I cannot, then, without remonstrance, allow you to identify the doctrine of our Oxford friends in question, on the two subjects I have mentioned, with the present spirit or the prospective creed of Catholics; or to a.s.sume, as you do, that because they are thoroughgoing and relentless in their statements, therefore they are the harbingers of a new age, when to show a deference for Antiquity will be thought little else than a mistake. For myself, hopeless as you consider it, I am not ashamed still to take my stand upon the Fathers, and do not mean to budge. The history of their time is not yet an old almanac to me. Of course I maintain the value and authority of the "Schola," as one of the _loci theologici_; still I sympathise with Petavius in preferring to its "contentious and subtle theology" that "more elegant and fruitful teaching which is moulded after the image of erudite antiquity."
The Fathers made me a Catholic, and I am not going to kick down the ladder by which I ascended into the Church. It is a ladder quite as serviceable for that purpose now as it was twenty years ago. Though I hold, as you remark, a process of development in Apostolic truth as time goes on, such development does not supersede the Fathers, but explains and completes them.
Is he right in saying that he is not responsible as a Roman Catholic for the extravagances that Dr. Pusey dwells upon? He is, it seems to us, and he is not. No doubt the Roman Catholic system is in practice a wide one, and he has a right, which we are glad to see that he is disposed to exercise, to maintain the claims of moderation and soberness, and to decline to submit his judgment to the fashionable theories of the hour. A stand made for independence and good sense against the pressure of an exacting and overbearing dogmatism is a good thing for everybody, though made in a camp with which we have nothing to do. He goes far enough, indeed, as it is. Still, it is something that a great writer, of whose genius and religious feeling Englishmen will one day be even prouder than they are now, should disconnect himself from the extreme follies of his party, and attempt to represent what is the n.o.bler and more elevated side of the system to which he has attached himself. But it seems to us much more difficult for him to release his cause from complicity with the doctrines which he dislikes and fears. We have no doubt that he is not alone, and that there are numbers of his English brethren who are provoked and ashamed at the self-complacent arrogance and childish folly shown in exaggerating and caricaturing doctrines which are, in the eyes of most Englishmen, extravagant enough in themselves. But the question is whether he or the innovators represent the true character and tendencies of their religious system. It must be remembered that with a jealous and touchy Government, like that of the Roman Church, which professes the duty and boasts of the power to put down all dangerous ideas and language, mere tolerance means much. Dr. Newman speaks as an Englishman when he writes thus:--
This is specially the case with great ideas. You may stifle them; or you may refuse them elbow-room; or you may torment them with your continual meddling; or you may let them have free course and range, and be content, instead of antic.i.p.ating their excesses, to expose and restrain those excesses after they have occurred. But you have only this alternative; and for myself, I prefer much, wherever it is possible, to be first generous and then just; to grant full liberty of thought, and to call it to account when abused.
But that has never been the principle of his Church. At least, the liberty which it has allowed has been a most one-sided liberty. It has been the liberty to go any length in developing the favourite opinions about the power of the Pope, or some popular form of devotion; but as to other ideas, not so congenial, "great" ones and little ones too, the lists of the Roman Index bear witness to the sensitive vigilance which took alarm even at remote danger. And those whose pride it is that they are ever ready and able to stop all going astray must be held responsible for the going astray which they do not stop, especially when it coincides with what they wish and like.
But these extreme writers do not dream of tolerance. They stoutly and boldly maintain that they but interpret in the only natural and consistent manner the mind of their Church; and no public or official contradiction meets them. There may be a disapproving opinion in their own body, but it does not show itself. The disclaimer of even such a man as Dr. Newman is in the highest degree guarded and qualified. They are the people who can excite attention and gain a hearing, though it be an adverse one. They have the power to make themselves the most prominent and accredited representatives of their creed, and, if thoroughgoing boldness and ability are apt to attract the growth of thought and conviction, they are those who are likely to mould its future form. Sober prudent people may prefer the caution of Dr.
Newman"s "chief authors," but to the world outside most of these will be little more than names, and the advanced party, which talks most strongly about the Pope"s infallibility and devotion to St. Mary, has this to say for itself. Popular feeling everywhere in the Roman communion appears to go with it, and authority both in Rome and in England shelters and sanctions it. Nothing can be more clearly and forcibly stated than the following a.s.sertions of the unimpeachable claim of "dominant opinions" in the Roman Catholic system by the highest Roman Catholic authority in England. "It is an ill-advised overture of peace," writes Archbishop Manning,
to a.s.sail the popular, prevalent, and dominant opinions, devotions, and doctrines of the Catholic Church with hostile criticism.... The presence and a.s.sistance of the Holy Ghost, which secures the Church within the sphere of faith and morals, invests it also with instincts and a discernment which preside over its worship and doctrines, its practices and customs. We may be sure that whatever is prevalent in the Church, under the eye of its public authority, practised by the people, and not censured by its pastors, is at least conformable to faith and innocent as to morals. Whosoever rises up to condemn such practices and opinions thereby convicts himself of the private spirit which is the root of heresy. But if it be ill-advised to a.s.sail the mind of the Church, it is still more so to oppose its visible Head. There can be no doubt that the Sovereign Pontiff has declared the same opinion as to the temporal power as that which is censured in others, and that he defined the Immaculate Conception, and that he believes in his own infallibility. If these things be our reproach, we share it with the Vicar of Jesus Christ. They are not our private opinions, nor the tenets of a school, but the mind of the Pontiff, as they were of his predecessors, as they will be of those who come after him.--Archbishop Manning"s _Pastoral_, pp.
