This pretended quotation is itself garbled. I wrote, ("Phases," 1st edition, p. 152)—"Of our moral and spiritual God we know nothing without, everything within." By omitting the adjectives, the critic produces a statement opposed to my judgment and to my writings; and then goes on to say. "Well, if Mr. Newman will engage to prove contradictions,… I think it is no wonder that his readers do not understand him."
I believe it is a received judgment, which I will not positively assert to be true, but I do not think I have anywhere denied, that God is discerned by us in the universe as a designer, creator, and mechanical ruler, through a mere study of the world and its animals and all their adaptations, even without an absolute necessity of meditating consciously on the intelligence of man and turning the eyes within. Thus a creative God may be said to be discerned "from without." But in my conviction, that God is not so discerned to be moral or spiritual or to be our God; but by moral intellect and moral experience acting "inwardly." If Mr. Rogers chooses to deny the justness of my view, let him deny it; but by omitting the emphatic adjectives he has falsified my sentence, and then has founded upon it a charge of inconsistency. In a previous passage (p. 79) he gave this quotation in full, in order to reproach me for silently withdrawing it in my second edition of the "Phases." He says:—
"The two sentences in small capitals are not found in the new edition of the 'Phases.' They are struck out. It is no doubt the right of an author to erase in a new edition any expressions he pleases; but when he is about to charge another with having grossly garbled and stealthily misrepresented him, it is as well to let the world know what he has erased and why. He says that my representation of his sentiments is the most direct and intense reverse of all that he has most elaborately and carefully written. It certainly is not the intense reverse of all that he has most elaborately and carefully scratched out."
I exhibit here the writer's own italics.
By this attack on my good faith, and by pretending that my withdrawal of the passage is of serious importance, he distracts the reader's attention from the argument there in hand (p. 79), which is, not what are my sentiments and judgements, but whether he had a right to dissolve and distort my chain of reasoning (see I. above) while affecting to quote me, and pretending that I gave nothing but assertion. As regards my "elaborately and carefully scratching out," this was done; 1. Because the passage seemed to me superfluous; 2. Because I had pressed the topic elsewhere; 3. Because I was going to enlarge on it in my reply to him, p. 199 of my second edition.[12] When the real place comes where my critic is to deal with the substance of the passage (p. 94 of "Defence"), the reader has seen how he mutilates it.
The other passage of mine which he has adduced, employs the word reveals, in a sense analogous to that of revelation, in avowed relation to things moral and spiritual, which would have been seen, had not my critic reversed the order of my sentences; which he does again in p. 78 of the "Defence," after my protest against his doing so in the "Eclipse." I wrote: (Soul, p. 59) "Christianity itself has thus practically confessed, what is theoretically clear, that an authoritative external revelation of moral and spiritual truth is essentially impossible to man. What God reveals to us, he reveals within, through the medium of our moral and spiritual senses." The words, "What God reveals," seen in the light of the preceding sentence, means: "That portion of moral and spiritual truth which God reveals." This cannot be discovered in the isolated quotation; and as, both in p. 78 and in p. 95, he chooses to quote my word What in italics, his reader is led on to interpret me as saying "every thing whatsoever which we know of God, we learn from within;" a statement which is not mine.
Besides this, the misrepresentation of which I complained is not confined to the rather metaphysical words of within and without, as to which the most candid friends may differ, and may misunderstand one another;—as to which also I may be truly open to correction;—but he assumes the right to tell his readers that my doctrine undervalues Truth, and Intellect, and Traditional teaching, and External suggestion, and Historical influences, and counts the Bible an impertinence. When he fancies he can elicit this and that, by his own logic, out of sentences and clauses torn from their context, he has no right to disguise what I have said to the contrary, and claim to justify his fraud by accusing me of self-contradiction. Against all my protests, and all that I said to the very opposite previous to any controversy, he coolly alludes to it (p. 40 of the "Defence") as though it were my avowed doctrine, that: "Each man, looking exclusively within, can at once rise to the conception of God's infinite perfections."
IV. When I agree with Paul or David (or think I do), I have a right to quote their words reverentially; but when I do so, Mr. Rogers deliberately justifies himself in ridiculing them, pretending that he only ridicules me. He thus answers my indignant denunciation in the early part of his "Defence," p. 5:—
"Mr. Newman warns me with much solemnity against thinking that 'questions pertaining to God are advanced by boisterous glee.' I do not think that the 'Eclipse' is characterised by boisterous glee; and certainly I was not at all aware, that the things which alone[13] I have ridiculed—some of them advanced by him, and some by others—deserved to be treated with solemnity. For example, that an authoritative external revelation,[14] which most persons have thought possible enough, is _im_possible,—that man is most likely born for a dog's life, and 'there an end'—that there are great defects in the morality of the New Testament, and much imperfection in the character of its founder,—that the miracles of Christ might be real, because Christ was a clairvoyant and mesmerist,—that God was not a Person, but a Personality;—I say, I was not aware that these things, and such as these, which alone I ridiculed, were questions 'pertaining to God,' in any other sense than the wildest hypotheses in some sense pertain to science, and the grossest heresies to religion."
Now first, is his statement true?