The last time I saw Count Arnim he asked about Newman's Vatican defence. I said that he had explained the decrees away by declaring that he meant no defence of persecution and tyrannicide. That was a canon of interpretation strong enough to blow any other ingredient into gas. Arnim objected that Newman's manipulations were not accepted at Rome. Just then he became a Cardinal, and so they were indirectly sanctioned.
I endow my seventeenth-century divine with the ingenuity and the integrity of Newman. Having given England the benefit of No. 90, he would gild Rome with the answer to the Expostulation. Shutting one eye to the Articles, like Chillingworth, he would, like Spinola, shut the other to the Council of Trent. Having expounded Anglo-Catholicism by the light of Bramhall, he would, in the same spirit, choose Cassander, Bossuet, Corker as genuine exponents of Roman Catholicism, and he could do both without insincerity or surrender.
Don't let me make too much of that passage in Newman. He defended the Syllabus, and the Syllabus justified all those atrocities. Pius the Fifth held that it was sound Catholic doctrine that any man may stab a heretic condemned by Rome, and that every man is a heretic who attacks the papal prerogatives. Borromeo wrote a letter for the purpose of causing a few Protestants to be murdered. Newman is an avowed admirer of Saint Pius and Saint Charles, and of the pontiffs who canonised them. This, and the like of this, is the reason of my deep aversion for him.
There is not time for Shorthouse to-day. I will tell you about him as soon as I can.
Cannes March 20-22, 1882
Wickham lent me John Inglesant yesterday, and I finished it before bedtime. I have read nothing more thoughtful and suggestive since Middlemarch, and I could fill with honest praise the pages I am going to blacken with complaint. But if I had access to the author, with privilege of free and indiscreet speech, it would seem a worthier tribute to his temper and ability to lay my litany of doubts before him. Not having it, I submit my questionings to yourself, as the warmest admirer of his work. Probably the difficulties which occur to me have been raised already in reviews which you have read. For instance:—
I. 29. Inglesant's name does not appear in the trials of the Protestants. Did the Marian persecution rage in Wilts?
73, 74. Here is a Puritan party in Parliament and a scheme to pervert its leaders, in August 1637. No Parliament had sat for eight years.
83. Juan Valdes was not a papist but a Protestant.
90. Would Foxe be the favourite and characteristic author of such Arminians as the Ferrars?