64-66, 1866.
To maintain his liberty against extreme opinions generally is one of Dr. Newman"s objects in writing his letter; the other is to state distinctly what he holds and what he does not hold, as regards the subject on which Dr. Pusey"s appeal has naturally made so deep an impression:--
I do so, because you say, as I myself have said in former years, that "That vast system as to the Blessed Virgin ... to all of us has been the special _crux_ of the Roman system" (p. 101). Here, I say, as on other points, the Fathers are enough for me. I do not wish to say more than they, and will not say less. You, I know, will profess the same; and thus we can join issue on a clear and broad principle, and may hope to come to some intelligible result.
We are to have a treatise on the subject of Our Lady soon from the pen of the Most Rev. Prelate; but that cannot interfere with such a mere argument from the Fathers as that to which I shall confine myself here. Nor, indeed, as regards that argument itself, do I profess to be offering you any new matter, any facts which have not been used by others,--by great divines, as Petavius, by living writers, nay, by myself on other occasions. I write afresh, nevertheless, and that for three reasons--first, because I wish to contribute to the accurate statement and the full exposition of the argument in question; next, because I may gain a more patient hearing than has sometimes been granted to better men than myself; lastly, because there just now seems a call on me, under my circ.u.mstances, to avow plainly what I do and what I do not hold about the Blessed Virgin, that others may know, did they come to stand where I stand, what they would and what they would not be bound to hold concerning her.
If this "vast system" is a _crux_ to any one, we cannot think that even Dr. Newman"s explanation will make it easier. He himself recoils, as any Englishman of sense and common feeling must, at the wild extravagances into which this devotion has run. But he accepts and defends, on the most precarious grounds, the whole system of thought out of which they have sprung by no very violent process of growth. He cannot, of course, stop short of accepting the definition of the Immaculate Conception as an article of faith, and, though he emphatically condemns, with a warmth and energy of which no one can doubt the sincerity, a number of revolting consequences drawn from the theology of which that dogma is the expression, he is obliged to defend everything up to that. For a professed disciple of the Fathers this is not easy. If anything is certain, it is that the place which the Blessed Virgin occupies in the Roman Catholic system--popular or authoritative, if it is possible fairly to urge such a distinction in a system which boasts of all-embracing authority--is something perfectly different from anything known in the first four centuries. In all the voluminous writings on theology which remain from them we may look in vain for any traces of that feeling which finds words in the common hymn, "_Ave, marls Stella_" and which makes her fill so large a s.p.a.ce in the teaching and devotion of the Roman Church. Dr. Newman attempts to meet this difficulty by a distinction. The doctrine, he says, was there, the same then as now; it is only the feelings, behaviour, and usages, the practical consequences naturally springing from the doctrine, which have varied or grown:--
I fully grant that the _devotion_ towards the Blessed Virgin has increased among Catholics with the progress of centuries. I do not allow that the _doctrine_ concerning her has undergone a growth, for I believe it has been in substance one and the same from the beginning.
There is, doubtless, such a distinction, though whether available for Dr. Newman"s purpose is another matter. But when we recollect that modern "doctrine," besides defining the Immaculate Conception, places her next in glory to the Throne of G.o.d, and makes her the Queen of Heaven, and the all-prevailing intercessor with her Son, the a.s.sertion as to "doctrine" is a bold one. It rests, as it seems to us, simply on Dr. Newman identifying his own inferences from the language of the ancient writers whom he quotes with the language itself. They say a certain thing--that Mary is the "second Eve." Dr. Newman, with all the theology and all the controversies of eighteen centuries in his mind, deduces from this statement a number of refined consequences as to her sinlessness, and greatness, and reward, which seem to him to flow from it, and says that it means all these consequences. Mr. Ruskin somewhere quotes the language of an "eminent Academician," who remarks, in answer to some criticism on a picture, "that if you look for curves, you will see curves; and if you look for angles, you will see angles." So it is here. The very dogma of the Immaculate Conception itself Dr. Newman sees indissolubly involved in the "rudimentary teaching" which insists on the parallelism between Eve and Mary:--
Was not Mary as fully endowed as Eve?... If Eve was (as Bishop Bull and others maintain) raised above human nature by that indwelling moral gift which we call grace, is it rash to say that Mary had a greater grace?... And if Eve had this supernatural inward gift given her from the moment of her personal existence, is it possible to deny that Mary, too, had this gift from the very first moment of her personal existence? I do not know how to resist this inference:--well, this is simply and literally the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. I say the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is in its substance this, and nothing more or less than this (putting aside the question of degrees of grace), and it really does seem to me bound up in that doctrine of the Fathers, that Mary is the second Eve.
