Part 26

Every one must be deeply touched by the Bishop of Manchester's sudden, and, to most of us, unexpected death; those not the least who, unhappily, found themselves in opposition to him in many important matters. For, in spite of much that many people must wish otherwise in his career as Bishop, it was really a very remarkable one. Its leading motive was high and genuine public spirit, and a generous wish to be in full and frank sympathy with all the vast masses of his diocese; to put himself on a level with them, as man with man, in all their interests, to meet them fearlessly and heartily, to raise their standard of justice and large-heartedness by showing them that in their life of toil he shared the obligation and the burden of labour, and felt bound by his place to be as unsparing and unselfish a worker as any of his flock. Indeed, he was as original as Bishop Wilberforce, though in a different direction, in introducing a new type and ideal of Episcopal work, and a great deal of his ideal he realised. It is characteristic of him that one of his first acts was to remove the Episcopal residence from a mansion and park in the country to a house in Manchester. There can be no doubt that he was thoroughly in touch with the working classes in Lancashire, in a degree to which no other Bishop, not even Bishop Wilberforce, had reached. There was that in the frankness and boldness of his address which disarmed their keen suspicion of a Bishop's inevitable assumption of superiority, and put them at their ease with him. He was always ready to meet them, and to speak off-hand and unconventionally, and as they speak, not always with a due foresight of consequences or qualifications. If he did sometimes in this way get into a scrape, he did not much mind it, and they liked him the better for it. He was perfectly fearless in his dealings with them; in their disputes, in which he often was invited to take a part, he took the part which seemed to him the right one, whether or not it might be the unpopular one. Very decided, very confident in his opinions and the expression of them, there yet was apparent a curious and almost touching consciousness of a deficiency in some of the qualities--knowledge, leisure, capacity for the deeper and subtler tasks of thought--necessary to give a strong speaker the sense of being on sure ground. But he trusted to his manly common sense; and this, with the populations with which he had to deal, served him well, at least in the main and most characteristic part of his work.

And for his success in this part of his work--in making the crowds in Manchester feel that their Bishop was a man like themselves, quite alive to their wants and claims and feelings, and not so unlike them in his broad and strong utterances--his Episcopate deserves full recognition and honour. He set an example which we may hope to see followed and improved upon. But unfortunately there was also a less successful side. He was a Bishop, an overseer of a flock of many ways of life and thought, a fellow-worker with them, sympathetic, laborious, warm-hearted. But he was also a Bishop of the Church of Christ, an institution with its own history, its great truths to keep and deliver, its characteristic differences from the world which it is sent to correct and to raise to higher levels than those of time and nature. There is no reason why this side of the Episcopal office should not be joined to that in which Bishop Frazer so signally excelled. But for this part of it he was not well qualified, and much in his performance of it must be thought of with regret. The great features of Christian truth had deeply impressed him; and to its lofty moral call he responded with conviction and earnestness. But an acquaintance with what he has to interpret and guard which may suffice for a layman is not enough for a Bishop; and knowledge, the knowledge belonging to his profession, the deeper and more varied knowledge which makes a man competent to speak as a theologian, Bishop Frazer did not possess. He rather disbelieved in it, and thought it useless, or, it might be, mischievous. He resented its intrusion into spheres where he could only see the need of the simplest and least abstruse language. But facts are not what we may wish them, but what they are; and questions, if they are asked, may have to be answered, with toil, it may be, and difficulty, like the questions, assuredly not always capable of easy and transparent statement, of mathematical or physical science; and unless Christianity is a dream and its history one vast delusion, such facts and such questions have made what we call theology. But to the Bishop's practical mind they were without interest, and he could not see how they could touch and influence living religion. And did not care to know about them; he was impatient, and even scornful, when stress was laid on them; he was intolerant when he thought they competed with the immediate realities of religion. And this want of knowledge and of respect for knowledge was a serious deficiency. It gave sometimes a tone of thoughtless flippancy to his otherwise earnest language. And as he was not averse to controversy, or, at any rate, found himself often involved in it, he was betrayed sometimes into assertions and contradictions of the most astounding inaccuracy, which seriously weakened his authority when he was called upon to accept the responsibility of exerting it.

