'I rejoice,' Mr
Gladstone
wrote, 'on your account personally; but more
for the sake of the Church.
for the sake of the Church.
Strachey - Eminent Victorians
.
.
Oh that my ways were made so direct that I might
keep Thy statutes. I will walk in Thy Commandments when Thou hast set my
heart at liberty. '
Such were the preoccupations of this young man. Perhaps they would have
been different, if he had had a little less of what Newman describes as
his 'high severe idea of the intrinsic excellence of Virginity'; but it
is useless to speculate.
Naturally enough the fierce and burning zeal of Keble had a profound
effect upon his mind. The two became intimate friends, and Froude,
eagerly seizing upon the doctrines of the elder man, saw to it that they
had as full a measure of controversial notoriety as an Oxford common
room could afford. He plunged the metaphysical mysteries of the Holy
Catholic Church into the atmosphere of party politics. Surprised Doctors
of Divinity found themselves suddenly faced with strange questions which
had never entered their heads before. Was the Church of England, or was
it not, a part of the Church Catholic? If it was, were not the Reformers
of the sixteenth century renegades? Was not the participation of the
Body and Blood of Christ essential to the maintenance of Christian life
and hope in each individual? Were Timothy and Titus Bishops? Or were
they not? If they were, did it not follow that the power of
administering the Holy Eucharist was the attribute of a sacred order
founded by Christ Himself? Did not the Fathers refer to the tradition of
the Church as to something independent of the written word, and
sufficient to refute heresy, even alone? Was it not, therefore, God's
unwritten word? And did it not demand the same reverence from us as the
Scriptures, and for exactly the same reason--BECAUSE IT WAS HIS WORD?
The Doctors of Divinity were aghast at such questions, which seemed to
lead they hardly knew whither; and they found it difficult to think of
very apposite answers. But Hurrell Froude supplied the answers himself
readily enough. All Oxford, all England, should know the truth. The time
was out of joint, and he was only too delighted to have been born to set
it right.
But, after all, something more was needed than even the excitement of
Froude combined with the conviction of Keble to ruffle seriously the
vast calm waters of Christian thought; and it so happened that that
thing was not wanting: it was the genius of John Henry Newman. If Newman
had never lived, or if his father, when the gig came round on the fatal
morning, still undecided between the two Universities, had chanced to
turn the horse's head in the direction of Cambridge, who can doubt that
the Oxford Movement would have flickered out its little flame unobserved
in the Common Room of Oriel? And how different, too, would have been the
fate of Newman himself! He was a child of the Romantic Revival, a
creature of emotion and of memory, a dreamer whose secret spirit dwelt
apart in delectable mountains, an artist whose subtle senses caught,
like a shower in the sunshine, the impalpable rainbow of the immaterial
world. In other times, under other skies, his days would have been more
fortunate. He might have helped to weave the garland of Meleager, or to
mix the lapis lazuli of Fra Angelico, or to chase the delicate truth in
the shade of an Athenian palaestra, or his hands might have fashioned
those ethereal faces that smile in the niches of Chartres. Even in his
own age he might, at Cambridge, whose cloisters have ever been
consecrated to poetry and common sense, have followed quietly in Gray's
footsteps and brought into flower those seeds of inspiration which now
lie embedded amid the faded devotion of the Lyra Apostolica.
At Oxford, he was doomed. He could not withstand the last enchantment of
the Middle Age. It was in vain that he plunged into the pages of Gibbon
or communed for long hours with Beethoven over his beloved violin. The
air was thick with clerical sanctity, heavy with the odours of tradition
and the soft warmth of spiritual authority; his friendship with Hurrell
Froude did the rest. All that was weakest in him hurried him onward, and
all that was strongest in him too. His curious and vaulting imagination
began to construct vast philosophical fabrics out of the writings of
ancient monks, and to dally with visions of angelic visitations and the
efficacy of the oil of St Walburga; his emotional nature became absorbed
in the partisan passions of a University clique; and his subtle
intellect concerned itself more and more exclusively with the
dialectical splitting of dogmatical hairs. His future course was marked
out for him all too clearly; and yet by a singular chance the true
nature of the man was to emerge triumphant in the end. If Newman had
died at the age of sixty, today he would have been already forgotten,
save by a few ecclesiastical historians; but he lived to write his
Apologia, and to reach immortality, neither as a thinker nor as a
theologian, but as an artist who has embalmed the poignant history of an
intensely human spirit in the magical spices of words.
When Froude succeeded in impregnating Newman with the ideas of Keble,
the Oxford Movement began. The original and remarkable characteristic of
these three men was that they took the Christian Religion au pied de la
lettre. This had not been done in England for centuries. When they
declared every Sunday that they believed in the Holy Catholic Church,
they meant it. When they repeated the Athanasian Creed, they meant it.
Even, when they subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles, they meant it-or
at least they thought they did. Now such a state of mind was
dangerous--more dangerous indeed--than they at first realised. They had
started with the innocent assumption that the Christian Religion was
contained in the doctrines of the Church of England; but, the more they
examined this matter, the more difficult and dubious it became. The
Church of England bore everywhere upon it the signs of human
imperfection; it was the outcome of revolution and of compromise, of the
exigencies of politicians and the caprices of princes, of the prejudices
of theologians and the necessities of the State. How had it happened
that this piece of patchwork had become the receptacle for the august
and infinite mysteries of the Christian Faith? This was the problem with
which Newman and his friends found themselves confronted. Other men
might, and apparently did, see nothing very strange in such a situation;
but other men saw in Christianity itself scarcely more than a convenient
and respectable appendage to existence, by which a sound system of
morals was inculcated, and through which one might hope to attain to
everlasting bliss.
To Newman and Keble it was otherwise. They saw a transcendent
manifestation of Divine power flowing down elaborate and immense through
the ages; a consecrated priesthood, stretching back, through the mystic
symbol of the laying on of hands, to the very Godhead; a whole universe
of spiritual beings brought into communion with the Eternal by means of
wafers; a great mass of metaphysical doctrines, at once incomprehensible
and of incalculable import, laid down with infinite certitude; they saw
the supernatural everywhere and at all times, a living force, floating
invisible in angels, inspiring saints, and investing with miraculous
properties the commonest material things. No wonder that they found such
a spectacle hard to bring into line with the institution which had been
evolved from the divorce of Henry VIII, the intrigues of Elizabethan
parliaments, and the Revolution of 1688. They did, no doubt, soon
satisfy themselves that they had succeeded in this apparently hopeless
task; but, the conclusions which they came to in order to do so were
decidedly startling.
The Church of England, they declared, was indeed the one true Church,
but she had been under an eclipse since the Reformation; in fact, since
she had begun to exist. She had, it is true, escaped the corruptions of
Rome; but she had become enslaved by the secular power, and degraded by
the false doctrines of Protestantism. The Christian Religion was still
preserved intact by the English priesthood, but it was preserved, as it
were, unconsciously--a priceless deposit, handed down blindly from
generation to generation, and subsisting less by the will of man than
through the ordinance of God as expressed in the mysterious virtue of
the Sacraments. Christianity, in short, had become entangled in a series
of unfortunate circumstances from which it was the plain duty of Newman
and his friends to rescue it forthwith. What was curious was that this
task had been reserved, in so marked a manner, for them. Some of the
divines of the seventeenth century had, perhaps, been vouchsafed
glimpses of the truth; but they were glimpses and nothing more. No, the
waters of the true Faith had dived underground at the Reformation, and
they were waiting for the wand of Newman to strike the rock before they
should burst forth once more into the light of day. The whole matter, no
doubt, was Providential--what other explanation could there be?
The first step, it was clear, was to purge the Church of her shames and
her errors. The Reformers must be exposed; the yoke of the secular power
must be thrown off; dogma must be reinstated in its old pre-eminence;
and Christians must be reminded of what they had apparently
forgotten--the presence of the supernatural in daily life. 'It would be
a gain to this country,' Keble observed, 'were it vastly more
superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion,
than at present it shows itself to be. ' 'The only good I know of
Cranmer,' said Hurrell Froude, 'was that he burned well. ' Newman
preached, and soon the new views began to spread. Among the earliest of
the converts was Dr Pusey, a man of wealth and learning, a professor, a
canon of Christ Church, who had, it was rumoured, been to Germany. Then
the Tracts for the Times were started under Newman's editorship, and the
Movement was launched upon the world.
The Tracts were written 'with the hope of rousing members of our Church
to comprehend her alarming position . . . as a man might give notice of a
fire or inundation, to startle all who heard him'. They may be said to
have succeeded in their objective, for the sensation which they caused
among clergymen throughout the country was extreme. They dealt with a
great variety of questions, but the underlying intention of all of them
was to attack the accepted doctrines and practices of the Church of
England. Dr. Pusey wrote learnedly on Baptismal Regeneration; he also
wrote on Fasting. His treatment of the latter subject met with
considerable disapproval, which surprised the Doctor. 'I was not
prepared,' he said, 'for people questioning, even in the abstract, the
duty of fasting; I thought serious-minded persons at least supposed they
practised fasting in some way or other. I assumed the duty to be
acknowledged and thought it only undervalued. ' We live and learn, even
though we have been to Germany.
