ex
planation since an admiration for the genius of John Henry
Cardinal Newman is likely to be construed as an unreserved
acceptance of his teaching. As a member of the English
Church, I am not able, of course, to follow Newman
through the psychological gymnastics he has so brilliantly
described in the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and in issuing
these essays it seems worth while to state the considera
tions which, to my mind, invalidate the general argument
he advanced in favour of secession from the National
Church. The circumstances under which Newman felt it neces
sary to formulate the theory of a Via Media, and the
suspicion latent throughout the days of the Movement
that the theory would not work, are described in my first
essay. From the passage there quoted (p. 39) it will be
seen that Newman's imaginative hold of Anglicanism
could have at no time been strong, and this will easily be
accounted for by the fact that, unlike Keble and Pusey,
he had come from a family which, although Church-going,
belonged to the then numerous class to whom the word
Church represented few ideas and barren sympathies. In
his work on the Prophetic Office, it is apparent that he had
set out on what seemed to him a novel and somewhat
doubtful attempt to present the Church with a theory by
which it could carry on its existence when the Liberal
party had severed its connection with the State. He
B 2

IV PREFACE.
seems to have been haunted by a suspicion that the
"Establishment" is of the essence of the National
Church, and that if the Liberals were allowed to work
their will, they would inflict a " mortal operation " upon
her constitution a. This indeed is one of the lines of
attack he developed subsequently to his secession, but
even before that gloomy event he seems to have had an
implicit fear that things might be as he afterwards thought
that he had discovered them to be. The Via Media was
never part and parcel of " the theology of a religious
imagination:" it never corresponded to the illative sense.
He indeed could sympathise with the poetry in which
Keble decked his Anglicanism : but then " poetry is the
refuge of those outside Catholicism b."
The distinction between poetry and the illative sense
is by no -neans clear, but it would seem that Newman
regarded the former as an artificial means of supplying
the life and energy which the latter ought naturally, but
for one reason or another in point of fact fails to supply.
The point, however, is that Newman never adequately
realised the objective existence of the English Church,
and consequently he was unable fully to appreciate that
his Church -membership was something far above his
citizenship. In later days the scandals of the hybrid
Jerusalem Bishopric scheme and the Gorham case did
much to make his view plausible, but the fact remains
that three out of the four contingencies0, which he de
clared would destroy the essence of the English Church,
have occurred, and the Church, so far from being weak-

* Difficulties of Anglicans. Passim. Discourses to Mixed Con
gregations, p. 251.
b Cf. the important essay on John Keble in vol. ii. of Essays His
torical and Critical. Newman's failure to see that his criticism
would damage his own theory of Assent renders his brother's re
marks on the Grammar plausible. Cf. The Early History of John
Henry Newman.
c i.e. The removal of the Bishops from the House of Lords ; the
State recognition of Ecclesiastical ordinances; the Clerical Disa
bilities Act, and legalisation of private prayer meetings.

PREFACE. V
ened, has, on the whole, been indefinitely strengthened by
their occurrence.
To these considerations it is only fair to add that the
conduct and views of the Bishops of Newman's days
were not consonant with any plausible theory of the
Church. To appreciate the full significance of this fact
it is only necessary to bear in mind the gross pluralism,
neglect of obvious duties, and disbelief in their Apostolic
mission which stands recorded in even the most ele
mentary and impartial histories of the epoch of the
Reform Bill. Newman himself records the state of doubt
existing in the mind of a Bishop who had read one of the
Tracts on the Apostolic Succession, which now-a-days
would be thought commonplace, not to say dull. At the
time of his secession Newman does not seem to have
recognised that the night was dark before dawn. " Until,"
he had written some years before, " until we can produce
a diocese, or place of education, or populous town, or
colonial department, or the like, administered on our
distinctive principles, as the diocese of Sodor and Man
in the days of Bishop Wilson, doubtless we have not as
much to urge in our behalf as we might haved." In
God's providence he lived to see things otherwise, and on
being confronted with the transformation, to declare that
the ways of God are inscrutable !
It is a mistake, however, to suppose that Newman left
his Church simply because he could not make the Via
Media " work." He had discovered, " to his confusion
and distress," in the antiquity to which Anglicans so con
fidently appeal, not a model to be copied, but a record of
and instigation to continuous development, and — alas for
" The Via Media of the Anglican Church, p. 18. Perhaps one
reason why secessions have been so numerous among Academics
is because the art of Diocesan organisation as regards the Univer
sities and in some cases the whole laity is " celare artem." But the
revival of synods and the institution of Diocesan Societies, musical
or for higher religious education, are earnests of the increasing recog
nition of a life in the Church for laity as well as clergy. The English
Church has now-a-days many a Bishop Wilson in her service.

VI PREFACE.
his theory !— that the Via Media had been the professed
method of heresy.
Now it is here that Newman was led astray by his
imagination. " Here," he thought, "here are Semi- Arians
and Monophysites practising, like us, a Via Media ! " It
does not seem to have occurred to him to inquire whether
these sects held a true or only a pretended Via Media.
The fact that they were willing to make a compromise,
and attempt to conciliate both parties, struck his imagina
tion, and his judgment was held in fetters. For it is
obvious that a true policy of Via Media is not the vulgar
one of compromise. It is not a mere giving of so much
to one party and so much to another — an attempt to win
peace at the expense of truth. It is rather the constant
habit, which philosophers have styled the Modern Critical
Method, of getting behind two apparent contradictions,
with a view to their ultimate reconciliation by a synthesis
of what is true, and a cancelling of what is fallacious in
either statement. And the right use of this method, and
a condemnation of its abuse, is afforded by the history
which caused Newman so much consternation. History
records that the Semi-Arians placed peace before truth,
and like those who teach doctrines thought to be socially
useful but intrinsically false, they would have offered to
God the unclean sacrifice of a lie.
While, then, the Semi-Arians are an instance of that
dishonest policy of compromise, the Church's condemnation
of Arianism may, on the other hand, he regarded as a Via
Media. The whole question may be stated as two contra
dictions, antinomies, apparent irreconcilables. The term
" Father " may or may not represent an analogy qf the
relationship between the First and Second Persons of the
Blessed Trinity. If, as the Arian contended, all the ideas
which the human mind associates with the term " Father "
apply to the First Person, then it is clear that He must
be prior in time to the Son. The Church did not
attempt to hush the matter up by a compromise, which
could only have been struck on the assumption that the
Revelation of the Father in the Son is " not worth

PREFACE. Vli
bothering about." So far from that she condemned
Arianism, because a complete application of the human
ideas of fatherhood to the Blessed First Person would
derogate from the Godhead of the Divine Son. Truth
was the sole object of the Church, and in striking directly
for the truth she hit upon a Via Media, since her declara
tion placed it beyond doubt that the Arian erred in that
he failed to perceive that the whole truth cannot be
expressed by a single analogy e.
Great and subtle as Newman's intellect was, it is only
too apparent that he misunderstood the nature of anti
nomies and the Via Media. In the Grammar of Assent
he gives two statements apparently irreconcilable, and yet
in themselves true. Space is infinite ; God only is infinite.
A mystery according to him lies in the fact that both
statements must be true in themselves, but together they
seem incompatible f. It has been argued that these
thoughts were suggested to him by his reading of either
Kant or Coleridge, but this has been met by his own some
what curious statement that neither he nor even Keble
and Pusey had read or possessed a work of either of these
thinkers s. But whether the antinomies were suggested to
him by Origen or Clement, or came from his own subtle
intellect, matters little ; the point is that he hardly appre
ciated the method by which they may be met. This may
be thought a bold saying, but it is borne out by his
unfortunate note to a passage in the Via Media : " An
extreme is not wrong as such, else there would be
something wrong in the idea of Divine Infinity11." There
would be something very wrong indeed in the ideas of the
theologian who regarded the Divine Infinity as the ex-
e Newman in a juvenile C.P.B., quoted in his Letters and Corre
spondence, makes similar remarks on the simile " The Lamb of God."
' See below, p. 24.
Una letter to W. S. Lilly. Any one who has read Pusey's In
quiry into the Probable Causes of Rationalism in German Theology
will certainly believe that the Cardinal's memory must have failed
him. k The Via Media of the Anglican Church, p. 42.

Viii PREFACE.
treme negation of limitation. God is surely called
Infinite because He is bounded by no other nature than
His own. The mere negation of limitation answers more
to the nature of evil than any other idea.
If then we distinguish between a Via Media and a com
promise, we shall also see that a Via Media is but one
aspect — the polemic aspect of the search for truth. Fear
lessness and honesty are the characteristics of that search,
and if (imagined) peace is put before truth the Via Media
by its nature becomes impossible. And just as corruption
is, in Newman's words, the peculiarity of Rome, so com
promise is the peculiarity of the Via Media. There are
few men in whom there are not germs of Latitudinarianism,
and the majority reck little of their responsibility for the
opinions they hold. It is just because the English Church
has cherished a tendency to prefer moral worth to adherence
to truth, that she has for so long a space found herself face
to face with a people for whom she imagines there is
no message. She has pursued a passive policy, and has
not responded to the many calls she has receivedto speak
with no uncertain voice. Even at the present moment she
seems but half aware of the hostility she will have to face
if she leaves the cause of the agricultural labourer without
a word of sympathy. This remark may seem out of place,
but in reality it is not so. Voicelessness is a result of a
degeneration from principle. The English Church has a
message for classes and masses, but for reasons of a not
reputable description she fails to deliver her charge. She
is silent when she ought to speak, she is disunited when
she ought to be united, she tolerates where she ought to
expel, because in so many secondary cases she prefers
peace to truth.
While candidly admitting to the fullest extent the evils
which spring from the human use of a divine instrument,
I must urge that Newman missed the true alternative
when he wrote : — " It is quite true that the ethos or temper
of ' Romanism,' when contrasted with Protestantism, is
excess, and that Protestantism viewed relatively to
« Romanism ' is in defect ; but in a state of things in which

PREFACE. ix
the mean teaching of a so-called ' Catholic ' truth is non
existent, and the choice lies between the one and the
other extreme, who would not prefer that Romanism
which has an excess of life to that of Protestanism, which
is deficient in it ? " Surely the true alternative is not to
despair of the golden mean, not to be prodigal because we
cannot be perfectly temperate, and prodigality is preferable
to 'stinginess.' The mean can perhaps only be com
pletely approximated in another world than this, and if so
this is but a reason why with greater earnestness we
should pray (and work) " Thy will be done in earth as it is
in heaven." It is our duty as English Churchmen to try
and get as near the mean as we can, not to be first one
thing and then another, not to fly to excess of life because
excess is preferable to deficiency. We claim no present
perfection ; we have wandered often far from the mean. But
it is no part of our theory to claim infallibility other than
that which is secured to those who whole-heartedly and
fearlessly would tread the way by the promise that those
who seek shall find. It is no part of our theory that we are
united by any other visible unity than our membership in
Christ by Baptism by reason of which we are to be " perfec
ted into one '." It is not indeed, as St. Augustine so beauti
fully says, it is not for what we are, but what we are coming
to be, that God loves us. We press towards the mark : and
our faculties grow as we use them. All we learn from
Science, all we learn from Morals, tell us that balance of
principle is a great and fundamental condition of life. In
the conduct of the best of men there will be deviations just
as there are deviations from the shortest course in the race
of the most trained athlete : the principle of progress is the
conscious attempt to make those deviations the slighter
and the fewer.
Regarding Newman's criticism of the Via Media as
fallacious, I am bound to confess that the Via Media
1 I use " membership " here to imply organic membership or one
ness of life. It is important to draw attention to this on account
of the common mistake of separating the notes of the Church from
the work of the Holy Spirit.