It seems obvious to remark that the Fathers are not even alleged to have themselves drawn this irresistible inference; and next, that even if it be drawn, there is a long interval between it and the elevation of the Mother of Jesus Christ to the place to which modern Roman doctrine raises her. Possibly, the Fathers might have said, as many people will say now, that, in a matter of this kind, it is idle to draw inferences when we are, in reality, utterly without the knowledge to make them worth anything. At any rate, if they had drawn them, we should have found some traces of it in their writings, and we find none. We find abundance of poetical addresses and rhetorical amplification, which makes it all the more remarkable that the plain dogmatic view of her position, which is accepted by the Roman Church, does not appear in them. We only find a "rudimentary doctrine," which, naturally enough, gives the Blessed Virgin a very high and sacred place in the economy of the Incarnation. But how does the doctrine, as it is found in even their rhetorical pa.s.sages, go a step beyond what would be accepted by any sober reader of the New Testament? They speak of what she was; they do not presume to say what she is. What Protestant could have the slightest difficulty in saying not only what Justin says, and Tertullian copies from him, and Irenaeus enlarges upon, but what Dr.
Newman himself says of her awful and solitary dignity, always excepting the groundless a.s.sumption which, from her office in this world takes for granted, first her sinlessness, and then a still higher office in the next? We do not think that, as a matter of literary criticism, Dr.
Newman is fair in his argument from the Fathers. He lays great stress on Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Irenaeus, as three independent witnesses from different parts of the world; whereas it is obvious that Tertullian at any rate copies almost literally from Justin Martyr, and it is impossible to compare a mere incidental point of rhetorical, or, if it be so, argumentative ill.u.s.tration, occurring once or twice in a long treatise, with a doctrine, such as that of the Incarnation itself, on which the whole treatise is built, and of which it is full. The wonder is, indeed, that the Fathers, considering how much they wrote, said so little of her; scarcely less is it a wonder, then, that the New Testament says so little, but from this little the only reason which would prevent a Protestant reader of the New Testament from accepting the highest statement of her historical dignity is the reaction from the development of them into the consequences which have been notorious for centuries in the unreformed Churches. Protestants, left to themselves, are certainly not p.r.o.ne to undervalue the saints of Scripture; it has been the presence of the great system of popular worship confronting them which has tied their tongues in this matter.
Yet Anglican theologians like Mr. Keble, popular poets like Wordsworth, broad Churchmen like Mr. Robertson, have said things which even Roman Catholics might quote as expressions of their feeling. But Dr. Newman must know that many things may be put, and put most truly, into the form of poetical expression which will not bear hardening into a dogma.
A Protestant may accept and even amplify the ideas suggested by Scripture about the Blessed Virgin; but he may feel that he cannot tell how the Redeemer was preserved from sinful taint; what was the grace bestowed on His mother; or what was the reward and prerogative which ensued to her. But it is just these questions which the Roman doctrine undertakes to answer without a shadow of doubt, and which Dr. Newman implies that the theology of the Fathers answered as unambiguously.
But from what has happened in the history of religion, we do not think that Protestants in general who do not shrink from high language about Abraham, Moses, or David, would find anything unnatural or objectionable in the language of the early Christian writers about the Mother of our Lord, though possibly it might not be their own; but the interval from this language to that certain knowledge of her present office in the economy of grace which is implied in what Dr. Newman considers the "doctrine" about her is a very long one. The step to the modern "devotion" in its most chastened form is longer still. We cannot follow the subtle train of argument which says that because the "doctrine" of the second century called her the "second Eve," therefore the devotion which sets her upon the altars of Christendom in the nineteenth is a right development of the doctrine. What is wanted is not the internal thread of the process, but the proof and confirmation from without that it was the right process; and this link is just what is wanting, except on a supposition which begs the question. It is conceivable that this step from "doctrine" to "devotion" may have been a mistake. It is conceivable that the "doctrine" may have been held in the highest form without leading to the devotion; for Dr. Newman, of course, thinks that Athanasius and Augustine held "the doctrine," yet, as he says, "we have no proof that Athanasius himself had any special devotion to the Blessed Virgin," and in another place he repeats his doubts whether St. Chrysostom or St. Athanasius invoked her; "nay," he adds, "I should like to know whether St. Augustine, in all his voluminous writings, invokes her once." What has to be shown is, that this step was not a mistake; that it was inevitable and legitimate.
