Part 8
1.
The first book that Newman wrote, after becoming a Catholic, was a novel. Loss and Gain (1848) tells the story of the education of a young man, Charles Reding, who, after experiencing the ‘religious phenomenon’ of Oxford in the 1840s, converts to Catholicism: the conversion is, at once, a result, a fulfilment of that education, and a repudiation of that education, or, at least, a repudiation of certain aspects of it. Of his own conversion, Newman would remark ‘Oxford made us Catholics’. In Loss and Gain, Newman shows a ‘course of thought and state of mind’ which ‘issues in [the] conviction’ of the ‘Divine origin’ of the ‘Catholic religion’, and that ‘course of thought’ arises from the experience of Oxford life – from encounters with the advocates of various religious ‘views’, and from attempts to make sense of those encounters.1 Reding is moved to become a Catholic by his experience of Oxford – not by any experiences of Catholic institutions. Yet his response to his experience involves a certain ‘mystery’: what Reding makes of his experiences is not simply determined by those experiences; there is a freedom in the way he makes sense of his experiences, and in that freedom, there is a ‘mystery’.
In the ‘Advertisement’ to the sixth edition of Loss and Gain, Newman remarked that he wrote the novel in response to a ‘tale directed against the Oxford converts to the Catholic Faith’ – From Oxford to Rome, by Elizabeth Harris (1847) – which was ‘as wantonly and preposterously fanciful, as [it was] injurious to those whose motives and actions it professed to represent’, a tale to which he felt the suitable response was ‘the publication of a second tale; drawn up with a stricter regard to truth and probability, and with at least some personal knowledge of Oxford, and some perception of the various aspects of the religious phenomenon, which the work in question handled so rudely and so unskilfully’, ‘dissipating the fog of pomposity and solemn pretence, which its writer had thrown around the personages introduced into it, by showing, as in a specimen, that those who were smitten with love of the Catholic Church, were nevertheless as able to write common-sense prose as other men’.2 Newman was concerned, that is, with the meaning accorded to the ‘religious phenomenon’ at Oxford; he would show that a ‘love of the Catholic Church’ could be quite consistent with ‘common sense’ (a ‘common sense’ swift to detect and to reject ‘pomposity and solemn pretence’). Newman would, moreover, show that one might be converted to Catholicism by a ‘course of thought’ involving the opinions that he had himself professed over the previous decade and a half: if those opinions could be shown to conduce to a conversion, then those opinions could be taken to account for such a conversion – one need not look elsewhere, for other influences, to account for it. In his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), Newman mentions a ‘general feeling’, a ‘prepossession’ against him, after his conversion, that he had been, when an Anglican, a secret ‘Romanist’, who had concealed his ‘Romanist’ designs – a ‘general feeling that I was for years where I had no right to be; that I was a “Romanist” in Protestant livery and service; that I was doing the work of a hostile Church in the bosom of the English Establishment, and knew it, or ought to have known it’.3 His ‘apparent indecision’ on certain matters, when ‘in Protestant livery’, was itself taken to be a mark of dishonesty.
If [the members of the movement] were inspired by Roman theologians, (and this was taken for granted,) why did they not speak out at once? Why did they keep the world in such suspense and anxiety as to what was coming next, and what was to be the upshot of the whole? Why this reticence, and half-speaking, and apparent indecision? It was plain that the plan of operations had been carefully mapped out from the first, and that these men were cautiously advancing towards its accomplishment, as far as was safe at the moment.4
If he ‘were inspired by Roman theologians’, and had a ‘plan of operations’, then his public professions – his various arguments, in defence of the English Church – were a ‘pretence’, a way of inveigling the unwary into accepting ‘Roman’ ideas. (This view of the writings of Newman was, of course, likely to counter any influence they might have, and Newman, on his conversion, hoped that his writings might continue to exert an influence on Anglicans.) The difference between the claim that he was a ‘Romanist’ and ‘knew it’, and the claim that he was a Romanist and ‘ought to have known it’, concerns whether he was dishonest, or whether he merely lacked ‘common sense’. In his Apologia, he aims to show that he was not dishonest (he observes at one point that ‘I am not setting myself up as a pattern of good sense or of any thing else: I am but vindicating myself from the charge of dishonesty’).5 In Loss and Gain, he would show, in Reding, how one, with no particular attachment to a religious ‘party’, exposed to the ‘religious phenomenon’ of Oxford, encountering ideas that were ‘in the air’, reflecting with ‘common sense’ (rather than any particular theological expertise) on those ideas, might be moved to convert to Catholicism. He would account, moreover, for how one, so moved, might seem somewhat ‘close’, or less than frank (rousing others to suspect concealed, discreditable motives): the motives of one, so moved, might be incomprehensible to others, should they be disposed to ‘view’ things differently; and, after all, there is a certain ‘mystery’ about such a conversion – the mystery of how grace moves the will.
The ‘mystery’ of the soul – its ‘secret’, as something ‘out of sight’ to others, as something apparent only to the ‘sight’ of God – is reflected on at the very beginning of Loss and Gain.
Charles Reding was the only son of a clergyman, who was in possession of a valuable benefice in a midland county. His father intended him for orders and sent him at a proper age to a public school. H e had long revolved in his mind the respective advantages and disadvantages of public and private education, and had decided in favour of the former. ‘Seclusion,’ he said, ‘is no security for virtue. There is no telling what is in a boy’s heart; he may look as open and happy as usual, and be as kind and attentive, when there is a great deal wrong going on within. The heart is a secret with its Maker; no one on earth can hope to get at it or to touch it. I have a cure of souls; what do I really know of my parishioners? Nothing; their hearts are sealed books to me. And this dear boy, he comes close to me; he throws his arms round me, but his soul is as much out of my sight as if he were at the antipodes. I am not accusing him of reserve, dear fellow; his very love and reverence for me keep him in a sort of charmed solitude. I cannot expect to get at the bottom of him.
