II. NEWMAN

MR. WARD'S' Life of Newman' is a permanent contribution to Church history. It is the work of a lifetime, in the sense that his other works have been subsidiary to it; it is the centre to which they converge. For Newman was the sun round which the lesser luminaries of his system circled; their movement and light were derived from him. Mr. Ward has peculiar qualifications for the task to which he has addressed himself. He stands in the first rank of biographers; he has had access to full and authentic sources; and, above all, he is steeped in his subject. More than anyone of our own-perhaps even of Newman'sgeneration, he has assimilated Newman's mind. He has done so, indeed, with a difference. The temperaments of the two men are dissimilar. To the gusts of passion which shook Newman-to his sensibility, his indignation, his scorn-Mr. Ward is a stranger. He has adopted Newman's standpoint rather than his personality, his conclusions rather than the mental and moral process by which they were attained. This is why, when he writes about Newman, we have an exact but not a very lifelike portrait. We miss the movement of the original; the versatility, the fire, are gone. In the present work this want is compensated by the free use which has been made of the Cardinal's journal and correspondence. The unreserve with which these have been drawn upon is remarkable. It is notorious that during his best years Newman was distrusted by and out of sympathy with his ecclesiastical superiors. As Mr. Ward puts it, 'He saw too much for a man of action.' When Talbot wrote to Manning,

'Dr. Newman is the most dangerous man in England,' he expressed the view all but universally held at Rome. These strained relations lasted till the death of Pius IX; he made no secret of his opinion about the policy of that pontiff-a policy resumed, after the Leonine interlude, by the present Pope. A Catholic biographer must have been exposed to no small temptation to suppress inconvenient facts and to water down disedifying expressions of opinion; the more so as their publication can scarcely be welcome in quarters whose authority he is not free to question, and to persons who have means of making their displeasure felt. That Mr. Ward has exercised a certain discretion in the use of his material is probable; how his book will be received by authority remains to be seen. But his outspokenness is great. So much has been told us that it is difficult to think that anything of importance has been concealed. The result is a masterpiece of biography, a profoundly painful picture, and a criticism of the Church of Rome from within-a criticism, it will seem to many, more damaging, because it is unconscious, than anything that has come from the avowedly Modernist school.

Newman stands high among the founders of what may be called neo-Catholicism. The Catholic Church of the eighteenth century was a social rather than an intellectual or a moral force. It was part of the established order of things; it was neither aggressive nor propagandist; it asked no more than to be let alone. With the nineteenth came the reaction from the Revolution, represented by De Maistre on the political, by mystics like the Curé d'Ars on the religious, and by Newman on the intellectual side. The first saw in the Papacy the foundation of the social fabric; the second won men by a saintliness whose inspiration, little as it might be suspected, was independent of Church or creed; the third carried the war into the enemies' camp, exposing the weak points of popular Protestantism, and arguing for the identity of the notion of Christianity with that of the Roman Church. Newman was a great man of letters, and a master of English prose; his knowledge of certain sides of human nature was

instinctive; he was a subtle and, within limits, an acute thinker; and he was one of the most consummate advocates who ever lived. He possessed the temperament of the artist in an exceptional degree. This does not make for the happiness either of its possessor or of those about him. 'Deep natures' (says Mr. Ward) (says Mr. Ward) are not the most equable. There will be bitter as well as sweet. Where there is intense love and gratitude there will be at times deep anger, deep resentment.' He was not easy to live with; Manning's view of him—and it was shared by more friendly judgeswas that he was difficult to understand.' His transports of emotion were tempestuous.