X PREFACE.
would in itself be a somewhat weak position for a Church
to base itself upon. For, as Newman truly says, " Pro
testantism 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 had no existence except on
paper ; it is known not positively but negatively, in its
differences from the rival creeds, not in its own pro
perties ; and can be only described as a third system,
neither the one nor the other, but with something of each,
cutting between them, and as if with a critical fastidious
ness, trifling with them both, and boasting to be nearer
antiquity than either." These words do undoubtedly
describe the prima facie appearance of the Via Media,
and as I have remarked in the first essay, very few of the
great Anglican divines have really attempted to draw up
their systems on the lines of a Via Media. It is true that
the general policy of the English Church has been to steer
clear of Papal or Protestant innovations, but the real
positive aim has not been merely a constant evasion of
extremes, but a holding to the Doctrine of the Cross k.
In striving to remain true to the faith once delivered, the
Church has been compelled to free doctrine after doctrine
from the corruptions and defections of the maximisers
and the minimi.sers respectively, and so a Via Media has
been a concomitant of her action, although by no means
her direct object1. To suppose that the concomitant
was the policy itself is to make the same mistake which
led Newman so terribly astray when the Semi-Arian and
Monophysite difficulties began to pulverise his Angli
canism"1. The passage from Dean Church's Oxford Movement,
quoted on pp. 40-1, has been much misinterpreted. He
k This sentence will recall Bishop Ken's well-known words.
1 The employment of an analogy being thrust upon one, it is hard
to express the case with ease.
m An excellent criticism of the passages in the Apologia dealing
with the Semi-Arians and Monophysites will be found in the Preface
to Canon Bright's Lessons from the Lives of Three Great Fathers.

PREFACE. xi
wisely remarks that the English Church does not base its
claim to the allegiance of Englishmen on the fact (which
ought to be recognised) that she offers a sound middle
course between extremes, but because, despite all brilliant
but one-sided logical counter-theories, she represents most
fully to her children " the mind that was in Christ Jesus."
He does not, as some controversialists and Reviews have
asserted, he does not ask us to be indifferent to logic, or
to remain in the Church simply because we were born
Englishmen, but, he contends, we have our Sparta, and
if our theories represent facts, we shall be compelled to
admit that our Sparta, if "a rough and incomplete one,"
can nevertheless be made to represent the cause of Christ
in the world.
The appeal from theories to facts always seems a step
from a higher to a lower ground, yet after all there is
nothing more tragic than an unrealisable ideal, nothing
more pernicious than a confusion of the real with the
ideal. The English Church represents in this respect the
much-abused English good sense which refuses to be
blinded to the real state of things by the acceptance of
a theory which would make them appear as ab initio
otherwise than what they are. The fundamental error of
Romanism is that its theories flatter and so misrepresent
the facts, while on the other hand there is perhaps a
tendency in Anglicanism to under-estimate facts. But
facts are prior to theories, and if we look at things in
a broad light we shall see that the Infallibilist theory no
more represents the Divine governance of the world
(which leaves men the freedom of will and intellect to
work out their own salvation) than the crudest of a priori
sciences represents the whole life of man in his Social,
and Political, and Religious relationship.
I venture, then, to think that in this Preface I have
stated the reasons that will at least account for my non-
acquiescence in the whole programme of " Newmanian-
ism." Of their sufficiency others may judge, but to me
Newman's polemical writings on Anglicanism, though
wonderfully eloquent and often ingenious, seem somehow

Xll PREFACE.
intellectually weak. I sincerely trust that nothing I have
said may seem harsh or impertinent, and I should be very
grieved if anything I said in controversy should give pain
to those who are dear to me in friendship. But a great
admiration is a sin against a hero if it is in any sense
irrational, and well-intentioned criticism is the highest
tribute that can be paid to a genuinely great genius.
In conclusion, I must add that the first essay was not
written with a view to publication, and I originally sent it
to the press with no other purpose than to have some
notes on the subject by me in a handy form. As, how
ever, there seems but little chance that my notes will be
used for the purpose for which they were somewhat
ambitiously first intended, I am sending them out for
publication with a vague hope that they may be in some
way useful to their purchasers. I must not, however,
forget to thank the Editor of the Lyceum for his per
mission to reprint the Review of Philomythus which first
appeared in his columns, and my friend, the Rev. H. J.
Browne, S.J., who so kindly " licked it into shape."
W. K. F.
Rome,
Jan. 26th, 1892.

4fefomatt atttr ijts IBttrattors a.

IN the course of a discussion which took place at Adding-
ton in 1877, Archbishop Tait was asked to give his
view of Newman's character, and the reply which he made
is remarkable, since it seems in a few sentences to focus
much of the hostile criticism that has been made since
and even before Newman's death.
" I have always,'' he answered, " regarded Newman as having
a strange duality of mind. On the one side is a wonderfully strong
and subtle reasoning faculty, on the other hand a blind faith, raised
almost entirely by his emotions. It seems to me that in all matters
of belief he first acts on his emotions, and then he brings the subtlety
of his reason to bear, till he has ingeniously persuaded himself that
he is logically right. The result is a condition in which he is practi
cally unable to distinguish between truth and falsehoodb."
What truth there may be in the assertion that Newman
built his religious teaching on a "blind faith raised almost
entirely by his emotions" will be seen when we come to dis
cuss the theory of a "Theology of a Religious Imagination0"
he formulated in the Grammar of Assent and described in
the Apologia, but the point to be noticed at present is that
Archbishop Tait gave a short and lucid account of the
impression which Newman's works seem to imprint on
students who are not prepared to accept the Tractarian
standpoint as philosophically tenable. Leslie Stephen
entertains the readers of the monthlies with elaborate
proofs of the Cardinal's scepticism, and Dr. Fairbairn, by
an ingenious caricature of Bishop Butler's arguments,
thinks that the scepticism canjnot only be proved but
* Read before the Newman Society, November 15th, 1891, in
Mr. A. Blennerhassett's Rooms, Balliol.
b Life of Archibald Campbell Tait, Archbishop of Canterbury,
vol. i. p. 89.
' Grammar of Assent, p. 171. The expression is Newman's.

14 Newman and his Detractors.
accounted for. Dr. Abbott, with far less ability and
decent feeling, has also made what may charitably be
called a quixotic attack on the giant his imagination has
called into existence, and has, like Cervantes' hero, come
from the fray with more damage to his own glorious self
than the object of his attack. But after all, the line of
criticism is iriore or less identical in each case. Newman,
complains Leslie Stephen, tenaciously clings to either
horn of a dilemma, and although fully conscious of his
uncomfortable position, absolutely refuses to admit that
he is acting fllogically and therefore unphilosophically :
Newman, Principal Fairbairn argues, held Butler's prin
ciples of probability the guide of life, and the supremacy
of the conscience, and these are mutually contradictory :
Newman, writes Dr. Abbott, with an apparent implication
that he himself is right with God, and Newman was not
and could never possibly have been, — Newman based his
religion not on reasonable apprehension, not even on
a worthy emotion, but on a degrading sense of craven
fear. The argument in each case is in essence identical,
and Mr. Meyrick perhaps is unconscious that his criti
cism is far from original when he writes in the pages of
the Foreign Church Chronicle : —
" It is -interesting to see the employment to which Newman put his
intellect. It was not the directing force within him, but it was
a faculty of extraordinary power which he used like a powerful slave
to which he gave his orders, for reconciling to his own conscience any
course that his will and affections had previously determined upon.
It was so subtle that it befooled him, and easily persuaded him that
anything that he chose to do or to say was right. His mind was
naturally sceptical, like his brother's, but his affections forced him to
resolve, by an act of will, to be a believer, and his intellect was then
called on to justify his resolution to himself and to the world. The
more that this process went on — and it grew upon him with his years
— belief lost the true character of belief and became acceptance.
Whether he gave an inward assent to a tenet, or whether he did
not, he would accept it if it came from a quarter to which he was
inclined to pay deference. We know that in his heart he regarded
the doctrine of the Pope's infallibility as the work of ' an insolent and
aggressive faction ; ' nevertheless, as soon as it was declared, he
accepted it, not with what we understand by belief, but (by the help
of his ' grammar ') with assent. So with the dogma of the Immaculate

Newman and his Detractors. 1 5
Conception. He accepted it when declared d, and condescended to
justify it by arguing in its favour from a known misreading in
Irenasus, the true character of which he ignored till he was compelled
to acknowledge it. ... .
" The record of Newman's life will be a sad one. It will be the
record of one who, endowed with great powers, warm affections,
strong will, high purpose, and a desire to do right, damaged pro
foundly the cause which he had most at heart, and promoted that
which he most abhorred."
Before proceeding to criticise the view thus baldly
stated, it is worth while to quote what Dr. Martineau
has to say on the question at issue.
" Whence," he asks, " arises that strange mixture of admiration
and of distrust of which most readers and hearers of John Henry
Newman are conscious ? Often as he carries us away by his close
dialectic, his wonderful readings of the human heart, his tender or
indignant fervour, there remains a small speck of misgiving which
we can never wipe out. The secret, perhaps, lies in this — that his
own faith is an escape from an alternative scepticism, which receives
the veto not of his reason but of his will. He has, after all, the
critical not the prophetic mind. He wants immediateness of religious
vision. Instead of finding his eye clearer and his foot firmer the
deeper he sinks to the ultimate ground of trust, he hints that the
d In regard to this statement, it is important to notice that
Newman had not only held but preached the doctrine of the Imma
culate Conception. Thus in the Discourses to Mixed Congregations,
he says : " First consider that, since Adam fell, none of his seed but
has been conceived in sin ; none save one. One exception there has
been. Who is that one? Not our Lord Jesus, for He was not con
ceived of man, but of the Holy Ghost. I mean His Virgin Mother,
who .... never was partaker in fact of Adam's transgression " (Dis
course Hi., p. 49). And again, on p. 355, "She never incurred, in
fact, Adam's deprivation." These Sermons were preached nearly five
years before the Definition of 1854.
In the second place, it should be noticed that Mr. Meyrick has
quoted the famous letter to Bishop Ullathorne very unfairly, and
has drawn from it a conclusion which the Cardinal over and over
again in his lifetime was at pains to repudiate. What Dr. Newman
condemned as the work of ' an insolent, aggressive faction ' was not
the doctrine of the Pope's infallibility (that he himself held im
plicitly), but the erection of this doctrine to the rank of a necessary
dogma. Cf. the Letters edited by John Oldcastle. Dr. Salmon admits
in his Infallibility of the Church the unfair construction which has
been placed on these words.

1 6 Newman and his Detractors.
ight is precarious, and that your step may chance on the water or
the rock in the abysmal realm. The tendency of the purest religious
insight is ever to quit superficial and derivative beliefs, and seek
the primitive roots where the finite draws life from the Infinite.
The awfulness of that position, the direct contact of the human
spirit with the Divine, the loneliness of communion when all media
of church and usage are removed, do not appal the piety of the
noblest mood. With Dr. Newman the order is reversed. He loves
to work with the upper strata of the minds with which he deals,
detecting their inconsistencies, balancing their wants, satisfying
them with the mere coherence and relative sufficiency of their
belief, but encouraging them to shrink from the last questioning.
With himself, indeed, he sometimes goes deeper, and descends
towards the bases of all devout belief; but evidently with less
assurance as his steps pass down. The ground feels to him less
and less solid as he penetrates from the deposits of recent expe
rience into the inner laboratory of the world ; and it is only when he
stands upon the crust, and takes it as it is, that he loses the. fear
that it rests upon the flood. His certainties are on the surface,
and his insecurities below. With men of opposite character, often
reputed to be sceptical, doubt is at the tope, and it is as the
swaying of water that is calm below, and sleeps in the entire mass
within its granite cradle. He seems to say within himself, ' There
is no bottom to these things that I can find ; we must put one
there ; and only mind that it be sufficient to hold them in, sup
posing it to be real.' He deals, in short, with the first truths of
religion as hypotheses, not known or knowable in themselves, but
recommended by the sufficient account they give of the facts, and
the practical fitness of belief in them to our nature. He denies
the existence for our mind of anything hviiroBerov, and treats even
our highest persuasions as a provisional discipline, wholesome for
us to retain, whether they be harmless errors or eternal truths'."
I must apologise for inflicting on my hearers so lengthy
a quotation, but the extreme beauty of the metaphor and
e Doubt can never be " at the top.'' Doubt is essentially a process
of the mental under-mmmg. Hence Newman's remark that diffi
culties are natural but doubts sinful, is very apposite. But it is
Philistinism to spoil the beauty of Martineau's simile.
' Essays, Reviews, and Addresses, vol. ii. pp. 233-4. Dr. Routh •
" who has been reserved to report to a forgetful generation what was
the theology of their fathers," used to make the fundamental advice
to theology students, "Verify your References." The application
of this advice to some of Dr. Martineau's quotations from Pusey's
Rational Character of German Theology pruduces interesting results.