“Each in his hidden sphere of bliss or woe,
Our hermit spirits dwell.”
It is our lot here below. No one on earth can know Charles’s secret thoughts. Did I guard him here at home ever so well, yet, in due time, it would be found that a serpent had crept into the heart of his innocence. Boys do not fully know what is good and what is evil; they do wrong things at first almost innocently. Novelty hides vice from them; there is no one to warn them or give them rules; and they become slaves of sin, while they are learning what sin is. They go to the university, and suddenly plunge into excesses, the greater in proportion to their inexperience. And, besides all this, I am not equal to the task of forming so active and inquisitive a mind as his. He already asks questions which I know not how to answer. So he shall go to a public school. There he will get discipline at least, even if he has more of trial; at least he will gain habits of self-command, manliness, and circumspection; he will learn to use his eyes, and will find materials to use them upon; and thus will be gradually trained for the liberty which, any how, he must have when he goes to college.’6
Loss and Gain shows the education of Charles Reding, as he ‘learn[s] to use his eyes’ on the ‘religious phenomenon’ of Oxford (with Reding ‘reading’, making sense of, his experiences). It consists, for the most part, of portrayals, not of ‘Charles’s secret thoughts’, but of his encounters with others, his conversations with others (together with some of his reflections on those encounters and conversations). Consisting for the most part of scenes of dialogue, debate, and conversation, it looks at how such conversation affects those who take part in it, at how it relates to the formation of those who take part in it: it is a bildungsroman, in being concerned, primarily, with the education, the formation, of one central character – Reding himself (though Reding is not the only character to develop – his development is counterposed with that of some of his friends). If it is concerned, for the most part, with conversation, the ‘pursuit of truth’, the life of the intellect, it intimates, nevertheless, the presence of that, in the soul, or ‘heart’, which is other than, more primary than, the life of the intellect. It intimates the presence of that, within the ‘heart’ of Reding, which is other than, more important than, that part of him that is engaged in conversations, arguments, and the like. At one point, it is observed that the ‘religious views’ of Reding were ‘progressing, unknown to himself’.
Here was Charles with his thoughts turned away from religious controversy for two years, yet with his religious views progressing, unknown to himself, the whole time. It could not have been otherwise, if he was to live a religious life at all. If he was to worship and obey his Creator, intellectual acts, conclusions, and judgments must accompany that worship and obedience. He might not realise his own belief till questions had been put to him; but then a single discussion with a friend … would bring out what he really did hold to his own apprehension.7
Scarcely anything of the ‘worship, and obedience’ of Reding, the spiritual life of Reding, up to the time of his conversion, is portrayed in Loss and Gain. Newman suggests that this ‘worship’ is something other than the ‘conclusions, and judgments’ of the intellect and yet that such ‘conclusions, and judgements, must accompany’ it.
When the father of Charles Reding observes that ‘his soul is as much out of my sight, as if he were at the antipodes’, quoting from The Christian Year – ‘Each in his hidden sphere or bliss or woe / Our hermit spirits dwell’ – he expresses a view with which Newman was in agreement. In a sermon on ‘The Immortality of the Soul’, preached in 1833, Newman maintains that ‘to feel that we have souls, is to feel our separation from things visible’, so that ‘we begin, by degrees, to perceive that there are but two beings in the whole universe, our own soul, and the God who made it’.8
Our friends and relations, whom we are right in loving, these, too, after all, are nothing to us here. They cannot really help or profit us; we see them, and they act upon us, only (as it were) at a distance, through the medium of sense; they cannot get at our souls; they cannot enter into our thoughts, or really be companions to us. In the next world it will, through God’s mercy, be otherwise; but here we enjoy, not their presence, but the anticipation of what one day shall be; so that, after all, they vanish before the clear vision we have, first, of our own existence, next of the presence of the great God in us, and over us, as our Governor and Judge, who dwells in us by our conscience, which is His representative.9
Newman would have agreed with the father of Reding, as to how ‘the heart is a secret with its Maker’. He would, equally, have sympathized with the reflection, ‘What do I really know of my parishioners? Nothing; their hearts are sealed books to me.’ For Newman, and for others, this was a matter for complaint – and it was felt to be owing, in part, to a lack of ecclesiastical ‘discipline’. The father of Reding, however, would seem to regard it as something inevitable. How much might his views, as ‘a clergyman … in possession of a valuable benefice’, be connected to some of the defects of that ecclesiastical discipline? His reflections on the education of Charles show prudence, but, then, do they involve too much of an acquiescence in the way things are ‘here below’? He remarks ‘Did I guard him here at home ever so well, yet, in due time, it would be found that a serpent had crep t into the heart of his innocence. Boys do not fully know what is good and what is evil; they do wrong things at first almost innocently. Novelty hides vice from them; there is no one to warn them or give them rules.’10 Might he not, himself, be one who could ‘warn’ his son, or ‘give … rules’ to him? Then again, he is recognizing that he cannot be always there to ‘warn’ or ‘give … rules’ to his son, in the various situations which his son will encounter in life – situations in which, for the inexperienced, ‘novelty hides vice’; indeed, his son could not acquire any ‘self-command’, any independence, without making sense of such situations for himself: one must have some liberty, if one is to be ‘trained for … liberty’. What is more, the experience of Reding, at his public school, is, with respect to his religious formation, beneficial: he ‘had the good fortune to fall into the hands of an excellent tutor, who, while he instructed him in the old Church-of-England principles of Mant and Doyley, gave his mind a religious impression, which secured him against the allurements of bad company, whether at the school itself, or afterwards at Oxford’.11 Should, though, the forming of such a ‘religious impression’ be left to ‘fortune’? In a sermon preached in 1856, at the University Church in Dublin, on ‘Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training’, Newman observes that though, in the present state of things, intellect and conscience are cultivated separately, forming separate ‘kingdoms’ within the soul, he would have teachers, at the University, exercise a pastoral ‘office’.