"This being the faith of the Fathers about the Blessed Virgin," says Dr. Newman, "we need not wonder that it should in no long time be trans.m.u.ted into devotion." The Fathers expressed a historical fact about her in the term [Greek: Theotokos]; therefore, argues the later view, she is the source of our present grace now. It is the _rationale_ of this inference, which is not an immediate or obvious one, which is wanted. And Dr. Newman gives it us in the words of Bishop Butler:--
Christianity is eminently an objective religion. For the most part it tells us of persons and facts in simple words, and leaves the announcement to produce its effect on such hearts as are prepared to receive it. This, at least, is its general character; and Butler recognises it as such in his _a.n.a.logy_, when speaking of the Second and Third Persons of the Holy Trinity:--"The internal worship," he says, "to the Son and Holy Ghost is no farther matter of pure revealed command than as the relations they stand in to us are matters of pure revelation; but the relations being known, the obligations to such internal worship are _obligations of reason arising out of those relations themselves_."
We acknowledge the pertinency of the quotation. So true is it that "the relations being known," the obligations of worship arise of themselves from these relations, that if the present relation of the Blessed Virgin to mankind has always been considered to be what modern Roman theology considers it, it is simply inconceivable that devotion to her should not have been universal long before St. Athanasius and St.
Augustine; and equally inconceivable, to take Dr. Newman"s remarkable ill.u.s.tration, that if the real position of St. Joseph is next to her, it should have been reserved for the nineteenth century, if not, indeed, to find it out, at least to acknowledge it; but the whole question is about the fact of the "relations" themselves. If we believe that the Second and Third Persons are G.o.d, we do not want to be told to worship them. But such a relation as Dr. Newman supposes in the case of the Blessed Virgin does not flow of itself from the idea contained, for instance, in the word [Greek: Theotokos], and even if it did, we should still want to be told, in the case of a creature, and remembering the known jealousy of religion of even the semblance of creature worship, what _are_ the "religious regards," which, not flowing from the nature of the case, but needing to be distinctly authorised, are right and binding.
The question is of a dogmatic and a popular system. We most fully admit that, with Dr. Newman or any other of the numberless well-trained and excellent men in the Roman Church, the homage to the Mother does not interfere with the absolutely different honour rendered to the Son. We readily acknowledge the elevating and refining beauty of that character, of which the Virgin Mother is the type, and the services which that ideal has rendered to mankind, though we must emphatically say that a man need not be a Roman Catholic to feel and to express the charm of that moral beauty. But here we have a doctrine as definite and precise as any doctrine can be, and a great system of popular devotion, giving a character to a great religious communion. Dr. Newman is not merely developing and ill.u.s.trating an idea: he is a.s.serting a definite revealed fact about the unseen world, and defending its consequences in a very concrete and practical shape. And the real point is what proof has he given us that this is a revealed fact; that it is so, and that we have the means of knowing it? He has given us certain language of the early writers, which he says is a tradition, though it is only what any Protestant might have been led to by reading his Bible. But between that language, taken at its highest, and the belief and practice which his Church maintains, there is a great gap. The "Second Eve," the [Greek: Theotokos], are names of high dignity; but enlarge upon them as we may, there is between them and the modern "Regina Coeli" an interval which nothing but direct divine revelation can possibly fill; and of this divine revelation the only evidence is the fact that there is the doctrine. So awful and central an article of belief needs corresponding proof. In Dr. Newman"s eloquent pages we have much collateral thought on the subject--sometimes instinct with his delicacy of perception and depth of feeling, sometimes strangely over-refined and irrelevant, but always fresh and instructive, whether to teach or to warn. The one thing which is missing in them is direct proof.
He does not satisfy us, but he does greatly interest us in his way of dealing with the practical consequences of his doctrine, in the manifold development of devotion in his communion. What he tells us reveals two things. By this devotion he is at once greatly attracted, and he is deeply shocked. No one can doubt the enthusiasm with which he has thrown himself into that devotion, an enthusiasm which, if it was at one time more vehement and defiant than it is now, is still a most intense element in his religious convictions. Nor do we feel ent.i.tled to say that in him it interferes with religious ideas and feelings of a higher order, which we are accustomed to suppose imperilled by it. It leads him, indeed, to say things which astonish us, not so much by their extreme language as by the absence, as it seems to us, of any ground to say them at all. It forces him into a championship for statements, in defending which the utmost that can be done is to frame ingenious pleas, or to send back a vigorous retort. It tempts him at times to depart from his generally broad and fair way of viewing things, as when he meets the charge that the Son is forgotten for the Mother, not merely by a denial, but by the rejoinder that when the Mother is not honoured as the Roman Church honours her the honour of the Son fails. It would have been better not to have reprinted the following extract from a former work, even though it were singled out for approval by the late Cardinal. The italics are his own:--
I have spoken more on this subject in my _Essay on Development_, p. 438, "Nor does it avail to object that, in this contrast of devotional exercises, the human is sure to supplant the Divine, from the infirmity of our nature; for, I repeat, the question is one of fact, whether it has done so. And next, it must be asked, _whether the character of Protestant devotion towards Our Lord has been that of worship at all_; and not rather such as we pay to an excellent human being.... Carnal minds will ever create a carnal worship for themselves, and to forbid them the service of the saints will have no tendency to teach them the worship of G.o.d.