Newman and his Detractors. 1 7
wonder of Dr. Martineau's style, which I venture to
think is only occasionally surpassed by Newman himself,
must be taken as a sufficient warrant for my so doing.
It is by way of being a truism that to understand a
man thoroughly you must know something of his prede
cessors, and it is still more a platitude to say that accredi
ted truths slumber deep. Consequently no excuse is needed
for prefacing what I have to say about the genuineness
of various portraits which Newman critics have sketched
by a few words in explanation of what may be considered
one of the most prominent features in nineteenth century
religious thought. It is not capable of denial that, inas
much as the philosophy of the century has, to so great an
extent, been an appeal from the intelligence to the moral
consciousness, the work of such thinkers as Carlyle,
Browning, and Newman, has a prima facie sceptical
bearing, although Newman, in making the moral con
sciousness but one of the several departments of the
evidence over which the intelligence, like a Platonic
justice, must act as judge, can, with far less reason than
the majority of his contemporaries, be attainted of
scepticism. The thought of the generation which New
man in religion, Carlyle in philosophy, and Browning
in poetry, resolutely set themselves to destroy, had been
of such a nature as to starve the religious and moral
emotions, and thereby to deprive the intellect of its
proper nutriment. In philosophy men had been striving
to realise a positive knowledge of the laws controlling
human destiny by collecting the various shreds of de
monstrable truth into a vast encyclopaedic system from
which the supernatural was to be rigorously eliminated.
The theologian conscious of the precariousness of his
position had attempted to meet the deist or materialist,
as the case might be, on his own ground, and in so doing
had forgotten the great fact that true religion is only
secondarily a system of philosophy. Even the saintly
Butler, for those who are cognisant of his inner life
must know that his was a saintly character, had con
descended to assume for purposes of resistless argument
c

1 8 Newman and his Detractors.
that a high state of probability is a sufficient basis for
the Christian faith to build on. But, after all, the John
sons, Beveridges, Butlers, and Wilsons were a respectable
minority ; and Mark Pattison makes little exaggeration
when in summing up the results of the eighteenth-century
attempt to place theology on a rational basis of external
evidence, he writes : —
"Theology is— 1st, and primarily, the contemplative speculative
habit, by means of which the mind places itself already in another
world than this ; a habit begun here to be raised to perfect vision
hereafter. 2ndly, and in an inferior degree it is ethical and regula
tive of our conduct as men, in those relations which are temporal and
transitory. Argumentative proof that such knowledge is possible
can never be substituted for the knowledge without detriment to the
mental habit. What is true of an individual is true of an age. When
an age is found occupied in proving its creed, this is but a token that
the age has ceased to have a proper belief in it." '' If the religious
history of. the eighteenth century," he continues, " proves anything it
is this : — That good sense, the best good sense, when it sets to work
with the material of human nature and Scripture to construct a re
ligion, will find its way to an ethical code, irreproachable in its
contents, and based on a just estimate and wise observation of the
facts of life, ratified by Divine sanctions in the shape of hope and
fear, of future rewards and penalties of obedience and disobedience.
This the eighteenth century did and did well. . . . When it came to
the supernatural part of Christianity its embarrassment began. It
was forced to keep it as much in the background as possible, or
to bolster it up by lame and inadequate reasonings. The philosophy
of common sense had done its own work ; it attempted more only to
shew, by its failure, that some higher organon was needed for
establishment of supernatural truth. The career of the evidential
school, its success and failure .... have enriched the history of
doctrine with a complete refutation of that method as an instrument
of theological investigation *."
From a theology of such a nature all that was poetic and
pious in man revolted.. The emotion of the soul, like a
mountain torrent swollen by winter snows, had broken down
the barriers with which the logician sought to impede its
course, and now ever increasing sought to carry all before
it. The night of the everlasting nay was far passed, and
* Essays and Reviews, "Tendencies of Religious Thought in
England." Cf. Newman, University Sermons, pp. 194, 199.

Newman and his Detractors. 19
the morn of the everlasting yea at hand. " Undine had
found her love ; the genius of poetry had kissed the
sleeping spring, and as it opened its laughing eyes all
the roses exhaled their sweetest perfumes, and all the
nightingales sang." The world had woken to the truth
that there is something in man greater than history,
greater than philosophy, something which can only find
monumental expression in poetry or religion. It was the
era of German Romanticism, of Goethe's Poetry, of
Coleridge's Philosophy, of Scott's novels, and soon of
Keble's Christian Yearh, and it was at such a crisis that
Newman, deserting his ancestral faith in a God whom
James Mill recklessly declared to be " the ne plus ultra
of wickedness," freed himself from the horrors of Cal
vinism with its gloomy fatalism and implicit deism.
If we look back on Newman's history, we shall, I think
be convinced of the slight evidence on which most of the
criticism depends, and indeed this is perhaps the most
fitting way of dealing with those who sceptically cry, shew
us some token for good. At any rate, it is the method
the Cardinal chose in dealing with Mr. Kingsley, who,
like his Hereward, possessed an untiring energy for hitting
furiously at what he believed wrong, and, once more like
Hereward, found his match at last. In passing on to our
story, we can hardly help paying homage to the sincerity
without which the Apologia could never have won its
cause with the English world as it has done, which alone
made possible that wonderfully objective autobiography
to be found among the letters in Miss Mozley's volumes.
The secret of the completeness of the self-revelation
is the love of truth which has never been sinned against.
Newman is describing himself not in order that he may win
what he always despised and over and over again sacrificed
— the admiration of his contemporaries, he is stating what
conscience tells him to be the plain history of his religious
experience, and he cares little what men may think when
'¦ Cf. Newman's Letter to Dr. Jelf in Via Media, vol. ii. p. 386,
and Oakley's Tractarian Movement, pp. 11, 12.
C 2

20 Newman and his Detractors.
God is Judge. " Commit thy way to the Lord and trust
in Him, and He will do it. And He will bring forth thy
justice as the light, and thy judgment as the noon
day." Such letters as have been given to the public, together
with the early passages in the Apologia, and the descrip
tion of the mind of ' an average child ' in the Grammar
of Assent will, I think, give a pretty complete description
of Newman's boyhood and early temperament. Writing
to him when at Dr. Nicholas' school at Ealing, his mother
gives expression to the loving confidence she and her
husband placed in their pet child. " I feel," she says,
" great comfort in the conviction that you will always act
to the best of your knowledge." What a wonderful antici
pation of what was to come in later years. This ad
herence to what his conscience commanded as right is the
mark of Newman's greatness, and at the same time it lent
fuel to the flames of self-will and even intolerance which
characterised his action in the storm and stress period of
the Tractarian Movement. Miss Mozley records how, after
an infantile struggle for mastery between mother and
son — the loving mother and strong-willed child — she
reminded him : " You see, John, you did not get your own
way." " No," he replied, " but I tried very hard." You
may depend upon it that the boy all along conscientiously
believed himself in the right. We shall see at a later
period manifestations of the same spirit which almost
seem at times to amount to a depressing lack of mental
balance. One of the most salient features in Newman's life is the
dependence of his character upon his faith. In his boyhood,
there is something almost morbid about the hidden life so
carefully thrust back behind an outward cover of plodding
docility, shewing itself in alternate fits of self-will and noble
anger. The religious life is developing at an abnormally
rapid rate, and deprived, as it is, of access to those chan
nels to which the teaching of his parents barred the way,
it naturally diffuses itself into mysticism.
" I was," he says, " very superstitious, and for some time previous to

Newman and his Detractors. 2 1
my conversion (when I was fifteen) used consciously to cross myself
on going into the dark '."
You can clearly see in the going out of his mind to the
heavenly an evidence of the fact that when self-conscious
ness comes with later years, a Church stripped of its sacra
mental teaching will not be able to hold him. When he
was nineteen he wrote a record of his boyish thoughts and
feelings on religious subjects.
" I used to wish the Arabian tales were true. My imagination ran on
unknown influences, on magical powers, and talismans. I thought
life must be a dream, or I an angel, and all this world a deception,
my fellow-angels, by a playful device, concealing themselves from me,
and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world '."
All this, Dr. Abbott tells us, is a substantial proof of
credulity ; your hero will in the sequel " fly on the wings
of an unbounded scepticism into the bosom of an un-
fathomed superstition." What hope for a man who claims
for his religion a continuous development, and who boldly
makes no hesitation about telling us that as a boy he
wished the Arabian Nights were true? I must confess
that Newman's early mysticism is to me not so much the
evidence of innate credulity as of a deep religious feeling,
to which the religion of his parents failed to minister.
When I see a girl playing with a doll, I do not take her
obvious pleasure in so doing as a proof of a mind naturally
prone to credulity, so far from that I am touched and
even struck with awe at the fact that the toy is one of the
primary channels of an emotion which in due time is to
ripen into a mother's love. That I came into the world
crying is, I hope, no evidence of a morbid temperament ;
on the contrary, I know for certain that my crying re
sulted from the expansion of my lungs, which now enables
me to laugh as heartily as Carlyle's Professor laughed on
a certain memorable occasion.
One of the most remarkable facts about Philomythus is,
that although it aims a somewhat venomous attack at
Newman, from first page to last you will not find a single
1 Apologia, p. 2. J Ibid., p. 2.

22 Newman and his Detractors.
word about the Grammar of Assent, save in one place
where the reverence in which it is generally held is
appealed to as an evidence of Newman's popularity. It
is impossible, despite the almost obvious probability, that
Dr. Abbott has attacked Newman without having read his
principal work. But an account of Newman's boyish
faith is surely incomplete if we except from it the masterly
account of a child's religion given in the Grammar : —
" It is my wish to take an ordinary child, but still one who is safe
from influences destructive of his religious instincts. Supposing he
has offended his parents, he will all alone and without effort, as if it
were the most natural of acts, place himself in the presence of God,
and beg of Him to set him right with them. Let us consider how
much is contained in this simple act. First, it involves the impres
sion on his mind of an unseen Being with whom he is in immediate
relation, and that relation so familiar that he can address Him when
ever he himself chooses ; next, of One whose goodwill towards him
he is assured of, and can take for granted— nay, who loves him
better, and is nearer to him, than his parents ; further, of One
who can hear him, wherever he happens to be, and who can read his
thoughts, for his prayer need not be vocal ; lastly, of One who
can effect a critical change in the state of feeling of others towards
him. That is, we shall not be wrong in holding that this child has
in his mind the image of an Invisible Being, who exercises a par
ticular providence among us, who is present every where, who is
heart-reading, heart-changing, ever-accessible, open to impetration.
What a strong and intimate vision of God must he have already
attained, if, as I have supposed, an ordinary trouble of mind has the
spontaneous effect of leading him for consolation and aid to an
Invisible Personal Power !
" Moreover, this image brought before his mental vision is the
image of One who by implicit threat and promise commands certain
things which he, the same child coincidently, by the same act of his
mind, approves ; which receive the adhesion of his moral sense and
judgment, as right and good. It is the image of One who is good,
inasmuch as enjoining and enforcing what is right and good, and
who, in consequence, not only excites in the child hope and fear, —
nay (it may be added), gratitude towards Him, as giving a law and
maintaining it by reward and punishment, — but kindles in him love
towards Him, as giving him a good law, and therefore as being good
Himself, for it is the property of goodness to kindle love, or rather
the very object of love is goodness j and all those distinct elements
of the moral law, which the typical child, whom I am supposing,
more or less consciously loves and approves, — truth, purity, justice,

N civilian and his Detractors. 23
kindness, and the like, — are but shapes and aspects of goodness.
And having in his degree a sensibility towards them all, for the sake
of them all he is moved to love the Lawgiver who enjoins them
upon him. And, as he can contemplate these qualities and their
manifestations under the common name of goodness, he is prepared
to think of them as indivisible, correlative, supplementary of each
other in one and the same Personality, so that there is no aspect
of goodness which God is not ; and that the more, because the
notion of a perfection embracing all possible excellences, both moral
and intellectual, is especially congenial to the mind, and there are in
fact intellectual attributes, as well as moral, included in the child's
image of God, as above represented.
" Such is the apprehension which even a child may have of his
Sovereign Lawgiver and Judge; which is possible in the case of
children, because, at least, some children possess it, whether others
possess it or no ; and which, when it is found in children, is found to
act promptly and keenly, by reason of the paucity of their ideas.
It is an image of the good God, good in Himself, good relatively
to the child, with whatever incompleteness ; an image, before it has
been reflected on, and before it is recognized by him as a notion.
Though he cannot explain or define the word " God," when told
to use it, his acts show that to him it is far more than a word. He
listens, indeed, with wonder and interest to fables or tales ; he has
a dim, shadowy sense of what he hears about persons and matters of
this world ; but he has that within him which actually vibrates,
responds, and gives a deep meaning to the lessons of his first
teachers about the will and the providence of God k."
That this may be accepted as a faithful account of
Newman's early faith is obvious when we compare it
with the Apologia. Dr. Martineau thinks that Newman's
mind lacked immediateness of vision ; how completely
do these years give the lie to that assertion !
The age of fifteen was a crisis in the Cardinal's life.
It was then that the most desired stage was reached.
He became converted, and of the genuineness of that re
turning to God he never subsequently at any time held
any doubts. But although it was not till he had dis
covered, first from parochial experience and secondly
from the influence of Hawkins, that " Calvinism is not
a key to the phenomena of human nature as they occur
in the world," he was fully conscious of the fact that his
k Grammar of Assent, y. 125.

