lat then did Mr. Newman do?
Oxford, 1892

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1892

WHAT THEN DID DR. NEWMAN DO ?

In the following pages I hope to enumerate some of the
services John Henry Newman conferred upon the Church
and on Christianity as a whole. The question stated by my
title has, during the last few weeks, been the subject of
heated discussion, and it has been felt that the City of
Oxford, in giving its decision whether a statue to Newman's
memory should or should not be erected in one of its public
places, has had to deal with an affair of national importance.
At such a moment as the present, it is well to appeal to
history and to ask in the most matter-of-fact way " Why is
Newman's memory worthy of any exceptional honour ? "
Such a question is always of importance when the paying of
a public tribute would seem to imply that an example is
worthy of general esteem or perhaps emulation, or that the
present occasion is to be the reparation of a wrong un
wittingly inflicted in the past. At such a season, however,
the feeling is irresistible that, whether or no the opportunity
of retrieving an ancient blunder will be eagerly seized upon,
Time and her servant History will establish the reputation
which the passing clouds of prejudice and ignorance would
hide. Death commingles with eternity all that is true and
pure — all that has in it the inspiration of life and truth ;
Time will in her fires refine the true metal from the base, and
so the wise words Chateaubriand said on the death of his
friend Joubert are always pertinent: " On ne vit dans la memoire
du monde que pas des traveaux pour le monde."*
What did Newman do for the English Church ? This
question may be best answered by a broad statement, which
I will afterwards demonstrate to be fully justified by the
evidence at our command. In 183 1, Newman faced a
movement hostile to the Church, and although he was
derided by those whose dignity he so ardently upheld, with
the loyal assistance of the party which had collected round
him, he staved off what would have otherwise been a fatal
blow to the prestige and influence of the national Church.
He found the English Church something little more than
an " Establishment"; he left her a Church. In the thirties
Catholic feeling was latent under forms enjoined by law, but
little supported by the religious consciousness of the people ;
in the nineties the influence of Catholicism is daily becoming
the paramount factor in the religious life of the nation.
* See note at end. A 2

It was not until the commencement of the present century
that the theory of the identity of Church and nation, and the
consequent fitness of the State control of ecclesiastical affairs,
became strained to the point of snapping by the advance of
the principles of toleration. As the position of the Noncon
formists became stronger, and their religious, political, and
educational rights became more clearly recognised, so pari
passu it became more and more apparently absurd to regard
the Church as an ecclesiastical synonym for the nation. A
theory, however, often survives the facts it is supposed to
represent, and this was conspicuously the case in the present
instance. Indeed the retention of the theory, when it was no
longer truthfully applicable, had in the past enabled the
party opposed to toleration to perpetuate their grossly unjust
exclusive legislation. This, at the time Newman took his
degree, was a truth just beginning to have due weight in
politics, and even Churchmen were beginning to see that
much as the " Establishment " might avail towards the
maintenance of the Church's prestige, yet it would work
exceedingly ill for the Church if her affairs were to be regu
lated by a Parliament in which not only those indifferent to
her well-being but even her enemies found their place.
There was, then, a clear necessity that the Church should
revive her independent life, and stand out from the world as
an everlasting because a Divine society, whose existence the
power of the State could by no legislation in any sense modify
or exterminate. But there was a difficulty more serious than the constitu
tional one. The internal state of the Church had become so
grievously bad that the alternatives were recuperare aut mori.
Negligence in her primary duties had in the last century
given rise to a revival, but that very revival, while pouring a
temporary life into her veins, did little to minister to the
permanent needs of the vast corporation in which it only
partially found its scope. Evangelicism pure and simple is a
religion of individualism, and' as such it will work and work
well as long as it is m the hands of the sincerely exalted but
when death has thinned the flock, the propaganda will fall
into the hands of inferior persons and the enthusiasm cool
down into a deistic quietism. No revival which has found
its centre outside the Church has, for this reason, ever proved
a permanent religious success, and of this truth the history of
SSS&Sr11 °f the Elght6enth CentU^ is a P^-rly
r rT^r^? *fgKish ChJUrch should have been almost devoid
of life is little to be wondered at when the constitution of her

ministry is regarded. In 1818 England and Wales were
divided into 10,421 benefices, but, despite the clumsy laws of
Henry VIII. and Elizabeth enjoining clerical residence, there
were in 1809 no less than 7,358 non-resident incumbents, in
1810 there were 5,840, and in 1811 as many as 6,311. In
1831 only forty-five of the 140 Ely incumbents were resident
in their parishes, and thus a diocese of 82,000 souls was
ministered to at the cost of £"60,000, the sum representing
the annual income of the diocesan livings. It is true that an
attempt at reform was made, but the selfish opposition of the
bishops proved stronger than their sense of decency. Against
these facts it should be remembered that, even had the
clerical non-residence been smaller, the presence of a jolly
fox-hunter in the village would not perhaps have been a
decided spiritual gain :
" A jovial youth, who thinks his Sunday task,
As much as God or man can fairly ask.
The rest he gives to loves and labours light,
To fields the morning, and to feasts the night.
None better skilled the noisy pack to guide,
To urge their chase, to cheer them or to chide.
A sportsman keen, he shoots through half the day,
And skilled at whist, devotes the night to play."
The worst matter no doubt floats upon the top, but after
all that may be said of the real piety to be found here and
there among the clergy of those days, it still remains the
obvious painful fact that their piety was of the nature of a
light burning behind a bushel. The clergy were, as Dean
Church puts it, either a political sect or else family men,
pious and pure, but characterised by a "quiet worldliness."
The failure of the clergy to minister with any degree of
adequacy to the spiritual needs of the fastly-increasing
population was not the chief cause of the unmistakable
unpopularity of the Church. The stumbling block and rock
of offence were the bishops. Recruited as they were from the
families whose political importance had its basis in the rotten
boroughs, they were not unnaturally regarded as the enemies
of the great cause (then regarded as a panacea) of Parlia
mentary Reform. Monopolised by the aristocracy, the
bishoprics no longer secured an excellent administration by
their being the crown of a deserving parochial career.* They
were not even filled by those who had by their learning con-
* Cf. Spencer Walpole, Hist. Eng., Vol. I., where it is shown that in
1815, 21 of the 26 then living prelates owed their bishoprics either to their
noble birth or to their having held some position in the households of the
great. Every Churchman should possess Mr. Hoare's admirable History
of the English Church, where a terrible account of these abuses will be
found.

