Fifty Years in the Church of Rome

by Charles Paschal Telesphore Chiniquy

Dr. Newman is really unfortunate in his paternity. He is the father of two children. The first-born was called Via Media. But it had neither head nor feet, it was suffocated on the day of its birth by a “ghost.” The second, called “Doctrinal Development,” was not viable. The father is so shocked with the sight of the monster, that he publicly confessed its deformities and cries out, “Mistake! mistake! mistake!” (pages 123-124 Apologia pro vita sua).

The troubled conscience of Dr. Newman has forced him to confess (page 111) that he was miserable, from his want of faith, when a minister of the Church of England and a Professor of Theology of Oxford: “Alas! it was my portion for whole years to remain without any satisfactory basis for my religious profession!” At page 174 and 175 he tells us how miserable and anxious he was when the voice of his conscience reproached him in the position he held in the Church of England, while leading her people to Rome. At page 158 he confesses his unspeakable confusion when he saw his supreme folly in building up the Via Media, and heard it crash at the appearance of a ghost. At page 123 he acknowledges how he deceived his readers, and deceived himself, in his “Doctrinal Development.” At page 132 he tells us how he had not only completely lost the confidence of his country, but lost confidence in himself. And it is after this humiliating and shameful course of life that he finds out “that the Church of Rome is right!”

Must we not thank God for having forced Dr. Newman to tell us through what dark and tortuous ways a Protestant, a disciple of the Gospel, a minister of Christ, a Professor of Oxford, fell into that sea of Sodom called Romanism or Papism! A great lesson is given us here. We see the fulfillment of Christ’s word about those who have received great talents and have not used them for the “Good Master’s honor and glory.”

Dr. Newman, without suspecting it, tells us that it was his course of action towards that branch of the Church of Christ of which he was a minister, that caused him to lose the confidence of his country, and troubled him so much that it caused him to lose that self-confidence which is founded on our faith and our union with Christ, who is our rock, our only strength in the hour of trial. Having lost her sails, her anchor, and her helm, the poor ship was evidently doomed to become a wreck. Nothing could prevent her from drifting into the engulfing abyss of Popery.

Dr. Newman confesses that it is only when his guilty conscience was uniting its thundering voice with that of his whole country to condemn him, that he said, “After all, the Church of Rome is right!”

These are the arguments, the motives, the light which have led Dr. Newman to Rome! And it is from himself that we have it! It is a just, and avenging God who forces his adversary to glorify Him and say the truth in spite of himself in this “Apologia pro vita sua.”

No one can read that book, written with almost a superhuman skill, ability, and fineness, without a feeling of unspeakable sadness at the sight of such bright talents, such eloquence, such extensive studies, employed by the author to deceive himself and deceive his readers; for it is evident, on every page, that Dr. Newman has deceived himself before deceiving his readers. But no one can read that book without feeling a sense of terror also. For he will hear, at every page, the thundering voice of the God of the Gospel, “Because they received not the love of the Truth that they might be saved, God shall send them strong delusions, that they should believe a lie.” (2 Thess. ii:10-11).

What, at first, most painfully puzzles the mind of the Christian reader of this book is the horror which Dr. Newman has for the Holy Scriptures. The unfortunate man who is perishing from hydrophobia does not keep himself more at a distance from water than he does from the word of God. It seems incredible, but it is a fact, that from the first page of the history of his “Religious Opinions” to page 261, where he joins the Church of Rome, we have not a single line to tell us that he has gone to the Word of God for light and comfort in his search after truth. We see Dr. Newman at the feet of Daniel Wilson, Scott, Milner, Whately, Hawkins, Blanco White, William James, Butler, Keble, Froude, Pusey, &c., asking them what to believe, what to do to be saved: but you do not see him a single minute, no! not a single minute, at the feet of the Saviour, asking him, “Master, what must I do to have ‘Eternal Life?’” The sublime words of Peter to Christ, which are filling all the echoes of heaven and earth, these eighteen hundred years, “Lord! To whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life!” have never reached his ears! In the long and gloomy hours, when his soul was chilled and trembling in the dark night of infidelity; when his uncertain feet were tired by vainly going here and there, to find the true way, he has never heard Christ telling him: “Come unto Me. I am the Way; I am the Door; I am the Life!” In those terrible hours of distress of which he speaks so eloquently, when he cries (page 111) “Alas! I was without any basis for my religious profession, in a state of moral sickness: neither able to acquiesce in Anglicanism, nor able to go to Rome:” when his lips were parched with thirst after truth, he never, no never, went to the fountain from which flow the waters of eternal life!

One day, he goes to the Holy Fathers. But what will he find there? Will he see how St. Cyprien sternly rebuked the impudence of Stephen, Bishop of Rome, who pretended to have some jurisdiction over the See of Carthage? Will he find how Gregory positively says that the Bishop who will pretend to be the “Universal Bishop” is the forerunner of Anti-Christ? Will he hear St. Augustine declaring that when Christ said to Peter, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church,” He was speaking of Himself as the rock upon which the Church would stand? No. The only thing which Dr. Newman brings us from the Holy Fathers is so ridiculous and so unbecoming that I am ashamed to have to repeat it. He tells us (page 78), “I have an idea. The mass of the Fathers (Justin, Anthenagoras, Irenæus, Clement, Tertullian, Origen, Ambrose), hold that, though Satan fell from the beginning, the angels fell before the deluge, falling in love with the daughters of men. This has lately come across me as a remarkable solution of a notion I cannot help holding.”

Allow me here to remind the reader that, though the Fathers have written many beautiful evangelical pages, some of them have written the greatest nonsense and the most absurd things which human folly can imagine. Many of them were born and educated as pagans. They had learned and believed the history and immorality of their demi-gods; they had brought those notions with them into the Church; and they had attributed to the angels of God, the passions and love for women which was one of the most conspicuous characters of Jupiter, Mars, Cupid, Bacchus, etc. And Dr. Newman, whose want of accuracy and judgment is so often revealed and confessed by him in this book, has not been able to see that those sayings of the Fathers were nothing but human aberrations. He has accepted that as Gospel truth, and he has been silly enough to boast of it.