Other tracts discussed the Holy Catholic Church, the Clergy, and the
Liturgy. One treated of the question 'whether a clergyman of the Church
of England be now bound to have morning and evening prayers daily in his
parish church? ' Another pointed out the 'Indications of a superintending
Providence in the preservation of the Prayer-book and in the changes
which it has undergone'. Another consisted of a collection of 'Advent
Sermons on Antichrist'. Keble wrote a long and elaborate tract 'On the
Mysticism attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church', in which he
expressed his opinions upon a large number of curious matters.
'According to men's usual way of talking,' he wrote, 'it would be called
an accidental circumstance that there were five loaves, not more nor
less, in the store of Our Lord and His disciples wherewith to provide
the miraculous feast. But the ancient interpreters treat it as designed
and providential, in this surely not erring: and their conjecture is
that it represents the sacrifice of the whole world of sense, and
especially of the Old Dispensation, which, being outward and visible,
might be called the dispensation of the senses, to the FATHER of our
LORD JESUS CHRIST, to be a pledge and means of communion with Him
according to the terms of the new or evangelical law.
They arrived at this idea by considering the number five, the number of
the senses, as the mystical opponent of the visible and sensible
universe--ta aistheta, as distinguished from ta noita. Origen lays down
the rule in express terms. '"The number five,"' he says, '"frequently,
nay almost always, is taken for the five senses. "' In another passage,
Keble deals with an even more recondite question. He quotes the teaching
of St. Barnabas that 'Abraham, who first gave men circumcision, did
thereby perform a spiritual and typical action, looking forward to the
Son'. St. Barnabas's argument is as follows: Abraham circumcised of his
house men to the number of 318. Why 318? Observe first the 18, then the
300. Of the two letters which stand for 18, 10 is represented by 1, 8 by
H. 'Thou hast here,' says St. Barnabas, 'the word of Jesus. ' As for the
300, 'the Cross is represented by Tau, and the letter Tau represents
that number'.
Unfortunately, however, St. Barnabas's premise was of doubtful validity,
as the Rev. Mr. Maitland pointed out, in a pamphlet impugning the
conclusions of the Tract. 'The simple fact is,' he wrote, 'that when
Abraham pursued Chedorlaomer "he armed his trained servants, BORN IN HIS
OWN HOUSE, three hundred and eighteen". When, more than thirteen
(according to the common chronology, fifteen) years after, he
circumcised "all the men of his house, BORN IN THE HOUSE, AND BOUGHT
WITH MONEY OF THE STRANGER", and, in fact, every male who was as much as
eight days old, we are not told what the number amounted to. Shall we
suppose (just for the sake of the interpretation) that Abraham's family
had so dwindled in the interval as that now all the males of his
household, trained men, slaves, and children, equalled only and exactly
the number of his warriors fifteen years before? '
The question seems difficult to answer, but Keble had, as a matter of
fact, forestalled the argument in the following passage, which had
apparently escaped the notice of the Rev. Mr. Maitland:
'Now whether the facts were really so or not (if it were, it was surely
by special providence), that Abraham's household at the time of the
circumcision was exactly the same number as before; still the argument
of St. Barnabas will stand. As thus: circumcision had from the
beginning, a reference to our SAVIOUR, as in other respects, so in this;
that the mystical number, which is the cipher of Jesus crucified, was
the number of the first circumcised household in the strength of which
Abraham prevailed against the powers of the world. So St. Clement of
Alexandria, as cited by Fell. '
And Keble supports his contention through ten pages of close print, with
references to Aristeas, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and Dr. Whitby.
Writings of this kind could not fail in their effect. Pious youths in
Oxford were carried away by them, and began to flock around the standard
of Newman. Newman himself became a party chief--encouraging, organising,
persuading. His long black figure, swiftly passing through the streets,
was pointed at with awe; crowds flocked to his sermons; his words were
repeated from mouth to mouth; 'Credo in Newmannum' became a common
catchword. Jokes were made about the Church of England, and practices,
unknown for centuries, began to be revived. Young men fasted and did
penance, recited the hours of the Roman Breviary, and confessed their
sins to Dr. Pusey. Nor was the movement confined to Oxford; it spread in
widening circles through the parishes of England; the dormant devotion
of the country was suddenly aroused. The new strange notion of taking
Christianity literally was delightful to earnest minds; but it was also
alarming. Really to mean every word you said, when you repeated the
Athanasian Creed! How wonderful! And what enticing and mysterious vistas
burst upon the view! But then, those vistas, where were they leading?
Supposing--oh heavens! --supposing after all they were to lead to--!
III
IN due course, the Tracts made their appearance at the remote rectory in
Sussex. Manning was some years younger than Newman, and the two men had
only met occasionally at the University; but now, through common
friends, a closer relationship began to grow up between them. It was
only to be expected that Newman should be anxious to enroll the rising
young Rector among his followers; and, on Manning's side, there were
many causes which impelled him to accept the overtures from Oxford.
He was a man of a serious and vigorous temperament, to whom it was
inevitable that the bold high principles of the Movement should strongly
appeal. There was also an element in his mind that element which had
terrified him in his childhood with Apocalyptic visions, and urged him
in his youth to Bible readings after breakfast--which now brought him
under the spell of the Oxford theories of sacramental mysticism. And
besides, the Movement offered another attraction: it imputed an
extraordinary, transcendent merit to the profession which Manning
himself pursued. The cleric was not as his lay brethren; he was a
creature apart, chosen by Divine will and sanctified by Divine
mysteries. It was a relief to find, when one had supposed that one was
nothing but a clergyman, that one might, after all, be something
else--one might be a priest.
Accordingly, Manning shook off his early Evangelical convictions,
started an active correspondence with Newman, and was soon working for
the new cause. He collected quotations, and began to translate the works
of Optatus for Dr. Pusey. He wrote an article on Justin for the British
Critic, "Newman's Magazine". He published a sermon on Faith, with notes
and appendices, which was condemned by an evangelical bishop, and
fiercely attacked by no less a person than the celebrated Mr. Bowdler.
'The sermon,' said Mr Bowdler, in a book which he devoted to the
subject, 'was bad enough, but the appendix was abominable. ' At the same
time he was busy asserting the independence of the Church of England,
opposing secular education, and bringing out pamphlets against the
Ecclesiastical Commission, which had been appointed by Parliament to
report on Church Property. Then we find him in the role of a spiritual
director of souls. Ladies met him by stealth in his church, and made
their confessions. Over one case--that of a lady, who found herself
drifting towards Rome--he consulted Newman. Newman advised him to
'enlarge upon the doctrine of I Cor. vii';
'also, I think you must press on her the prospect of benefiting the poor
Church, through which she has her baptism, by stopping in it. Does she
not care for the souls of all around her, steeped and stifled in
Protestantism? How will she best care for them by indulging her own
feelings in the communion of Rome, or in denying herself, and staying in
sackcloth and ashes to do them good? '
Whether these arguments were successful does not appear.
For several years after his wife's death, Manning was occupied with
these new activities, while his relations with Newman developed into
what was apparently a warm friendship. 'And now vive valeque, my dear
Manning', we find Newman writing in a letter dated 'in festo S. Car.
1838', 'as wishes and prays yours affectionately, John H. Newman'. But,
as time went on, the situation became more complicated. Tractarianism
began to arouse the hostility, not only of the evangelical, but of the
moderate churchmen, who could not help perceiving in the ever-deepening,
'catholicism' of the Oxford party, the dread approaches of Rome. The
"Record" newspaper an influential Evangelical journal--took up the
matter and sniffed Popery in every direction; it spoke of certain
clergymen as 'tainted'; and after that, preferment seemed to pass those
clergymen by. The fact that Manning found it wise to conduct his
confessional ministrations in secret was in itself highly significant.
It was necessary to be careful, and Manning was very careful indeed. The
neighbouring Archdeacon, Mr. Hare, was a low churchman; Manning made
friends with him, as warmly, it seemed, as he had made friends with
Newman. He corresponded with him, asked his advice about the books he
should read, and discussed questions of Theology--'As to Gal. vi 15, we
cannot differ. . . . With a man who reads and reasons I can have no
controversy; and you do both. ' Archdeacon Hare was pleased, but soon a
rumour reached him, which was, to say the least of it, upsetting.
Manning had been removing the high pews from a church in Brighton, and
putting in open benches in their place. Everyone knew what that meant;
everyone knew that a high pew was one of the bulwarks of Protestantism,
and that an open bench had upon it the taint of Rome. But Manning
hastened to explain:
'My dear friend,' he wrote, 'I did not exchange pews for open benches,
but got the pews (the same in number) moved from the nave of the church
to the walls of the side aisles, so that the whole church has a regular
arrangement of open benches, which (irregularly) existed before . . . I am
not today quite well, so farewell, with much regard--Yours ever, H. E.
M. '
Archdeacon Hare was reassured.
It was important that he should be, for the Archdeacon of Chichester was
growing very old, and Hare's influence might be exceedingly useful when
a vacancy occurred. So, indeed, it fell out. A new bishop, Dr.
Shuttleworth, was appointed to the See, and the old Archdeacon took the
opportunity of retiring. Manning was obviously marked out as his
successor, but the new bishop happened to be a low churchman, an
aggressive low churchman, who went so far as to parody the Tractarian
fashion of using Saints' days for the dating of letters by writing 'The
Palace, washing-day', at the beginning of his. And--what was equally
serious--his views were shared by Mrs. Shuttleworth, who had already
decided that the pushing young Rector was 'tainted'. But at the critical
moment Archdeacon Hare came to the rescue; he persuaded the Bishop that
Manning was safe; and the appointment was accordingly made--behind Mrs.