6
ferred great services on the cause of Christian knowledge :
" Paley is a great man," lamented George III.; " will never
be a bishop — will never be a bishop."
I once visited the home of a poor fellow who from want of
employment had fallen into a sad if not a fatal state of desti
tution. In one corner of the room stood a sewing machine,
but three obstacles prevented its use from being a support to
the family. For (i) the doctor had forbidden the wife to use
it, and (2) even had the woman been strong enough to turn it
to good account, she had not the necessary knowledge, and
(3), supposing the first two obstacles overcome, the machine
was all but hopelessly broken. When I read my report to
the Charity Organisation Committee, the humour and perhaps
even the pathos did not escape their presumably hardened
hearts. The sewing machine, never used and perhaps never
to be used, was the last article the ail-but starving family
would part with, for was it not the outward and visible sign
of the respectability and independence of those halcyon days,
when thirty shillings in wages were expended with an unwise
regularity ? You will nearly always find a sewing machine in
a distressed home, for it is, as I have said, a sacrament, even
when unused, of a woman's respectability. It argues that
time was when the wife was a good worker, and there the
machine stands the pathetic witness to what was and
perhaps in God's good time may be again.
The condition of poverty which has not reached the
workhouse crisis, in which the sewing machine still survives,
is a by no means inapt illustration of the condition into which
the Church had fallen at the beginning of this century. The
Church had its machinery, but it was too weak and diseased
to make use of it even if it had been aware of the way in
which the wheels should be set in motion ; and in this respect
in a worse plight than my poor woman — the Church did not
seem aware that the machinery was sadly out of gear. My
poor friends were destitute because the world could give
them nothing to do ; the Church was destitute because she
had so much to do and did not know how to do it, or indeed
that it had got to be done.
In contrast to the spiritual degradation of the Church
stands the intellectual reawakening of those times. One
great event brings a thousand others into existence. The
French Revolution in its later and disgusting aspects the
crushing Imperialism of Napoleon were as broken dams in
the course of human thought. In Germany, under the
Romanticist influence, the desert of barren encyclopsedism
had blossomed as a rose, and everywhere the waters broke int

song. The criticism of Kant followed by the transcendental
school of thought seemed to men parched in the arid desert of
materialism to be the striking of a rock from whence would in
evitably flow forth the springs of a higher life than had before
been conceivable. It was the age of German Romanticism,
of Fouque's Undine, of Goethe's poetry, of Coleridge's philo
sophy, of Scott's Waverley Novels, and for lesser minds of
"noeticism," not yet of Brougham, and of the general diffu
sion of " entertaining knowledge." But although the times
were ripe for a " spiritual revival," the Church, with an
apparently insuperable inertia, was prepared to let the
opportunity slip by — perhaps never to return, prepared to
allow her children to take an undisciplined enjoyment of a
teaching akin indeed to her own essence, but leading in its
extremes to the morasses and quagmires of an impossible
rationalism. Things were indeed looking black, and their aspect was
not mistaken by those watching the signs of the seasons.
John Keble in his visits to parishes distant from his own
Gloucestershire home, where the non-juror traditions of his
ancestry were not forgotten, had seen and reported that
things were going from bad to worse. " I felt," he says,
"affection for my Church but not tenderness. I felt dismay at
her prospects, anger and scorn at her do-nothing perplexity.
There was need of a second Reformation." Hugh James Rose
had gauged the threatening aspect of German Rationalism,
and begun, in the fine words of Newman's dedication, to " stir
up the gift that was in us, and bid us betake ourselves to our
true mother." "The holy house is still beset
With leaguer of stern foes
Bad thoughts within, bad men without,
All evil spirits round about,
Are banded in unblest device
To spoil Love's earthly paradise."

" Is this a time to plant and build,
Add house to house, and field to field,
When round our walls the battle lowers,
When mines are hid beneath our towers,
And watchful foes are stealing round
To search and spoil the holy ground ?
" Is this a time for moonlight dreams
Of love and home by mazy streams,
For Fancy with her shadowy toys,
Aerial hopes and pensive joys,
While souls are wandering far and wide
And curses swarm on every side ?

8
" Awake, why linger in the gorgeous town,
Sworn liegemen of the Cross and thorny crown ?
Up from your beds of sloth and shame,
Speed to the eastern mount like flame,
Nor wonder, should ye find your King in tears
Even with the loud Hosanna ringing in His ears."
The Christian Year appeared in 1827, and "woke up in
the hearts of thousands a new music, the music of a school
long unknown in England." It is now perhaps impossible to
regard the work as other than one, which, ministering to the
permanent needs of the soul, is like the Imitatio "for all time."
But this very fact is significant. Dr. Johnson had declared
with all his well-known positiveness that religion cannot lend
itself to poetry, and here, in the very form which that good
man would have thought impossible, the great revival made
itself first to be felt. Yet if we read the Christian Year
through historical glasses, its connection with the times will
not escape detection. There is over and over again a note of
suppressed passion — a protest that men are living quiet,
peaceful, sleepy lives when Christ, through the signs of the
times, bids them to be on their watch and armed.
" But what are Heaven's alarms to hearts that cower
In wilful slumber, deepening every hour,
That draw their curtains closer round
The nearer swells the trumpet's sound."
The swallows are flying low before the rain. The note of
warning is too distinct to be missed, but the Church sleeps,
deaf to the cries of the children clinging to her idle breasts.
Truly 'tis " an age of light, light without love."
So Keble sang in 1827, but things went on getting blacker
and blacker, and at last began to draw to an issue. The
Liberal party had conquered the bishops' policy, and now
commenced their attack on the bishops themselves. Sup
pression of sees, appropriation of endowments, schemes of
separation of Church and State, couched in terms of
" National Apostacy," were in the air. Lord Grey set
flame to the fuel, and warned the bishops to get their house
in order. Looking back on those troublous days, we perhaps fail to
recognise the gravity of the position the Church then found
herself in, and this is probably because we are not as yet able
to estimate adequately the true proportions of the religious
revival which began then and is still at work. For more than
fifty years the vast labour of building up a Church more
truly national than before has been in progress, and even
now (with the feeble and unpopular rural organisation) is onlv
half complete. Into this great vwork thousands of men have