Is it not one part of our especial office to receive those from the hands of father and mother, whom father and mother can keep no longer? Thus, while professing all sciences, and speaking by the mouths of philosophers and sages, a University delights in the well-known appellation of “Alma Mater” … able to confute and put right those who would set knowledge against itself, and would make truth contradict truth, and would persuade the world that, to be religious, you must be ignorant, and to be intellectual, you must be unbelieving.12
‘In the case of the young, whose education lasts a few years, where the intellect is, there is the influence. Their literary, their scientific teachers, really have the forming of them … . Youths need a masculine religion, if it is to carry captive their restless imaginations, and their wild intellects, as well as to touch their susceptible hearts.’13 From as early as the 1820s, Newman had entertained the aspiration to combine, in the ‘office’ of university teachers, a responsibility for forming the ‘intellect’ with a responsibility for forming the conscience; as a tutor at Oriel, he had tried to establish a new approach to tutoring, developing it into more of a ‘pastoral’ office, but his proposed reforms had not been accepted by the Master of Oriel. While he might well have agreed with the father of Reding, as to the need for the ‘active and inquisitive’ minds of the young to be formed, not by their parents, but those best fitted to ‘answer’ their questions, he might have considered the father of Reding to be aspiring for too little, in hoping that his son might acquire merely ‘habits of self-command, manliness, and circumspection’. Reding himself, expresses a sense that he requires – and is not getting – ‘practical direction’ in religious matters. Talking with a friend, about the advice given him by a tutor, to avoid extremes in all things, to aim always at a ‘mean’, he remarks, ‘I … got nothing definite from him.’
He did not say, ‘This is true, that is false’; but ‘Be true, be true, be good, be good, don’t go too far, keep in the mean, have your eyes about you, eschew parties, follow our divines, all of them’; – all which was but putting salt on the bird’s tail. I want some practical direction, not abstract truths … . I don’t understand having duties put on me which are too much for me. I don’t understand, I dislike, having a will of my own, when I have not the means to use it justly. In such a case, to tell me to act of myself, is like Pharaoh setting the Israelites to make bricks without straw. Setting me to inquire, to judge, to decide, forsooth! it’s absurd; who has taught me?14
Reding feels he is too much left to himself – his ‘spirit’ is, in a sense, made a ‘hermit’, and he is asked ‘to act of [him]self’. When, later, he feels sympathy for a friend, Willis, who has become a Catholic, he feels that he is taken out of his isolation – he is ‘no longer alone in the world’. He walks home at night, alongside Willis, and when it is time for them to take their separate ways, Willis bids him farewell, declaring, ‘“who knows when I may see you next, and where? may it be in the courts of the true Jerusalem, the Queen of Saints, the Holy Roman Church, the Mother of us all!” He drew Charles to him and kissed his cheek, and was gone before Charles had time to say a word.’15
Yet Charles could not have spoken had he had ever so much opportunity. He set off at a brisk pace, cutting down with his stick the twigs and brambles which the pale twilight discovered in his path. It seemed as if the kiss of his friend had conveyed into his own soul the enthusiasm which his words had betokened. He felt himself possessed, he knew not how, by a high superhuman power, which seemed able to push through mountains, and to walk the sea. With winter around him, he felt within like the springtide, when all is new and bright. He perceived that he had found, what indeed he had never sought, because he had never known what it was, but what he had ever wanted – a soul sympathetic with his own. He felt he was no longer alone in the world, though he was losing that true congenial mind the very moment he had found him. Was this, he asked himself, the communion of Saints?16
What might Reding mean by ‘the communion of Saints’? In a sermon preached in 1837 on ‘The Communion of Saints’, Newman maintains that this ‘communion’ consists in the presence of Christ in the members of the Church – so that they are ‘one and all the births and manifestations of one and the same unseen spiritual principle or power, “living stones,” internally connected, as branches from a tree, not as the parts of a heap’, such that the ‘divine and adorable Form [of Christ], which the Apostles saw and handled, after ascending into heaven became a principle of life, a secret origin of existence to all who believe, through the gracious ministration of the Holy Ghost’.17 The Church is the ‘body’ of Christ, animated by the life of Christ. ‘From the day of Pentecost to this hour there has been in the Church but One Holy One, the King of kings, and Lord of lords Himself, who is in all believers, and through whom they are what they are; their separate persons being but as separate developments, vessels, instruments, and works of Him who is invisible.’18 The ‘Ministry and Sacraments, the bodily presence of Bishop and people, are given us as keys and spells, by which we bring ourselves into the presence of the great company of Saints; they are as much as this, but they are no more; they are not identical with that company’.19 In a sermon preached later in the same year, on ‘The Church a Home for the Lonely’, Newman characterizes the Church as ‘a secret home, for faith and love to enjoy, wherever found, in spite of the world around us’.20 ‘Though thou art in a body of flesh, a member of this world, thou hast but to kneel down reverently in prayer, and thou art at once in the society of Saints and Angels.’21 In a sermon preached a few years earlier, in 1834, on ‘The Visible Church an Encouragement to Faith’, Newman observes that those who ‘surrender [their] hearts to Christ and obey God’ are ‘the few’, that ‘they are sprinkled up and down the world … [and] are separated the one from the other’, and that ‘they do not even know each other’, or themselves (‘they do not dare take to themselves the future titles of God’s elect, though they be really reserved for them’), or, ‘even when they know each other (as far as man can know man), still … they may not form an exclusive communion together’.22 The ‘elect’ are ‘scattered about amid the leaves of that Mystical Vine which is seen, and receive their nurture from its trunk and branches’.