Shuttleworth's back. She was furious, but it was too late; Manning was
an Archdeacon. All the lady could do, to indicate her disapprobation,
was to put a copy of Mr. Bowdler's book in a conspicuous position on the
drawing-room table, when he came to pay his respects at the Palace.
Among the letters of congratulation which Manning received, was one from
Mr Gladstone, with whom he had remained on terms of close friendship
since their days together at Oxford.
'I rejoice,' Mr Gladstone wrote, 'on your account personally; but more
for the sake of the Church. All my brothers-in-law are here and scarcely
less delighted than I am. With great glee am I about to write your new
address; but, the occasion really calls for higher sentiments; and sure
am I that you are one of the men to whom it is specially given to
develop the solution of that great problem--how all our minor
distractions are to be either abandoned, absorbed, or harmonised through
the might of the great principle of communion in the body of Christ. '
Manning was an Archdeacon; but he was not yet out of the woods. His
relations with the Tractarians had leaked out, and the Record was
beginning to be suspicious. If Mrs. Shuttleworth's opinion of him were
to become general, it would certainly be a grave matter. Nobody could
wish to live and die a mere Archdeacon. And then, at that very moment,
an event occurred which made it imperative to take a definite step, one
way or the other. That event was the publication of Tract No. 90.
For some time it had been obvious to every impartial onlooker that
Newman was slipping down an inclined plane at the bottom of which lay
one thing, and one thing only--the Roman Catholic Church. What was
surprising was the length of time which he was taking to reach the
inevitable destination. Years passed before he came to realise that his
grandiose edifice of a Church Universal would crumble to pieces if one
of its foundation stones was to be an amatory intrigue of Henry VIII.
But, at last he began to see that terrible monarch glowering at him
wherever he turned his eyes. First he tried to exorcise the spectre with
the rolling periods of the Caroline divines; but it only strutted the
more truculently. Then in despair he plunged into the writings of the
early Fathers, and sought to discover some way out of his difficulties
in the complicated labyrinth of ecclesiastical history. After months
spent in the study of the Monophysite heresy, the alarming conclusion
began to force itself upon him that the Church of England was perhaps in
schism. Eventually he read an article by a Roman Catholic on St.
Augustine and the Donatists, which seemed to put the matter beyond
doubt. St. Augustine, in the fifth century, had pointed out that the
Donatists were heretics because the Bishop of Rome had said so. The
argument was crushing; it rang in Newman's ears for days and nights;
and, though he continued to linger on in agony for six years more, he
never could discover any reply to it. All he could hope to do was to
persuade himself and anyone else who liked to listen to him that the
holding of Anglican orders was not inconsistent with a belief in the
whole cycle of Roman doctrine as laid down at the Council of Trent. In
this way he supposed that he could at once avoid the deadly sin of
heresy and conscientiously remain a clergyman in the Church of England;
and with this end in view, he composed Tract No. 90.
The object of the Tract was to prove that there was nothing in the
Thirty-nine Articles incompatible with the creed of the Roman Church.
Newman pointed out, for instance, that it was generally supposed that
the Articles condemned the doctrine of Purgatory; but they did not; they
merely condemned the Romish doctrine of Purgatory--and Romish, clearly,
was not the same thing as Roman. Hence it followed that believers in the
Roman doctrine of Purgatory might subscribe the Articles with a good
conscience. Similarly, the Articles condemned 'the sacrifices of
masses', but they did not condemn 'the sacrifice of the Mass'. Thus, the
Mass might be lawfully celebrated in English Churches. Newman took the
trouble to examine the Articles in detail from this point of view, and
the conclusion he came to in every case supported his contention in a
singular manner.
The Tract produced an immense sensation, for it seemed to be a deadly
and treacherous blow aimed at the very heart of the Church of England.
Deadly it certainly was, but it was not so treacherous as it appeared at
first sight. The members of the English Church had ingenuously imagined
up to that moment that it was possible to contain, in a frame of words,
the subtle essence of their complicated doctrinal system, involving the
mysteries of the Eternal and the Infinite on the one hand, and the
elaborate adjustments of temporal government on the other. They did not
understand that verbal definitions in such a case will only perform
their functions so long as there is no dispute about the matters which
they are intended to define: that is to say, so long as there is no need
for them. For generations this had been the case with the Thirty-nine
Articles. Their drift was clear enough; and nobody bothered over their
exact meaning. But directly someone found it important to give them a
new and untraditional interpretation, it appeared that they were a mass
of ambiguity, and might be twisted into meaning very nearly anything
that anybody liked. Steady-going churchmen were appalled and outraged
when they saw Newman, in Tract No. 90, performing this operation. But,
after all, he was only taking the Church of England at its word. And
indeed, since Newman showed the way, the operation has become so
exceedingly common that the most steady-going churchman hardly raises an
eyebrow at it now.
At the time, however, Newman's treatment of the Articles seemed to
display not only a perverted supersubtlety of intellect, but a temper of
mind that was fundamentally dishonest. It was then that he first began
to be assailed by those charges of untruthfulness which reached their
culmination more than twenty years later in the celebrated controversy
with Charles Kingsley, which led to the writing of the Apologia. The
controversy was not a very fruitful one, chiefly because Kingsley could
no more understand the nature of Newman's intelligence than a subaltern
in a line regiment can understand a Brahmin of Benares. Kingsley was a
stout Protestant, whose hatred of Popery was, at bottom, simply
ethical--an honest, instinctive horror of the practices of priestcraft
and the habits of superstition; and it was only natural that he should
see in those innumerable delicate distinctions which Newman was
perpetually drawing, and which he himself had not only never thought of,
but could not even grasp, simply another manifestation of the inherent
falsehood of Rome. But, in reality, no one, in one sense of the word,
was more truthful than Newman. The idea of deceit would have been
abhorrent to him; and indeed it was owing to his very desire to explain
what he had in his mind exactly and completely, with all the refinements
of which his subtle brain was capable, that persons such as Kingsley
were puzzled into thinking him dishonest. Unfortunately, however, the
possibilities of truth and falsehood depend upon other things besides
sincerity. A man may be of a scrupulous and impeccable honesty, and yet
his respect for the truth--it cannot be denied--may be insufficient. He
may be, like the lunatic, the lover, and the poet, 'of imagination all
compact'; he may be blessed, or cursed, with one of those 'seething
brains', one of those 'shaping fanatasies' that 'apprehend more than
cool reason ever comprehends'; he may be by nature incapable of sifting
evidence, or by predilection simply indisposed to do so. 'When we were
there,' wrote Newman in a letter to a friend after his conversion,
describing a visit to Naples, and the miraculous circumstances connected
with the liquefaction of St. Januarius's blood,
'the feast of St. Gennaro was coming on, and the Jesuits were eager for
us to stop--they have the utmost confidence in the miracle--and were the
more eager because many Catholics, till they have seen it, doubt it. Our
father director here tells us that before he went to Naples he did not
believe it. That is, they have vague ideas of natural means,
exaggeration, etc. , not of course imputing fraud. They say conversions
often take place in consequence. It is exposed for the Octave, and the
miracle continues--it is not simple liquefaction, but sometimes it
swells, sometimes boils, sometimes melts--no one can tell what is going
to take place. They say it is quite overcoming-and people cannot help
crying to see it. I understand that Sir H. Davy attended everyday, and
it was this extreme variety of the phenomenon which convinced him that
nothing physical would account for it. Yet there is this remarkable fact
that liquefactions of blood are common at Naples--and, unless it is
irreverent to the Great Author of Miracles to be obstinate in the
inquiry, the question certainly rises whether there is something in the
air. (Mind, I don't believe there is--and, speaking humbly, and without
having seen it, think it a true miracle--but I am arguing. ) We saw the
blood of St Patrizia, half liquid; i. e. liquefying, on her feast day. St
John Baptist's blood sometimes liquefies on the 29th of August, and did
when we were at Naples, but we had not time to go to the church. We saw
the liquid blood of an Oratorian Father; a good man, but not a saint,
who died two centuries ago, I think; and we saw the liquid blood of Da
Ponte, the great and holy Jesuit, who, I suppose, was almost a saint.
But these instances do not account for liquefaction on certain days, if
this is the case. But the most strange phenomenon is what happens at
Ravello, a village or town above Amalfi. There is the blood of St.
Pantaleon. It is in a vessel amid the stonework of the Altar-it is not
touched but on his feast in June it liquefies. And more, there is an
excommunication against those who bring portions of the True Cross into
the Church. Why? Because the blood liquefies, whenever it is brought. A
person I know, not knowing the prohibition, brought in a portion, and
the Priest suddenly said, who showed the blood, "Who has got the Holy
Cross about him? " I tell you what was told me by a grave and religious
man. It is a curious coincidence that in telling this to our Father
Director here, he said, "Why, we have a portion of St. Pantaleon's blood
at the Chiesa Nuova, and it is always liquid. "'
After leaving Naples, Newman visited Loreto, and inspected the house of
the Holy Family, which, as is known to the faithful, was transported
thither, in three hops, from Palestine.
