CHAPTER I

OF THEOLOGICAL WRITERS

THE state of Ecclesiastical affairs at the beginning of the half-century was full of agitation and confusion. Oxford was the centre of a conflict which extended over the whole kingdom, and which had perhaps a greater effect than any religious movement except the Reformation, throughout England. Both period and movement are dominated by one commanding figure, of whom it can scarcely be said so much that he was a theologian, a controversialist and a religious thinker, as that he was himself—a man of such singular mind, character and personality, that while we think and speak of the works of other men, our minds are occupied, wherever he appears, chiefly with him—John Henry Newman: once a submissive member of the Evangelical school of religious thought, then a believer in the Fathers and the English Church: then a disturbed and

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anxious inquirer, wading in deep waters of confusion and uncertainty: afterwards making a casuistical though always sincere attempt to find footing within his own communion upon the rock of the Church which appeared to him the only thing solid on earth: then landing with a sudden impulse, though after long preparation and detachment from all previous ties, upon that rock indeed, but the Rock of Peter, the—as he had slowly come to regard it-unaltered and unalterable foundation of Rome. The excitement with which the world, of which he was the central figure, watched all these evolutions, was like that with which a great drama might be watched, or the performance of an athlete in the classic games. The slowness of the process extending over so many years, the self-concentrated attention of the actor working out step by step in his own mind each lingering detail of the way-himself, as it were, the first and most interested spectator of those processes going on within himself, never flagging in his interest, never drawn aside to any lesser occupation of thought-afforded one of the most wonderful spectacles that has ever been laid open before men. Newman had no sense of humour, no apprehension of that natural perspective which daunts many men, and prevents them from thus concentrating upon themselves their own profoundest interest and observation.

His Apologia is perhaps in this sense the most wonderful book that ever was written. There it is apparent that he took himself as much in earnest at the beginning of his career as at the end was as gravely respectful of his own conclusions as a boy, as of those he reached in maturity of manhood, and that the career of his own mind was to himself the chief epic, drama, history and poem in existence.

It is not necessary here to relate a tale which has already been told so often. The man, who will not die, is to this generation more interesting than those Tracts for the Times about which we have already heard so much. That he began, after his first phase of evangelicalism was over, with the conviction that the Church of England was even more truly than Rome Apostolic, purer and better and more trustworthy in divine institution that he was gradually led to entertain the doubts that arose during a severe course of study and reading on that point, and found no certainty in his former faith, no answer that could satisfy him and the manner in which that problem was slowly and finally worked out in his mind, is now known more or less to every reader. How completely in his thoughts the question turned upon this not upon the fundamental truths of religion but upon the Apostolic Succession, the unbroken tradition, the divine commission of the ecclesiastical

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body, whose special teachings whatever they might be were comparatively indifferent to him in comparison is proved by the strange fact that when he finally entered the Church of Rome, he did so quite unsatisfied in his mind about the doctrine of transubstantiation, and very dubious about the worship given to the Virgin and the Saints-matters the ordinary believer would find of first importance: but which to him were as nothing, secondary questions to be fitted into his scheme as best he could, so long as he could plant his foot upon the chief thing, which was the Church, the succession of the Apostles, the foundation of unbroken tradition and fact. There are many now who share that final conviction; there are many who hold Newman's former conviction that the Church of England is as Apostolic (not in character be it remembered but in this unbroken external line) as Rome :—while around stands a whole world wondering that this should have become the chief matter in the eyes of so many Christian men, and that such a mind as Newman's should have encountered what was in fact the loss of all things, the sacrifice of every prepossession, of his traditional surroundings, his previous career, his friends, almost life itself, and adopted the position of a neophyte taught and ruled by much lesser men than himself, in an atmosphere new, strange and foreign to him-for the sake of this

outside matter, a thing external to all private duty and feeling. It was as if a man had expatriated himself, bound himself in foreign laws uncongenial to him, and relinquished his home, because he thought the British constitution after the Reform Bill was no longer the British constitution as it had been before. But the metaphor is a poor one.

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It has been suggested that Newman felt his hold of Christian truths so insecure that he fled for refuge to the authority which, so to speak, reestablished these truths on its own infallible word and made obedience a duty. We can find no trace of this theory of salvage in his works. would, it seems to us, be more true to say, that Christian truths were so entirely a matter of course in his mind, that he could push them aside for the consideration of a question which seemed to him more instantly important, i.e. whether or not Rome or the Anglican Church was the divinely instituted medium for their extensionand that his convictions were so absolute that he was free to go on to other matters.

This, however, is the fact whatever the internal motive may have been. He occupied years of his life in making every attempt that reason, imagination, and that casuistry which is the mixture of both, were capable of, to demonstrate that his own Anglican Church was the Church of