Yet there was a pause. It was no secret what was coming. But men lingered. It was not till the summer that the first drops of the storm began to fall. Then through the autumn and the next year, friends, whose names and forms were familiar in Oxford, one by one disappeared and were lost to it. Fellowships, livings, curacies, intended careers, were given up. Mr. Ward went. Mr. Capes, who had long followed Mr. Ward's line, and had spent his private means to build a church near Bridgewater, went also. Mr. Oakeley resigned Margaret Chapel and went. Mr. Ambrose St. John, Mr. Coffin, Mr. Dalgairns, Mr. Faber, Mr. T. Meyrick, Mr. Albany Christie, Mr. R. Simpson of Oriel, were received in various places and various ways, and in the next year, Mr. J.S. Northcote, Mr. J.B. Morris, Mr. G. Ryder, Mr. David Lewis. On the 3d of October 1845 Mr. Newman requested the Provost of Oriel to remove his name from the books of the College and University, but without giving any reason. The 6th of October is the date of the "Advertisement" to the work which had occupied Mr. Newman through the year—the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. On the 8th he was, as he has told us in the Apologia, received by Father Dominic, the Passionist. To the "Advertisement" are subjoined the following words:
Postscript.—Since the above was written the Author has joined the Catholic Church. It was his intention and wish to have carried his volume through the press before deciding finally on this step. But when he got some way in the printing, he recognised in himself a conviction of the truth of the conclusion, to which the discussion leads, so clear as to preclude further deliberation. Shortly afterwards circumstances gave him the opportunity of acting on it, and he felt that he had no warrant for refusing to act on it.
So the reality of what had been so long and often so lightly talked about by those who dared it, provoked it, or hoped for it, had come indeed; and a considerable portion of English society learned what it was to be novices in a religious system, hitherto not only alien and unknown, but dreaded, or else to have lost friends and relatives, who were suddenly transformed into severe and uncompromising opponents, speaking in unfamiliar terms, and sharply estranged in sympathies and rules of life. Some of them, especially those who had caught the spirit of their leader, began life anew, took their position as humble learners in the Roman Schools, and made the most absolute sacrifice of a whole lifetime that a man can make. To others the change came and was accepted as an emancipation, not only from the bonds of Anglicanism, but from the obligations of orders and priestly vows and devotion. In some cases, where they were married, there was no help for it. But in almost all cases there was a great surrender of what English life has to offer to those brought up in it. Of the defeated party, those who remained had much to think about, between grief at the breaking of old ties, and the loss of dear friends, and perplexities about their own position. The anxiety, the sorrow at differing and parting, seem now almost extravagant and unintelligible. There are those who sneer at the "distress" of that time. There had not been the same suffering, the same estrangement, when Churchmen turned dissenters, like Bulteel and Baptist Noel. But the movement had raised the whole scale of feeling about religious matters so high, the questions were felt to be so momentous, the stake and the issue so precious, the "Loss and Gain" so immense, that to differ on such subjects was the differing on the greatest things which men could differ about. But in a time of distress, of which few analogous situations in our days can give the measure, the leaders stood firm. Dr. Pusey, Mr. Keble, Mr. Marriott accepted, with unshaken faith in the cause of the English Church, the terrible separation. They submitted to the blow—submitted to the reproach of having been associates of those who had betrayed hopes and done so much mischief; submitted to the charge of inconsistency, insincerity, cowardice; but they did not flinch. Their unshrinking attitude was a new point of departure for those who believed in the Catholic foundation of the English Church.
Among those deeply affected by these changes, there were many who had been absolutely uninfluenced by the strong Roman current. They had recognised many good things in the Roman Church; they were fully alive to many shortcomings in the English Church; but the possibility of submission to the Roman claims had never been a question with them. A typical example of such minds was Mr. Isaac Williams, a pupil of Mr. Keble, an intimate friend of Mr. Newman, a man of simple and saintly life, with heart and soul steeped in the ancient theology of undivided Christendom, and for that very reason untempted by the newer principles and fashions of Rome. There were numbers who thought like him; but there were others also, who were forced in afresh upon themselves, and who had to ask themselves why they stayed, when a teacher, to whom they had looked up as they had to Mr. Newman, and into whose confidence they had been admitted, thought it his duty to go. With some the ultimate, though delayed, decision was to follow him. With others, the old and fair proejudicium against the claims of Rome, which had always asserted itself even against the stringent logic of Mr. Ward and the deep and subtle ideas of Mr. Newman, became, when closed with, and tested face to face in the light of fact and history, the settled conviction of life. Some extracts from contemporary papers, real records of the private perplexities and troubles actually felt at the time, may illustrate what was passing in the minds of some whom knowledge and love of Mr. Newman failed to make his followers in his ultimate step. The first extract belongs to some years before, but it is part of the same train of thinking.[124]
As to myself, I am getting into a very unsettled state as to aims and prospects. I mean that as things are going on, a man does not know where he is going to; one cannot imagine what state of things to look forward to; in what way, and under what circumstances, one's coming life—if it does come—is to be spent; what is to become of one. I cannot at all imagine myself a convert; but how am I likely, in the probable state of things, to be able to serve as an English clergyman? Shall I ever get Priest's orders? Shall I be able to continue always serving? What is one's line to be; what ought to be one's aims; or can one have any?