'I went to Loreto,' he wrote, 'with a simple faith, believing what I
still more believed when I saw it. I have no doubt now. If you ask me
why I believe it, it is because everyone believes it at Rome; cautious
as they are and sceptical about some other things. I have no antecedent
difficulty in the matter. He who floated the Ark on the surges of a
world-wide sea, and enclosed in it all living things, who has hidden the
terrestrial paradise, who said that faith might move mountains, who
sustained thousands for forty years in a sterile wilderness, who
transported Elias and keeps him hidden till the end, could do this
wonder also. '
Here, whatever else there may be, there is certainly no trace of a
desire to deceive. Could a state of mind, in fact, be revealed with more
absolute transparency?
When Newman was a child he 'wished that he could believe the Arabian
Nights were true'. When he came to be a man, his wish seems to have been
granted.
Tract No. 90 was officially condemned by the authorities at Oxford, and
in the hubbub that followed, the contending parties closed their ranks;
henceforward, any compromise between the friends and the enemies of the
Movement was impossible. Archdeacon Manning was in too conspicuous a
position to be able to remain silent; he was obliged to declare himself,
and he did not hesitate. In an archidiaconal charge, delivered within a
few months of his appointment, he firmly repudiated the Tractarians. But
the repudiation was not deemed sufficient, and a year later he repeated
it with greater emphasis. Still, however, the horrid rumours were
afloat. The "Record" began to investigate matters, and its vigilance was
soon rewarded by an alarming discovery: the sacrament had been
administered in Chichester Cathedral on a weekday, and 'Archdeacon
Manning, one of the most noted and determined of the Tractarians, had
acted a conspicuous part on the occasion'. It was clear that the only
way of silencing these malevolent whispers was by some public
demonstration whose import nobody could doubt. The annual sermon
preached on Guy Fawkes Day before the University of Oxford seemed to
offer the very opportunity that Manning required. He seized it; got
himself appointed preacher; and delivered from the pulpit of St. Mary's
a virulently Protestant harangue. This time there could indeed be no
doubt about the matter: Manning had shouted 'No Popery! ' in the very
citadel of the Movement, and every one, including Newman, recognised
that he had finally cut himself off from his old friends. Everyone, that
is to say, except the Archdeacon himself. On the day after the sermon,
Manning walked out to the neighbouring village of Littlemore, where
Newman was now living in retirement with a few chosen disciples, in the
hope of being able to give a satisfactory explanation of what he had
done. But he was disappointed; for when, after an awkward interval, one
of the disciples appeared at the door, he was informed that Mr. Newman
was not at home.
With his retirement to Littlemore, Newman had entered upon the final
period of his Anglican career. Even he could no longer help perceiving
that the end was now only a matter of time. His progress was hastened in
an agitating manner by the indiscreet activity of one of his proselytes,
W. G. Ward. a young man who combined an extraordinary aptitude for a
priori reasoning with a passionate devotion to Opera Bouffe. It was
difficult, in fact, to decide whether the inner nature of Ward was more
truly expressing itself when he was firing off some train of scholastic
paradoxes on the Eucharist or when he was trilling the airs of Figaro
and plunging through the hilarious roulades of the Largo al Factotum.
Even Dr. Pusey could not be quite sure, though he was Ward's spiritual
director. On one occasion his young penitent came to him, and confessed
that a vow which he had taken to abstain from music during Lent was
beginning to affect his health. Could Dr. Pusey see his way to releasing
him from the vow? The Doctor decided that a little sacred music would
not be amiss. Ward was all gratitude, and that night a party was
arranged in a friend's rooms. The concert began with the solemn
harmonies of Handel, which were followed by the holy strains of the 'Oh
Salutaris' of Cherubini. Then came the elevation and the pomp of
'Possenti Numi' from the Magic Flute. But, alas! there lies much danger
in Mozart. The page was turned and there was the delicious duet between
Papageno and Papagena. Flesh and blood could not resist that; then song
followed song, the music waxed faster and lighter, until, at last Ward
burst into the intoxicating merriment of the Largo al Factotum. When it
was over, a faint but persistent knocking made itself heard upon the
wall; and it was only then that the company remembered that the rooms
next door were Dr. Pusey's.
The same entrainment which carried Ward away when he sat down to a piano
possessed him whenever he embarked on a religious discussion. 'The thing
that was utterly abhorrent to him,' said one of his friends, 'was to
stop short. ' Given the premises, he would follow out their implications
with the mercilessness of a medieval monk, and when he had reached the
last limits of argument, be ready to maintain whatever propositions he
might find there with his dying breath. He had the extreme innocence of
a child and a mathematician. Captivated by the glittering eye of Newman,
he swallowed whole the supernatural conception of the universe which
Newman had evolved, accepted it as a fundamental premise, and 'began at
once to deduce from it whatsoever there might be to be deduced. ' His
very first deductions included irrefutable proofs of (I) God's
particular providence for individuals; (2) the real efficacy of
intercessory prayer; (3) the reality of our communion with the saints
departed; (4) the constant presence and assistance of the angels of God.
Later on he explained mathematically the importance of the Ember Days:
'Who can tell,' he added, 'the degree of blessing lost to us in this
land by neglecting, as we alone of Christian Churches do neglect, these
holy days? ' He then proceeded to convict the Reformers, not only of
rebellion, but'--for my own part I see not how we can avoid adding--of
perjury. ' Every day his arguments became more extreme, more rigorously
exact, and more distressing to his master. Newman was in the position of
a cautious commander-in-chief being hurried into an engagement against
his will by a dashing cavalry officer. Ward forced him forward step by
step towards-no! he could not bear it; he shuddered and drew back. But
it was of no avail. In vain did Keble and Pusey wring their hands and
stretch forth their pleading arms to their now vanishing brother. The
fatal moment was fast approaching. Ward at last published a devastating
book in which he proved conclusively, by a series of syllogisms, that
the only proper course for the Church of England was to repent in
sackcloth and ashes her separation from the Communion of Rome. The
reckless author was deprived of his degree by an outraged University,
and a few weeks later was received into the Catholic Church.
Newman, in a kind of despair, had flung himself into the labours of
historical compilation. His views of history had changed since the days
when, as an undergraduate, he had feasted on the worldly pages of
Gibbon.
'Revealed religion,' he now thought, 'furnishes facts to other sciences,
which those sciences, left to themselves, would never reach. Thus, in
the science of history, the preservation of our race in Noah's Ark is an
historical fact, which history never would arrive at without
revelation. '
With these principles to guide him, he plunged with his disciples into a
prolonged study of the English Saints. Biographies soon appeared of St.
Bega, St. Adamnan, St. Gundleus, St. Guthlake, Brother Drithelm, St.
Amphibalus, St. Wuistan, St. Ebba, St. Neot, St. Ninian, and Cunibert
the Hermit. Their austerities, their virginity, and their miraculous
powers were described in detail. The public learned with astonishment
that St Ninian had turned a staff into a tree; that St. German had
stopped a cock from crowing, and that a child had been raised from the
dead to convert St. Helier. The series has subsequently been continued
by a more modern writer whose relation of the history of the blessed St.
Mael contains, perhaps, even more matter for edification than Newman's
biographies.
At the time, indeed, those works caused considerable scandal. Clergymen
denounced them in pamphlets. St. Cuthbert was described by his
biographer as having 'carried the jealousy of women, characteristic of
all the saints, to an extraordinary pitch'. An example was given,
whenever he held a spiritual conversation with St Ebba, he was careful
to spend the ensuing ours of darkness 'in prayer, up to his neck in
water'. 'Persons who invent such tales,' wrote one indignant
commentator, 'cast very grave and just suspicions on the purity of their
own minds. And young persons, who talk and think in this way, are in
extreme danger of falling into sinful habits. As to the volumes before
us, the authors have, in their fanatical panegyrics of virginity, made
use of language downright profane. '
One of the disciples at Littlemore was James Anthony Froude, the younger
brother of Hurrell, and it fell to his lot to be responsible for the
biography of St. Neot. While he was composing it, he began to feel some
qualms. Saints who lighted fires with icicles, changed bandits into
wolves, and floated across the Irish Channel on altar-stones, produced a
disturbing effect on his historical conscience. But he had promised his
services to Newman, and he determined to carry through the work in the
spirit in which he had begun it. He did so; but he thought it proper to
add the following sentence by way of conclusion: 'This is all, and
indeed rather more than all, that is known to men of the blessed St.
Neot; but not more than is known to the angels in heaven. '
Meanwhile, the English Roman Catholics were growing impatient; was the
great conversion never coming, for which they had prayed so fervently
and so long? Dr. Wiseman, at the head of them, was watching and waiting
with special eagerness. His hand was held out under the ripening fruit;
the delicious morsel seemed to be trembling on its stalk; and yet it did
not fall. At last, unable to bear the suspense any longer, he dispatched
to Littlemore Father Smith, an old pupil of Newman's, who had lately
joined the Roman communion, with instructions that he should do his
best, under cover of a simple visit of friendship, to discover how the
land lay. Father Smith was received somewhat coldly, and the
conversation ran entirely on topics which had nothing to do with
religion. When the company separated before dinner, he was beginning to
think that his errand had been useless; but, on their reassembling, he
suddenly noticed that Newman had changed his trousers, and that the
colour of the pair which he was now wearing was grey. At the earliest
moment, the emissary rushed back post-haste to Dr. Wiseman. 'All is
well,' he exclaimed; 'Newman no longer considers that he is in Anglican
orders. " Praise be to God! ' answered Dr Wiseman. 'But how do you know? '
Father Smith described what he had seen. 'Oh, is that all? My dear
father, how can you be so foolish? ' But Father Smith was not to be
shaken.
keep Thy statutes. I will walk in Thy Commandments when Thou hast set my
heart at liberty. '
Such were the preoccupations of this young man. Perhaps they would have
been different, if he had had a little less of what Newman describes as
his 'high severe idea of the intrinsic excellence of Virginity'; but it
is useless to speculate.