Moreover, ... great and constant as is the devotion which the Catholic pays to St. Mary, it has a special province, and _has far more connection with the public services and the festive aspect of Christianity_, and with certain extraordinary offices which she holds, _than with what is strictly personal and primary in religion_".
Our late Cardinal, on my reception, singled out to me this last sentence, for the expression of his especial approbation.
Can Dr. Newman defend the first of these two a.s.sertions, when he remembers such books of popular Protestant devotion as Wesley"s Hymns, or the German hymn-books of which we have examples in the well-known _Lyra Germanica_? Can he deny the second when he remembers the exercises of the "Mois de Marie" in French churches, or if he has heard a fervid and earnest preacher at the end of them urge on a church full of young people, fresh from Confirmation and first Communion, a special and personal self-dedication to the great patroness for protection amid the daily trials of life, in much the same terms as in an English Church they might be exhorted to commit themselves to the Redeemer of mankind? Right or wrong, such devotion is not a matter of the "festive aspect" of religion, but most eminently of what is "personal and primary" in it; and surely of such a character is a vast proportion of the popular devotion here spoken of.
But for himself, no doubt, he has accepted this _cultus_ on its most elevated and refined side. He himself makes the distinction, and says that there is "a healthy" and an "artificial" form of it; a devotion which does not shock "solid piety and Christian good sense; I cannot help calling this the English style." And when other sides are presented to him, he feels what any educated Englishman who allows his English feelings play is apt to feel about them. What is more, he has the boldness to say so. He makes all kinds of reserves to save the credit of those with whom he cannot sympathise. He speaks of the privileges of Saints; the peculiarities of national temperament; the distinctions between popular language and that used by scholastic writers, or otherwise marked by circ.u.mstances; the special characters of some of the writers quoted, their "ruthless logic," or their obscurity; the inculpated pa.s.sages are but few and scattered in proportion to their context; they are harsh, but sound worse than they mean; they are hardly interpreted and pressed. He reminds Dr. Pusey that there is not much to choose between the Oriental Churches and Rome on this point, and that of the two the language of the Eastern is the most florid; luxuriant, and unguarded. But, after all, the true feeling comes out at last, "And now, at length," he says, "coming to the statements, not English, but foreign, which offend you, I will frankly say that I read some of those which you quote with grief and almost anger." They are "perverse sayings," which he hates. He fills a page and a half with a number of them, and then deliberately p.r.o.nounces his rejection of them.
After such explanations, and with such authorities to clear my path, I put away from me as you would wish, without any hesitation, as matters in which my heart and reason have no part (when taken in their literal and absolute sense, as any Protestant would naturally take them, and as the writers doubtless did not use them), such sentences and phrases as these:--that the mercy of Mary is infinite, that G.o.d has resigned into her hands His omnipotence, that (unconditionally) it is safer to seek her than her Son, that the Blessed Virgin is superior to G.o.d, that He is (simply) subject to her command, that our Lord is now of the same disposition as His Father towards sinners--viz. a disposition to reject them, while Mary takes His place as an Advocate with the Father and Son; that the Saints are more ready to intercede with Jesus than Jesus with the Father, that Mary is the only refuge of those with whom G.o.d is angry; that Mary alone can obtain a Protestant"s conversion; that it would have sufficed for the salvation of men if our Lord had died, not to obey His Father, but to defer to the decree of His Mother, that she rivals our Lord in being G.o.d"s daughter, not by adoption, but by a kind of nature; that Christ fulfilled the office of Saviour by imitating her virtues; that, as the Incarnate G.o.d bore the image of His Father, so He bore the image of His Mother; that redemption derived from Christ indeed its sufficiency, but from Mary its beauty and loveliness; that as we are clothed with the merits of Christ so we are clothed with the merits of Mary; that, as He is Priest, in like manner is she Priestess; that His body and blood in the Eucharist are truly hers, and appertain to her; that as He is present and received therein, so is she present and received therein; that Priests are ministers as of Christ, so of Mary; that elect souls are, born of G.o.d and Mary; that the Holy Ghost brings into fruitfulness His action by her, producing in her and by her Jesus Christ in His members; that the kingdom of G.o.d in our souls, as our Lord speaks, is really the kingdom of Mary in the soul--and she and the Holy Ghost produce in the soul extraordinary things--and when the Holy Ghost finds Mary in a soul He flies there.
Sentiments such as these I never knew of till I read your book, nor, as I think, do the vast majority of English Catholics know them. They seem to me like a bad dream. I could not have conceived them to be said. I know not to what authority to go for them, to Scripture, or to the Fathers, or to the decrees of Councils, or to the consent of schools, or to the tradition of the faithful, or to the Holy See, or to Reason. They defy all the _loci theologici_.