thrown themselves with self-sacrificing devotion, and those
who have not been able to give the whole of their time have
given nobly of their substance. Thus, by the grace of God,
the English Church abounds in the Catholic note of vitality.
The time- for boasting has not and will never come. There
are tasks yet almost untouched that must be performed and
that soon : there is our rural population to be brought more
completely into touch with the clergy : the work in the towns
is far from being what a more sinc.ere not to say earnest self-
devotion might make it : the spiritual needs of the Colonies
are scandalously provided for : the missionary efforts have to
be more than redoubled ; and above all the spirit of unity has
to be more diligently cultivated. Yet, taking all in all, the
labour expended has been simply vast, and it is this reflected
light which makes the Church of fifty years ago seem a far
brighter institution than it really was in itself.
The point which must be now pressed home is that the
question is not whether the crisis then threatening the
Church could have been met by Keble, Rose, Froude, Pusey,
or any one else, but that it was met by Newman. History
does not embark us in the quest of undiscovered possi
bilities but of facts. I know of no contention so absurd as
that which would deny Newman the credit of his work simply
because it might have been done just as well by some one else
with equal or greater genius. It is however urged with far
greater plausibility that Newman's share in the movement
was a secondary one ; that the revival was started by Keble
and successfully carried on by Pusey. Such a view requires
serious examination.
It is perfectly true that Keble published the Christian Year
so far back as 1827, and that this was historically the first
document belonging to a movement which to so great an
extent was of a literary nature. On the other hand, however,
it must be borne in mind that the Christian Year, so far from
being intended by its author to stir up a movement, was in
reality only the private meditations which Keble's friends
after much persuasion induced him to publish. It is also
true that, while Newman came of a quasi-Calvinistic
ancestry, the Kebles, on the other hand, held all the tradi
tions of Laud's school, which had descended to them through
their non-juror ancestry. But, again, it is all important to
notice that Newman had before 1830 freed his mind from the
Calvinistic dogmas, and as a witness to their demonstrated
falsity was perhaps more inclined to be extreme in the
opposing Catholic views than were those who believed as
their fathers had believed before them.

10
To establish Newman's leadership it is by no means
necessary to underrate the pervading influence of Keble and
the " good-men " whose lives have been writ in gold by Dean
Burgon. Keble, as is well known, had not been resident in
Oxford for many years previous to the commencement of the
movement, and if any one reads the letters printed in his
Memoir by Sir J. Coleridge, he will carry away the impres
sion that Keble was a fellow-worker who lived in a very
different atmosphere from that in which the others did their
respective shares.* It is Newman whom he speaks of as
especially in need of strength in the task that both had in
common. His influence first on J. H. Froude and then on
Newman himself was of course simply incalculable, but
Keble had few friends in the University, while " Credo in
Newmanum," "Newmania," etc., were among the commonest
expressions in Oxford conversation of the time.
The objectors to Newman's leadership can quote a few
modest passages in the Apologia, which only show how
truthful an account is to be found in that wonderful book.
Newman certainly assigns the preaching of the Sermon on
National Apostacy as the commencement of the movement, but
then he has said that had the Oriel Tutorship business not
previously occurred there would have in all probability been
no movement at all. If, however, the reader has read Keble's
dull Assize Sermon, he will certainly have been surprised
that its matter and language (very much milder than the
average sermon to be heard now-a-days) could have stirred
up in people even more excitable than the usual audience at
such an oration the seeds of a movement that was to have so
profound an effect on English religion, literature, and social
life. The true account of the feelings which preceded the
movement cannot be found elsewhere than in the famous
pages of the Apologia where Newman describes with wonderful
power the Mediterranean Voyage : —
" England was solely in my thoughts, and the news from Eng
land came rarely and imperfectly. The bill for the suppression of
* " About a year ago, when staying at Hursley, I remember John Keble
saying " I now look upon my time with Newman and Pusey as a sort of
parenthesis in my life, and I have now returned again to my old views
such as I had before. At the time of the great Oxford Movement, when
I used to go up to you at Oxford, Pusey and Newman were full of the
wonderful progress and success of the movement — whereas I had always
been taught that the truth must be unpopular and despised and to make
confession for it was all that one could do; but I see that I was fairly
carried off my legs by the sanguine views they held, and the effects that
were showing themselves in all quarters," Isaac Williams: Autobioera-bhv
p. 18. Keble also spoke of himself as being under " Newman's yoke "
Froude thought that the publication of the Christian Year would stamt>
Keble in the popular inind as a methodistl "

II
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
inwardly. I became fierce against its instruments and its mani
festations. 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 my 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
Apostolica 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 ! ' — 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 Monsignore 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 to do in Eng
land.' I went down at once to Sicily, and the presentiment 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 have
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.'

12
" 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 compulsory delay at Paris) till I reached
England, and my mother's house."
In urging then that Newman gave really the efficient start
to the movement, I do not of course mean to say that he was
its originator in any sense above the one in which any one
man can be said to have founded a great movement. No set
of ideas has ever come into the world suddenly, and if idea
preceded idea, prophet preceded prophet. It is a truism of
history to say that before Savonarolas there are Arnold of
Brescias, before Luthers — Wycliffes, before Giordano Brunos
— Abelards, before Francis Bacons — Roger Bacons, before
Robespierres — Rousseaus, and so on, and it is nothing beyond
what we should have expected, when we find before Burgon's
" Good Men," — Non-jurors, Bishop Wilsons and Alexander
Knoxs. The truth is that Keble, Hurrell Froude, as well as
many others who had little sympathy with the movement
(such as Hawkins, and Whately) tempered an intellect and
made it a fit agent not only to express their thoughts (and in
this sense were its masters), but to take those thoughts and
lay them before the world with a boldness and eloqnence of
which they were not possessed.
No newspaper correspondent has as yet claimed the Move
ment as Pusey's, and this because it is well known that Pusey
only joined it some time after it was well on foot. The com
parison of Pusey's writings with those of Newman will at once
put beyond all doubt on whose side was the balance of the
force, and a reference to the impressions recorded for us by
authorities as competent as Dean Church, Principal Shairp,
Sir F. Doyle, Norman Macleod, W. Palmer, H. Oakley, and
Father Lockhart, will show that the most winning power the
Tractarians possessed was displayed not in the intermittent
paper warfare of the Tracts, or controversial argument in the
closet, but in those wonderful discourses delivered by one with
a stooping figure and the mien of greatest humility and sim
plicity. It was not the eloquence nor even the beautiful
simplicity of the language, but rather the insight into motive