Partly for this reason, partly from a certain vivacity of temper, he certainly showed himself, in spite of his popular qualities, less equal than many others of his brethren to the task of appeasing and assuaging religious strife. The difficulties in Manchester were not greater than in other dioceses; there was not anything peculiar in them; there was nothing but what a patient and generous arbiter, with due knowledge of the subject, might have kept from breaking out into perilous scandals. Unhappily he failed; and though he believed that he had only done his duty, his failure was a source of deep distress to himself and to others. But now that he has passed away, it is but bare justice to say that no one worked up more conscientiously to his own standard. He gave himself, when he was consecrated, ten or twelve years of work, and then he hoped for retirement. He has had fifteen, and has fallen at his post. And to the last, the qualities which gave his character such a charm in his earlier time had not disappeared. There seemed to be always something of the boy about him, in his simplicity, his confiding candour and frankness with his friends, his warm-hearted and kindly welcome, his mixture of humility with a sense of power. Those who can remember him in his younger days still see, in spite of all the storms and troubles of his later ones, the image of the undergraduate and the young bachelor, who years ago made a start of such brilliant promise, and who has fulfilled so much of it, if not all. These things at any rate lasted to the end--his high and exacting sense of public duty, and his unchanging affection for his old friends.

XXVI

NEWMAN'S "APOLOGIA"[30]

[30] _Apologia pro Vitâ Suâ_. By John Henry Newman, D.D. _Guardian_, 22nd June 1864.

We have not noticed before Dr. Newman's _Apologia_, which has been coming out lately in weekly numbers, because we wished, when we spoke of it, to speak of it as a whole. The special circumstances out of which it arose may have prescribed the mode of publication. It may have been thought more suitable, in point of form, to answer a pamphlet by a series of pamphlets rather than at once by a set octavo of several hundred pages. But the real subject which Dr. Newman has been led to handle is one which will continue to be of the deepest interest long after the controversy which suggested it is forgotten. The real subject is the part played in the great Church movement by him who was the leading mind in it; and it was unsatisfactory to speak of this till all was said, and we could look on the whole course described. Such a subject might have well excused a deliberate and leisurely volume to itself; perhaps in this way we should have gained, in the laying out and concentration of the narrative, and in what helps to bring it as a whole before our thoughts. But a man's account of himself is never so fresh and natural as when it is called out by the spur and pressure of an accidental and instant necessity, and is directed to a purpose and quickened by feelings which belong to immediate and passing circumstances. The traces of hurried work are of light account when they are the guarantees that a man is not sitting down to draw a picture of himself, but stating his case in sad and deep earnest out of the very fulness of his heart.

The aim of the book is to give a minute and open account of the steps and changes by which Dr. Newman passed from the English Church to the Roman. The history of a change of opinion has often been written from the most opposite points of view; but in one respect this book seems to stand alone. Let it be remembered what it is, the narrative and the justification of a great conversion; of a change involving an entire reversal of views, judgments, approvals, and condemnations; a change which, with all ordinary men, involves a reversal, at least as great, of their sympathies and aversions, of what they tolerate and speak kindly of. Let it be considered what changes of feeling most changes of religion compel and consecrate; how men, commonly and very naturally, look back on what they have left and think they have escaped from, with the aversion of a captive to his prison; how they usually exaggerate and make absolute their divergence from what they think has betrayed, fooled, and degraded them; how easily they are tempted to visit on it and on those who still cling to it their own mistakes and faults. Let it be remembered that there was here to be told not only the history of a change, but the history of a deep disappointment, of the failure of a great design, of the breakdown of hopes the most promising and the most absorbing; and this, not in the silence of a man's study, but in the fever and contention of a great struggle wrought up to the highest pitch of passion and fierceness, bringing with it on all sides and leaving behind it, when over, the deep sense of wrong. It is no history of a mere intellectual movement, or of a passage from strong belief to a weakened and impaired one, to uncertainty, or vagueness, or indifference; it is not the account of a change by a man who is half sorry for his change, and speaks less hostilely of what he has left because he feels less friendly towards what he has joined. There is no reserved thought to be discerned in the background of disappointment or a wish to go back again to where he once was. It is a book which describes how a man, zealous and impatient for truth, thought he had found it in one Church, then thought that his finding was a delusion, and sought for it and believed he had gained it in another. What it shows us is no serene readjustment of abstract doctrines, but the wreck and overturning of trust and conviction and the practical grounds of life, accompanied with everything to provoke, embitter, and exasperate. It need not be said that what Dr. Newman holds he is ready to carry out to the end, or that he can speak severely of men and systems.