There is nothing of them in the Missal, in the Roman Catechism, in the Roman _Raccolta_, in the Imitation of Christ, in Gother, Challoner, Milner, or Wiseman, so far as I am aware. They do but scare and confuse me. I should not be holier, more spiritual, more sure of perseverance, if I twisted my moral being into the reception of them; I should but be guilty of fulsome frigid flattery towards the most upright and n.o.ble of G.o.d"s creatures if I professed them--and of stupid flattery too; for it would be like the compliment of painting up a young and beautiful princess with the brow of a Plato and the muscle of an Achilles. And I should expect her to tell one of her people in waiting to turn me off her service without warning. Whether thus to feel be the _scandalum parvulorum_ in my case, or the _scandalum Pharisaeorum_, I leave others to decide; but I will say plainly that I had rather believe (which is impossible) that there is no G.o.d at all, than that Mary is greater than G.o.d. I will have nothing to do with statements, which can only be explained by being explained away. I do not, however, speak of these statements, as they are found in their authors, for I know nothing of the originals, and cannot believe that they have meant what you say; but I take them as they lie in your pages. Were any of them, the sayings of Saints in ecstasy, I should know they had a good meaning; still I should not repeat them myself; but I am looking at them, not as spoken by the tongues of Angels, but according to that literal sense which they bear in the mouths of English men and English women. And, as spoken by man to man in England in the nineteenth century, I consider them calculated to prejudice inquirers, to frighten the unlearned, to unsettle consciences, to provoke blasphemy, and to work the loss of souls.
Of course; it is what might be expected of him. But Dr. Newman has often told us that we must take the consequences of our principles and theories, and here are some of the consequences which meet him; and, as he says, they "scare and confuse him." He boldly disavows them with no doubtful indignation. But what other voice but his, of equal authority and weight, has been lifted up to speak the plain truth about them?
Why, if they are wrong, extravagant, dangerous, is his protest solitary? His communion has never been wanting in jealousy of dangerous doctrines, and it is vain to urge that these things and things like them have been said in a corner. The Holy Office is apt to detect mischief in small writers as well as great, even if these teachers were as insignificant as Dr. Newman would gladly make them. Taken as a whole, and in connection with notorious facts, these statements are fair examples of manifest tendencies, which certainly are not on the decline. And if a great and spreading popular _cultus_, encouraged and urged on beyond all former precedent, is in danger of being developed by its warmest and most confident advocates into something of which unreason is the lightest fault, is there not ground for interfering?
Doubtless Roman writers maybe quoted by Dr. Newman, who felt that there was a danger, and we are vaguely told about some checks given to one or two isolated extravagances, which, however, in spite of the checks, do not seem to be yet extinct. But Allocutions and Encyclicals are not for errors of this kind. Dr. Newman says that "it is wiser for the most part to leave these excesses to the gradual operation of public opinion,--that is, to the opinion of educated and sober Catholics; and this seems to me the healthiest way of putting them down." We quite agree with him; but his own Church does not think so; and we want to see some evidence of a public opinion in it capable of putting them down. As it is, he is reduced to say that "the line cannot be logically drawn between the teaching of the Fathers on the subject and our own;"
an a.s.sertion which, if it were true, would be more likely to drag down one teaching than to prop up the other; he has to find reasons, and doubtless they are to be found thick as blackberries, for accounting for one extravagance, softening down another, declining to judge a third. But in the meantime the "devotion" in its extreme form, far beyond what he would call the teaching of his Church, has its way; it maintains its ground; it becomes the mark of the bold, the advanced, the refined, as well as of the submissive and the crowd; it roots itself under the shelter of an authority which would stop it if it was wrong; it becomes "dominant"; it becomes at length part of that "mind of the living Church" which, we are told, it is heresy to impugn, treason to appeal from, and the extravagance of impertinent folly to talk of reforming.
It is very little use, then, for Dr. Newman to tell Dr. Pusey or any one else, "You may safely trust us English Catholics as to this devotion." "English Catholics," as such,--it is the strength and the weakness of their system,--have really the least to say in the matter.
The question is not about trusting "us English Catholics," but the Pope, and the Roman Congregation, and those to whom the Roman authorities delegate their sanction and give their countenance. If Dr.
Newman is able, as we doubt not he is desirous, to elevate the tone of his own communion and put to shame some of its fashionable excesses, he will do a great work, in which we wish him every success, though the result of it might not really be to bring the body of his countrymen nearer to it. But the substance of Dr. Pusey"s charges remain after all unanswered, and there is no getting over them while they remain. They are of that broad, palpable kind against which the refinements of argumentative apology play in vain. They can only be met by those who feel their force, on some principle equally broad. Dr. Newman suggests such a ground in the following remarks, which, much as they want qualification and precision, have a basis of reality in them:--
It is impossible, I say, in a doctrine like this, to draw the line cleanly between truth and error, right and wrong. This is ever the case in concrete matters which have life. Life in this world is motion, and involves a continual process of change. Living things grow into their perfection, into their decline, into their death.