They live on its Sacraments and its Ministry; they gain light and salvation from its rites and ordinances; they communicate with each other through it; they obey its rulers; they walk together with its members; they do not dare to judge of this man or that man, on their right hand or their left, whether or not he is absolutely of the number of those who shall be saved; they accept all as their brethren in Christ, as partakers of the same general promises.23
Their communion with one another is, then, imperfect; and they are, for the most part, solitary in the world. Do they get any ‘consolation’ from ‘the Church which they see’ – ‘some sensible stay, a vision of Heaven, of peace amid purity, antagonist to the world that now is’?24 Newman maintains that ‘the Church which they see’, despite the ‘suffocation’ of a ‘worldly atmosphere’, nevertheless manifests the ‘light’ of the ‘Spirit’ – ‘viewed at a little distance, its whole surface will be illuminated, though the light really streams from apertures which might be numbered’.25 There is, moreover, consolation in ‘the records of those who lived and died by faith in the old time’, the Scriptures: faith ‘recounts the list of faithful servants of God … and no longer feels sad as if it were alone … [and] by degrees [the faithful Christian] learns to have them as familiar images before his mind, to unite his cause with theirs’.26 ‘What a world of sympathy and comfort is thus opened to us in the Communion of Saints! … Are we young, and in temptation or trial? we cannot be in worse circumstances than Joseph. Are we in sickness? Job will surpass us in sufferings as in patience.’ Last of all, ‘What is [the] Church but a pledge and proof of God’s never-dying love and power from age to age? He set it up in mercy to mankind, and its presence among us is a proof that in spite of our sins He has not yet forsaken us … . He said, He would be with His Church: He has continued it alive to this day. He has continued the line of His Apostles onwards through every age and all troubles and perils of the world.’27 To participate in the liturgy, is to ‘elicit and realize the invisible’ – the ‘very disposition of the [church] building, the subdued light, the aisles, the Altar, with its pious adornments, are figures of things unseen, and stimulate our fainting faith’.28 These things are, however, compensations, for a life that is, in many respects, solitary. Newman felt that the ‘elect’ might have ‘glimpses’ of one another, in this life, but these ‘glimpses’ would be brief, uncertain. ‘God alone sees the heart; now an d then, as they walk their way, they see glimpses of God’s work in others; they take hold of them awhile in the dark, but soon lose them; they hear their voices, but cannot find them … . Among those with whom their lot is cast, whom they see continually, one or two, perhaps, are given them to rejoice in.’29
When Reding feels that, in his friendship with his Catholic friend, Willis, he is encountering a ‘soul sympathetic with his own’, and wonders whether he is experiencing something of the ‘communion of Saints’, he then reflects – ‘how could it be, when he was in one communion and Willis in another?’30 Prior to his asking this question, however, it has been observed, of his ‘progress’ toward Catholicism, that ‘he could not escape the destiny of being one of the elect of God’: ‘What a mystery is the soul of man! Here was Charles, busy with Aristotle and Euripides, Thucydides and Lucretius, yet all the while growing towards the Church … . He could not escape the destiny of being one of the elect of God … . He could not ultimately escape his destiny of becoming a Catholic.’31 In the phrasing, here, the ‘destiny of being one of the elect of God’ is paralleled with the ‘destiny of becoming a Catholic’. The sense that is being accorded to the term ‘elect’, here, is perhaps somewhat ambiguous: in one way of taking the term, the ‘elect’ are those who are in the Church Militant, those who, in being baptized, have been ‘called out’, chosen by God (as early as 1832, Newman could use the term ‘elect’ in this sense – remarking, in a sermon on ‘Divine Decrees’, that, in the Christian covenant, God is presented as ‘predestining to glory, characters not persons, pledging the gift of perseverance not to individuals, but to a body of which the separate members might change’, so that ‘Christian Election is … conditional’ and ‘souls chosen for eternal life might fall away’);32 in another way of taking the term, the ‘elect’ are those in the Church Triumphant, who do not ‘fall away’ (and Newman could use the term in this sense – claiming, in a sermon preached in 1836, on ‘The Visible Church for the sake of the Elect’, that in ‘Christian states … human nature remains what it was, though it has been baptized’, that an ‘an ordinary religious man’ is usually one who ‘seldom thinks of the Day of Judgment, seldom thinks of sins past, says few prayers, cares little for the Church, has no zeal for God’s truth, spends his money on himself’ and ‘such is not one of God’s elect’, for ‘the latter is more than just, temperate, and kind; he has a devoted love of God, high faith, holy hope, ever-flowing charity, a noble self-command, a strict conscientiousness, humility never absent, gentleness in speech, simplicity, modesty, and unaffectedness, an unconsciousness of what his endowments are, and what they make him in God’s sight’ – the elect, in this sense, consisting of ‘a certain number of souls in the world, known to God, unknown to us, who will obey the Truth when offered to them, whatever be the mysterious reason that they do and others do not’.)33 If Newman is using the term ‘elect’ to mean, in effect, the members of the Church Militant, then the term ‘elect’ has, here, the same reference as ‘Catholic’ – the parallelism of the ‘destiny of being one of the elect’ and the ‘destiny of becoming a Catholic’ accords with an equivalence in reference: to be ‘elect’, in this sense, is to be a Catholic. If Newman is using the term ‘elect’ to mean, in effect, the saints, then he could be suggesting that, as Reding is one of the ‘elect’, so he becomes a Catholic: he is one of those ‘who will obey the Truth when offered’, so he accepts the Truth, ‘offered’ by the Church; ‘becoming a Catholic’, the ordinary means of salvation, is instrumental to his becoming a saint, and it is his ‘destiny’ to become a saint. (Newman did not maintain that only members of the Catholic Church received grace: in his lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching (1850), he observes that ‘grace is given for the merits of Christ all over the earth; there is no corner, even of Paganism, where it is not present, present in each heart of man in real sufficiency for his ultimate salvation’, but he insists, equally, that ‘the grace given them is intended ultimately to bring them into the Church, and if it is not tending to do so, it will not ultimately profit them’.)34 In the parallelism of ‘elect’ and ‘Catholic’, then, Newman associates (without quite identifying) the visible life of the Church, with the invisible life of the Spirit. The scene in which Willis parts from Reding, in the ‘pale twilight’, seems very much a symbol of the kind of insight which Newman takes the ‘elect’ to have into one another – ‘They see glimpses of God’s work in others; they take hold of them awhile in the dark, but soon lose them; they hear their voices, but cannot find them.’ The scene in which Reding senses, in Willis, a ‘soul sympathetic to his own’, is prefigured by a scene, which takes place, again, when Reding is walking home at night (after an evening party in which he and his friends have, among other things, been discussing Willis, and the likelihood of his returning to the Anglican Church) in which Reding encounters a ‘penitent’, before ‘a tall wooden Cross, which, in better days, had been a religious emblem, but had served in latter times to mark the boundary between two contiguous parishes’.
