We have followed out these steps thus in detail, not only because of their intense interest as an autobiography, but also because the narrative itself seems to throw the strongest possible light on the mainly-important question how far this defection of one of her greatest sons does really tend to weaken the argumentative position of the English Church in her strife with Rome. What has been said already will suffice to prove that in our opinion no such consequence can justly follow from it. We acknowledge freely the greatness of the individual loss. But the causes of that defection are, we think, clearly shown to have been the peculiarities of the individual, not the weakness of the side which he abandoned. His steps mark no path to any other. He sprang clear over the guarding walls of the sheepfold, and opened no way through them for other wanderers. Men may have left the Church of England because their leader left it; but they could not leave it as he left it, or because of his reasons for leaving it. In truth, he appears never to have occupied a thoroughly real Church-of-England position. He was at first, by education and private judgment, a Calvinistic Puritan; he became dissatisfied with the coldness and barrenness of this theory, and set about finding a new position for himself, and in so doing he skipped over true, sound English Churchmanship into a course of feeling and thought allied with and leading on to Rome. Even the hindrances which so long held him back can scarcely be said to have been indeed the logical force of the unanswerable credentials of the English Church. On the contrary they were rather personal impressions, feelings, and difficulties. His faithful, loving nature made him cling desperately to early hopes, friendships, and affections. Even to the end Thomas Scott never loses his hold upon him. His narrative is not the history of the normal progress of a mind from England to Rome; it is so thoroughly exceptional that it does not seem calculated to seduce to Rome men governed in such high matters by argument and reason rather than by impulse and feeling. We do not therefore think that the mere fact of this secession tells with any force against that communion whose claims satisfied to their dying day such men as Hooker and Andrewes, and Ussher and Hammond, and Bramhall and Butler.
But, beyond this, his present view of the English Church appears to be incompatible with that fierce and internecine hostility to the claim upon the loyalty of her children which is really essential to clear the act of perverting others from her ranks from the plainest guilt of schism. It is not merely that the nobleness and tenderness of his nature make his tone so unlike that of many of those who have taken the same step with himself. It is not that every provocation—and how many they have been!—every misunderstanding—and they have been all but universal; every unworthy charge or insinuation—down to those of Professor Kingsley, failed to embitter his feelings against the communion he has deserted and the friends whom he has left. It is not this to which we refer, for this is personal to himself, and the fruit of his own generosity and true greatness of soul. But we refer to his calm, deliberate estimate of the forsaken Church. He says, indeed, that since his change he has "had no changes to record, no anxiety of heart whatever. I have been in perfect peace and contentment. I never had one doubt" (p. 373). But, as we have seen already, this was always the temporary condition in which every new phase of opinion landed him. He was always able to build up these tabernacles of rest. The difference between this and those former resting-places is clear. In those he was still a searcher after truth: he needed and required conviction, and a new conviction might shake the old comfort. But his present resting-place is built upon the denial of all further enquiry. "I have," he says (p. 374), "no further history of religious opinions to narrate": and some following words show how entirely it is this abandonment of the idea of the actual conviction of truth for the blind admission of the dictates of a despotic external authority on which he rests.
* * * * *
There is another deeply interesting question raised by Dr. Newman's work, on which, if our limits did not absolutely prevent, we should be glad to enter. We mean the present position of the Church of Rome with that great rationalistic movement with which we, too, are called to contend. Everywhere in Europe this contest is proceeding, and the relations of the Church of Rome towards it are becoming daily more and more embarrassed. Mr. Ffoulkes tells us that "the 'Home and Foreign Review' is the only publication professing to emanate from Roman Catholics in this country that can be named in the same breath with the leading Protestant Reviews."[1] Since he wrote these words its course has been closed by Pontifical authority. M. Montalembert has barely escaped censure with the payment of the penalty—so heavy to his co-religionists—of an enforced silence; and Dr. Newman "interprets recent acts of authority as tying the hands of a controversialist such as I should be,"[2] and so is prevented completing the great work which has occupied so much of his thoughts, and which promised, more than any other work this country is likely to see, to set some limiting boundary line between the provinces of a humble faith in Revelation and an ardent love of advancing science. This is an evil inflicted by Rome on this whole generation. But in truth, whenever the mind of Christendom is active, the attitude of the Papal communion before this new enemy is that of a startled, trembling minaciousness, which invites the deadly combat it can so ill maintain.