13
and the recesses of the soul where grace struggles with incli
nation that marked those sermons with the stamp of irresistible
genius. A great religious teacher seldom seeks to win his way
by argument : he rather seeks to show the soul something
about itself which is new even to itself, and by so doing
establishes his power. It was this power that won Nathanael
to Jesus, and wrung from Peter the almost despairing recog
nition of the mastery, "Lord, Thou knowest all things, Thou
knowest that I love Thee." The power of attracting souls is
a knowledge of their inmost nature and needs, and this know
ledge was Newman's greatest gift.
So far then I have claimed for Newman the leading place
in a movement which from any point of view must now be
admitted to have staved off a great religious disaster. I do
not go so far as saying, as Dean Church says, that Newman
was " the maker of the Church of England as we now see it,"
although these words coming from such an authority, and
quoted with approval by Cardinal Manning, strike the key
note of Newman's great labour of making the English Church
true to herself.
Now it is not uncommonly stated that the importance of
the Oxford Movement has been exaggerated, that the Church
was not in so corrupt a state as is usually made out, and that
the distinctive doctrines of the Church of England were even
then consistently preached and followed by a fairly numerous
body of Clergy. The truth of the last statement no one would
wish to deny, but it is clear that when Newman originated the
Tracts for the Times the course of events had rendered a purely
passive position impossible. For to the majority of men it
seemed that the " Establishment " was of the essence of the
English Church, and if the connection with the State were
broken the Church would be deprived, as it were, of one of its
principal sources of life. The idea, as every one now-a-days
would admit, was false to a degree, but this fact is only due to
the light of recently developed principle. It was the work of
the Tractarians, not only to make clear the independent life of
the Church, but to fortify her weakened ramparts so that she
might be able to stand firm before any future attacks of
Liberalism or what not. The Movement was, therefore, of a
genuinely conservative type. It was no attempt to re-introduce
the tenets distinctively associated with ultramontanism : it was
rather the attempt to make the Church of England recognise
that she was something more than a mere State department
which might be at any moment destroyed by the power on
whose support she had hitherto too closely relied ; an attempt
to put her in the necessarily independent position by com-

14
pelling her to realise her true foundation in the eternal principles
of her Catholicity. To achieve this, it was necessary to tan
into a brighter flame the long dying embers of her Sacramental
life — to make her, in short, true to herself as an integral
branch of the one true Catholic Church of Christ.
The task was no easy one. Never had the teaching of the
Church been more misinterpreted and less cared for. Accord
ing to the XlXth Article the due administration of the Sacra
ment is of the inmost essence of the visible Church of Christ,
and yet at that epoch they were not only mal- administered,
but " the pure word of God ''• explaining their nature regarded
as a thing of nought. The reality of Christ's presence in the
Blessed Eucharist, the regenerating laver of Holy Baptism,
the sanctity of the specially bestowed gifts of the Spirit — all
these doctrines, the very life and sustenance of the Catholic
Church, were the subjects of open disparagment by the school
who made spasmodic conversion the sum of the religious life,
and the still vaster body who professed to prefer moral ex
cellence to truth.
If the cause that Newman represented had been such a one
as to meet with a warm welcome from those whom it benefited,
there would be less reason to honour him for his share in it.
But so far had the Church wandered from its ancient moorings
that the place whither it was implored to return seemed but a
strange land. And if the bishops who refused to believe in
their own apostolic succession had only been possessed of a
sense of humour, things might have been otherwise. What
excuse had they for their existence — their bloated, overpaid,
mud-volcano existence, if they did not bear witness to the
truths their own liturgy proclaimed ? Dean Church in two
essays which appeared as leading articles in the Guardian has
suggested that the shameful worldliness of the clergy of New
man's day was perhaps of the nature of a little rift within his
Anglican lute, and here is the description of Oxford clergy by
the Cardinal himself : —
" I cannot bear the pomp and pretence I see everywhere. I am
not speaking against individuals; they are very good persons, I
know ; but really if you saw Oxford as it is ! The Heads with such
large incomes ; they are indeed very liberal with their money, and
their wives are often simple, self-denying persons, as every one
says, and do a great deal of good in the place ; but I speak of the
system. Here are ministers of Christ with large incomes, living
m finely furnished houses, with wives and families, and stately
butlers and servants in livery, giving dinners all in the best style,
condescending and gracious, waving their hands and mincing their
words, as if they were the cream of the earth, but without anything
to make them clergymen but a black coat and a white tie. And

15
the Bishops or Deans come, with women tucked under their arm,
and they can't enter church but a fine powdered man runs first
with a cushion for them to sit on, and a warm sheepskin to keep
their feet from the stones."
There is no need to enter into an examination of the theology
of the Tracts for the Times. It is by no means hard to criticise
their contents somewhat severely. They caused unnecessary
disturbance of opinion by confusing private opinions (such as
Williams' theory of doctrinal reserve, |and Pusey's early view of
post-baptismal sin) with the re-statement of the great Catholic
doctrines, which was the function proper to the movement.
But it must be remembered that the Tractarian days were
not times of quiet deliberation, but of storm and stress. The
movement flamed up suddenly, and men felt bound to state
their principles with all possible boldness. It is not at any
time an easy task for a thinker to determine what is an
objective portion of a system and what is but the natural
accretion of his own individual mind.
For a large number of sincerely religious persons the
tenets of the Tractarians are still impossible, yet the ethos of
the movement must commend itself to all. Ethically it
represents an attempt to bring to men's minds the sternness
of Christ's teaching. The false liberalism which would make
free of what -is not its own, would for mere convenience sake
compromise error with the truth, resolve sin — the crucifying
again of the Son of God and the putting Him to an open
shame — into a pardonable weakness to be accounted for by
the frailty of human nature, the assumption of an attitude of
indifference to the welfare of the cause of the Incarnation,
the fin de- siecle sacrifice of holiness to culture, and religion to
assthetics ; these were the elements in modern society with
which the Tractarians proclaimed undying warfare.
The service, then, that the movement conferred on the
Church is simply incalculable, and Newman's part in that
movement was most prominent. But were the good results
of those years of hard and distressing work outweighed by
the blow inflicted by his secession ?
That Newman's secession was the most grievous blow
which the cause of the Catholic Church of this country has
received in modern times appeared a truth even to Lord
Beaconsfield, and there is no disguising the gravity of the
catastrophe. Not only did the secession remove from the
service of a movement, whose welfare was everything to the
Church, its ablest if not its holiest leader, but it caused a sort
of temporary paralysis in the religious life of Oxford. "When
Newman went over to Rome I closed my mind with a snap,