It was bright moonlight; and … he bounded over the stile at the side of the road, and was at once buried in the shade of the copse along which his path lay. Soon he came in sight of a tall wooden Cross, which, in better days, had been a religious emblem, but had served in latter times to mark the boundary between two contiguous parishes. The moon was behind him, and the sacred symbol rose awfully in the pale sky, overhanging a pool, which was still venerated in the neighborhood for its reported miraculous virtue. Charles, to his surprise, saw distinctly a man kneeling on the little mound out of which the Cross grew; nay, heard him, for his shoulders were bare, and he was using the discipline upon them, while he repeated what appeared to be some form of devotion. Charles stopped, unwilling to interrupt, yet not knowing h ow to pass; but the stranger had caught the sound of feet, and in a few seconds vanished from his view. He was overcome with a sudden emotion, which he could not control. ‘O happy times,’ he cried, ‘when faith was one! O blessed penitent, whoever you are, who know what to believe, and how to gain pardon, and can begin where others end! Here am I, in my twenty-third year, uncertain about everything, because I have nothing to trust.’ He drew near to the Cross, took off his hat, knelt down and kissed the wood, and prayed awhile that whatever might be the consequences, whatever the trial, whatever the loss, he might have grace to follow whithersoever God should call him. He then rose and turned to the cold well; he took some water in his palm and drank it. He felt as if he could have prayed to the Saint who owned that pool – St. Thomas the Martyr, he believed – to plead for him, and to aid him in his search after the true faith; but something whispered, ‘It is wrong’; and he checked the wish. So, regaining his hat, he passed away, and pursued his homeward path at a brisk pace.35
When Reding arrives home, he finds an ‘anonymous paper’ has been left for him, consisting of a series of questions, mostly about the nature of the Church – beginning with ‘What is meant by the One Church, of which the Creed speaks?’ Wondering who might have left it for him, ‘his mind glanced to the person whom he had seen under the Cross; perhaps it glanced further’.36 On looking it over, he reflects, ‘it’s well written – better than Willis could write; it’s not Willis’s. There’s something about that Willis I don’t understand.’37 Reding decides that the ‘paper’ was not left by Willis – it is ‘better than Willis could write’ – but then he has not seen Willis for some time; perhaps Willis, since Reding saw him last, has acquired greater wisdom, greater insight. If one takes it that it is Willis who Reding saw ‘under the Cross’, and Willis who left the ‘paper’, then the relationship of Reding to Willis, at this moment, is analogous to the relationship which, according to Newman, the elect have to one another – ‘They take hold of them awhile in the dark, but soon lose them; they hear their voices, but cannot find them.’
At the close of Loss and Gain, Reding and Willis meet once again. Reding has ‘been admitted into the communion of the Catholic Church about an hour since’, at a Passionist convent; Willis has become a Passionist priest, taking the religious name Aloysius.
A good God overrules all things [said Father Aloysius]. But I must away. Do you recollect my last words when we parted in Devonshire? I have thought of them often since; they were too true then. I said, ‘Our ways divide’. They are different still, yet they are the same. Whether we shall meet again here below, who knows? but there will be a meeting ere long before the Throne of God, and under the shadow of His Blessed Mother and all Saints. ‘Deus manifeste veniet, Deus noster, et non silebit.’Reding took Father Aloysius’s hand and kissed it; as he sank on his knees the young priest made the sign of blessing over him. Then he vanished through the door of the sacristy; and the new convert sought his temporary cell, so happy in the Present, that he had no thoughts either for the Past or the Future.38
Reding and Willis, then, will not experience friendship, companionship, in their life in the Church. Becoming a Catholic will not mean, for Reding, experiencing the companionship of a ‘mind congenial’ to his own: the invisible ‘communion’ will not become fully visible, will not be manifest in a visible form. Willis, quoting from Psalm 49, anticipates a time when ‘God shall come manifestly: our God shall come, and shall not keep silence’. The overcoming of solitude, isolation, is associated with ‘God coming manifestly’.
The scene in which Reding encounters the ‘penitent’ by the Cross, and the scene in which, after the ‘kiss of his friend’, Willis, Reding experiences what seems a ‘high superhuman power’ – these scenes differ, markedly, in style, in mood, from the rest of Loss and Gain. They do not entirely depart from realism; but the scenes are more symbolic than they are realistic – the ‘sacred symbol’ of ‘the moon’ casts its light, turning all that happens into a ‘symbol’. They are scenes, moreover, in which Reding is induced to recognize his own sympathies – his inclination toward ‘Rome’ (rather than merely his uncertainty, and his dissatisfaction with his present circumstances). His latent affinity to Catholicism – to that which, in the world of Oxford, is suppressed – emerges; an instinct of his ‘heart’ becomes apparent. There is a suggestion, moreover, that it is in Catholicism, and only there, that certain instincts of the ‘heart’, of the ‘hermit spirit’, are properly recognized, and expressed: there, that something of the inmost life of the ‘soul’ is expressed, and satisfied. In the year after being received into the Catholic Church, reviewing a new volume of poetry by Keble, Lyra Innocentium, Newman observes that, in The Christian Year, Keble ‘did that for the Church of England which none but a poet could do: he made it poetical’. Newman then claims that ‘poetry is the refuge of those who have not the Catholic Church to flee to and repose upon, for the Church herself is the most sacred and august of poets’.
