Then came the first surprise. The Apologia was read with the keenest interest by those who most differed from the writer's practical conclusions; twenty years had elapsed since he had taken the unpopular step which seemed to condemn him to obscurity; and now he emerged from it, challenging not in vain the sympathy of his countrymen. They awoke, it may be said—at least the younger generation of them—to what he really was; the old jars and bitternesses had passed out of remembrance; they only felt that they had one among them who could write—for few of them ever heard his wonderful voice—in a way which made English hearts respond quickly and warmly. And the strange thing was that the professed, the persistent denouncer of Liberalism, was welcomed back to his rightful place among Englishmen by none more warmly than by many Liberals. Still, though his name was growing more familiar year by year, the world did not see much more of him. The head of a religious company, of an educational institution at Birmingham, he lived in unpretending and quiet simplicity, occupied with the daily business of his house, with his books, with his correspondence, with finishing off his many literary and theological undertakings. Except in some chance reference in a book or newspaper which implied how considerable a person the world thought him, he was not heard of. People asked about him, but there was nothing to tell. Then at last, neglected by Pius IX., he was remembered by Leo XIII. The Pope offered him the Cardinalship, he said, because he thought it would be "grateful to the Catholics of England, and to England itself." And he was not mistaken. Probably there is not a single thing that the Pope could do which would be so heartily welcomed.
After breaking with England and all things English in wrath and sorrow, nearly thirty-five years ago, after a long life of modest retirement, unmarked by any public honours, at length before he dies Dr. Newman is recognised by Protestant England as one of its greatest men. It watches with interest his journey to Rome, his proceedings at Rome. In a crowd of new Cardinals—men of eminence in their own communion—he is the only one about whom Englishmen know or care anything. His words, when he speaks, pass verbatim along the telegraph wires, like the words of the men who sway the world. We read of the quiet Oxford scholar's arms emblazoned on vestment and furniture as those of a Prince of the Church, and of his motto—Cor ad cor loquitur. In that motto is the secret of all that he is to his countrymen. For that skill of which he is such a master, in the use of his and their "sweet mother tongue," is something much more than literary accomplishment and power. It means that he has the key to what is deepest in their nature and most characteristic in them of feeling and conviction—to what is deeper than opinions and theories and party divisions; to what in their most solemn moments they most value and most believe in.
His profound sympathy with the religiousness which still, with all the variations and all the immense shortcomings of English religion, marks England above all cultivated Christian nations, is really the bond between him and his countrymen, who yet for the most part think so differently from him, both about the speculative grounds and many of the practical details of religion. But it was natural for him, on an occasion like this, reviewing the past and connecting it with the present, to dwell on these differences. He repeated once more, and made it the keynote of his address, his old protest against "Liberalism in religion," the "doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but one creed is as good as another." He lamented the decay of the power of authority, the disappearance of religion from the sphere of political influence, from education, from legislation. He deplored the increasing impossibility of getting men to work together on a common religious basis. He pointed out the increasing seriousness and earnestness of the attempts to "supersede, to block out religion," by an imposing and high morality, claiming to dispense with it.
He dwelt on the mischief and dangers; he expressed, as any Christian would, his fearlessness and faith in spite of them; but do we gather, even from such a speaker, and on such an occasion, anything of the remedy? The principle of authority is shaken, he tells us; what can he suggest to restore it? He under-estimates, probably, the part which authority plays, implicitly yet very really, in English popular religion, much more in English Church religion; and authority, even in Rome, is not everything, and does not reach to every subject. But authority in our days can be nothing without real confidence in it; and where confidence in authority has been lost, it is idle to attempt to restore it by telling men that authority is a good and necessary thing. It must be won back, not simply claimed. It must be regained, when forfeited, by the means by which it was originally gained. And the strange phenomenon was obviously present to his clear and candid mind, though he treated it as one which is disappearing, and must at length pass away, that precisely here in England, where the only religious authority he recognises has been thrown off, the hold of religion on public interest is most effective and most obstinately tenacious.