[1] "Union Review," ix, 294. [2] "Apol." 405.
These facts are patent to every one who knows anything whatever of the present state of religious thought throughout Roman Catholic Europe. Almost every one knows further that the struggle between those who would subject all science and all the actings of the human mind to the authority of the Church, and those who would limit the exercise of that authority more or less to the proper subject-matter of theology, is rife and increasing. The words of, perhaps, the ablest living member of the Roman Catholic communion have rung through Europe, and many a heart in all religious communions has been saddened by the thought of Dr. Döllinger's virtual censure. And yet it is at such a time as this that Dr. Manning ventures to put forth his "Letters to a Friend," painting all as peace, unanimity, and obedient faith within the Roman Church; all dissension, unbelief, and letting slip of the ancient faith within our own communion. Surely such are not the weapons by which the cause of God's truth can be advanced!
But we must bring our remarks on the "Apologia" to a close.
Some lessons there are, and those great ones, which this book is calculated to instil into members of our own communion. Pre-eminently it shows the rottenness of that mere Act-of-Parliament foundation on which some, now-a-days, would rest our Church. Dr. Newman suggests, more than once, that such a course must rob us of all our present strength. Dr. Manning sings his paean with wild and premature delight, as if the evil was already accomplished. In his first letter he triumphed in the silence of Convocation, but that silence has since been broken. A solemn synodical judgment, couched in the most explicit language, has condemned the false teaching which had been our Church's scandal. But because a "very exalted person in the House of Lords"[1] (p. 4), with an ignorance or an ignoring of law, as was shown in the debate, which was simply astonishing, chose, in a manner which even Dr. Manning condemns, to assert, without a particle of real evidence, that the Convocation had exceeded its legitimate powers, Dr. Manning is in ecstasies. The "very exalted person" becomes "a righteous judge, a learned judge, a Daniel come to judgment—yea, a Daniel." These shouts of joy ought to be enough to show men where the real danger lies. Our present position is impregnable. But if we abandon it for the new one proposed to us by the Rationalist party, how shall we be able to stand? How could a national religious Establishment which should seek to rest its foundations—not on God's Word; on the ancient Creeds; on a true Apostolic ministry; on valid Sacraments; on a living, even though it be an obscured, unity with the Universal Church, and so on the presence with her of her Lord, and on the gifts of His Spirit—but upon the critical reason of individuals, and the support of Acts of Parliament—ever stand in the coming struggle? How could it meet Rationalism on the one hand? How could it withstand Popery on the other? After such a fatal change its career might be easily foreshadowed. Under the assaults of Rationalism, it would year by year lose some parts of the great deposit of the Catholic faith. Under the attacks of Rome, it would lose many of those whom it can ill spare, because they believe most firmly in the verities for which she is ready to witness. Thus it might continue until our ministry were filled with the time-serving, the ignorant, and the unbelieving; and, when this has come to pass, the day of final doom cannot be far distant. How such evils are to be averted is the anxious question of the present day. The great practical question seems to us to be that to which we have before this alluded,[2]—How the Supreme Court of Appeal can be made fitter for the due discharge of its momentous functions? We cannot enter here upon that great question. But solved it must be, and solved upon the principles of the great Reformation statutes of our land, which maintain, in the supremacy of the Crown, our undoubted nationality; which, besides maintaining this great principle of national life, save us from all the terrible practical evils of appeals to Rome, and yet which maintain the spirituality of the land, as the guardians under God of the great deposit of the Faith, in the very terms in which the Catholic Church of Christ has from the beginning received, and to this day handed down in its completeness, the inestimable gift.
[1] Hansard's "House of Lord's Debates," July 15, 1864 [2] "Quarterly Review," vol. cxv. p. 560