Naturally enough the fierce and burning zeal of Keble had a profound
effect upon his mind. The two became intimate friends, and Froude,
eagerly seizing upon the doctrines of the elder man, saw to it that they
had as full a measure of controversial notoriety as an Oxford common
room could afford. He plunged the metaphysical mysteries of the Holy
Catholic Church into the atmosphere of party politics. Surprised Doctors
of Divinity found themselves suddenly faced with strange questions which
had never entered their heads before. Was the Church of England, or was
it not, a part of the Church Catholic? If it was, were not the Reformers
of the sixteenth century renegades? Was not the participation of the
Body and Blood of Christ essential to the maintenance of Christian life
and hope in each individual? Were Timothy and Titus Bishops? Or were
they not? If they were, did it not follow that the power of
administering the Holy Eucharist was the attribute of a sacred order
founded by Christ Himself? Did not the Fathers refer to the tradition of
the Church as to something independent of the written word, and
sufficient to refute heresy, even alone? Was it not, therefore, God's
unwritten word? And did it not demand the same reverence from us as the
Scriptures, and for exactly the same reason--BECAUSE IT WAS HIS WORD?
The Doctors of Divinity were aghast at such questions, which seemed to
lead they hardly knew whither; and they found it difficult to think of
very apposite answers. But Hurrell Froude supplied the answers himself
readily enough. All Oxford, all England, should know the truth. The time
was out of joint, and he was only too delighted to have been born to set
it right.
But, after all, something more was needed than even the excitement of
Froude combined with the conviction of Keble to ruffle seriously the
vast calm waters of Christian thought; and it so happened that that
thing was not wanting: it was the genius of John Henry Newman. If Newman
had never lived, or if his father, when the gig came round on the fatal
morning, still undecided between the two Universities, had chanced to
turn the horse's head in the direction of Cambridge, who can doubt that
the Oxford Movement would have flickered out its little flame unobserved
in the Common Room of Oriel? And how different, too, would have been the
fate of Newman himself! He was a child of the Romantic Revival, a
creature of emotion and of memory, a dreamer whose secret spirit dwelt
apart in delectable mountains, an artist whose subtle senses caught,
like a shower in the sunshine, the impalpable rainbow of the immaterial
world. In other times, under other skies, his days would have been more
fortunate. He might have helped to weave the garland of Meleager, or to
mix the lapis lazuli of Fra Angelico, or to chase the delicate truth in
the shade of an Athenian palaestra, or his hands might have fashioned
those ethereal faces that smile in the niches of Chartres. Even in his
own age he might, at Cambridge, whose cloisters have ever been
consecrated to poetry and common sense, have followed quietly in Gray's
footsteps and brought into flower those seeds of inspiration which now
lie embedded amid the faded devotion of the Lyra Apostolica.
At Oxford, he was doomed. He could not withstand the last enchantment of
the Middle Age. It was in vain that he plunged into the pages of Gibbon
or communed for long hours with Beethoven over his beloved violin. The
air was thick with clerical sanctity, heavy with the odours of tradition
and the soft warmth of spiritual authority; his friendship with Hurrell
Froude did the rest. All that was weakest in him hurried him onward, and
all that was strongest in him too. His curious and vaulting imagination
began to construct vast philosophical fabrics out of the writings of
ancient monks, and to dally with visions of angelic visitations and the
efficacy of the oil of St Walburga; his emotional nature became absorbed
in the partisan passions of a University clique; and his subtle
intellect concerned itself more and more exclusively with the
dialectical splitting of dogmatical hairs. His future course was marked
out for him all too clearly; and yet by a singular chance the true
nature of the man was to emerge triumphant in the end. If Newman had
died at the age of sixty, today he would have been already forgotten,
save by a few ecclesiastical historians; but he lived to write his
Apologia, and to reach immortality, neither as a thinker nor as a
theologian, but as an artist who has embalmed the poignant history of an
intensely human spirit in the magical spices of words.
When Froude succeeded in impregnating Newman with the ideas of Keble,
the Oxford Movement began. The original and remarkable characteristic of
these three men was that they took the Christian Religion au pied de la
lettre. This had not been done in England for centuries. When they
declared every Sunday that they believed in the Holy Catholic Church,
they meant it. When they repeated the Athanasian Creed, they meant it.
Even, when they subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles, they meant it-or
at least they thought they did. Now such a state of mind was
dangerous--more dangerous indeed--than they at first realised. They had
started with the innocent assumption that the Christian Religion was
contained in the doctrines of the Church of England; but, the more they
examined this matter, the more difficult and dubious it became. The
Church of England bore everywhere upon it the signs of human
imperfection; it was the outcome of revolution and of compromise, of the
exigencies of politicians and the caprices of princes, of the prejudices
of theologians and the necessities of the State. How had it happened
that this piece of patchwork had become the receptacle for the august
and infinite mysteries of the Christian Faith? This was the problem with
which Newman and his friends found themselves confronted. Other men
might, and apparently did, see nothing very strange in such a situation;
but other men saw in Christianity itself scarcely more than a convenient
and respectable appendage to existence, by which a sound system of
morals was inculcated, and through which one might hope to attain to
everlasting bliss.
To Newman and Keble it was otherwise. They saw a transcendent
manifestation of Divine power flowing down elaborate and immense through
the ages; a consecrated priesthood, stretching back, through the mystic
symbol of the laying on of hands, to the very Godhead; a whole universe
of spiritual beings brought into communion with the Eternal by means of
wafers; a great mass of metaphysical doctrines, at once incomprehensible
and of incalculable import, laid down with infinite certitude; they saw
the supernatural everywhere and at all times, a living force, floating
invisible in angels, inspiring saints, and investing with miraculous
properties the commonest material things. No wonder that they found such
a spectacle hard to bring into line with the institution which had been
evolved from the divorce of Henry VIII, the intrigues of Elizabethan
parliaments, and the Revolution of 1688. They did, no doubt, soon
satisfy themselves that they had succeeded in this apparently hopeless
task; but, the conclusions which they came to in order to do so were
decidedly startling.
The Church of England, they declared, was indeed the one true Church,
but she had been under an eclipse since the Reformation; in fact, since
she had begun to exist. She had, it is true, escaped the corruptions of
Rome; but she had become enslaved by the secular power, and degraded by
the false doctrines of Protestantism. The Christian Religion was still
preserved intact by the English priesthood, but it was preserved, as it
were, unconsciously--a priceless deposit, handed down blindly from
generation to generation, and subsisting less by the will of man than
through the ordinance of God as expressed in the mysterious virtue of
the Sacraments. Christianity, in short, had become entangled in a series
of unfortunate circumstances from which it was the plain duty of Newman
and his friends to rescue it forthwith. What was curious was that this
task had been reserved, in so marked a manner, for them. Some of the
divines of the seventeenth century had, perhaps, been vouchsafed
glimpses of the truth; but they were glimpses and nothing more. No, the
waters of the true Faith had dived underground at the Reformation, and
they were waiting for the wand of Newman to strike the rock before they
should burst forth once more into the light of day. The whole matter, no
doubt, was Providential--what other explanation could there be?
The first step, it was clear, was to purge the Church of her shames and
her errors. The Reformers must be exposed; the yoke of the secular power
must be thrown off; dogma must be reinstated in its old pre-eminence;
and Christians must be reminded of what they had apparently
forgotten--the presence of the supernatural in daily life. 'It would be
a gain to this country,' Keble observed, 'were it vastly more
superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion,
than at present it shows itself to be. ' 'The only good I know of
Cranmer,' said Hurrell Froude, 'was that he burned well. ' Newman
preached, and soon the new views began to spread. Among the earliest of
the converts was Dr Pusey, a man of wealth and learning, a professor, a
canon of Christ Church, who had, it was rumoured, been to Germany. Then
the Tracts for the Times were started under Newman's editorship, and the
Movement was launched upon the world.
The Tracts were written 'with the hope of rousing members of our Church
to comprehend her alarming position . . . as a man might give notice of a
fire or inundation, to startle all who heard him'. They may be said to
have succeeded in their objective, for the sensation which they caused
among clergymen throughout the country was extreme. They dealt with a
great variety of questions, but the underlying intention of all of them
was to attack the accepted doctrines and practices of the Church of
England. Dr. Pusey wrote learnedly on Baptismal Regeneration; he also
wrote on Fasting. His treatment of the latter subject met with
considerable disapproval, which surprised the Doctor. 'I was not
prepared,' he said, 'for people questioning, even in the abstract, the
duty of fasting; I thought serious-minded persons at least supposed they
practised fasting in some way or other. I assumed the duty to be
acknowledged and thought it only undervalued. ' We live and learn, even
though we have been to Germany.
Other tracts discussed the Holy Catholic Church, the Clergy, and the
Liturgy. One treated of the question 'whether a clergyman of the Church
of England be now bound to have morning and evening prayers daily in his
parish church? ' Another pointed out the 'Indications of a superintending
Providence in the preservation of the Prayer-book and in the changes
which it has undergone'. Another consisted of a collection of 'Advent
Sermons on Antichrist'. Keble wrote a long and elaborate tract 'On the
Mysticism attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church', in which he
expressed his opinions upon a large number of curious matters.