No rule of art will suffice to stop the operation of this natural law, whether in the material world or in the human mind.... What has power to stir holy and refined souls is potent also with the mult.i.tude, and the religion of the mult.i.tude is ever vulgar and abnormal; it ever will be tinctured with fanaticism and superst.i.tion while men are what they are. A people"s religion is ever a corrupt religion. If you are to have a Catholic Church you must put up with fish of every kind, guests good and bad, vessels of gold, vessels of earth. You may beat religion out of men, if you will, and then their excesses will take a different direction; but if you make use of religion to improve them, they will make use of religion to corrupt it. And then you will have effected that compromise of which our countrymen report so unfavourably from abroad,--a high grand faith and worship which compels their admiration, and puerile absurdities among the people which excite their contempt.
It is like Dr. Newman to put his case in this broad way, making large admissions, allowing for much inevitable failure. That is, he defends his Church as he would defend Christianity generally, taking it as a great practical system must be in this world, working with human nature as it is. His reflection is, no doubt, one suggested by a survey of the cause of all religion. The coming short of the greatest promisee, the debas.e.m.e.nt of the n.o.blest ideals, are among the commonplaces of history. Christianity cannot be maintained without ample admissions of failure and perversion. But it is one thing to make this admission for Christianity generally, an admission which the New Testament in foretelling its fortunes gives us abundant ground for making; and quite another for those who maintain the superiority of one form of Christianity above all others, to claim that they may leave out of the account its characteristic faults. It is quite true that all sides abundantly need to appeal for considerate judgment to the known infirmity of human nature; but amid the conflicting pretensions which divide Christendom no one side can ask to have for itself the exclusive advantage of this plea. All may claim the benefit of it, but if it is denied to any it must be denied to all. In this confused and imperfect world other great popular systems of religion besides the Roman may use it in behalf of shortcomings, which, though perhaps very different, are yet not worse. It is obvious that the theory of great and living ideas, working with a double edge, and working for mischief at last, holds good for other things besides the special instance on which Dr. Newman comments. It is to be further observed that to claim the benefit of this plea is to make the admission that you come under the common law of human nature as to mistake, perversion, and miscarriage, and this in the matter of religious guidance the Roman theory refuses to do. It claims for its communion as its special privilege an exemption from those causes of corruption of which history is the inexorable witness, and to which others admit themselves to be liable; an immunity from going wrong, a supernatural exception from the common tendency of mankind to be led astray, from the common necessity to correct and reform themselves when they are proved wrong. How far this is realised, not on paper and in argument, but in fact, is indeed one of the most important questions for the world, and it is one to which the world will pay more heed than to the best writing about it There are not wanting signs, among others of a very different character, of an honest and philosophical recognition of this by some of the ablest writers of the Roman communion. The day on which the Roman Church ceases to maintain that what it holds must be truth because it holds it, and admits itself subject to the common condition by which G.o.d has given truth to men, will be the first hopeful day for the reunion of Christendom.
XXVIII
NEWMAN"S PAROCHIAL SERMONS[32]
[32]
_Parochial and Plain Sermons_. By John Henry Newman, B.D., formerly Vicar of St. Mary"s, Oxford. Edited by W.J. Copeland, B.D. _Sat.u.r.day Review_, 5th June 1869.
Dr. Newman"s Sermons stand by themselves in modern English literature; it might be said, in English literature generally. There have been equally great masterpieces of English writing in this form of composition, and there have been preachers whose theological depth, acquaintance with the heart, earnestness, tenderness, and power have not been inferior to his. But the great writers do not touch, pierce, and get hold of minds as he does, and those who are famous for the power and results of their preaching do not write as he does. His sermons have done more perhaps than any one thing to mould and quicken and brace the religious temper of our time; they have acted with equal force on those who were nearest and on those who were farthest from him in theological opinion. They have altered the whole manner of feeling towards religious subjects. We know now that they were the beginning, the signal and first heave, of a vast change that was to come over the subject; of a demand from religion of a thoroughgoing reality of meaning and fulfilment, which is familiar to us, but was new when it was first made. And, being this, these sermons are also among the very finest examples of what the English language of our day has done in the hands of a master. Sermons of such intense conviction and directness of purpose, combined with such originality and perfection on their purely literary side, are rare everywhere. Remarkable instances, of course, will occur to every one of the occasional exhibition of this combination, but not in so sustained and varied and unfailing a way.