What is the history of this? What is the explanation of it? Why is it that where "authority," as he understands it, has been longest paramount and undisputed, the public place and public force of religion have most disappeared; and that a "dozen men taken at random in the streets" of London find it easier, with all their various sects, to work together on a religious basis than a dozen men taken at random from the streets of Catholic Paris or Rome? Indeed, the public feeling towards himself, expressed in so many ways in the last few weeks, might suggest a question not undeserving of his thoughts. The mass of Englishmen are notoriously anti-Popish and anti-Roman. Their antipathies on this subject are profound, and not always reasonable. They certainly do not here halt between two opinions, or think that one creed is as good as another. What is it which has made so many of them, still retaining all their intense dislike to the system which Cardinal Newman has accepted, yet welcome so heartily his honours in it, notwithstanding that he has passed from England to Rome, and that he owes so much of what he is to England? Is it that they think it does not matter what a man believes, and whether a man turns Papist? Or is it not that, in spite of all that would repel and estrange, in spite of the oppositions of argument and the inconsistencies of speculation, they can afford to recognise in him, as in a high example, what they most sincerely believe in and most deeply prize, and can pay him the tribute of their gratitude and honour, even when unconvinced by his controversial reasonings, and unsatisfied by the theories which he has proposed to explain the perplexing and refractory anomalies of Church history? Is it not that with history, inexorable and unalterable behind them, condemning and justifying, supporting and warning all sides in turn, thoughtful men feel how much easier it is to point out and deplore our disasters than to see a way now to set them right? Is it not also that there are in the Christian Church bonds of affinity, subtler, more real and more prevailing than even the fatal legacies of the great schisms? Is it not that the sympathies which unite the author of the Parochial Sermons and the interpreter of St. Athanasius with the disciples of Andrewes, and Ken, and Bull, of Butler and Wilson, are as strong and natural as the barriers which outwardly keep them asunder are to human eyes hopelessly insurmountable?
XXX
CARDINAL NEWMAN'S COURSE[34]
[34] Guardian, 13th August 1890.
The long life is closed. And men, according to their knowledge and intelligence, turn to seek for some governing idea or aspect of things, by which to interpret the movements and changes of a course which, in spite of its great changes, is felt at bottom to have been a uniform and consistent one. For it seems that, at starting, he is at once intolerant, even to harshness, to the Roman Church, and tolerant, though not sympathetic, to the English; then the parts are reversed, and he is intolerant to the English and tolerant to the Roman; and then at last, when he finally anchored in the Roman Church, he is seen as—not tolerant, for that would involve dogmatic points on which he was most jealous, but—sympathetic in all that was of interest to England, and ready to recognise what was good and high in the English Church.
Is not the ultimate key to Newman's history his keen and profound sense of the life, society, and principles of action presented in the New Testament? To this New Testament life he saw, opposed and in contrast, the ways and assumptions of English life, religious as well as secular. He saw that the organisation of society had been carried, and was still being carried, to great and wonderful perfection; only it was the perfection of a society and way of life adapted to the present world, and having its ends here; only it was as different as anything can be from the picture which the writers of the New Testament, consciously and unconsciously, give of themselves and their friends. Here was a Church, a religion, a "Christian nation," professing to be identical in spirit and rules of faith and conduct with the Church and religion of the Gospels and Epistles; and what was the identity, beyond certain phrases and conventional suppositions? He could not see a trace in English society of that simple and severe hold of the unseen and the future which is the colour and breath, as well as the outward form, of the New Testament life. Nothing could be more perfect, nothing grander and nobler, than all the current arrangements for this life; its justice and order and increasing gentleness, its widening sympathies between men; but it was all for the perfection and improvement of this life; it would all go on, if what we experience now was our only scene and destiny. This perpetual antithesis haunted him, when he knew it, or when he did not. Against it the Church ought to be the perpetual protest, and the fearless challenge, as it was in the days of the New Testament. But the English Church had drunk in, he held, too deeply the temper, ideas, and laws of an ambitious and advancing civilisation; so much so as to be unfaithful to its special charge and mission. The prophet had ceased to rebuke, warn, and suffer; he had thrown in his lot with those who had ceased to be cruel and inhuman, but who thought only of making their dwelling-place as secure and happy as they could. The Church had become respectable, comfortable, sensible, temperate, liberal; jealous about the forms of its creeds, equally jealous of its secular rights, interested in the discussion of subordinate questions, and becoming more and more tolerant of differences; ready for works of benevolence and large charity, in sympathy with the agricultural poor, open-handed in its gifts; a willing fellow-worker with society in kindly deeds, and its accomplice in secularity. All this was admirable, but it was not the life of the New Testament, and it was that which filled his thoughts. The English Church had exchanged religion for civilisation, the first century for the nineteenth, the New Testament as it is written, for a counterfeit of it interpreted by Paley or Mr. Simeon; and it seemed to have betrayed its trust.