Essays in Rationalism

ESSAYS IN RATIONALISM
BY CHARLES ROBERT NEWMAN ( Brother of Cardinal Newman. ) WITH PREFACE BY GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE. AND BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY J. M. WHEELER.
LONDON: PROGRESSIVE PUBLISHING COMPANY, 28 Stonecutter Street, E.C. 1891
LONDON: PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY G. W. FOOTE, 28 STONECUTTER STREET, E.C.
ESSAYS IN RATIONALISM.
Whether this little volume will find sufficient patrons to defray the cost of its production is at least doubtful. The writer whose essays it contains lived in obscurity and will never be popular. But he possessed a fine intellect, however frustrated by circumstances; he belonged to an illustrious family; and it is well to let the public have access to the opinions of a brother of Cardinal Newman and of Professor Newman, a brother who took his own course, as they did, and thought out for himself an independent philosophy.
All Charles Robert Newman’s writings that are known to have been printed, appeared in the Reasoner, edited by Mr. George Jacob Holyoake, at various dates during 1860–61. With trifling exceptions they are all reprinted in this collection.
Mr. Holyoake has kindly supplied a brief account of the atheistic Newman, and Mr. J. M. Wheeler has gathered all the information that is obtainable as to his life and personality.
Of Charles Robert Newman, until the death of his brother, the Cardinal, almost nothing was known. Some reminiscences of him by Mr. Thomas Purnell and Precentor Edmund Venables appeared in the Athenæum at the time of his death in 1884, and these remain the chief sources of information concerning him. Mr. G. J. Holyoake also, in his paper The Present Day , wrote: “If the public come to know more of Charles R. Newman, it will be seen that all the brothers, John Henry, Francis William, and Charles R. Newman, were men of unusual distinction of character, and that while each held diverse views, all had the family qualities of perspicacity, candor and conscience.” But these notes attracted little attention. Most people were under the impression there were only two brothers, who had long figured in the public eye as types of the opposite courses of modern thought towards Romanism and Rationalism. Yet the real type of antagonism to Rome was to be found in Charles Robert, who is dismissed by the Rev. Thomas Mozley with the words: “There was also another brother, not without his share in the heritage of natural gifts.”