'According to men's usual way of talking,' he wrote, 'it would be called
an accidental circumstance that there were five loaves, not more nor
less, in the store of Our Lord and His disciples wherewith to provide
the miraculous feast. But the ancient interpreters treat it as designed
and providential, in this surely not erring: and their conjecture is
that it represents the sacrifice of the whole world of sense, and
especially of the Old Dispensation, which, being outward and visible,
might be called the dispensation of the senses, to the FATHER of our
LORD JESUS CHRIST, to be a pledge and means of communion with Him
according to the terms of the new or evangelical law.
They arrived at this idea by considering the number five, the number of
the senses, as the mystical opponent of the visible and sensible
universe--ta aistheta, as distinguished from ta noita. Origen lays down
the rule in express terms. '"The number five,"' he says, '"frequently,
nay almost always, is taken for the five senses. "' In another passage,
Keble deals with an even more recondite question. He quotes the teaching
of St. Barnabas that 'Abraham, who first gave men circumcision, did
thereby perform a spiritual and typical action, looking forward to the
Son'. St. Barnabas's argument is as follows: Abraham circumcised of his
house men to the number of 318. Why 318? Observe first the 18, then the
300. Of the two letters which stand for 18, 10 is represented by 1, 8 by
H. 'Thou hast here,' says St. Barnabas, 'the word of Jesus. ' As for the
300, 'the Cross is represented by Tau, and the letter Tau represents
that number'.
Unfortunately, however, St. Barnabas's premise was of doubtful validity,
as the Rev. Mr. Maitland pointed out, in a pamphlet impugning the
conclusions of the Tract. 'The simple fact is,' he wrote, 'that when
Abraham pursued Chedorlaomer "he armed his trained servants, BORN IN HIS
OWN HOUSE, three hundred and eighteen". When, more than thirteen
(according to the common chronology, fifteen) years after, he
circumcised "all the men of his house, BORN IN THE HOUSE, AND BOUGHT
WITH MONEY OF THE STRANGER", and, in fact, every male who was as much as
eight days old, we are not told what the number amounted to. Shall we
suppose (just for the sake of the interpretation) that Abraham's family
had so dwindled in the interval as that now all the males of his
household, trained men, slaves, and children, equalled only and exactly
the number of his warriors fifteen years before? '
The question seems difficult to answer, but Keble had, as a matter of
fact, forestalled the argument in the following passage, which had
apparently escaped the notice of the Rev. Mr. Maitland:
'Now whether the facts were really so or not (if it were, it was surely
by special providence), that Abraham's household at the time of the
circumcision was exactly the same number as before; still the argument
of St. Barnabas will stand. As thus: circumcision had from the
beginning, a reference to our SAVIOUR, as in other respects, so in this;
that the mystical number, which is the cipher of Jesus crucified, was
the number of the first circumcised household in the strength of which
Abraham prevailed against the powers of the world. So St. Clement of
Alexandria, as cited by Fell. '
And Keble supports his contention through ten pages of close print, with
references to Aristeas, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and Dr. Whitby.
Writings of this kind could not fail in their effect. Pious youths in
Oxford were carried away by them, and began to flock around the standard
of Newman. Newman himself became a party chief--encouraging, organising,
persuading. His long black figure, swiftly passing through the streets,
was pointed at with awe; crowds flocked to his sermons; his words were
repeated from mouth to mouth; 'Credo in Newmannum' became a common
catchword. Jokes were made about the Church of England, and practices,
unknown for centuries, began to be revived. Young men fasted and did
penance, recited the hours of the Roman Breviary, and confessed their
sins to Dr. Pusey. Nor was the movement confined to Oxford; it spread in
widening circles through the parishes of England; the dormant devotion
of the country was suddenly aroused. The new strange notion of taking
Christianity literally was delightful to earnest minds; but it was also
alarming. Really to mean every word you said, when you repeated the
Athanasian Creed! How wonderful! And what enticing and mysterious vistas
burst upon the view! But then, those vistas, where were they leading?
Supposing--oh heavens! --supposing after all they were to lead to--!
III
IN due course, the Tracts made their appearance at the remote rectory in
Sussex. Manning was some years younger than Newman, and the two men had
only met occasionally at the University; but now, through common
friends, a closer relationship began to grow up between them. It was
only to be expected that Newman should be anxious to enroll the rising
young Rector among his followers; and, on Manning's side, there were
many causes which impelled him to accept the overtures from Oxford.
He was a man of a serious and vigorous temperament, to whom it was
inevitable that the bold high principles of the Movement should strongly
appeal. There was also an element in his mind that element which had
terrified him in his childhood with Apocalyptic visions, and urged him
in his youth to Bible readings after breakfast--which now brought him
under the spell of the Oxford theories of sacramental mysticism. And
besides, the Movement offered another attraction: it imputed an
extraordinary, transcendent merit to the profession which Manning
himself pursued. The cleric was not as his lay brethren; he was a
creature apart, chosen by Divine will and sanctified by Divine
mysteries. It was a relief to find, when one had supposed that one was
nothing but a clergyman, that one might, after all, be something
else--one might be a priest.
Accordingly, Manning shook off his early Evangelical convictions,
started an active correspondence with Newman, and was soon working for
the new cause. He collected quotations, and began to translate the works
of Optatus for Dr. Pusey. He wrote an article on Justin for the British
Critic, "Newman's Magazine". He published a sermon on Faith, with notes
and appendices, which was condemned by an evangelical bishop, and
fiercely attacked by no less a person than the celebrated Mr. Bowdler.
'The sermon,' said Mr Bowdler, in a book which he devoted to the
subject, 'was bad enough, but the appendix was abominable. ' At the same
time he was busy asserting the independence of the Church of England,
opposing secular education, and bringing out pamphlets against the
Ecclesiastical Commission, which had been appointed by Parliament to
report on Church Property. Then we find him in the role of a spiritual
director of souls. Ladies met him by stealth in his church, and made
their confessions. Over one case--that of a lady, who found herself
drifting towards Rome--he consulted Newman. Newman advised him to
'enlarge upon the doctrine of I Cor. vii';
'also, I think you must press on her the prospect of benefiting the poor
Church, through which she has her baptism, by stopping in it. Does she
not care for the souls of all around her, steeped and stifled in
Protestantism? How will she best care for them by indulging her own
feelings in the communion of Rome, or in denying herself, and staying in
sackcloth and ashes to do them good? '
Whether these arguments were successful does not appear.
For several years after his wife's death, Manning was occupied with
these new activities, while his relations with Newman developed into
what was apparently a warm friendship. 'And now vive valeque, my dear
Manning', we find Newman writing in a letter dated 'in festo S. Car.
1838', 'as wishes and prays yours affectionately, John H. Newman'. But,
as time went on, the situation became more complicated. Tractarianism
began to arouse the hostility, not only of the evangelical, but of the
moderate churchmen, who could not help perceiving in the ever-deepening,
'catholicism' of the Oxford party, the dread approaches of Rome. The
"Record" newspaper an influential Evangelical journal--took up the
matter and sniffed Popery in every direction; it spoke of certain
clergymen as 'tainted'; and after that, preferment seemed to pass those
clergymen by. The fact that Manning found it wise to conduct his
confessional ministrations in secret was in itself highly significant.
It was necessary to be careful, and Manning was very careful indeed. The
neighbouring Archdeacon, Mr. Hare, was a low churchman; Manning made
friends with him, as warmly, it seemed, as he had made friends with
Newman. He corresponded with him, asked his advice about the books he
should read, and discussed questions of Theology--'As to Gal. vi 15, we
cannot differ. . . . With a man who reads and reasons I can have no
controversy; and you do both. ' Archdeacon Hare was pleased, but soon a
rumour reached him, which was, to say the least of it, upsetting.
Manning had been removing the high pews from a church in Brighton, and
putting in open benches in their place. Everyone knew what that meant;
everyone knew that a high pew was one of the bulwarks of Protestantism,
and that an open bench had upon it the taint of Rome. But Manning
hastened to explain:
'My dear friend,' he wrote, 'I did not exchange pews for open benches,
but got the pews (the same in number) moved from the nave of the church
to the walls of the side aisles, so that the whole church has a regular
arrangement of open benches, which (irregularly) existed before . . . I am
not today quite well, so farewell, with much regard--Yours ever, H. E.
M. '
Archdeacon Hare was reassured.
It was important that he should be, for the Archdeacon of Chichester was
growing very old, and Hare's influence might be exceedingly useful when
a vacancy occurred. So, indeed, it fell out. A new bishop, Dr.
Shuttleworth, was appointed to the See, and the old Archdeacon took the
opportunity of retiring. Manning was obviously marked out as his
successor, but the new bishop happened to be a low churchman, an
aggressive low churchman, who went so far as to parody the Tractarian
fashion of using Saints' days for the dating of letters by writing 'The
Palace, washing-day', at the beginning of his. And--what was equally
serious--his views were shared by Mrs. Shuttleworth, who had already
decided that the pushing young Rector was 'tainted'. But at the critical
moment Archdeacon Hare came to the rescue; he persuaded the Bishop that
Manning was safe; and the appointment was accordingly made--behind Mrs.