6

Christie walked with him from Oxford to Littlemore when the great separation of 1845 was approaching. Newman spoke never a word all the way, and Christie's hand, when they arrived, was wet with Newman's tears. When he made his confession in Littlemore chapel his exhaustion was such that he could not walk without help. When he went to Rome to set right the differences with his brethren of London . . . he walked barefoot from the halting-stage of the diligence all the way to St. Peter's. When Ambrose St. John died, he threw himself on the bed by the corpse, and spent the night there.1

Such a temper is not normal; overstrain.

one cannot mistake the

Newman had in an eminent degree the skill in verbal fence characteristic of the Oxford of his generation; but his mastery of expression was greater than his knowledge of fact. In this respect he resembled Mr. Gladstone. Both had accustomed themselves to an economy' in the use of language to such an extent that plain men were often at a loss to know what they really meant. Reasoning meant more to him than truth, tradition than testimony. 'A fact is not disproved because the testimony is confused and insufficient'; and, As if evidence were the test of truth! '2 But in figures and modes and fine shades of meaning, he was an expert; he analysed conceptions and refined upon 1 Ward, Life of Newman, i. 21. 2 Essay on Miracles, pp. 171, 231,

terms. Never consciously insincere, he constantly gave the impression of insincerity. You could not detect the fallacy, but a true instinct told you it was there. Hence the distrust inspired by 'that subtle and delicately lubricated illative rhetoric by which you are led downwards on an exquisitely elaborated inclined plane, from a truism to a probability, from a strong probability to a fair probability, and from a fair probability to a pious but most improbable belief.'1

When we start with assuming that miracles are not unlikely, we are putting forth a position which lies imbedded, as it were, and involved in the great revealed fact of the Incarnation. So much is plain at starting; but more is plain too. Miracles are not only not unlikely, they are positively likely; and for this simple reason, because for the most part, when God begins, He goes on. We conceive that when He first did a miracle, He began a series; what He commenced, He continued; what has been, will be. Surely this is good and clear reasoning! 2

From this position the advance is easy to the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius at Naples and the motion of the eyes of the pictures of the Madonna in the Roman States.' Hence the sense of insecurity with which his dialectical victories inspire us. The superstructure was brilliant, but it was built on sand. His life was one long crusade against the outlook over the world which he knew as Liberalism'; he left this Liberalism triumphant along the whole line. Now it is scarcely a party; it is the educated lay world,' he says himself in the 'Apologia (cap. v). His name is associated with a movement which the English mind refused to take seriously, and which, while it has left a profound mark on the Anglican clergy, has driven a wedge between the English people and the English Church. He gave up all to follow his ideal; but, like the shores of Ausonia, as he advanced it retreated. The Church of the Fathers could not be reproduced in the nineteenth century. His conception of it, if unlike the 1 Philomythus, p. 32.

2 Present Position of Catholics, pp. 298, 306.

actual Church of England, was at least as unlike the actual Church of Rome.

Nothing shows more clearly how far we have passed from the Oxford Movement than the effort of imagination required to picture the Oxford in which it originated. Newman described it in 'Loss and Gain'; but it is a world very remote from us. Lord Coleridge writes of the Sunday-afternoon sermons at St. Mary's: 'There was scarcely a man of note in the University, old or young, who did not during the last two or three years of Newman's incumbency habitually attend the services and listen to the sermons.' We simply cannot reconstruct the situation. There has been no second Newman; but, if there were twenty, Oxford would not be affected in this way. It is not that there is less religion than formerly: it is probable that there is more. But it finds other modes of expression: the climate has changed. The distinctive note of the unreformed Oxford in which Newman was so dominant a figure was its provincialism; it stood outside the main stream of the European mind. German, in spite of Bishop Lloyd's efforts, was almost unknown; Phrontisterion' showed the level of speculative thinking; in theology every extravagance found a congenial home. As a divine, Newman did not rise above this level. His pulpit commentary on the massacre of the Canaanitesmen, women, and children-by the Israelitish tribesmen under Joshua is typical. 'Doubtless, as they slew those who suffered for the sins of their fathers, their thoughts turned, first to the fall of Adam, next to that unseen state where all inequalities are righted.' His dialectic, acute as it was, confined itself to the analysis of received terms and current conceptions. He did not attempt to go behind them; this, as David Lewis (who had been his curate) used to say, he would have thought wrong.

He had taken over from popular thought and Puritan tradition certain hard-and-fast antitheses--the religious and the secular, the supernatural and the natural, the Church and the world. These distinctions, taken abso1 Parochial and Plain Sermons, iii. 187.