i6
and it has not opened since," was the famous remark of a
slightly less famous Oxford man. From Newman's departure
from Oxford dates the commencement of those days when, in
Clough's words, " men's minds were tossed like autumn
leaves." It is not then my intention to refute the vulgar view
which represents Newman as responsible for all the seces
sions that have occurred since and even before his own. So
far from leading others Newman himself was rather led to
Rome, and we know for certain that he did his best to dis
courage rather than accelerate the rush Romewards that
commenced some time before the publication of Tract XC.
Any one who has contrasted the dishonest teaching of Ward's
Ideal with the (at least) historically accurate statements of
Tract XC. will know that the public mind has confused (as
Ward confused) the teaching of the former with the facts of the
latter, and certainly no one who has made himself acquainted
with Ward's character will assign his secession to the direct
influence of Newman. Neither is it my intention to show
what with little thought is obvious — that Newman's secession
had its good side, and that it came when Newman had
probably done all that it was in his power to do for the
English Church. Dean Church has shewn how absurd it is
to suppose that the Oxford Movement ceased when Newman
left Oxford. So far from that, the action of the University in
reality only compelled the workers to seek a larger field of
operations. But, taking all in all, does Newman's secession
really tell against his honour ? Is it no token for good that a
man should sell all that he has and follow whither he is led ?
Is it no lesson to our time-serving, peace-preferring days of
foul compromise, that for Faith's sake, like Abraham of old,
the leader of his race should be constrained to travel out of
his own country into a strange land ? Is the man a "deserter"
who counts fame, a secured position, and the esteem of friends
as nought in order that Christ's call may be unhesitatingly
followed ? When in our churches we sing that loveliest of
hymns, "Lead kindly light," can we in our hearts believe
that he who wrote those words, and whose conscience acquitted
him of having ever " sinned against light," in answer to his
prayer was allowed to wander "o'er moor and fen" after
some ignis fatuus, far away from where at dawn
. . . " Those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile."
If so it be, then are we indeed without Christ in the world
and are of all men most miserable. Let us look to it how
we answer the question.

i7
Few events have in modern times brought any one into
such unreasoning odium as Newman's secession brought
him, and indeed the recent revival of this spirit of unworthy
criticism would lead one to support a fairly universal proposi
tion that vulgar Protestantism is as unchristian and unfor
giving as it is foolish and perverted. Speaking of Keble,
Newman had occasion to write in after years : —
"Would that others had confined themselves to this — we will
not say kind and gentle, but— equitable tone in their reproofs ! we
speak 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 Church. We are not here crying for mercy, but asking
justice, demanding common English fairness; we have a right to
expect, but we do not find, that considerate, compassionate, com
prehensive judgment upon their conduct, which, instead of fixing on
particular isolated points in it, views it as a whole — uses the good,
which is its general character, to hide its incidental faults, makes
one part explain another, what is strong here excuse what is weak
there, and evident sincerity of intention atone for infirmity of per
formance — which has a regard to circumstances, to the trial of an
almost necessary excitement, to the necessity of acting beyond
criticism, yet without precedent, and of reaching a certain object
when all paths to it have respectively their own difficulties. We
are not apologizing for their great and momentous decision itself,
but for the peculiarities which have accompanied its execution ; if
to do as much as this be considered after all asking for mercy, not
for equity, it is only such mercy, to say the least, as the parties
censuring, as well as the parties censured, will require themselves
on a day to come. In the well-known words of the poet —
1 In the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation ; we do pray for mercy ;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.' "
II. Over and above Newman's good service to the Eng
lish Church is the inestimable gift conferred on Christianity
as a whole by his writings. Of his literary style I have
nothing to say here, unless it is to remark that its merits
have been as much misapprehended as his teaching has been
misunderstood and misinterpreted.*
In a letter sent to me some four years ago, the late Dr.
Bloxam, who was for some time Newman's curate and to
the last remained one of his carissimi, in referring to the
* For masterpieces see the account of the locust storm in Callista, the
refutation of Gibbon in the latter part of the Grammar of Assent, and the
description of the Holy Mass in Loss and Gain. As a specimen of
Newman's dialectic read the chapter on creed-making in the Avians of the
Fourth Century. B

i8
Cardinal's illness wrote : " I shall pray for him at service
to-morrow (Sunday), because the English Church owes him
so much — if only on account of his sermons." Dr. Bloxam
hit the right note, and I shall therefore devote the rest of the
present pamphlet to a statement, as brief as intelligibility
will allow, of the outlines of Newman's distinctive contribu
tions to religious thought.
Now what is the purport of the great work which
Newman's admirers so loudly extol ? Did he destroy Dar
winism or " reconcile " it with Genesis? Did he indisputably
prove the Johnnian authorship of the Fourth Gospel ? or that
David only could have been the author of the noth Psalm ?
Did he place it beyond the doubt of an unbiassed observer of
facts that the chapters usually assigned to a single individual
prophet could have been written by no more hands than one,
and those the hands of Isaiah ? Or if he was a stranger in the
field of Biblical study, was it in the quarries of modern social
investigation that the marks of his tools must be traced?
Did he enter the arena of the industrial world and cry shame
on the grasping capitalist, or " unite " to the sweated indus
trial ? Perchance he was to be found on the temperance
platform, or at the gates of the London dockyard. But if
he was none of these things ! If indeed he was not a man of
the Editor of the Review of Reviews' own heart, then Principal
Fairbairn is at a loss to know what claim to honour Newman
can possess, save it were the giving to nothing a "local
habitation and a name" in forty substantial volumes need
ing classification.
No. Newman neither refuted Robert Elsmere, nor out-
socialised the Fabian Society, and so from a fin de siecle point
of view he is perhaps a thing of nought. To me, however, it
seems that his greatness is in his very power to take you
from a world of burning questions, away from the noisy
assertions of first-principle-despising controversialists, back,
behind the hastily-drawn inferences of practical life, to the
sphere where truth stares the soul in the face and refuses to
be misunderstood. There is nothing he touches which he
does not adorn. He takes into his grasp our commonplace
hum-drum thoughts and, having, as it were, dipt them in a
well of life, gives them back to us clad in robes of inspiration.
He imperatively demands that you should take his point of
view, and with him see the distant scene suffused with a light
that never was on land or sea. He has pre-eminently the
power of making life " real" to us, and this by reason of the
subtle power by which in his own life the "real" has its
being in the unseen Eternity of God, For him there have