24 Newman and his Detractors
conversion was of the kind which Evangelicals prescribe
as imperative if election is to be secured, In 1821, the
period when he was most ardently evangelical, he drew
up a series of Scripture texts illustrating the various stages
of condemnation, terror, Gospel tidings, apprehension of
Christ, sense of pardon and salvation, joy and peace,
final perseverance ; but he adds in a note : —
" I speak of conversion with great diffidence, being obliged to
adopt the language of books. For my own feelings, as far as I can
remember, were so different from any account I have ever read, that
I dare not go by what may be called an individual case."
Five years later he added : —
"That is, I wrote juxta prcescriptum. In the matter in question,
that is, conversion, my own feelings were not violent, but a returning
to, a renewal of, principles, under the power of the Holy Spirit, which
I had already left, and in a measure acted on when young '."
Conversion was, then, for a Newman a very real event,
although it did not entail any break in the continuity of his
spiritual growth. It took place in 18 16, a year full-fraught
with many an indelible memory to be stored up in the
boy's memory.
"When I was fifteen, (in the autumn of 1816,) a great change
of thought took place in me. I fell under the influences of a definite
Creed, and received into my intellect impressions of dogma, which,
through God's mercy, have never been effaced or obscured. Above
and beyond the conversations and sermons of the excellent man,
long dead, the Rev. Walter Mayers, of Pembroke College, Oxford,
who was the human means of this beginning of divine faith in me,
was the effect of the books which he put into my hands, all of
the school of Calvin. One of the first books I read was a work
of Romaine's ; I neither recollect the title nor the contents, except
one doctrine, which of course I do not include among those which
I believe to have come from a divine source, viz. the doctrine of final
perseverance. I received it at once, and believed that the inward
conversion of which I was conscious, (and of which I still am more
certain than that I have hands and feet,) would last into the next
life, and that I was elected to eternal glory. I have no conscious
ness that this belief had any tendency whatever to lead me to be
1 Letters and Correspondence of J. H. Newman, vol. i. pp. 123-4.
In the Auto-biography, Newman lays great stress on the " formative
influence " of his parochial work at St. Clcnient's.

Newman and his Detractors. 25
careless about pleasing God. I retained it till the age of twenty-one,
when it gradually faded away ; but I believe that it had some in
fluence on my opinions, in the direction of those childish imaginations
which I have already mentioned, viz. in isolating me from the objects
which surrounded me, in confirming me in my mistrust of the reality
of material phenomena, and making me rest in the thought of two
and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and
my Creator™ ; — for while I considered myself predestined to salvation,
my mind did not dwell upon others, as fancying them simply passed
over, not predestined to eternal death. I only thought of the mercy
to myself"." Secondly, " another deep imagination " fell on him in
1816, viz., "that it would be the will of God that I should.
lead a single life." The apprehension of these sort of
duties is very remarkable in Newman, and his obedience
to them is probably the explanation of the remark made
to his servant during his illness on the famous Mediter
ranean journey in 1833, " I shall not die, " I shall not die,"
repeated, " for I have not sinned against light, I have not
sinned against light0." At Tre Fontane he had written : —
But Thou, dear Lord,
Whilst I traced out bright scenes which were to come,
Isaac's pure blessings, and a verdant home,
Did'st spare me and withhold Thy fearful word ;
Willing me year by year, till I am found
A pilgrim pale with Paul's sad girdle bound p."
It is very probable that if instead of being entrusted
with collections of letters, memoranda, and those won
derful fragments of autobiography, Miss Mozley had
been deputed to write a biography, she would have drawn
a sharp contrast between the schoolboy and the under
graduate. The former is very much more of a character
m In Grammar of Assent (p. 178), Newman writes : — " We may be
able to master, at least in part, the course of our past history ; its
turning-points, our hits, and our great mistakes. We may have
a sense of the presence of a Supreme Being, which never has
been dimmed by even a passing shadow, which has inhabited us
ever since we can recollect anything, and which we cannot imagine
our losing. We may be able, for others have been able, so to realize
the precepts and truths of Christianity, as deliberately to surrender
our life, rather than transgress the one or to deny the other." Cf.
" Lead, Kindly Light." " Apologia Pro Vita Sua, pp. 4-5.
0 Ibid., p. 34. » Verses on Various Occasions, p. 133.

26 Newman and his Detractors.
than the latter. The poetical mysticism is ever so much
more attractive than the hard and cold Calvinism to
whose influence John Henry had, with characteristic
docility, submitted himself. The schoolboy is a leader;
he has his own society with a strict disciplina arcani, and
a newspaper full of articles bearing palpable witness to
the mastery of ideas over the power of expressing them.
The undergraduate is a cadaverous person, studying till
his eyesight and finally his health give way. The suc
cessful attempt to gain a fellowship at Oriel — and most
readers of the letters and correspondence will be surprised
by reading the account of what an election at Oriel then
implied — is, however, a proof of the greatness which would
not accept a disappointment of a humiliating nature as
the criterion of his worth. A few years later Newman
was one of the examiners in the schools where he had so
signally failed to distinguish himself.
I do not propose to follow Newman's various doctrinal
wanderings during his stay in Oxford. There were at
this time two men in England who, starting from very
similar conceptions of the immanence of God in the
world, the transience and deceptiveness of things seen,
the sole reality of the inner world, ended as far apart as
men could possibly become. From the pulpit of S.
Mary's, on Michaelmas Day of 183 1, Newman gave
classical expression to the thoughts which had always
haunted him, even as a child 1.
" I do not pretend," he says, " to say that we are told in Scripture
what matter is ; but I affirm that as our souls move our bodies, be
our bodies what they may, so there are Spiritual Intelligences which
move those wonderful and vast portions of the natural world which
seem to be inanimate ; and as the gestures, speech, and expressive
countenances of our friends around us enable us to hold intercourse
with them, so in the motions of universal nature, in the interchange
of day and night, summer and winter, wind and storm, fulfilling His
word, we are reminded of the blessed and dutiful angels. Well then,
on this day's Festival, may we sing the hymn of those three Holy
' " Naturally timid and retiring, over-sensitive, and, though lively
and cheerful, yet not without a tinge of melancholy in his character,
Which sometimes degenerated into mawkishness." Loss and Gain,
p. 6.

Newman and his Det7-actors. 27
Children whom Nebuchadnezzar cast into the fiery furnace. The
angels were bid to change the nature of the flame, and make it
harmless to them ; and they in turn called on all the creatures of
God, on the angels especially, to glorify Him. Though many hun
dred years have passed since that time, and the world now vainly
thinks it knows more than it did, and that it has found the real
causes of the things it sees, still we may say, with grateful and
simple hearts, ' O all ye works of the Lord, O ye angels of the Lord,
0 ye sun and moon, stars of heaven, showers and dew, winds of God,
light and darkness, mountains and hills, green things upon the earth,
bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him for ever.' Thus,
whenever we look abroad, we are reminded of those most gracious
and holy beings, the servants of the Holiest, who deign to minister to
the heirs of salvation. Every breath of air, every ray of light and
heat, every beautiful prospect, is as it were the skirts of their gar
ments, the waving of the robes of those whose faces see God in
Heaven. And I put it to anyone, whether it is not as philosophical
and as full of intellectual enjoyment, to refer the movements of the
natural world to them, as to attempt to explain them by certain
theories of science ; useful as these theories certainly are for par
ticular purposes, and capable (in subordination to that higher view)
of a religious application r."
The same thought was placed before English readers
that very year in the pages of Sartor Resartus. Nature,
Carlyle tells us, is but the "reflex of our own mind's face,"
the phantasy of our dream, or what the Earth Spirit in
Faust names it, the garment of the living God.
In beings flood, in actions storm,
I walk and work, above, beneath,
Work and weave in endless motion !
Birth and death
An Infinite motion.
Tis thus at the roaring loom of time I ply,
And weave for God the garment thou seest Him by.
Where did the same thought lead Newman ? where
did it lead Carlyle ? Froude, in his Reminiscences
of infamous renown, tells us how, on visiting Carlyle
' This is only a quotation from a Sermon, the whole of which
might with propriety have been quoted. The whole point is this,
that we know more about spiritual laws than material. See the
next paragraph but one of the same sermon, "The Powers of
Nature," {Parochial Sermons, vol. ii. pp. 358 — 367), and cf. The
Arians of the Fourth Century, pp. 75, 76.

28 Newman and his Detractors.
a few weeks before his death, they fell to discussing
the grounds of belief. Froude confessed that he " could
only believe in a God which (sic) did something,"
whereat Carlyle, with a cry of pain which indelibly
impressed itself on Froude's memory, cried, " He does
nothing." This was the faith of one who, knowing the
great things of God, was too proud and self-sufficient
to acquiesce in the simple precept of bathing in Jordan.
During his years at Oriel, Newman had come indirectly
through Hurrell Froude under the magic influence of
Keble. Looking back on the events of the Oxford Move
ment we are apt to judge Keble's work superficially. It
is hard to say how deep and far-reaching his influence
was. Unlike Newman, he had come of a family proud of
its non-juror ancestry, and was therefore saved the spiritual
birth-pangs which beset his disciple's career. He was a man
not only of marvellous faith and fine poetic talent, but of
almost unequalled intellectual brilliancy. Coming up at
the age of sixteen to an Exhibition at Corpus, which was
specially dear to him as being Hooker's old College, before
his nineteenth birthday had come round he had won all
the University prizes, save, strange to say, the Newdigate
(in which he secured an honorary mention), taken a double
first, and been elected with the crowning distinction of
a Fellowship at Oriel. To the surprise of all, and the
mortification of some, he made up his mind to accept
a country curacy, and give himself with no reservation to
God's service. Hence, despite Newman's immense rever
ence (of which we catch a glimpse when in describing his
reception at Oriel as a newly-elected Fellow he tells us — ¦
" I bore it till Keble took my hand, and then felt so abashed and
unworthy of the honour done me, that I seemed desirous of quite
sinking into the ground")
— in spite of a feeling amounting almost to awe, Newman,
until 1828, seems to have been more under the influence of
Whately than anyone elses. But the only person who
could nurse the emotion of his seething imagination was
• It is not very generally known that Newman wrote a portion
of Whately's Logic.