Between Dr. Newman and the great French school there is this difference--that they are orators, and he is as far as anything can be in a great preacher from an orator. Those who remember the tones and the voice in which the sermons were heard at St. Mary"s--we may refer to Professor Shairp"s striking account in his volume on Keble, and to a recent article in the _Dublin Review_--can remember how utterly unlike an orator in all outward ways was the speaker who so strangely moved them. The notion of judging of Dr. Newman as an orator never crossed their minds. And this puts a difference between him and a remarkable person whose name has sometimes been joined with his--Mr. F. Robertson.
Mr. Robertson was a great preacher, but he was not a writer.
It is difficult to realise at present the effect produced originally by these sermons. The first feeling was that of their difference in manner from the customary sermon. People knew what an eloquent sermon was, or a learned sermon, or a philosophical sermon, or a sermon full of doctrine or pious unction. Chalmers and Edward Irving and Robert Hall were familiar names; the University pulpit and some of the London churches had produced examples of forcible argument and severe and finished composition; and of course instances were abundant everywhere of the good, sensible, commonplace discourse; of all that was heavy, dull, and dry, and of all that was ignorant, wild, fanatical, and irrational. But no one seemed to be able, or to be expected, unless he avowedly took the buffoonery line which some of the Evangelical preachers affected, to speak in the pulpit with the directness and straightforward unconventionality with which men speak on the practical business of life. With all the thought and vigour and many beauties which were in the best sermons, there was always something forced, formal, artificial about them; something akin to that mild pomp which usually attended their delivery, with beadles in gowns ushering the preacher to the carpeted pulpit steps, with velvet cushions, and with the rustle and fulness of his robes. No one seemed to think of writing a sermon as he would write an earnest letter. A preacher must approach his subject in a kind of roundabout make-believe of preliminary and preparatory steps, as if he was introducing his hearers to what they had never heard of; make-believe difficulties and objections were overthrown by make-believe answers; an unnatural position both in speaker and hearers, an unreal state of feeling and view of facts, a systematic conventional exaggeration, seemed almost impossible to be avoided; and those who tried to escape being laboured and grandiloquent only escaped it, for the most part, by being vulgar or slovenly. The strong severe thinkers, jealous for accuracy, and loathing clap-trap as they loathed loose argument, addressed and influenced intelligence; but sermons are meant for heart and souls as well as minds, and to the heart, with its trials and its burdens, men like Whately never found their way. Those who remember the preaching of those days, before it began to be influenced by the sermons at St. Mary"s, will call to mind much that was interesting, much that was ingenious, much correction of inaccurate and confused views, much manly encouragement to high principle and duty, much of refined and scholarlike writing. But for soul and warmth, and the imaginative and poetical side of the religious life, you had to go where thought and good sense were not likely to be satisfied.
The contrast of Mr. Newman"s preaching was not obvious at first. The outside form and look was very much that of the regular best Oxford type--calm, clear, and lucid in expression, strong in its grasp, measured in statement, and far too serious to think of rhetorical ornament. But by degrees much more opened. The range of experience from which the preacher drew his materials, and to which he appealed, was something wider, subtler, and more delicate than had been commonly dealt with in sermons. With his strong, easy, exact, elastic language, the instrument of a powerful and argumentative mind, he plunged into the deep realities of the inmost spiritual life, of which cultivated preachers had been shy. He preached so that he made you feel without doubt that it was the most real of worlds to him; he made you feel in time, in spite of yourself, that it was a real world with which you too had concern. He made you feel that he knew what he was speaking about; that his reasonings and appeals, whether you agreed with them or not, were not the language of that heated enthusiasm with which the world is so familiar; that he was speaking words which were the result of intellectual scrutiny, balancings, and decisions, as well as of moral trials, of conflicts and suffering within; words of the utmost soberness belonging to deeply gauged and earnestly formed purposes. The effect of his sermons, as compared with the common run at the time, was something like what happens when in a company you have a number of people giving their views and answers about some question before them.
You have opinions given of various worth and expressed with varying power, precision, and distinctness, some clever enough, some clumsy enough, but all more or less imperfect and unattractive in tone, and more or less falling short of their aim; and then, after it all, comes a voice, very grave, very sweet, very sure and clear, under whose words the discussion springs up at once to a higher level, and in which we recognise at once a mind, face to face with realities, and able to seize them and hold them fast.
The first notable feature in the external form of this preaching was its terse unceremonious directness. Putting aside the verbiage and dulled circ.u.mlocution and stiff hazy phraseology of pulpit etiquette and dignity, it went straight to its point. There was no waste of time about customary formalities. The preacher had something to say, and with a kind of austere severity he proceeded to say it. This, for instance, is the sort of way in which a sermon would begin:--
Hypocrisy is a serious word. We are accustomed to consider the hypocrite as a hateful, despicable character, and an uncommon one.
How is it, then, that our Blessed Lord, when surrounded by an innumerable mult.i.tude, began, _first of all_, to warn His disciples against hypocrisy, as though they were in especial danger of becoming like those base deceivers the Pharisees? Thus an instructive subject is opened to our consideration, which I will now pursue.--Vol. I. Serm. X.