Shuttleworth's back. She was furious, but it was too late; Manning was
an Archdeacon. All the lady could do, to indicate her disapprobation,
was to put a copy of Mr. Bowdler's book in a conspicuous position on the
drawing-room table, when he came to pay his respects at the Palace.
Among the letters of congratulation which Manning received, was one from
Mr Gladstone, with whom he had remained on terms of close friendship
since their days together at Oxford.
'I rejoice,' Mr Gladstone wrote, 'on your account personally; but more
for the sake of the Church. All my brothers-in-law are here and scarcely
less delighted than I am. With great glee am I about to write your new
address; but, the occasion really calls for higher sentiments; and sure
am I that you are one of the men to whom it is specially given to
develop the solution of that great problem--how all our minor
distractions are to be either abandoned, absorbed, or harmonised through
the might of the great principle of communion in the body of Christ. '
Manning was an Archdeacon; but he was not yet out of the woods. His
relations with the Tractarians had leaked out, and the Record was
beginning to be suspicious. If Mrs. Shuttleworth's opinion of him were
to become general, it would certainly be a grave matter. Nobody could
wish to live and die a mere Archdeacon. And then, at that very moment,
an event occurred which made it imperative to take a definite step, one
way or the other. That event was the publication of Tract No. 90.
For some time it had been obvious to every impartial onlooker that
Newman was slipping down an inclined plane at the bottom of which lay
one thing, and one thing only--the Roman Catholic Church. What was
surprising was the length of time which he was taking to reach the
inevitable destination. Years passed before he came to realise that his
grandiose edifice of a Church Universal would crumble to pieces if one
of its foundation stones was to be an amatory intrigue of Henry VIII.
But, at last he began to see that terrible monarch glowering at him
wherever he turned his eyes. First he tried to exorcise the spectre with
the rolling periods of the Caroline divines; but it only strutted the
more truculently. Then in despair he plunged into the writings of the
early Fathers, and sought to discover some way out of his difficulties
in the complicated labyrinth of ecclesiastical history. After months
spent in the study of the Monophysite heresy, the alarming conclusion
began to force itself upon him that the Church of England was perhaps in
schism. Eventually he read an article by a Roman Catholic on St.
Augustine and the Donatists, which seemed to put the matter beyond
doubt. St. Augustine, in the fifth century, had pointed out that the
Donatists were heretics because the Bishop of Rome had said so. The
argument was crushing; it rang in Newman's ears for days and nights;
and, though he continued to linger on in agony for six years more, he
never could discover any reply to it. All he could hope to do was to
persuade himself and anyone else who liked to listen to him that the
holding of Anglican orders was not inconsistent with a belief in the
whole cycle of Roman doctrine as laid down at the Council of Trent. In
this way he supposed that he could at once avoid the deadly sin of
heresy and conscientiously remain a clergyman in the Church of England;
and with this end in view, he composed Tract No. 90.
The object of the Tract was to prove that there was nothing in the
Thirty-nine Articles incompatible with the creed of the Roman Church.
Newman pointed out, for instance, that it was generally supposed that
the Articles condemned the doctrine of Purgatory; but they did not; they
merely condemned the Romish doctrine of Purgatory--and Romish, clearly,
was not the same thing as Roman. Hence it followed that believers in the
Roman doctrine of Purgatory might subscribe the Articles with a good
conscience. Similarly, the Articles condemned 'the sacrifices of
masses', but they did not condemn 'the sacrifice of the Mass'. Thus, the
Mass might be lawfully celebrated in English Churches. Newman took the
trouble to examine the Articles in detail from this point of view, and
the conclusion he came to in every case supported his contention in a
singular manner.
The Tract produced an immense sensation, for it seemed to be a deadly
and treacherous blow aimed at the very heart of the Church of England.
Deadly it certainly was, but it was not so treacherous as it appeared at
first sight. The members of the English Church had ingenuously imagined
up to that moment that it was possible to contain, in a frame of words,
the subtle essence of their complicated doctrinal system, involving the
mysteries of the Eternal and the Infinite on the one hand, and the
elaborate adjustments of temporal government on the other. They did not
understand that verbal definitions in such a case will only perform
their functions so long as there is no dispute about the matters which
they are intended to define: that is to say, so long as there is no need
for them. For generations this had been the case with the Thirty-nine
Articles. Their drift was clear enough; and nobody bothered over their
exact meaning. But directly someone found it important to give them a
new and untraditional interpretation, it appeared that they were a mass
of ambiguity, and might be twisted into meaning very nearly anything
that anybody liked. Steady-going churchmen were appalled and outraged
when they saw Newman, in Tract No. 90, performing this operation. But,
after all, he was only taking the Church of England at its word. And
indeed, since Newman showed the way, the operation has become so
exceedingly common that the most steady-going churchman hardly raises an
eyebrow at it now.
At the time, however, Newman's treatment of the Articles seemed to
display not only a perverted supersubtlety of intellect, but a temper of
mind that was fundamentally dishonest. It was then that he first began
to be assailed by those charges of untruthfulness which reached their
culmination more than twenty years later in the celebrated controversy
with Charles Kingsley, which led to the writing of the Apologia. The
controversy was not a very fruitful one, chiefly because Kingsley could
no more understand the nature of Newman's intelligence than a subaltern
in a line regiment can understand a Brahmin of Benares. Kingsley was a
stout Protestant, whose hatred of Popery was, at bottom, simply
ethical--an honest, instinctive horror of the practices of priestcraft
and the habits of superstition; and it was only natural that he should
see in those innumerable delicate distinctions which Newman was
perpetually drawing, and which he himself had not only never thought of,
but could not even grasp, simply another manifestation of the inherent
falsehood of Rome. But, in reality, no one, in one sense of the word,
was more truthful than Newman. The idea of deceit would have been
abhorrent to him; and indeed it was owing to his very desire to explain
what he had in his mind exactly and completely, with all the refinements
of which his subtle brain was capable, that persons such as Kingsley
were puzzled into thinking him dishonest. Unfortunately, however, the
possibilities of truth and falsehood depend upon other things besides
sincerity. A man may be of a scrupulous and impeccable honesty, and yet
his respect for the truth--it cannot be denied--may be insufficient. He
may be, like the lunatic, the lover, and the poet, 'of imagination all
compact'; he may be blessed, or cursed, with one of those 'seething
brains', one of those 'shaping fanatasies' that 'apprehend more than
cool reason ever comprehends'; he may be by nature incapable of sifting
evidence, or by predilection simply indisposed to do so. 'When we were
there,' wrote Newman in a letter to a friend after his conversion,
describing a visit to Naples, and the miraculous circumstances connected
with the liquefaction of St. Januarius's blood,
'the feast of St. Gennaro was coming on, and the Jesuits were eager for
us to stop--they have the utmost confidence in the miracle--and were the
more eager because many Catholics, till they have seen it, doubt it. Our
father director here tells us that before he went to Naples he did not
believe it. That is, they have vague ideas of natural means,
exaggeration, etc. , not of course imputing fraud. They say conversions
often take place in consequence. It is exposed for the Octave, and the
miracle continues--it is not simple liquefaction, but sometimes it
swells, sometimes boils, sometimes melts--no one can tell what is going
to take place. They say it is quite overcoming-and people cannot help
crying to see it. I understand that Sir H. Davy attended everyday, and
it was this extreme variety of the phenomenon which convinced him that
nothing physical would account for it. Yet there is this remarkable fact
that liquefactions of blood are common at Naples--and, unless it is
irreverent to the Great Author of Miracles to be obstinate in the
inquiry, the question certainly rises whether there is something in the
air. (Mind, I don't believe there is--and, speaking humbly, and without
having seen it, think it a true miracle--but I am arguing. ) We saw the
blood of St Patrizia, half liquid; i. e. liquefying, on her feast day. St
John Baptist's blood sometimes liquefies on the 29th of August, and did
when we were at Naples, but we had not time to go to the church. We saw
the liquid blood of an Oratorian Father; a good man, but not a saint,
who died two centuries ago, I think; and we saw the liquid blood of Da
Ponte, the great and holy Jesuit, who, I suppose, was almost a saint.
But these instances do not account for liquefaction on certain days, if
this is the case. But the most strange phenomenon is what happens at
Ravello, a village or town above Amalfi. There is the blood of St.
Pantaleon. It is in a vessel amid the stonework of the Altar-it is not
touched but on his feast in June it liquefies. And more, there is an
excommunication against those who bring portions of the True Cross into
the Church. Why? Because the blood liquefies, whenever it is brought. A
person I know, not knowing the prohibition, brought in a portion, and
the Priest suddenly said, who showed the blood, "Who has got the Holy
Cross about him? " I tell you what was told me by a grave and religious
man. It is a curious coincidence that in telling this to our Father
Director here, he said, "Why, we have a portion of St. Pantaleon's blood
at the Chiesa Nuova, and it is always liquid. "'
After leaving Naples, Newman visited Loreto, and inspected the house of
the Holy Family, which, as is known to the faithful, was transported
thither, in three hops, from Palestine.