Newman and his Detractors. 29
Keble. Consequently the publication of the Christian
Year was a turning-point in Newman's development.
Speaking a priori, I should judge that the work, while
fostering the latent tendencies of thought which were by
slow steps leading him on his road to a deeper Catho
licism, also prolonged his period of doubt and hesita
tion by stirring up in his mind that poetic love which
Keble's verse throws round a liturgy an outsider might
regard as formally cold and perhaps even lifeless. New
man, however, partly in the Apologia, partly in his review
of Keble's Lyra Innocentium, tells us that the two main
intellectual truths which the Christian Year brought home
to him were those which he had previously learned from
Bishop Butler.
" The first of these was what may be called, in a large sense of the
word, the Sacramental System ; that is the doctrine that material
phenomena are both the types and the instruments of real things
unseen — a doctrine which embraces in its fulness, not only what
Anglicans, as well as Catholics, believe about Sacraments properly
so called; but also the article of 'the Communion of Saints;' and
likewise the Mysteries of the Faith."
The second intellectual principle which Newman learned
from Keble was that the difficulty which arises from the
fact that probability is the guide of life, and that a reli
gious man cannot by nature be contented with a ' merely
probable God '
" could be met by ascribing the firmness of assent which we give to
religious doctrine, not to the probabilities which introduced it, but
to the living power of faith and love which accepted it. In illustra
tion, Mr. Keble used to quote the words of the Psalm, ' I will guide
thee with Mine eye.' This is the very difference, he used to say, be
tween slaves and friends or children. Friends do not ask for literal
commands ; but from their knowledge of the speaker, they anticipate
his half-words, and from love of him they anticipate his wishes '."
A good example of Dr. Abbott's method of giving
evidence the lie categorical may be seen in the following
passage : —
" This profound truth, thus simply expressed, demands our close
attention ; for it may explain the gradual divergence and ultimate
* Apologia, pp. 18, 19. Cf. Arians, pp. 75— 79-

30 Newman and his Detractors.
parting between Keble and the man who thought himself at that time
his follower. Newman fancied that he agreed with Keble ; but he did
not and could not, because he had not the same conception of God.
Keble — or Keble as here represented — loved God as a Father,
and was content to remain as a child, trusting and believing ; New
man feared God as a Judge, and was consequently always asking for
literal commands, either direct from God, or indirect through au
thorities appointed by Him. Between two theologians, thus differing,
however unconsciously, in the fundamental principle of Christianity,
there would be no ultimate harmony "."
The two principles Newman learned from Keble have
been strangely travestied by Dr. Fairbairn. It is, he con
tends, flagrantly absurd not to recognise the doctrine of
probability the guide of life, and the supremacy of the
conscience as naturally contradictory. The argument does
not demand very much of our attention for the reason
that it is based on an ignoratio elenchi. Principal Fairbairn
strangely misapprehends the nature of the problem. The
point is this: Newman recognises as clearly as anyone the
impossibility of a religion based on mere probability, and
therefore finds a basis of certitude, not in the logic of
empiricism (to which of course the principle of probability
applies), but in the moral consciousness of which the
intellect is but a co-ordinate agency. The doctrine of the
Grammar of Assent, to which, and not the Apologia,
the appeal ought to be made, is very clear on this point.
Assent is unconditioned by argument, real assent is an
assent given to facts and not inferences about or notions
of facts. Real assent is religion, notional assent is theo
logy apart from any subjective feeling on the part of the in
dividual assenting. The difference is all that lies between
the man who admits that " there is no doubt that there is
a God," and pious Job who cries from the depths —
" Hear, I beseech Thee, and I will speak : I will demand of Thee,
and declare Thou unto me. I have heard of Thee by the hearing
of the ear : but now mine eyes have seen Thee. Wherefore I abhor
myself in dust and ashes.''
The grounds of natural religion with Newman lie-in
the voice of the conscience — the silent authority which
° Philomythus, pp. 57, 58.

Newman and his Detractors. 3 1
Cicero speaks of as the God ruling within us ; the ground
of Christianity in what he calls the "illative sense."
To get a healthy contempt for Dr. Abbott, read that lovely
sermon, " Love the Safeguard of Truth," and there you
will find that Newman's certitude of God's love for us in
Christ is not built on the spiritual cowardice which even
the devils possess, but on that promise of the Good Shep
herd which perhaps more than any other words of the
Lord Jesus has found a crevice wherein to rest in al
most every heart the Gospel has penetrated. " I am the
Good Shepherd, and I know Mine, and Mine know Me.
My sheep hear My voice and know them, and they follow
Me, and I give them everlasting life, and they shall never
perish, and no man shall pluck them out of My hand."
But I have said enough in practical description of
Newman's " Theology of a Religious Imagination,"
and I will leave Dr. Fairbairn's present contention with
the remark that as probability the guide of life is a
metaphysical doctrine and the supremacy of the con
science an ethical, that since supremacy and infallibility
( are not one and the same things, and finally since Newman
did not make probability the basis of his religion, there is
very little point left in the contention that Butler, Keble,
and Newman based an elaborate philosophy on two mu
tually contradictory hypotheses.
{Note in Explanation of Newman's use of the terin Reason.]
[Principal Fairbairn occasionally supports his allegation
by a single quotation, which as a rule appears stripped of
context and footnote, and once was cited from the Apolo
gia, when, as a matter of fact, it is to be found in one of
the sermons. Newman, urges Principal Fairbairn, said
that the reason was a critical and corosive power, hence
it is impossible to deny that he was a sceptic. This used
practically to be all the Principal's case, which has now,
however, received bulky increments.
Newman, it should be noticed, uses the word " reason "
in three different applications. Sometimes he uses it in
its popular application when contrasted with Faith, in

32 Newman and his Detractors.
which case reason practically amounts to mere expert-
ness in logical argument; sometimes he uses it as an
equivalent to a posteriori argument — a faculty of " evi-
dence-mongering ;" sometimes he makes it a synonym for
the " wisdom of the world " as when reason investigates
the subject-matter of religion from a standpoint radically
wrong. These distinctions ought always to be borne in
mind. The following passages from the University Ser
mons seem to give a better idea of Newman's philosophy
than can be found anywhere else : —
" Now in attempting to investigate what are the distinct offices of
faith and reason in religious matters, and the relation of the one to
the other, I observe that though it be undeniable that reason has a
power of analysis and criticism in all opinions and conduct, and
nothing is true or right but what may be justified, and in a certain
sense proved by it ; and unless the doctrines received by faith are
approvable by reason, they have no claim to be regarded as true; it
does not therefore follow that faith is actually grounded on reason in
the believing mind itself; unless, indeed, to take a parallel case, a
judge can be called the origin as well as the justifier of the innocence
or truth of those which are brought before him. A judge does not
make men honest, but acquits and vindicates them ; in like manner
reason need not be the origin of faith, as faith exists in the very
persons believing, though it does testify and verify it. This, then,
is the one confusion, which must be cleared up in the question — the
assumption that reason must be the inward principle of action in
religious enquiries or conduct in the case of this or that individual,
because, like a spectator, it acknowledges and concurs in what goes
on — the mistake of a critical for a creative. This distinction," he
continues in words which throw light on Fairbaim's argument refer
red to in the text of my essay, " we cannot fail to recognise as true
in itself, and applicable to the matter in hand. It is what we all
admit at once as regards the principle of the conscience. No one
will say that conscience is against reason, or that its dictates cannot
be thrown into an argumentative form ; yet who will, therefore, main
tain that it is not an original principle, but must depend, before it
acts, upon some previous processes of the reason ? Reason analyses
the grounds and motives of action ; a reason is an analysis, but is
not the motion itself. As, then, conscience is a simple element in
our nature, yet its operations admit of being surveyed and scrutinised
by reason ; so may faith be cognisable, and its acts be justfied, by
reason, without being in matter of fact dependent upon it ; and as we
reprobate, under the name of Utilitarianism, the substitution of reason
for conscience, so perchance it is a parallel error to teach that a pro-

Newman and his Detractors. 33
cess of reason is the sine qua non for true religious faith. When the
Gospel is said to require a rational faith, this need not need more
than that faith is accordant to right reason in the abstract, not that it
results from it in the particular case." — University Sermons, New
Edition, pp. 182-4.
For a refutation of the charge that Newman made
assent irrational, cf. The Grammar of Assent, p. 81, et
passim. Newman accounts for the fact that faith seems
to be content with prima facie weak proofs, by the doctrine
of the illative sense, which has been beautifully, and, per
haps, more clearly explained by Dean Paget, in his Facul
ties for Belief and Unbelief. In short, nobody hated the
habit of "regarding all truth as a theory" (cf. Arians
of the Fourth Century, p. 200) more sincerely than John
Henry Newman.
But while it is perfectly true that Newman cannot with
justice be regarded as a sceptic in the sense which his
detractors would apply that expression, yet he did hold
that there were mysteries connected with a devout accept-
tance of the Christian Faith which the human reason will
never subdue. He thus, as in The Arians, p. 152, and The
Grammar of Assent, p. 51, states antinomies of thought,
which were probably suggested to him by Origen (cf.
Origen de Principiis, 1, 2, § 10). But, as he says —
" Strictly speaking, the dogma of the Holy Trinity, as a complex
whole or mystery, is not the form or object of religious apprehension
and assent ; but as it is a number of propositions, taken one by one."
A mystery is the combination of two or more propo
sitions taken in themselves intelligible but relatively to
human intellect incompatible. In this general sense
(which the detractors cannot, without being guilty of
Stating pointless truisms, have intended their criticisms to
be taken) we are all necessarily sceptics, Principal Fair
bairn himself included *.]
1 The paragraphs in brackets formed no part of the original text.
In addition to the above-mentioned references, cf. the Sermon
on " The Mysteries of Nature and of Grace," in Discourses to Mixed
Congregations, and "The Genesis of Error" in Contemp. Review,
Oct. 1885; and "Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training"
in Sermons on Various Occasions. D

34 Newman and his Detractors.
In 1828 Newman was appointed Vicar of S. Mary's, and
in his own words came out of his shell and remained out
of it till 1841. If I allowed my pen the latitude it has
more than once in the writing of the paper attempted to
steal, I should not be able to bring my essay to the
speedy close which my conscience warns me ought to be
at hand. But when you haye traced the formation of a
permanent idea in a mind like Newman's, you have im
plicitly traced his whole career. He is, after all, a better
illustration of the theory of development than even the
early ages of Christianity. In the Apologia and the Gram
mar he is always reiterating the truth that any alterations
in his views in reality left great permanent truths unaltered,
though clad in a new form. His secession in '45 was an
infinitely less radical change than the slow and gradual
revolution which had deposed Calvinism to enshrine
Anglicanism. In the Idea of a University he luminously
remarks that the very word God involves a theology ; and
it is on this truth I have based my description of his
mindy. The God the Calvinist prates about is a sulky
cynic who watches with superb disdain the victims whom
He has called into existence to destroy by a method
which paradoxically can never be completed. Newman
had never really believed in such a fiction. His early years
had been a time of isolation. God loved him, and that
was enough, though it was terrible to think that others
' Ina paper read to the Merton College Essay Society, I tried
to treat Newman's life by describing first his conception of God,
and then the Religious system in which that conception clothed
itself ; and then the attempt to read that system into the Anglican
formularies, and failing that the secession to Rome. God, Religion,
Church are three stages of religious life. " Our naked feelings make
haste to clothe themselves in propositions which lie at hand among
our store of opinions." (George Eliot, Romola, Chap, xliv.) Cf,
Taine's Law of Mutual Dependence formulated in the Introduction
to his History of English Literature. See especially pp. 143-6 of
Newman's Arians of the Fourth Century. Herbert Spencer's at
tempt to penetrate the latent truth of all religions by cancelling their
mutual contradictions, is a contradiction of the true evolutionary
theory of development, How much 'scientific' truth would escape
if such a process were tried on the rival text-books ?