19
always been "two, and only two, absolute and luminously
self-evident beings, myself and my Creator." Of the
prophetic mind, like the angels of the little children, it
may be said that its face sees the Father in heaven, and we
much mistake its function if we expect of it the work of the
critic or scientist.
So much then in anticipation of any misinterpretation :
it is now our duty to take a cursory view of Newman's
distinctive teaching.
Science is truly said to be atomistic : its fundamental
maxim is Divide et impera. But as Auguste Comte, following
a wise remark of Bacon's showed, the classification of the
sciences should as regards reality be horizontal rather than
vertical (that is to say, the sciences are not really sharply
divided from each other but overlap, and the same laws run
through the whole body like nerves in the human frame),
so Newman sought to correct the besetting error which
separates by an impossible gulf the provinces of faith and
reason. He showed that the human faculties do not act
separately but in close combination and co-operation, that
faith cannot act without reason any more than my fingers
can write these words without a corresponding and previous
energy of the brain, and that in consequence it is a false and
precarious thing to draw the indelible distinctions which the
so-called Rationalist would have us make.
Faith and reason cannot, then, be naturally opposed,
although they be made to do so by their perverted use, in
the same way as in the physical constitution the grosser
parts can be over-developed and thereby ruin the finer parts
of the organism, and vice versa. Perverted use, however,
is only a witness to the possibility of an ideal harmony.
Faith is an independent human faculty, no more originated,
though of course approved by the reason, than the innocence
of an acquitted prisoner is originated by the judge who tried
him. Reason establishes Faith, but it is absurd to suppose
that it creates it. The reason is a critical but never a
creative power.
"But," urges the Rationalist, "you cannot deny that the
faculty you call faith is just-a-bit credulous, that it is often
content with evidence from the point of view of cold critical
reason insufficient." The Rationalist is in the majority of
cases correct. Faith is often " content^ with evidence from
the point of view of cold critical reason insufficient." But is
it rational, is it logical, to say that "cold critical reason" is
the whole of Reason ? Reason surely has to deal with facts
 such facts as are humanly knowable. Now the voice of
B 2

20

conscience is a fact, and it is a philosophic error of the first
water to substitute reason for the conscience. Reason was
intended to interpret not to create life, and consequently if
Reason overlooks the facts of Faith in the interests of a so-
called Rationalist or Synthetic theory it is fundamentally
untrue to itself. For Faith has its facts. Let us take the
case of a child who has offended his parents (we are assuming
that he is safe from influences destructive of his religious
instincts), "he will at once 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 impression on his mind of an unseen Being with
whom he is in immediate relation, and that relation so
familiar that he can address Him whenever 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 particular providence
among us, who is present everywhere, 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 en
forcing 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 there
fore as being good Himself, for it is the property of goodness
to kindle love, or rather the very object of love is goodness ;
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, kindness, and the

21

like— are but shapes and aspects of goodness. And having
m 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, sup
plementary 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 embrac
ing 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 recognised 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."
To this description of a child's instinctive recognition of
the goodness of the essentially good Father in Heaven, it will
be objected that the facts are only true of a few children.
But, as Newman says, it matters little as long as they are true
in known instances, and, in point of fact, there are not a few
persons who can say with Newman : " 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 realise the precepts and truths of Christianity, as
deliberately to surrender our life rather than transgress the
one or deny the other."
Faith then has its facts, and it recognises these by the
power Newman calls "the illative sense." The terminology
of the Grammar of Assent to the majority of persons is unsatis-

22
factory, but there is no necessity to discuss the matter here,
and it is desirable to evade the difficulties of an obviously
unnecessary discussion of terms. The Illative sense might
be said to be Reason infused with Love. We are made in
God's image, and have consequently a power, blunted by sin,
of discerning, as God discerns, what is suited to our nature.
Thus we know what is true by its being compatible with our
nature in its completest sense, as in the same way we know
what is right in conduct by the witness of our conscience.
" I am the Good Shepherd, and I know My sheep and mine
know Me. My sheep hear My voice, and I know them and
they follow Me." Thus the sheep are able to recognise the
Shepherd's voice, and distinguish it from the robber's.
Reason then may (in its truest sense) work side by side
with the illative sense or power of recognising truth as
spiritually discerned, and it is, therefore, strictly rational that
faith should be content with weak proofs as long as the truth
to be attested does fit itself in with the witness of the needs of
the soul. On the other hand, however, there is a faculty of
" evidence-mongering " which sometimes arrogates to itself
the proud title of reason, and if men went by this alone it is
doubtful whether they would not find the "proofs" to be
equally divided against affirmation and the contrary. The
Agnostic and Atheist may be logical in their arguments from
the assumptions they start with.* Logic, it has been well
said, makes no martyrs, and if we believed simply because
the object of belief represented a succession of inductions, we
should indeed be at the mercy of any change in the " wind of
doctrine" which might elect to upset our delicately posed
ladder. Fortunately we are made otherwise. Truth does
not go in search of an olive branch, but of place in which to
build a permanent nest. Admitting that a truth has been
attained by a logical process — and how rare is the case — it at
once falls in with a body of companion truths, and by its
connection with them gains a strength by which it is able to
retain its place, even after the ladder of argument has been
kicked down. When we recognise a truth singly we may
call it a "notional assent," when we recognise it as a fact of
life (i.e., in connection with other ideas) it is a " real assent."
These distinctions are brought out by Newman, in some of
the finest passages in modern English literature, the subtle
beauty of which has been recognised by minds so different as
J. Anthony Froude, Walter Bagehot, J. B. Mozley and
R. H. Hutton. ¦"
* This carefully guarded admission is usually stripped of the conditions
required to make it true, and then cited as an instance of the Cardinal's
scepticism ! s