What is the Catholic Church, viewed in her human aspect, but a discipline of the affections and passions? What are her ordinances and practices but the regulated expression of keen, or deep, or turbid feeling, and thus a ‘cleansing’, as Aristotle would word it, of the sick soul? She is the poet of her children; full of music to soothe the sad and control the wayward, – wonderful in story for the imagination of the romantic; rich in symbol and imagery, so that gentle and delicate feelings, which will not bear words, may in silence intimate their presence or commune with themselves. Her very being is poetry; every psalm, every petition, every collect, every versicle, the cross, the mitre, the thurible, is a fulfilment of some dream of childhood, or aspiration of youth.39
Certain instincts, or feelings, ‘which will not bear words’, present in ‘dream[s] of childhood, or aspiration[s] of youth’, have their fulfilment in the life, and the worship, of the Catholic Church. Something of the inmost lif e of the ‘heart’, ‘which will not bear words’, has, there, its proper expression. Newman maintained, equally, that it is in Catholicism, above all, that the inmost life of the ‘heart’, the life of the soul, is properly recognized. In his lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching (1850), Newman attests to an insight, about the Church, ‘which has been forced on me, as a matter of fact and experience, most powerfully ever since I was a Catholic, as it must be forced on every one who is in the communion of the Church’ – the insight that the Church ‘contemplates, not the whole, but the parts; not a nation, but the men who form it; not society in the first place, but in the second place, and in the first place individuals; it looks beyond the outward act, on and into the thought, the motive, the intention, and the will’.
[The] mighty world-wide Church, like her Divine Author, regards, consults for, labours for the individual soul; she looks at the souls for whom Christ died, and who are made over to her; and her one object, for which everything is sacrificed – appearances, reputation, worldly triumph – is to acquit herself well of this most awful responsibility … . The Church overlooks everything in comparison of the immortal soul.40
The Church ‘consults for’ the ‘soul’ – and Reding is aware of his own soul. Early on in Loss and Gain, Reding admits to his sister Mary, with whom he is close, that ‘we are so blest that I am sometimes quite frightened … there’s one text which has ever dwelt on my mind, “Rejoice with trembling”. I can’t take full unrestrained pleasure in anything … . It may be a selfish prudence, for what I know; but I am sure that, did I give my heart to any creature, I should be withdrawing it from God.’41 Mary replies, ‘Whatever we lose, no change can affect us as a family. While we are we, we are to each other what nothing external can be to us, whether as given or as taken away’, but Reding observes, ‘Everything is so uncertain here below.’42 When Mary insists, ‘We are sure of each other,’ Reding kisses her, but replies, ‘It seems presumptuous to say so. David and Jonathan were parted; St. Paul and St. Barnabas.’ Seeing that Mary has become upset, he declares, ‘Oh, what an ass I am … for thus teasing you about nothing; no, I only mean that there is One only who cannot die, who never changes, only One. It can’t be wrong to remember this.’43 If Reding feels that to give his ‘heart to any creature’ would be to ‘withdraw it’ (idolatrously) from God, then does this, itself, create a kind of inhibition, a reserve, in his relationships with others – so that, ‘withdrawing’ himself from others, he experiences all relationships with others as imperfect, unsatisfactory (feeling that they ‘act upon us … at a distance’, and ‘cannot get at our souls’ or ‘enter into our thoughts, or really be companions to us’), and, experiencing his relationships with others in this way, he feels that only in his relationship with God there can be a full communion? There is, evidently, a difference between a ‘distance’ from others that arises from a kind of inhibition, and a ‘distance’ that is inescapable, inevitable, arising from the imperfect character of all communication in this world, all communication ‘through the medium of sense’. Newman would have it that ‘earthly’ communication is, inevitably, imperfect: in a sermon preached in 1839 on ‘The Thought of God, the Stay of the Soul’, he maintains that ‘none but the presence of our Maker can enter us; for to none besides can the whole heart in all its thoughts and feelings be unlocked and subjected’; it ‘is this feeling of simple and absolute confidence and communion, which soothes and satisfies those to whom it is vouchsafed. We know that even our nearest friends enter into us but partially, and hold intercourse with us only at times; whereas the consciousness of a perfect and enduring Presence, and it alone, keeps the heart open.’44 In Loss and Gain, it is observed, at one point, that Reding has ‘an habitual sense of the Divine Presence; a sense which, of course, did not insure uninterrupted conformity of thought and deed to itself, but still there it was – the pillar of the cloud before him and guiding him’ such that ‘he felt himself to be God’s creature, and responsible to Him – God’s possession, not his own’.45 It is, perhaps, by contrast with this ‘sense of the Divine Presence’, that Reding feels all other ‘intercourse’ to be imperfect. He ends his discussion with Mary, by quoting some lines of Cowper, on how God is the ‘centre’ and ‘point of rest’ of ‘all minds’.
Thou art the source and centre of all minds,
Their only point of rest, Eternal Word.
From Thee departing, they are lost, and rove
At random, without honour, hope, or peace.
From Thee is all that soothes the life of man.46
Not long after Reding has this conversation with Mary, about how ‘there is One only who cannot die, who never changes, only One’, his father dies. Reding has been experiencing certain doubts about the English Church, after attending a lecture on the 39 Articles, but, on the death of his father, he feels all these doubts to be ‘shams’, unreal.