Newman and his Detractors. 35
less fortunate than he must suffer. In time he comes to
see the grander, the whole truth of Catholicity. Sic Deus
delexit mundum. God is not a mere cynical observer, He
is what his heart, his illative sense told him all along,
the Supreme love. And this is not all. Love must manifest
itself, it cannot stand by a mere idler. No one can believe
in a God who does nothing. Here Newman's natural love
for the mystic came in. What more easy to believe than
that the vast world as we see it is a sacrament, an out
ward and visible sign of inward and visible verities ?
Believe this and positive philosophies and encyclopaedic
systems and attourney logic cease to bind man. Pro
bability is no longer doubt.
" The reality of conversion," exclaims Newman, " as cutting at the
root of doubt, a chain between God and the soul, that is with every
link complete ; I know I am right. How do you know it ? I know
I know." Newman's soul went out for sacramental refreshment,
and for a time he succeeded in persuading himself that he
could find it in the National Church. There sure enough
in her liturgy, in her great Divines, Catholicism stood in
all its beauty. But the English Church had fallen on
evil times. Its clergy were either ignorant, worldly, and
proud — a respectable or political caste, or else simple,
ill-trained, and, as Dean Church puts it, of a quietly
worldly disposition. Its teaching was misunderstood,
its sacraments mal-administered, the decency and order
of the sanctuary neglected, the very edifices allowed to
crumble into something little better than elaborately con
structed outhouses. The Liberal party, flushed from
their Reform Bill triumph, had determined to follow up
their victory by an attack on Toryism in its very cita
del, and Lord Grey cautioned the bishops to get their
house in order. Clearly then the time had come for
action — in Newman's words, " to stir up the gift that
was in us, and betake ourselves to our true mother."
This is the storm and stress period of Newman's life.
The whole depths of the man were mightily stirred. He
goes abroad for the first time, sick and irritated, de-
D 2

$5 Newman and his Detractors.
termined to see nothing but the light guiding him now
o'er moor and fen and crag and torrent : the night is
dark, and he is far from home.
" England was in my thoughts solely, and the news from England
came rarely and imperfectly. The Bill for the Suppression of the
Irish Sees was in progress, and filled my mind. I had fierce
thoughts against the Liberals.
" It was the success of the Liberal cause which fretted me in
wardly. I became fierce against its instruments and its manifesta
tions. A French vessel was at Algiers ; I would not even look
at the tricolour. On my return, though forced to stop twenty-four
hours at Paris, I kept indoors the whole time, and all that I saw
of that beautiful city was what I saw from the Diligence. The
Bishop of London had already sounded me as to my filling one of
the Whitehall preacherships, which he had just then put on a new
footing ; but I was indignant at the line which he was taking, and
from my Steamer I had sent home a letter declining the appoint
ment by anticipation, should it be offered to me. At this time I was
specially annoyed with Dr. Arnold, though it did not last into later
years. Some one, I think, asked, in conversation at Rome, whether
a certain interpretation of Scripture was Christian ? it was answered
that Dr. Arnold took it ; I interposed, ' But is he a Christian ? '
The subject went out of my head at once ; when afterwards I was
taxed with it, I could say no more in explanation, than (what
I believe was the fact) that I must have had in mind some free views
of Dr. Arnold about the Old Testament : — I thought I must have
meant, ' Arnold answers for the interpretation,-but who is to answer
for Arnold ? ' It was at Rome, too, that we began the Lyra Apos-
tolica which appeared monthly in the British Magazine The motto
shows the feeling of both Froude and myself at the time: we
borrowed from M. Bunsen a Homer, and Froude chose the words
in which Achilles, on returning to the battle, says, ' You shall know
the difference, now that I am back again.'
" Especially when I was left by myself the thought came upon me
that deliverance is wrought, not by the many but by the few, not
by bodies but by persons. Now it was, I think, that I repeated
to myself the words, which had ever been dear to me from my
school-days, 'Exoriare aliquis V — now too, that Southey's beautiful
poem of Thalaba, for which I had an immense liking, came forcibly
to my mind. I began to think that I had a mission. There are
sentences of my letters to my friends to this effect, if they are not
destroyed. When we took leave of Monsignor Wiseman, he had
courteously expressed a wish that we might make a second visit
to Rome ; I said with great gravity, ' We have a work (o do in
England.' I went down at once to Sicily, and the presentiment

Newman and his Detractors. 37
grew stronger. I struck into the middle of the island, and fell
ill of a fever at Leonforte. My servant thought that I was dying,
and begged for my last directions. I gave them, as he wished ;
but I said, ' I shall not die.' I repeated, ' I shall not die, for I have
not sinned against light, I have not sinned against light.' I never
hav< been able quite to make out what I meant.
" I got to Castro-Giovanni, and was laid up there for nearly three
weeks. Towards the end of May I left for Palermo, taking three
days for the journey. Before starting from my inn in the morning of
May 26th or 27th, I sat down on my bed, and began to sob violently.
My servant, who had acted as my nurse, asked what ailed me.
I could only answer him, ' I have a work to do in England.'
" I was aching to get home ; yet for want of a vessel I was kept at
Palermo for three weeks. I began to visit the Churches, and they
calmed my impatience, though I did not attend any services. I knew
nothing of the Presence of the Blessed Sacrament there. At last
I got off in an orange boat, bound for Marseilles. Then it was that
I wrote the lines, ' Lead, kindly light,' which have since become well
known. We were becalmed a whole week in the Straits of Bonifacio.
I was writing verses the whole time of my passage. At length I got
to Marseilles, and set off for England. The fatigue of travelling
was too much for me, and I was laid up for several days at Lyons.
At last I got off again, and did not stop night or day, (except a com
pulsory delay at Paris,) till I reached England, and my mother's
house. My brother had arrived from Persia only a few hours before."
The Sunday following his return, July 14, 1833, Keble
preached the Assize Sermon on National Apostacy, and
the Oxford Movement had begun. All Newman's work
at this great epoch in the history of the Church is marked
by a display of temper, which it is hard to blame or
unreservedly admire. The rebuke he in after times ad
ministered to the temerity of the younger men in the
Infallibilist party is pertinent to his own party at this
date. " There are those among us, as it must be confessed, who for years
past have conducted themselves as if no responsibility attached
to wild words, and over-bearing deeds ; who have stated truths in
the most paradoxical form, and stretched principles till they were
close upon snapping; and who at length, having done their best
to set the house upon fire, leave to others to put out the flame z."
His conduct at this time he describes as infused with
* A Letter Addressed to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk, on Oc
casion of Mr. Gladstones Recent Expostulation, p. 2.

38 Newman and his Detractors.
a mixture of fierceness and sport. He callously led
his opponents into the mire, and left them there. He
confesses all this himself: —
"This absolute confidence in my cause, which led me to neg
ligence or wantonness, also laid me open, not unfairly, to the opposite
charge of fierceness in certain steps which I took, or words which
I published. In the Lyra Apostolica, I have said that before
learning to love, we must 'learn to hate;' though I had explained
my words by adding 'hatred of sin.' In one of my first Sermons
I said, ' I do not shrink from uttering my firm conviction that it
would be a gain to the country were it vastly more superstitious,
more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion than at
present it shows itself to be.' I added, of course, that it would
be an absurdity to suppose such tempers of mind desirable in
themselves. The corrector of the press bore these strong epithets
till he got to ' more fierce,' and then he put in the margin a query.
In the very first page of the first Tract, I said of the Bishops, that,
'black event though it would be for the country, yet we could not
wish them a more blessed termination of their course, than the
spoiling of their goods and martyrdom.' In consequence of a pas
sage in my work upon the Arian History™, a Northern dignitary
wrote to accuse me of wishing to re-establish the blood and torture
of the Inquisition. Contrasting heretics and heresiarchs, I had said,
' The latter should meet with no mercy : he assumes the office of the
Tempter ; and, so far forth as his error goes, must be dealt with
by the competent authority, as if he were embodied evil. To spare
him is a/ false and dangerous pity. It is to endanger the souls of
thousands, and it is uncharitable towards himself.' I cannot deny
that this is a very fierce passage ; but Arius was banished, not
burned ; and it is only fair to myself to say that neither at this,
nor any other time of my life, not even when I was fiercest, could
I have even cut off a Puritan's ears, and I think the sight of
a Spanish auto-da-fi would have been the death of me. Again, when
one of my friends, of liberal and evangelical opinions, wrote to
expostulate with me on the course I was taking, I said that we
would ride over him and his, as Othniel prevailed over Chushan-
rishathaim, king of Mesopotamia. Again, I would have no dealings
with my brother, and I put my conduct upon a syllogism. I said,
' S. Paul bids us avoid those who cause divisions ; you cause divisions :
therefore I must avoid you.' I dissuaded a lady from attending
the marriage of a sister who had seceded from the Anglican Church.
No wonder that Blanco White, who had known me under such
different circumstances, now hearing the general course that I was
taking, was amazed at the change which he recognized in me "."
• Apologia, pp. 34-5.

Newman and his Detractors. 39
The conflict, however, had loosed him from his moorings.
He believed firmly and devoutly in the apostolic claims
of his National Church, but what was her basis apart from
the State ? That was the question which the liberal
attack had forced upon him, and to which he made
confident reply that the Church of England is a via
media between the extremes of Papist and Puritan. Even
at the time he seems to have been by no means certain
of the success of his theory."
"A religious principle or idea, however true, before it is found
in a substantive form, is but a theory ; and since many theories
are not more than theories, and do not admit of being carried
into effect, it is exposed to the suspicion of being one of these,
and of having no existence out of books. The proof cf reality
in a doctrine is its holding together when actually attempted.
Practical men are naturally prejudiced against what is new, on this
ground if on no other, that it has not had the opportunity of satisfying
this test. Christianity would appear at first a mere literature, or
philosophy, or mysticism, like the Pythagorean rule or Phrygian
worship ; nor till it was tried, could the coherence of its parts be
ascertained. Now the class of doctrines in question as yet labours
under the same difficulty. Indeed, they are in one sense as entirely
new as Christianity when first preached ; for though they profess
merely to be that foundation on which it originally spread, yet as far
as they represent a Via Media, that is, are related to extremes which
did not then exist, and do exist now, they appear unreal, for a double
reason, having no exact counterpart in early timesb, and being super
seded now by actually existing systems. 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 ; it is known, not positively but negatively, in its differences
from the rival creeds, not in its own properties ; and can only be
described as a third system, neither the one nor the other, but with
something of each, cutting between them, and, as if with a critical
fastidiousness, trifling with them both, and boasting to be nearer
Antiquity than either.
" What is this but to fancy a road over mountains and rivers, which
h [" This is what the Author thought, before to his confusion and
distress he found in early history a veritable Via Media in both
the Semi-Arian and the Monophysite parties, and they, as being
heretical, broke his attachment to middle paths." Vid. Difficulties
of Angl., Lect. xii.]

40 Newman and his Detractors.
has never been cut ? 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. They accuse us of
tendering no proof to show that our view is not self-contradictory,
and if set in motion, would not fall to pieces, or start off in different
directions at once. Learned divines, they say, may have propounded
it, as they have ; controversialists may have used it to advantage
when supported by the civil sword against Papists or Puritans ; but,
whatever its merits, still, when left to itself, to use a familiar term,
it may not ' work.' And the very circumstance that it has been
propounded for centuries by great names, and not yet reduced to
practice as a system, is alleged as an additional presumption against
its feasibility. To take for instance the subject of Private Judgment;
our theory here is neither Protestant nor Roman ; and has never
been duly realized. Our opponents ask, What is it ? Is it more
than a set of words and phrases, of exceptions and limitations
made for each successive emergency, of principles which contradict
each other c ? "
The theory too also found little favour with the rank
and file of the Tractarians3, and their sympathisers. At
the most it was accepted provisionally, and with Newman's
secession it was discarded. It then became necessary for
his friends to choose between him and the English Church,
" and," writes Dean Church, " the choice was made by those who
did not follow him, on a principle little honoured or believed
in at the time on either side, Roman or Protestant : but the
principle which in the long run restored hope and energy to
a cause which was supposed to be lost. It was not the revival of
the old Via Media ; it was not the assertion of the superiority of the
English Church ; it was not a return to the old-fashioned and un
generous methods of controversy with Rome — one-sided in all cases,
ignorant, coarse, unchristian in many ; it was not the proposal
of a new theory of the Church — its functions, authority, and teaching,
a counter-ideal to Mr. Ward's imposing Ideal. It was the resolute,
serious appeal from brilliant logic, and keen sarcasm, and pathetic
and impressive eloquence, to reality, and experience, as well as
c The Via Media of the Anglican Church, Introduction, § 12.
d It was, writes Mr. Hutton, "a gallant enterprise, but one that
for all practical purposes failed. The road was never made, though
a tract was marked out over mountains and rivers, and fords were
found across the rivers, practicable for a few adventurous men, and
which are used by a certain number of stragglers even to the present
day." — Card. Newman, p. 75.