23
It was then no mean service to Christianity to have
pointed out m so wonderful a manner the distinctive and vet
co-operative functions of Faith and Reason, and the service
was conferred at a time when much needed. When Newman
began his career the world was tiring of the old mechanical
evidence school, of which Paley is the most typical repre
sentative. The theology of the preceding epoch was happily
hit off by Dr. Johnson, when he described it as an Old Bailey
Theology in which the Apostles were daily placed on trial
for forgery. Such a theology could little satisfy the expanded
nature of the new century. For all that it attained to was a
probable God and a probable immortality for the soul, if
religious and moral duties, probably valuable, were observed
with such a quality of zeal as would probably amount to the
probable requirements of the aforesaid probable Deity ; and
all this with a by no means improbable contingency that the
whole affair was a mistake. That the system was rationally
absurd is obvious, since no man can really worship a probable
God. Collins' answer to the question, " Why do you send
your servants to church ?" is well known : " Because if they
did not they would either rob or murder me."
Carlyle has shown how this probability system led to
Atheism, and it is easy to see how it paved the way for a
strengthening of the Calvinism that had so strong an anti-
Christian influence on men like James Mill. In the essay on
Diderot, Carlyle writes: "Above all, that faint possible theism
which now forms our common English creed, cannot too soon
be swept out of the world." "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 of thine and thought of thine — and thou wert wise
to look to it."
That probability is the guide of life Newman when very
young had learned from Butler. But neither he nor Butler
really applied this to their own faiths,* and why ? As we have
* This is important to notice because Principal Fairbairn has recently
accused Newman and (by implication) Butler of holding two contradictory
principles  probability the guide of life and the supremacy of the con
science Infallibility and Supremacy are of course in two different spheres,
but the Principal's contention is an ignoratio elenchi.

24
seen, the worship of a merely probable God is not only
irrational but impossible, and Newman learned "from Mr.
Keble that this difficulty 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 illustration, 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."
Of the "living power of faith and love" which raises
doctrines from probability to irrefragable certitude I have
spoken above, and need not repeat my remarks here, but the
words I have just quoted describe the whole ethos of the
Oxford Movement. It was a central doctrine of the move
ment, and one little congenial with the tastes and habits of
the world, that ethical discipline is the necessary condition for
maintenance of the truth. This is, however, not the point I
wish to dwell on here. The great fact is that Newman's
work, although few people agree with the terms of which he
makes use, effected this great service for Christianity — it
made it see where its strength lay and have recourse to
the fountain of its inspiration. By so doing, Newman sup
plied a new field of nobler Christian evidence — the witness
of man's spiritual being to God, when the old system of
exterior evidence had not only ceased to fulfil its object, but
even become, as the quotation from Carlyle illustrates, an
active cause of misbelief.
Again, I have pointed out that the probabilist theory,
based as it is on external evidence, leads to a mechanical
conception of the universe. The gloomy rationalistic methods
can but support a deistic ethical system. This fact is well
borne out by the religious history of the last century, con
cerning which Mark Pattison has well written : 
"Theology is— first, 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. Secondly, and in an inferior degree, it is ethical and
regulative of our conduct as men, in those relations which are
temporal and transitory. Argumentative proof that such know
ledge 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

25
h-aIt a ProPer belief in it." " If the religious- history of the
eighteenth century," he continues, "proves anything it is this:
inat good sense, the best good sense, when it sets to work with
¦fi «laje" °f numan nature and Scripture to construct a religion,
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 the
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 instru
ment of theological investigation."
Just as Newman had met the probabilist theory, by show
ing that love was an irrefragable witness-bearer, so he met the
mechanist theory by the beautiful sacramental doctrine of the
universe. If God is Love, He would never have left the uni
verse to go its own way without His continual mercy ever
preventing and following it. " Every breath of air, every ray
of light and heat, every beautiful prospect, is as it were the
skirts of their garments, the waving of the robes of those
whose faces see God in Heaven." His study of Butler had
done much to impress on his mind the truth 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." Thus God has not created the world
and thenceforth rested in what Liddon called the " cynicism
of an unbroken silence." The recognition of this truth led to
the revolution in theology which has made belief possible for
those whom modern thought had trained to rightly despise
the old mechanical system. The Incarnation rather than
the Atonement has come to be regarded as the centre of
Christian philosophy.
A great difficulty often experienced by those who would
enter the Church lies in the inability to reconcile the modern
with the primitive aspects, and this difficulty was again met
by Newman. The theory of the development of doctrine is
perhaps the most original of his contributions to Christian
defence. It would take too long to show how this theory is a
distinct gain to Christian as distinct from Roman apologetics.
I can only here ask those who intend to study the famous
Essay to read side by side with it the portions of the History

26
of the Arians of the IV th Century which deal with the primitive
disciplina arcani, the economy, and creed making, and to bear
in mind Newman's theory of assent. If this is done it will be
seen that the development theory can stand apart from the
Romanist cause, for whose service the Essay was intended.
Another valuable element in Newman's teaching is his
Idea of a University. The throwing open of our Universities to
all sorts of Religions and un- Religion has indeed rendered im
possible that training of mind which can alone be considered
philosophically adequate. From the Christian point of view
no education is worthy of the name which is not based on the
likeness of man's nature to God. Oxford studies have now-a-
days no basis but anarchy, and this is because they have little
or no relation to the educational needs of the mind but are
simply directed to the propagation of useful knowledge. The
days when our Universities will be subjected to the rough
handling of the promoters of " a sound commercial educa
tion " are perhaps not so far distant, for the present system
amounts to little more than a cumbrous method of distribut
ing easily- acquired certificates. In the minds of those who
founded the colleges a very different ideal was in view. It
seemed to them that it was possible through the influences of
a true learning to ripen the faculties of the student till his
mind was able to reflect with greater perfection the truths
God had willed to be its light. Dominus illuminatio mea was the
proud motto. But now nous avons change tout cela is our boast,
and the one line of conduct that can insure what goes by the
name of a "brilliant University career" is a consistent refusal
to permit the intellect to partake of its proper food.
The reiterated teaching of Newman's Idea of a University
is that knowledge and religion are not capable of separation,
and he shows how the attempt to make such a separation
leads to degeneration in either department. Let art separate
itself from religion, and it will immediately become anti-re
ligious, nay, deprived of its inspiration, it will languish and
die. Let political economy be studied on the assumption
that it can be perfected without any reference to the develop
ing science of ethics, and immediately it becomes first un
ethical, and then, as it gains a paramount place in the minds
of its votaries, even anti-ethical. The essential work of a
University is to harmonise the provinces of learning, to so
perfect its students that they shall not entertain the idola
specus of the specialist. For the Christian the unity of know
ledge cannot be separated from its end — the contemplation of
truth with "the mind that was in Christ Jesus."
In this hastily drawn sketch of Newman's work, I have