Let all this be remembered, and also that there is an opposition between what he was and what he is, which is usually viewed as irreconcilable, and which, on the ordinary assumptions about it, is so; and we venture to say that there is not another instance to be quoted, of the history of a conversion, in which he who tells his conversion has so retained his self-possession, his temper, his mastery over his own real judgment and thoughts, his ancient and legitimate sympathies, his superiority to the natural and inevitable temptations of so altered a position; which is so generous to what he feels to be strong and good in what he has nevertheless abandoned, so fearless about letting his whole case come out, so careless about putting himself in the right in detail; which is so calm, and kindly, and measured, with such a quiet effortless freedom from the stings of old conflicts, which bears so few traces of that bitterness and antipathy which generally--and we need hardly wonder at it--follows the decisive breaking with that on which a man's heart was stayed, and for which he would once have died.

There is another thing to be said, and we venture to say it out plainly, because Dr. Newman himself has shown that he knows quite well what he has been doing. While he has written what will command the sympathy and the reverence of every one, however irreconcilably opposed to him, to whom a great and noble aim and the trials of a desperate and self-sacrificing struggle to compass it are objects of admiration and honour, it is undeniable that ill-nature or vindictiveness or stupidity will find ample materials of his own providing to turn against him. Those who know Dr. Newman's powers and are acquainted with his career, and know to what it led him, and yet persist in the charge of insincerity and dishonesty against one who probably has made the greatest sacrifice of our generation to his convictions of truth, will be able to pick up from his own narrative much that they would not otherwise have known, to confirm and point the old familiar views cherished by dislike or narrowness. This is inevitable when a man takes the resolution of laying himself open so unreservedly, and with so little care as to what his readers think of what he tells them, so that they will be persuaded that he was ever, even from his boyhood, deeply conscious of the part which he was performing in the sight of his Maker. Those who smile at the belief of a deep and religious mind in the mysterious interventions and indications of Providence in the guidance of human life, will open their eyes at the feeling which leads him to tell the story of his earliest recollections of Roman Catholic peculiarities, and of the cross imprinted on his exercise-book. Those who think that everything about religion and their own view of religion is such plain sailing, so palpable and manifest, that all who are not fools or knaves must be of their own opinion, will find plenty to wonder at in the confessions of awful perplexity which equally before and after his change Dr. Newman makes. Those who have never doubted, who can no more imagine the practical difficulties accompanying a great change of belief than they can imagine a change of belief itself, will meet with much that to them will seem beyond pardon, in the actual events of a change, involving such issues and such interests, made so deliberately and cautiously, with such hesitation and reluctance, and in so long a time; they will be able to point to many moments in it when it will be easy to say that more or less ought to have been said, more or less ought to have been done. Much more will those who are on the side of doubt, who acquiesce in, or who desire the overthrow of existing hopes and beliefs, rejoice in such a frank avowal of the difficulties of religion and the perplexities of so earnest a believer, and make much of their having driven such a man to an alternative so obnoxious and so monstrous to most Englishmen. It is a book full of minor premisses, to which many opposite majors will be fitted. But whatever may be thought of many details, the effect and lesson of the whole will not be lost on minds of any generosity, on whatever side they may be; they will be touched with the confiding nobleness which has kept back nothing, which has stated its case with its weak points and its strong, and with full consciousness of what was weak as well as of what was strong, which has surrendered its whole course of conduct, just as it has been, to be scrutinised, canvassed, and judged. What we carry away from following such a history is something far higher and more solemn than any controversial inferences; and it seems almost like a desecration to make, as we say, capital out of it, to strengthen mere argument, to confirm a theory, or to damage an opponent.