Newman and his Detractors. 41
history, as to the positive and substantial characteristics of the
traditional and actual existing English Church, shown not on paper
but in work ; and in spite of contradictory appearances and incon
sistent elements ; and along with this, an attempt to put in a fair
and just light the comparative excellences and defects of other parts
of Christendom, excellences to be ungrudgingly admitted but not
to be allowed to bar the recognition of facts. The English Church
was after all worth living in and fighting for as any other ; it was
not only in England that light and dark, in teaching and in life,
were largely intermingled, and the intermixture had to be largely
allowed for. We had our Sparta, a noble, if a rough and in
complete one ; patiently to do our best for it, for it was better
than leaving it to its fate, in obedience to signs and reasonings
which the heat of strife might well make delusive. It was our
hopeful token that boasting had to be put away from us for
a long time to come. In these days of stress and sorrow were laid the
beginnings of a school, whose main purpose was to see things as they
are ; which learned by experience to distrust unqualified admiration and
unqualified disparagement ; not afraid to honour all that is great
and beneficent in Rome, not afraid with English frankness to criticise
freely at home ; but not to be won over, in one case by good things,
to condone and accept bad things, and not deterrent in the other
from service, from love, from self-sacrifice, by the presence of much
to regret and resist'."
There was then throughout the Oxford Movement
a suspicion lurking in Newman's mind as to the untenable-
ness of the Anglican position his imagination had defined.
We have seen it in his work in the Via Media ; we see it
in Tract LXXXV., where in dealing with Scripture as the
basis of Ecclesiastical Polity he says : —
" We have a choice of three conclusions. Either there is no defi
nite religious information given us by Christianity at all, or it is given
in Scripture in an indirect way, and covert way, or indeed it is
given, but not in Scripture. The first is the Latitudinarian view
which has gained ground in this day; the second is our own Anglican
ground, the third is the ground of the Roman Church. If then men
will not content themselves with merely probable (what we may be
disposed to call) insufficient proof s of matters of faith and worship, we
must be either Latitudinarians or Roman Catholics '."
' Dean Church, The Oxford Movement, pp. 346-7. Cf. Dean
Church's Essay on Bp. Andrewes in Masters of English Theology.
Cf. Lecky, England in Eighteenth Century, vol. iii. p. 210. '
' Newman, Discussions and Arguments, p. 1 27, or Tracts for Times,
vol. v., Tract lxxxv. p. 15.

42 Newman and his Detractors.
It will be observed that a Via Media supplies no cri
terion for deciding what is and what is not an extreme,
and it must further be noticed that Newman in reality
never worked the compromise but, like most great Angli
cans, fell back on Antiquity, and what did he find there,
but what, as the passage I have just quoted shows, only
hints and suggestion of the systematic theology of later
times ? The History of the Arians, with its remarkable
chapter on creed making, displays the principle of the
Economy and Disciplina Arcani, and affords a sort of fur
ther illustration of the theory of development. Alas for his
Anglicanism, Newman had discovered that Antiquity, like
the Bible, gives nothing more than " insufficient proofs
of matters of faith and worship." It is possible that the
ingenuity of the " Essay on Development of Doctrine "
might have been worked in the Anglican interests, but the
time had come when the Bishops gave Newman to under
stand that his Sacramentalism could no longer find scope
in the English Church, and it is to their action and that
of the University that the secessions of the next few years
are due.
I have summed up, as far as ability and pressure of
time have allowed me, the main events of Newman's
Anglican career, and here I may stop the record. Newman
entered the Roman Community with a formed mind.
Looking back on the career, it seems to me that the
mother's loving anticipation was thoroughly confirmed.
" I feel great comfort in the conviction that you will
always act to the best of your knowledge."
What Newman did for the English Church, what he
did for the Roman, are questions I cannot discuss in this
place. But what he has done for the nation ought not to
pass unmentioned. It fell to his lot to bring two im
portant sections of the English nation to know and respect
each other : he conferred on both the inestimable gift
* As Dr. Salmon shows, the Theory of Development apart from
the Infallibilist Theory which can stand or fall by itself, really works
in favour of Latitudinarianism. Cf. Infallibility of the Church,
Lect. ii.

Newman and his Detractors. 43
of a wonderfully pure example of self-sacrifice to the cause
of truth.
For some years previous to his death, John Henry
Cardinal Newman was for most Englishmen a subject for
poetic reverence. The old man who had done so much
to make the English Church what she is, to bring the
ignorant, prejudiced John Bull to see that his Papist
neighbour is not necessarily a traitor to the country, who
uncomplainingly had borne so much undeserved contumely
and persecution, who, despite the unpopularity of his opi
nions, was always held vir pietate gravis, the glamour of his
ecclesiastical rank, the fascination of his simple life spent
as it was in the homes of English thought and English
civic life, the music of his prose, the fervour of his verse,
nay, perhaps even the portrait of that wonderful face — all
these went to make the English folk delight to reverence
its lately-discovered hero. But after all said and done, the
honour the world is willing to bestow on those whom it
considers great is seldom very rationally accorded, and it is
only too apparent that in Newman's case the English
people were decidedly more influenced by sentiment than
by a reasonable appreciation of his merits. But " to pure
eyes and Christian hearts" Newman's life will not be
without its lesson and encouragement, for it is the his
tory of one whose constant prayer is " that in all things
he may know God's will, and at all times be ready to
fulfil it\"
b The farewell sermon at Littlemore — " The Parting of Friends,"
in Sermons on Subjects of the Day.

(Reprinted from The Lyceum for July, 1891.)

CARLYLE, in his essay on Diderot, tells us that —
"Above all, that faint possible theism, which now forms our
common English creed, cannot too soon be swept out of the world.
What," he asks, " what is the nature of that individual, who, with
hysterical violence, theoretically asserts a God, perhaps a revealed
symbol and worship of God ; and for the rest, in thought, word,
and conduct, meet with him where you will, is found living as if
his theory were some polite figure of speech, and his theoretical
God a mere distant simulacrum, with whom he, for his part, has
nothing further to do ? Fool ! The Eternal is no simulacrum ; God
is not only there, but here or nowhere, in that life-breath of thine)
in that act and thought of thine — and thou wert wise to look to it."
In this passage we have an expression of one of the
best feelings which mark the. thought of the first half of
this century— the sense of disproportion. Everywhere
men were beginning to perceive that their institutions
were ludicrously inadequate to the needs they professed
to supply, that the conduct of the world was a wretched
satire on its professed principles, that there could be no
real advancement of humanity unless these shams were
done away with, and the world restored to sincerity and
truth. And nowhere was this desire more keenly felt
than in the religious world. Men could not help asking
themselves whether their talk, of a Catholic Church was
not but a gloomy satire when applied to the status quo
of the English Establishment, and the process of testing
went behind the artificial world of national institutions
* Philomythus : An Antidote against Credulity. A Discussion of
Cardinal Newman's Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles. By Edwin
A. Abbott, D.D. (Macmillan.)
Newmanianism : A Preface to Philomythus. By Edwin A. Abbott,
D.D. (Macmillan.)

Dr. Edwin Abbotts Philomythus. 45
back to the very belief which slumbered on in the minds
of the respectable.
" Current phrases, the keynotes of many a sermon," writes Dean
Church, "were fearlessly taken to pieces. Men were challenged to
examine the meaning of their words. They were cautioned, or
ridiculed, as the case might be, on the score of ' confusion of thought'
and ' inaccuracy of mind ; ' they were convicted of great logical sins,
ignoratio elenchi or 2indistributed middle terms; and bold theories
began to make their appearance about religious principles and
teaching, which did not easily accommodate themselves to popular
conceptions11." It is not, then, hard to see why, at this period of testing,
men of deep religious instincts should exhibit feelings
similar to those which underly the passage quoted at the
head of our article, and that the pious, like Keble and
Newman, should question the value of devotion to a Deity
whose existence was but probable. On this score the
Oxford Tractarians and the author of Sartor Resartus
were at one.
The feeling of disproportion which we have just de
scribed had the effect of compelling men to compare their
conduct with the ideals they professed, and to ask them
selves whether the Religion whose precepts they implicitly
followed was really the Religion of Christ ? The answers
were too ludicrously apparent to those who did not chose
to play the sophist with their conscience. The stern
ethical teaching, the hard doctrinal sayings of Christ
were not in tone with the " polished ungodliness " of the
modern re'gime. In a very remarkable sermon the dis
crepancy was pointed out by John Henry Newman : —
" In every age of Christianity since it was first preached, there has
been what may be called a religion of the world, which so far imitates
the one religion as to deceive the unstable and unwary."
b The Oxford Movement, p. 18. Cf. Mark Pattison's Memoirs,
pp. 78 — 81 ; Palmer's Narrative of Events connected with The
Tracts for The Times, pp. 11, 12, and W. G. Ward and the Oxford
Movement, Chapter Hi., and an article of Mr. Pattison's in vol. i.
No. 1 of Mind. A good descripfion of the internal condition of
the Church at the beginning of the century may be found in the
Rev. A. H. Hore's excellent History of the Church of England
(Parker and Co.).

46 Dr. Edwin Abbott's Philomythus.
In the early ages of Christianity, religion wore too
exclusively its darker side; Christians tended to wrap
themselves up in the "consuming fire," and forget the
infinity of the divine Love0. But now, in these latter
days, nous avons change- tout cela. Our society virtues
have become, as Burke warned us, but mere abstinences
from unpopular vices ; we abstain from immorality because
not to do so would offend the sensibility of the cultured
fin de siecle: adultery and dirty boots are improprieties,
differing in degree a little — in kind not a whit. The old
idea of sin is repudiated as superstitious because it in
volves such antique (the epithet is sufficiently damning)
notions as the responsibility of the individual, or a judg
ment to come.
It was against this lukewarmness, this contentment with
the mere external duties of religion, and the neglect of the
cultivation of that spirit of 'holy fear,' that Newman's
voice rose in heated protest. As we read Newman's
University and Parochial Sermons we become gradually
more and more conscious of the man's instinctive feeling
of the awful nearness and reality of the Divine Presence
and Will. His words are not those of a writer paying
scrupulous obedience to the laws of literary art, or of
a theologian culling his curatives from a more or less
definite supply of dogmas, but rather they are the ex
pressions of thoughts lying too deep for words — thoughts
which can only find root in hearts attuned to the heart
of the preacher. "Cor ad cor loquitur." The same
impression which modern readers carry away from New
man's volumes is the one which penetrated those who
heard the original delivery of the sermons.
" He always began," writes Sir F. Doyle in his Reminiscences,
" as if he had determined to set forth his idea of the truth in the
plainest and simplest language — language, as men say, ' intelligible
to the meanest understanding.' But his ardent zeal and fine poetical
imagination were not thus to be controlled. As I hung upon his
words, it seemed to me as if I could trace behind his will, and press
ing, so to speak, against it, a rush of thoughts and feelings which he
c See Parochial Sermons, vol. i., " Religion of the Day."

Dr. Edwin Abbotts Philomythus. 47
kept struggling to hold back ; but in the end they were generally too
strong for him, and poured themselves out in a torrent of eloquence
all the more impetuous from having been so long repressed. The
effect of these outbursts was irresistible, and carried his hearers
beyond themselves at once. Even when his efforts of self-restraint
were more successful, those very efforts gave a life and colour to his
style which riveted the attention of all within the reach of voice."
To understand the writings of Cardinal Newman, the
first condition is a knowledge not only of the man, but
of the influence by which he was actuated. Dr. Abbott,
in his recent attack, has informed us that this influence
was one of fear : —
" In Newman's writings," he tells us, "there are ample indications
that Fear unduly predominated, that in his estimation Fear was not
only, as he said it ought to be, ' the predominant grace in the be
ginning of Christian life,' but prominent, whether 'grace or not,'
to the end of his Anglican career. The Love of God, as it is
described in the New Testament, appears to have been either absent
or quite latent on him ; and he himself spoke of love as a ' Pre
servative Addition' to feard — a kind of afterthought in the scheme of
Christian religion. Nor was the absence of Love compensated by
any profound trust in God's infinite justice and righteousness."
After some more imaginative writing of a similar type,
Dr. Abbott remarks : —
" Thus the Image of God became for him the image not of a Father,
not even of a just Judge, but of a dread inspiring Holiness ; a
dazzling Splendour dark with the excess of light ; practically a dark
ness; before which he could but prostrate himself in abject awe,
prepared for whatever lightnings and thunderbolts might come forth,
and prepared to call them 'just.'"
If not for other reasons, Dr. Abbott's " Philomythus " is
worthy of attention, albeit a sorrowful one, since the
work shows how great is the gulf fixed between the Saint
and the Logician. We do not propose to follow the
example of our admirable contemporary, The Spectator,
and give an elaborate criticism of " Philomythus," since
we have little confidence in the method of attacking
doctrinal details, apart from the theism of which they are
d Mr. Hutton thinks that " it degrades love to speak of it as a mere
'preservative addition to a Gospel of fear.'" (Card. Newman,
p. 184.) The point is that Newman said that it was a "preservative
addition," but not a "mere preservative addition." The Godhead
may be said to be a preservative to humility.