'I went to Loreto,' he wrote, 'with a simple faith, believing what I
still more believed when I saw it. I have no doubt now. If you ask me
why I believe it, it is because everyone believes it at Rome; cautious
as they are and sceptical about some other things. I have no antecedent
difficulty in the matter. He who floated the Ark on the surges of a
world-wide sea, and enclosed in it all living things, who has hidden the
terrestrial paradise, who said that faith might move mountains, who
sustained thousands for forty years in a sterile wilderness, who
transported Elias and keeps him hidden till the end, could do this
wonder also. '
Here, whatever else there may be, there is certainly no trace of a
desire to deceive. Could a state of mind, in fact, be revealed with more
absolute transparency?
When Newman was a child he 'wished that he could believe the Arabian
Nights were true'. When he came to be a man, his wish seems to have been
granted.
Tract No. 90 was officially condemned by the authorities at Oxford, and
in the hubbub that followed, the contending parties closed their ranks;
henceforward, any compromise between the friends and the enemies of the
Movement was impossible. Archdeacon Manning was in too conspicuous a
position to be able to remain silent; he was obliged to declare himself,
and he did not hesitate. In an archidiaconal charge, delivered within a
few months of his appointment, he firmly repudiated the Tractarians. But
the repudiation was not deemed sufficient, and a year later he repeated
it with greater emphasis. Still, however, the horrid rumours were
afloat. The "Record" began to investigate matters, and its vigilance was
soon rewarded by an alarming discovery: the sacrament had been
administered in Chichester Cathedral on a weekday, and 'Archdeacon
Manning, one of the most noted and determined of the Tractarians, had
acted a conspicuous part on the occasion'. It was clear that the only
way of silencing these malevolent whispers was by some public
demonstration whose import nobody could doubt. The annual sermon
preached on Guy Fawkes Day before the University of Oxford seemed to
offer the very opportunity that Manning required. He seized it; got
himself appointed preacher; and delivered from the pulpit of St. Mary's
a virulently Protestant harangue. This time there could indeed be no
doubt about the matter: Manning had shouted 'No Popery! ' in the very
citadel of the Movement, and every one, including Newman, recognised
that he had finally cut himself off from his old friends. Everyone, that
is to say, except the Archdeacon himself. On the day after the sermon,
Manning walked out to the neighbouring village of Littlemore, where
Newman was now living in retirement with a few chosen disciples, in the
hope of being able to give a satisfactory explanation of what he had
done. But he was disappointed; for when, after an awkward interval, one
of the disciples appeared at the door, he was informed that Mr. Newman
was not at home.
With his retirement to Littlemore, Newman had entered upon the final
period of his Anglican career. Even he could no longer help perceiving
that the end was now only a matter of time. His progress was hastened in
an agitating manner by the indiscreet activity of one of his proselytes,
W. G. Ward. a young man who combined an extraordinary aptitude for a
priori reasoning with a passionate devotion to Opera Bouffe. It was
difficult, in fact, to decide whether the inner nature of Ward was more
truly expressing itself when he was firing off some train of scholastic
paradoxes on the Eucharist or when he was trilling the airs of Figaro
and plunging through the hilarious roulades of the Largo al Factotum.
Even Dr. Pusey could not be quite sure, though he was Ward's spiritual
director. On one occasion his young penitent came to him, and confessed
that a vow which he had taken to abstain from music during Lent was
beginning to affect his health. Could Dr. Pusey see his way to releasing
him from the vow? The Doctor decided that a little sacred music would
not be amiss. Ward was all gratitude, and that night a party was
arranged in a friend's rooms. The concert began with the solemn
harmonies of Handel, which were followed by the holy strains of the 'Oh
Salutaris' of Cherubini. Then came the elevation and the pomp of
'Possenti Numi' from the Magic Flute. But, alas! there lies much danger
in Mozart. The page was turned and there was the delicious duet between
Papageno and Papagena. Flesh and blood could not resist that; then song
followed song, the music waxed faster and lighter, until, at last Ward
burst into the intoxicating merriment of the Largo al Factotum. When it
was over, a faint but persistent knocking made itself heard upon the
wall; and it was only then that the company remembered that the rooms
next door were Dr. Pusey's.
The same entrainment which carried Ward away when he sat down to a piano
possessed him whenever he embarked on a religious discussion. 'The thing
that was utterly abhorrent to him,' said one of his friends, 'was to
stop short. ' Given the premises, he would follow out their implications
with the mercilessness of a medieval monk, and when he had reached the
last limits of argument, be ready to maintain whatever propositions he
might find there with his dying breath. He had the extreme innocence of
a child and a mathematician. Captivated by the glittering eye of Newman,
he swallowed whole the supernatural conception of the universe which
Newman had evolved, accepted it as a fundamental premise, and 'began at
once to deduce from it whatsoever there might be to be deduced. ' His
very first deductions included irrefutable proofs of (I) God's
particular providence for individuals; (2) the real efficacy of
intercessory prayer; (3) the reality of our communion with the saints
departed; (4) the constant presence and assistance of the angels of God.
Later on he explained mathematically the importance of the Ember Days:
'Who can tell,' he added, 'the degree of blessing lost to us in this
land by neglecting, as we alone of Christian Churches do neglect, these
holy days? ' He then proceeded to convict the Reformers, not only of
rebellion, but'--for my own part I see not how we can avoid adding--of
perjury. ' Every day his arguments became more extreme, more rigorously
exact, and more distressing to his master. Newman was in the position of
a cautious commander-in-chief being hurried into an engagement against
his will by a dashing cavalry officer. Ward forced him forward step by
step towards-no! he could not bear it; he shuddered and drew back. But
it was of no avail. In vain did Keble and Pusey wring their hands and
stretch forth their pleading arms to their now vanishing brother. The
fatal moment was fast approaching. Ward at last published a devastating
book in which he proved conclusively, by a series of syllogisms, that
the only proper course for the Church of England was to repent in
sackcloth and ashes her separation from the Communion of Rome. The
reckless author was deprived of his degree by an outraged University,
and a few weeks later was received into the Catholic Church.
Newman, in a kind of despair, had flung himself into the labours of
historical compilation. His views of history had changed since the days
when, as an undergraduate, he had feasted on the worldly pages of
Gibbon.
'Revealed religion,' he now thought, 'furnishes facts to other sciences,
which those sciences, left to themselves, would never reach. Thus, in
the science of history, the preservation of our race in Noah's Ark is an
historical fact, which history never would arrive at without
revelation. '
With these principles to guide him, he plunged with his disciples into a
prolonged study of the English Saints. Biographies soon appeared of St.
Bega, St. Adamnan, St. Gundleus, St. Guthlake, Brother Drithelm, St.
Amphibalus, St. Wuistan, St. Ebba, St. Neot, St. Ninian, and Cunibert
the Hermit. Their austerities, their virginity, and their miraculous
powers were described in detail. The public learned with astonishment
that St Ninian had turned a staff into a tree; that St. German had
stopped a cock from crowing, and that a child had been raised from the
dead to convert St. Helier. The series has subsequently been continued
by a more modern writer whose relation of the history of the blessed St.
Mael contains, perhaps, even more matter for edification than Newman's
biographies.
At the time, indeed, those works caused considerable scandal. Clergymen
denounced them in pamphlets. St. Cuthbert was described by his
biographer as having 'carried the jealousy of women, characteristic of
all the saints, to an extraordinary pitch'. An example was given,
whenever he held a spiritual conversation with St Ebba, he was careful
to spend the ensuing ours of darkness 'in prayer, up to his neck in
water'. 'Persons who invent such tales,' wrote one indignant
commentator, 'cast very grave and just suspicions on the purity of their
own minds. And young persons, who talk and think in this way, are in
extreme danger of falling into sinful habits. As to the volumes before
us, the authors have, in their fanatical panegyrics of virginity, made
use of language downright profane. '
One of the disciples at Littlemore was James Anthony Froude, the younger
brother of Hurrell, and it fell to his lot to be responsible for the
biography of St. Neot. While he was composing it, he began to feel some
qualms. Saints who lighted fires with icicles, changed bandits into
wolves, and floated across the Irish Channel on altar-stones, produced a
disturbing effect on his historical conscience. But he had promised his
services to Newman, and he determined to carry through the work in the
spirit in which he had begun it. He did so; but he thought it proper to
add the following sentence by way of conclusion: 'This is all, and
indeed rather more than all, that is known to men of the blessed St.
Neot; but not more than is known to the angels in heaven. '
Meanwhile, the English Roman Catholics were growing impatient; was the
great conversion never coming, for which they had prayed so fervently
and so long? Dr. Wiseman, at the head of them, was watching and waiting
with special eagerness. His hand was held out under the ripening fruit;
the delicious morsel seemed to be trembling on its stalk; and yet it did
not fall. At last, unable to bear the suspense any longer, he dispatched
to Littlemore Father Smith, an old pupil of Newman's, who had lately
joined the Roman communion, with instructions that he should do his
best, under cover of a simple visit of friendship, to discover how the
land lay. Father Smith was received somewhat coldly, and the
conversation ran entirely on topics which had nothing to do with
religion. When the company separated before dinner, he was beginning to
think that his errand had been useless; but, on their reassembling, he
suddenly noticed that Newman had changed his trousers, and that the
colour of the pair which he was now wearing was grey. At the earliest
moment, the emissary rushed back post-haste to Dr. Wiseman. 'All is
well,' he exclaimed; 'Newman no longer considers that he is in Anglican
orders. " Praise be to God! ' answered Dr Wiseman. 'But how do you know? '
Father Smith described what he had seen. 'Oh, is that all? My dear
father, how can you be so foolish? ' But Father Smith was not to be
shaken.