The storm is not yet come: how it may come, and how soon it may blow over, and what it may leave behind, is doubtful; but some sort of crisis, I think, must come before things settle. With the Bishops against us, and Puritanism aggressive, we may see strange things before the end.
When the "storm" had at length come, though, before its final violence, the same writer continues:
The present hopeless check and weight to our party—what has for the time absolutely crushed us—is the total loss of confidence arising from the strong tendency, no longer to be dissembled or explained away, among many of us to Rome. I see no chance of our recovery, or getting our heads above water from this, at least in England, for years to come. And it is a check which will one day be far greater than it is now. Under the circumstances—having not the most distant thought of leaving the English Church myself, and yet having no means of escaping the very natural suspicion of Romanising without giving up my best friends and the most saint-like men in England—how am I to view my position? What am I witnessing to? What, if need be, is one to suffer for? A man has no leaning towards Rome, does not feel, as others do, the strength of her exclusive claims to allegiance, the perfection of her system, its right so to overbalance all the good found in ours as to make ours absolutely untrustworthy for a Christian to rest in, notwithstanding all circumstances of habit, position, and national character; has such doubts on the Roman theory of the Church, the Ultramontane, and such instincts not only against many of their popular religious customs and practical ways of going on, but against their principles of belief (e.g. divine faith = relics), as to repel him from any wish to sacrifice his own communion for theirs; yet withal, and without any great right on his part to complain, is set down as a man who may any day, and certainly will some day, go over; and he has no lawful means of removing the suspicion:—why is it tanti to submit to this?
However little sympathy we Englishmen have with Rome, the Western Churches under Rome are really living and holy branches of the Church Catholic; corruptions they may have, so may we; but putting these aside, they are Catholic Christians, or Catholic Christianity has failed out of the world: we are no more [Catholic] than they. But this, public opinion has not for centuries, and does not now, realise or allow. So no one can express in reality and detail a practical belief in their Catholicity, in their equality (setting one thing against another) with us as Christians, without being suspected of what such belief continually leads to—disloyalty to the English Church. Yet such belief is nevertheless well-grounded and right, and there is no great hope for the Church till it gains ground, soberly, powerfully, and apart from all low views of proselytising, or fear of danger. What therefore the disadvantage of those among us who do not really deserve the imputation of Romanising may be meant for, is to break this practical belief to the English Church. We may be silenced, but, without any wish to leave the English Church, we cannot give up the belief, that the Western Church under Rome is a true, living, venerable branch of the Christian Church. There are dangers in such a belief, but they must be provided against, they do not affect the truth of the belief.
Such searchings of heart were necessarily rendered more severe and acute by Mr. Newman's act. There was no longer any respite; his dearest friends must choose between him and the English Church. And the choice was made, by those who did not follow him, on a principle little honoured or believed in at the time on either side, Roman or Protestant; but a principle which in the long-run restored hope and energy to a cause which was supposed to be lost. It was not the revival of the old Via Media; it was not the assertion of the superiority of the English Church; it was not a return to the old-fashioned and ungenerous methods of controversy with Rome—one-sided in all cases, ignorant, coarse, unchristian in many. It was not the proposal of a new theory of the Church—its functions, authority and teaching, a counter-ideal to Mr. Ward's imposing Ideal It was the resolute and serious appeal from brilliant logic, and keen sarcasm, and pathetic and impressive eloquence, to reality and experience, as well as to history, as to the positive and substantial characteristics of the traditional and actually existing English Church, shown not on paper but in work, and in spite of contradictory appearances and inconsistent elements; and along with this, an attempt to put in a fair and just light the comparative excellences and defects of other parts of Christendom, excellences to be ungrudgingly admitted, but not to be allowed to bar the recognition of defects. The feeling which had often stirred, even when things looked at the worst, that Mr. Newman had dealt unequally and hardly with the English Church, returned with gathered strength. The English Church was after all as well worth living in and fighting for as any other; it was not only in England that light and dark, in teaching and in life, were largely intermingled, and the mixture had to be largely allowed for. We had our Sparta, a noble, if a rough and an incomplete one; patiently to do our best for it was better than leaving it to its fate, in obedience to signs and reasonings which the heat of strife might well make delusive. It was one hopeful token, that boasting had to be put away from us for a long time to come. In these days of stress and sorrow were laid the beginnings of a school, whose main purpose was to see things as they are; which had learned by experience to distrust unqualified admiration and unqualified disparagement; determined not to be blinded even by genius to plain certainties; not afraid to honour all that is great and beneficent in Rome, not afraid with English frankness to criticise freely at home; but not to be won over, in one case, by the good things, to condone and accept the bad things; and not deterred, in the other, from service, from love, from self-sacrifice, by the presence of much to regret and to resist.