48 Dr. Edwin Abbotts Philomythus.
but modes of expression. A belief in God involves a
theology e, and the character of the theology must be in
tone with the belief. If, for instance, we believe in a
miracle-working God, we shall not stumble at scriptural
or ecclesiastical miracles. Attourney logic, as Carlyle
christened it, knows of no miracles : its watchword is
science without wonder. Dr. Abbott has not as yet be
come wholly a victim to logic, but the author of Robert
Elsmere has claimed his " Antidote to Superstition " as an
earnest of the ultimate secession of the broad-church or
liberal school of theologians to the sublimated positivism f,
which is, in fact, the logical outcome of that school, and
over which the spirit of Mathew Arnold reigns supreme.
The question we have set ourselves is, then, the question
— What was the attitude of Newman to his God ? was it
the one which Dr. Abbott has so painfully described, of
a cowardice, a fear unguarded by love?
Perhaps the most noticeable fact in the lives of the
saints is the progress through which they all seem mostly
to have passed — the progress from Fear to Love. It is
noticeable, moreover, that Love, even when it is almost
perfected, does not so much cast out Fear as balance it,
and assign to it its rightful place. There is, indeed, a fear,
of which it has been said that, " There is no Fear in Love ;
and that Perfect Love casteth out fear," but this is not the
natural Fear of the creature when the presence of the
Creator and Redeemer is realized, but the fear which
arises from sin persisted in, the fear which the Devils
recognise. Far different is the former Fear, the dread
which St. Paul (pace Dr. Abbott) has enjoined as the
unvarying accompaniment of the working out of our
salvation ; for this fear has no existence apart from the
love which cherishes it, of which it is a condition. The
souls which have been nearest to God, as St. Augustine,
and St. Thomas, and even the poor tinker of Elstow, have
so notably shown us, experience a shrinking as soon as
• See above, p. 25.
* Vide Mrs. Humphrey Ward in Nineteenth Century for May, 1891.
Cf. the passage quoted from Mark Pattison's contribution to Essays
and Reviews, on p. 18, supra.

Dri Edwin Abbotts Philomythus. 49
the self-consciousness of the relation is realized. Over
the face of the seer who has seen the Beatific Vision must
pass the veil of fear : " Woe is me, for I am undone :
because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the
midst of a people of unclean lips ; for mine eyes have
seen the King, the Lord of Hosts."
Now what was Newman, what was his message, to whom
was it delivered, are the questions which must be answered
before the rationality of his fear can be accounted for.
The age to which he spoke we have described ; the
message has been hinted at ; but who was Newman ?
The story of Newman's childhood is too well known
to need a detailed account in this article. It is, after
all, only the most salient point in his nature with which
we are at present concerned, and that is his firm realization
of the immediateness of the Divine Presence. At the age
of fifteen he became acquainted with a work of Romaine's,
which taught the doctrine of final preservation — a doctrine
which a few years later he " denied and abjured," but the
work had, nevertheless, a permanent influence, viz. :
"In isolating me from the objects which surrounded me, in confirm
ing me in my mistrust of the reality of material phenomena, and
making me rest in the thought of two, and only two, absolute and lu
minously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator!'
In 1823 he learned from Butler's Analogy that
" The very idea of an analogy between the separate works of God
leads to the conclusion that the system which is of less importance
is economically or sacramentally connected with the more momentous
system *, and of this conclusion the theory, to which I was inclined
as a boy, viz., the unreality of material phenomena, is an ultimate
resolution.'' While he was thus becoming daily more and more con
fident that there was no real world but the ideal, he pro
portionately became more and more confident of the fact
of a Divine Guidance.
8 Newman held that we really know more about the spirit world
than we do about the brute creation. Mr. Hutton in his Leaders
in English Religious Thought gives a marvellous quotation to this
effect. E

SO Dr. Edwin Abbotts Philomythus.
" I am obliged to mention, though I do it with great reluctance,
another deep imagination, which at this time, the autumn of 1816,
took possession of me — that there can be no mistake about the
fact, viz. : that it would be the will of God that I should live a single
life." This instinct, he tells us, was "strengthened by my
feeling of separation from the visible world, of which I
have spoken above."
In 1827, Keble, after much hesitation, published his
lovely Christian Year, and "woke up in the hearts of
thousands a new music, the music of a school long un
known in England." Dean Church, in his work on " The
Oxford Movement," has shown how Keble's influence first
worked on Newman through Hurrell Froude, and a
glimpse at the Apologia will serve to show us that there
is very little in Newman's philosophy of religion which
is not also to be found in Keble's. Referring to the
Christian Year, Newman writes :
" Nor can I pretend to analyse in my own instance the effect of
religious teaching so deep, so pure, so beautiful. I have never till
now tried to do so ; yet I think I am not wrong in saying, that the
two main intellectual truths which it brought home to me were the
same two which I had learned from Butler, though recast in the
creative mind of my new master. The first of these was what may
be called in a large sense of the word, the Sacramental System; that
is the doctrine that material phenomena are both the types and the
instruments of real things unseen — a doctrine which embraces in its
fulness, not only what Anglicans, as well as Catholics, believe
about Sacraments properly so called ; but also the article of ' the
Communion of Saints ; ' and likewise the Mysteries of the Faithh."
The second intellectual principle which Newman learned
from Keble, was that the difficulty, which arises from the
fact that probability is the guide of life, and that a religious
man cannot by nature be contented with a " merely pro
bable God " — a difficulty touched on above —
" could be met by ascribing the firmness of assent which we give
to religious doctrine, not to the probabilities which introduced it, but
* For a most beautiful illustration, see The Sermon for St. Michael
mas Day, quoted in the Apologia, and see also Grammar of Assent,
p. 51, and Arians, pp. 75-79. (Ed. 1890.) See the Essay on John
Keble in Newman's Essays Historical and Critical, vol. ii. Cf. above,
pp. 26-7.

Dr. Edwin Abbotts Philomythus. 51
to the living power of faith and love which accepted it. In illus
tration, Mr. Keble used to quote the words of the Psalm, ' I will
guide thee with Mine eye.' This is the very difference, he used
to say, between slaves and friends or children. Friends do not
ask for literal commands ; but from their knowledge of the speaker,
they anticipate his half-words, and from love of him they anticipate
his wishes."
We have perhaps given sufficient quotations to show
that Newman built his own personal faith on his own
consciousness of the reality of God's Presence, and shall
we be surprised, after what we have seen as to the nature
of the Divine fear, if we find that the development of the
primary religious idea was evolved with fear ? Yet (pace
Dr. Abbott) the fear grew up into love by the process
which Newman himself has so beautifully described : —
"We know that no temper of mind is acceptable in the Divine
Presence without love ; it is love which makes Christian fear differ
from servile dread, and true faith differ from the faith of devils ; yet,
in the beginning of the religious life, fear is the prominent evangelical
grace, and love is but latent in fear, and has in course of time to be
developed out of what seems its contradictory. Thus, when it is
developed, it takes that prominent place which fear held before, yet
protecting, not superseding, it. Love is added, not fear removed,
and the mind is but perfected in grace by what seems a revolution.
' They that sow in tears, reap in joy ; ' yet, afterwards still ' they are
sorrowful, though always rejoicing'.' "
Dr. Abbott has wisely abstained from dealing with The
Grammar of Assent^, which represents the fully-developed
state of Newman's mind, and prefers to pick out such
passages as may, isolated from their context, prove his
thesis of Newman's spiritual cowardice, from the earlier
and professedly immature works. In his eager search he
has overlooked a very noble sermon treating " Love " as
the "safeguard of Truth against Superstition1." In this
1 Development of Doctrine. Chap, xi., Section 1 .
k There is a chapter in Philomythus entitled "A Grammar of
Ecclesiastical Assent," but this is made up of Dr. Abbott's chippings.
and is in no way a criticism of Newman's Grammar, which is not
quoted anywhere throughout the whole book.
1 See also a Sermon on "Obedience without Love" in Parochial
Sermons, vol. iv.

$2 Dr. Edwin Abbotts Philomythus.
sermon Newman takes up a line which is afterwards
developed into the doctrine of the illative consciousness
of the Grammar of Assent. This illative consciousness is
founded on the promise of Scripture : " I am the. Good
Shepherd, and know My sheep, and am known of Mine.
My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they
follow Me." In these words Newman found, as many
others have found, a certitude which no power of human
reasoning could shake, a confidence which, with St. Paul,
could say : " For I am persuaded, that neither death nor
life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things
present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor
any other creature, shall separate us from the love of God,
which is in Christ Jesus."
Dr. Abbott has written a book which merits the severest
criticism, but O the pity of it ! Dr. Abbott is, first and
foremost, a scholar, and yet we find that he has attacked
the writings of a man whose principal work he has only
too plainly left unstudied — perhaps unread. To bring
home his charges, he has interpolated quotations with his
own miserable glosses, and attempted to twist his author's
words into meanings they were never intended to convey.
He has inadequately quoted and grossly misconstrued.
All this deserves the most detailed and most ruthless
exposure ; but we frankly confess that we have no heart
for such a task. " Philomythus " has convicted its author
of a worse failing than slovenly scholarship, it has proved
that he has little or no capacity for gauging the elements
of true religion. It has, in fact, not so much weakened
our veneration for a " lost leader," as saddened us by a
description to be read between the lines of the author
himself. " What," we cannot refrain from asking ourselves,
"what can a man who speaks so slightingly of rever
ential fear know of God ? "
Lastly. Dr. Abbott has told us that Newman was
thankless. Was this so? Did not his whole life bear
out the ancient rule, that those who are forgiven much,
love much ? No one was ever more conscious of the
guidance of God, of the Divinity shaping our ends, " rough

Dr. Edwin Abbotts Philomythus. S3
hew them as we will," and herein was he thankful that
God in His mercy, while guiding him " o'er moor and fen
and crag and torrent," hid from him the revelation of a
destiny which then would have been intolerable. During
his famous Mediterranean journey, when as is well known
he was powerfully affected by the anticipation of the work
which lay before him on his return, he was full of grate
fulness to Him, and wrote at Tre Fontane :
" But Thou, dear Lord !
Whilst I traced out bright scenes which were to come,
Isaac's pure blessing and a verdant home,
Did'st spare me, and withhold Thy fearful word,
Willing me year by year till I am found
A pilgrim pale, with Paul's sad girdle bound."
Seventeen years later, thankfulness is still in his heart,
for the economy (" What I do thou knowest not now, but
thou shall know hereafter "), and thus the man, whom Dr.
Abbott tells us knew not the love of Christ, writes from
the Oratory of his Master's teaching :
" As snow those inward pleadings fall,
As soft, as bright, as pure, as cool,
With gentle weight and gradual,
And sink into the feverish soul.
The Sinless One, He comes to seek,
The dreary heart, the spirit lone,
Tender of natures proud or weak
Not less than if they were His own.
He takes and scans the sinner o'er,
Handling his scholars one by one,
Weighing what they can bear, before
He gives the penance to be done™."
Dr. Abbott has told us of the Cardinal's works that " a
young man loving Christ will find in them, as far as I can
judge, little strength, stimulus, little sustenance." The
judgment lies with a generation which will know Dr.
Abbott as little as he knows them.
» "St. Philip In His God." Verses on Various Occasions,
pp. 298-9.