2/
omitted many points of minor interest, and I have also omitted
to delineate the special lines of his pleading in favour of
Anglicanism and Rome. The strength and weakness of these
latter arguments I hope to comment on elsewhere, and so
there is no need to devote any space to them here. It is
interesting, however, to remark that the Development of
Doctrine theory was to a great extent an anticipatory illustra
tion of the Doctrine of Evolution, and that in the History of
the Arians Newman was one of the earliest to adopt the
probably more correct view of the Antiochene (rather than the
Alexandrian) origin of the heresy. These, perhaps, are points
of scholarly rather than general interest, but they are re
markable instances of the acuteness of his intellect.
Let it then be remembered that Newman's claim to great
ness lies in the consistent and manful way in which, in the
middle portion of this century, he faced the great forces then
threatening not only the existence of the Church but even the
religious life of the nation. He met them not in the weak,
half-hearted way we now meet similar attacks. He did not
attempt to form a compromise with the enemies of religion
and the propaganda of error and then christen it a Via Media :
he had no belief in the policy of making peace on terms dic
tated by the sceptic* He rather called to men to be true to
their Church and the rich inheritance of the past, and not to
sell cheap what is most dear — the faith once delivered to the
Saints. His fundamental message to the times was this —
that no peace is worthy of the name save that which is based
on the Truth. It is a lesson which we every day, whether as
Churchmen or as Christians, have to lay to heart — the Truth
before all things.
The mention of Carlyle, made a few pages back, may call
to the reader's memory some of the sneers that bizarre seer
was pleased to fling at the Oxford party, and it is therefore
worth while to notice how little Carlyle could afford to con
temn a teaching in many respects so akin to his own. In
Sartor Resartus, which appeared in the same year as Newman
preached his famous Michaelmas sermon, we are told that
the visible universe is but " the reflex of our minds' face, the
phantasy of our dream," or what Goethe's Erd-Geist names it
"the garment of the Living God": —
" 'Tis thus at the roaring loom of time I fly
And weave for God the garment thou seest Him by."
* A certain school of Churchmen seem to be unable to distinguish
between a " rehabilitation of faith " and a " rehabilitation of the Faith."
The former represents the fundamental need of our times, the latter its
heresy and self-will if not its blasphemy. How can a Churchman seriously
charge the Dissenter with self-will, when he claims for himself the right to
revise the teaching of the Church ?

28
In the passage I have quoted from one of the Critical
Essays written about this time, Carlyle, one would have
thought, does something more than " with hysterical violence
theoretically assert a God, perhaps a revealed symbol and
worship of God " : he loudly protests " God is not only there,
but here or nowhere — in that life-breath of thine and thought
of thine — and thou wert wise to look to it." Yet despite all
this eager language, despite his classical hatred of shams, did
Carlyle ever do much more than assert the truth and sneer
at those who gave their lives to "doing the truth"? His
biographer, whose sins in this case are sins of commis
sion rather than omission, recounts how on visiting the
philosopher a few weeks before his death, the two fell to dis
cussing the grounds of belief. Mr. Froude confessed that he
" could only believe in a God which (sic.) did something."
Whereat Carlyle, with a cry of pain which indelibly im
pressed itself on Froude' s memory, cried " He does nothing."
And yet according to theory, God is in that "life-breath of
thine, that thought of thine"! The most acrimonious and
prejudiced critics of Newman credit him with the virtue of
teaching what he believed, and many of his followers have
undoubtedly learned their philosophy from him. Could
either of these two statements be made of Carlyle ? Is not
his force directly only literary, and religious and ethical only
indirectly ?
The meaning of this sentence will perhaps be clarified by
the following quotation from J. S. Mill's Autobiography:
" Instead of my having been taught anything in the first
instance by Carlyle, it was only in proportion as I came to
see the same truths through media more suited to my mental
constitution, that I recognized them in his writings. Then
indeed the wonderful power with which he put them forth
made a deep impression upon me, and I was during a long
period one of his most fervent admirers ; but the good his
writings did me was not as philosophy to instruct but as
poetry to animate."
III. What Newman did for Church and Christendom has
now been recounted, and the author feels all the more deeply
the wise words of the Oxford Town Councillor : — " The one
thing which it is supremely impossible for us to do is to estimate
the genius of John Henry Cardinal Newman." In conclusion,
however, let us notice that it fell to Newman to bring two
important sections of the English nation to know and respect
each other, and that he conferred on either the inestimable
gift of a wonderfully pure example of self-sacrifice to the cause
of truth. For some years previous to his death, John Henry

29
Cardinal Newman was for most Englishmen a subject of poetic
reverence The old man who had done so much to make the
t ug ?T ,Vhurch what she is> to hlinS 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 opinions, 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 his portrait — all these went
to make the English folk delight to reverence its lately-dis
covered 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 apprecia
tion of his merits. NOTE,
This essay was in print before the Duke of Norfolk's Committee
withdrew their offer, but I have thought it best to let the present
paragraph stand as originally written. That Oxford has not had to
give its, decision one way or the other is due to the action of the
Protestant party and those who — on this occasion at least — were
willing to act as Protestants. It will be interesting to know whether
University College will accept the beautiful Shelley monument
offered by Lady Shelley. Not that the cases are parallel, for it
cannot be disputed that Newman was a Roman Catholic ! The
cause of Shelley's expulsion was nothing nearly so bad as the
recognition of an external authority : it was merely the inability of
the then governing body to recognise the poetic beauty of infidelity !
No one can have any doubts as to the preferability of an eman
cipated morality, and what matter if the happiness of a few
individuals here and there be sacrificed to the creation of a really
great genius ! The question in regard to the Newman Memorial,
Is Professor Ince and the Rector of Exeter told us, was not a
literary one. Neither was it a question of locality, for in the
motion passed at the " motley meeting" objection was made to the
assignment of any public spot to the memorial. The colleges are
not Sf places? but why should one erect in the sanctuary what
one would consider a degradation to passers-by if placed in the
strLts ? Why should a Shelley Memorial be a literary one, and
the Newman purely religious? Professor Ince would probably
1 +3 the occasion was not one on which the interests of
PPtl^ntism could oe sacrificed to logic! The writer hopes to
ci Mr FoTs work of art enshrined in the college which so unjustly
^/she"^ and his faithful friend, and therefore, a fortiori,
hXP ouU uVge the "nemorialisation of one of Oxford's redeeming
meer^john Henry Newman.