The truth, in fact, is, that the interest is personal much more than controversial. Those who read it as a whole, and try to grasp the effect of all its portions compared together and gathered into one, will, it seems to us, find it hard to bend into a decisive triumph for any of the great antagonist systems which appear in collision. There can be no doubt of the perfect conviction with which Dr. Newman has taken his side for good. But while he states the effect of arguments on his own mind, he leaves the arguments in themselves as they were, and touches on them, not for the sake of what they are worth, but to explain the movements and events of his own course. Not from any studied impartiality, which is foreign to his character, but from his strong and keen sense of what is real and his determined efforts to bring it out, he avoids the temptation--as it seems to us, who still believe that he was more right once than he is now--to do injustice to his former self and his former position. At any rate, the arguments to be drawn from this narrative, for or against England, or for or against Rome, seem to us very evenly balanced. Of course, such a history has its moral. But the moral is not the ordinary vulgar one of the history of a religious change. It is not the supplement or disguise of a polemical argument. It is the deep want and necessity in our age of the Church, even to the most intensely religious and devoted minds, of a sound and secure intellectual basis for the faith which they value more than life and all things. We hope that we are strong enough to afford to judge fairly of such a spectacle, and to lay to heart its warnings, even though the particular results seem to go against what we think most right. It is a mortification and a trial to the English Church to have seen her finest mind carried away and lost to her, but it is a mortification which more confident and peremptory systems than hers have had to undergo; the parting was not without its compensations if only that it brought home so keenly to many the awfulness and the seriousness of truth; and surely never did any man break so utterly with a Church, who left so many sympathies behind him and took so many with him, who continued to feel so kindly and with such large-hearted justice to those from whom his changed position separated him in this world for ever.

The _Apologia_ is the history of a great battle against Liberalism, understanding by Liberalism the tendencies of modern thought to destroy the basis of revealed religion, and ultimately of all that can be called religion at all. The question which he professedly addresses himself to set at rest, that of his honesty, is comparatively of slight concern to those who knew him, except so far that they must be interested that others, who did not know him, should not be led to do a revolting injustice. The real interest is to see how one who felt so keenly the claims both of what is new and what is old, who, with such deep and unusual love and trust for antiquity, took in with quick sympathy, and in its most subtle and most redoubtable shapes, the intellectual movement of modern times, could continue to feel the force of both, and how he would attempt to harmonise them. Two things are prominent in the whole history. One is the fact of religion, early and deeply implanted in the writer's mind, absorbing and governing it without rival throughout. He speaks of an "inward conversion" at the age of fifteen, "of which I was conscious, and of which I am still more certain than that I have hands and feet." It was the religion of dogma and of a definite creed which made him "rest in the thought of two, and two only, supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator"--which completed itself with the idea of a visible Church and its sacramental system. Religion, in this aspect of it, runs unchanged from end to end of the scene of change:--

I have changed in many things; in this I have not. From the age of fifteen dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion; I know no other religion. I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery. As well can there be filial love without the fact of a father, as devotion without the fact of a Supreme Being. What I held in 1816 I held in 1833, and I hold in 1864. Please God I shall hold it to the end. Even when I was under Dr. Whately's influence I had no temptation to be less zealous for the dogmas of the faith.

The other thing is the haunting necessity, in an age of thought and innovation, of a philosophy of religion, equally deep, equally comprehensive and thorough, with the invading powers which it was wanted to counteract; a philosophy, not on paper or in theory, but answering to and vouched for by the facts of real life. In the English Church he found, we think that we may venture to say, the religion which to him was life, but not the philosophy which he wanted. The _Apologia_ is the narrative of his search for it. Two strongly marked lines of thought are traceable all through, one modern in its scope and sphere, the other ancient. The leading subject of his modern thought is the contest with liberal unbelief; contrasted with this was his strong interest in Christian antiquity, his deep attachment to the creed, the history, and the moral temper of the early Church. The one line of thought made him, and even now makes him, sympathise with Anglicanism, which is in the same boat with him, holds the same principle of the unity and continuity of revealed truth, and is doing the same work, though, as he came to think in the end, feebly and hopelessly. The other, more and more, carried him away from Anglicanism; and the contrast and opposition between it and the ancient Church, in organisation, in usage, and in that general tone of feeling which quickens and gives significance and expression to forms, overpowered more and more the sense of affinity, derived from the identity of creeds and sacraments and leading points of Church polity, and from the success with which the best and greatest Anglican writers had appropriated and assimilated the theology of the Fathers. But though he urges the force of ecclesiastical precedents in a startling way, as in the account which he gives of the effect of the history of the Monophysites on his view of the tenableness of the Anglican theory, absolutely putting out of consideration the enormous difference of circumstances between the cases which are compared, and giving the instance in question a force and importance which seem to be in singular contrast with the general breadth and largeness of his reasoning, it was not the halting of an ecclesiastical theory which dissatisfied him with the English Church.