It was the first great grief poor Charles had ever had, and he felt it to be real. How did the small anxieties which had of late teased him vanish before this tangible calamity! He then understood the difference between what was real and what was not. All the doubts, inquiries, surmises, views, which had of late haunted him on theological subjects, seemed like so many shams, which flitted before him in sun-bright hours, but had no root in his inward nature, and fell from him, like the helpless December leaves, in the hour of his affliction. He felt now where his heart and his life lay. His birth, his parentage, his education, his h ome, were great realities; to these his being was united; out of these he grew. He felt he must be what providence had made him. What is called the pursuit of truth seemed an idle dream. He had great tangible duties to his father’s memory, to his mother and sisters, to his position; he felt sick of all theories as if they had taken him in, and he secretly resolved never more to have anything to do with them. Let the world go on as it might, happen what would to others, his own place and his own path were clear. He would go back to Oxford, attend steadily to his books, put aside all distractions, avoid bye-paths, and do his best to acquit himself well in the schools. The Church of England as it was, its Articles, bishops, preachers, professors, had sufficed for much better persons than he was; they were good enough for him. He could not do better than imitate the life and death of his beloved father; quiet years in the country at a distance from all excitements, a round of pious, useful works among the poor, the care of a village school, and at length the death of the righteous.47
Newman suggests that this encounter with the ‘real’ is, in itself, beneficial. Reding, thenceforth, understands the difference between what is ‘real’, and what is not. ‘A leaf had been turned over in his life; he could not be what he had been. People come to man’s estate at very different ages … . Charles had left Oxford a clever unformed youth; he returned a man.’48 Reding turns away, at this time, from the ‘doubts, inquiries, surmises, views, which had of late haunted him on theological subjects’; but, while ‘his thoughts [are] turned away from religious controversy for two years’, nevertheless, ‘his religious views [are] progressing, unknown to himself, the whole time’, though this ‘progress’ in his ‘views’ proceeds, not merely from ‘inquiries, surmises, views’, but from something rather more ‘real’ – from his efforts to ‘to worship and obey his Creator’ (‘intellectual acts, conclusions, and judgments must accompany that worship and obedience’). His turning away, for a time, from explicit, systematic ‘inquiries … on theological subjects’, means that his ‘progress’ in ‘religious views’ is informed, not by mere ratiocination, but by ‘worship, and obedience’ (by his ‘real’ spiritual life). Yet, while there is piety and humility in the sense Reding has that ‘his birth, his parentage, his education, his home, were great realities; to these his being was united; out of these he grew’, and there is piety and humility in his sense that the ‘Church of England as it was … had sufficed for much better persons than he was … [it was] good enough for him’, nevertheless, his reaction against all mere ‘theories’ involves something like a tendency toward scepticism, or an acquiescence in uncertainty – a rejection of ‘the pursuit of truth’ as an ‘idle dream’.
In the period prior to his conversion to Catholicism, Newman engaged in a correspondence with Keble, in which he set out some of the considerations that were moving him toward ‘Rome’. Less than a week before he was received into the Catholic Church, Newman got a letter from Keble, in which Keble commented on how some of his doubts and anxieties were quieted when he witnessed the peaceful deaths of members of the Church of England (his brother, Tom, was dying at that time, his life ‘hanging by a thread’).
At such times one seems in a way to see deeper into realities, and I must own to you that the impression on my own mind of the reality of things I have been brought up among, and of its being my own fault, not theirs, whereinsoever I am found wanting, – this impression seems to deepen in me as Death draws nearer, and I find it harder and harder to imagine that persons such as I have seen and heard of lately should be permitted to live and die deceiving themselves in such a point, as whether they are aliens to the graces of God’s Sacraments or no.49
‘It is very mysterious, very bewildering indeed; but, being so, one’s duty seems clearly pointed out: to abide where one is, till some call comes upon one. If this were merely my own reason or feeling, I should mistrust it altogether, knowing, alas! that I am far indeed from the person to whom guidance is promised, but when I see the faith of others, such as I know them to be, and so very near to me as God has set them, I am sure that it would be a kind of impiety to dream of separating myself from them.’50 Newman and Keble differed in their interpretation of the Butlerian principle the ‘probability is the guide of life’, and the ‘guide’ of religion:51 Newman felt that, while arguments for religious belief might be only, in themselves, ‘probable’, one might nevertheless be justified, by a cumulation of ‘probable’ arguments, in becoming certain about such matters – certitude (as a ‘habit of mind’) might arise, legitimately, from ‘concurring and converging probabilities’; Keble felt that, as arguments for religious belief are only, in themselves, probable, rather than demonstrative, one cannot attain to certainty in religious matters, so that faith is an abiding in uncertainty – and he could maintain that a ‘rightly disposed and considerate person … would rather be startled and rendered suspicious by arguments and statements which sound entirely satisfactory’, since ‘if the whole Kingdom of God be in the decayed condition, which so many appearances indicate; how dare any individual among us seek great things for himself, either in the way of certainty or sensible comfort?’ Keble would associate uncertainty, in this regard, with a proper humility; he could suggest that a ‘longing after abstract perfection’ might involve a certain pride; and he suggested that ‘the mark of the Cross seems rather to belong to those who struggle on in a decayed and perhaps still decaying Church, bearing their burden as they may, than those who allow their imaginations to dwell on fancied improvements and blessings to be obtained on possible changes of communion’. In his correspondence with Newman, prior to his conversion, Keble asked Newman to consider whether he might have a ‘tendency’ to a ‘certain restlessness, a longing after something more, analogous perhaps to an exquisite ear in music, which would keep you, I should think, in spite of yourself, intellectually and morally dissatisfied, wherever you were’.52 One might become ‘dissatisfied’ with the church one is in, imagining ‘something more’ might be had elsewhere, yet this might be ‘fanciful’: things, elsewhere, might be no better, if not worse (‘the whole Church might be so lowered by sin, as to hinder one’s finding on earth anything which seems really to answer to the Church of the Scriptures’). What one is ‘dissatisfied’ with might be, in fact, simply ‘reality’: one might be pursuing that which is only imaginary, owing to an ‘exquisite’ perception of an imaginary ‘perfection’ – a ‘perfect’ Church, manifest in such a way as to justify a ‘perfect’ assurance as to its claims. Keble asks, then, whether there might be a refusal of ‘realities’, in the dissatisfaction of Newman with the Anglican Church: a refusal of the reality of uncertainty; a refusal of the reality that ‘perfection’, in this world, is not to be had. If one feels ‘dissatisfied’ with oneself, where one is, if one feels one might realize ‘great things’ elsewhere – that one might attain to spiritual ‘perfection’ elsewhere – then one must recognize that one is ‘wanting’, spiritually – otherwise, one would not be aspiring for ‘more’ – and if one is ‘wanting’, imperfect, spiritually, then perhaps one should be hesitant to judge the ‘realities’ one is ‘among’ (if one is ‘wanting’, how could one be a good judge?), and perhaps one is ‘wanting’, not because those ‘realities’ are at fault, but because one is at fault oneself: one could, perhaps, have got more from those ‘realities’, if one were better ‘disposed’ (‘I must own to you that the impression on my own mind of the reality of things I have been brought up among, and of its being my own fault, not theirs, whereinsoever I am found wanting’). The view of Keble, then, corresponds to that of Reding: that ‘what is called the pursuit of truth’ might be ‘an idle dream’ (a ‘dream’ of ‘perfection’, of a certainty, which is not to be had) and that one must ‘be what providence had made’ one (one must ‘bear’ being uncertain, as a part of what ‘providence’ has made one to be, and one must acknowledge oneself to be a part of, and subject to, what one has ‘been brought up among’, not putting oneself ‘above’ it, so to speak, by assessing it according to a ‘fanciful’ notion of perfection). Is this, however, to abdicate a certain responsibility for oneself? Reding reflects that his ‘birth, his parentage, his education, his home, were great realities; to these his being was united; out of these he grew’.53
While the ‘being’ of Reding may be ‘united’ to the ‘great realities’ of ‘birth’, ‘parentage’, ‘home’, it is not wholly subsumed by them. Reding feels himself to be ‘God’s posession, not his own’ – not the ‘possession’ of his ‘birth, his parentage, his education, his home’. If he is moved by a ‘longing after something more’, could not this ‘longing’ be regarded as something, in itself, good: in an essay written in 1839, Newman observes of those ‘who wish for things which they have not, start and look about them with beating hearts and troubled eyes, when a whisper, from whatever source, tells them that their yearnings perchance may find somewhat to satisfy them’, that such ‘feelings, if of earth, are merely enthusiastic, and often argue impatience and want of discipline’ but ‘when those feelings are true and right, they are the motions of a divine love, and the disposition to confide which they involve, whithersoever tending, is of the nature of faith’.54 He then acknowledges that ‘as to what are earthly, what heavenly feelings, and who is to discriminate between them, this is quite another question, on which men of different sentiments will decide differently’.55 With regard to the sense Reding has that ‘he must be what providence had made him’, he will eventually take it that ‘providence’ has ‘made him’ convinced of the truth of Catholicism, that his belief, in this matter, is a ‘part of’ himself.
I said, ‘Perhaps I am in a dream. Oh, that I could pinch myself and awake!’ You know what stress I laid on my change of feeling upon my dear father’s death; what I thought to be convictions before, vanished then like a cloud. I have said to myself, ‘Perhaps these will vanish too’. But no; ‘the clouds return after the rain’; they come again and again, heavier than ever. It is a conviction rooted in me; it endures against the prospect of loss of mother and sisters … . No, by this time I have proved that it is a real conviction. My belief in the Church of Rome is part of myself: I cannot act against it without acting against God … . All reason comes from God; our grounds must at best be imperfect; but if they appear to be sufficient after prayer, diligent search, obedience, waiting, and, in short, doing our part, they are His voice calling us on. He it is, in that case, who makes them seem convincing to us. I am in His hands.56
The ‘conviction’ is ‘part of’ himself, and yet it is, equally, a ‘calling’ from what is more than the self; to ‘act against it’ is to act against God: it is ‘His voice calling’.
2.
What is it that makes Reding ‘intellectually and morally dissatisfied’ with the ‘realities’ he has ‘been brought up among’? What is his ‘intellectual’ progress?
When he first arrives at Oxford, Reding abides by the ‘maxim’ that ‘we must measure people by what they are, and not by what they are not’ and he has ‘a great notion of loving every one – of looking kindly on every one’: he does not have a definite ‘view’ of religious matters; he is ‘in the season of poetry … because when we first see things, we see them in a “gay confusion,” which is a principal element of the poetical’, and he has not yet begun to ‘number and sort and measure things’, ‘advanc[ing] towards philosophy and truth, but … reced[ing] from poetry’.57 As one should look ‘kindly on every one’, he feels, so one should not concern oneself overmuch with any apparent defects in their beliefs, with ‘what they are not’. His attitude changes, in this regard, owing, in part, to the influence of his friend, Sheffield, who scorns ‘shams’ – expressions or forms that are separated from ‘real’ meanings or functions – and who insists that ‘we must … have a standard of things, else one good thing is as good as another’.58 (Much of the satire of Loss and Gain is concerned, in this regard, with ‘shams’, with various kinds of unreality – with those who are attracted to certain professions, without having sufficient sense of the meaning of those professions, and their relation to reality.)59 Reding and Sheffield contrast with one another, in their ways of thinking: Sheffield ‘easily picked up opinions and facts, especially on controversies of the day, without laying anything very much to heart’ and, being ‘ready, clear-sighted, unembarrassed, and somewhat forward’, he ‘was not satisfied intellectually with things as they are … was critical, impatient to reduce things to system, pushed principles too far, was fond of argument, partly from pleasure in the exercise, partly because he was perplexed, though he did not lay anything very much to heart’,60 whereas Reding ‘understood more deeply than Sheffield, and held more practically, what he had once received’, and ‘was gentle and affectionate, and easily led by others, except when duty clearly interfered’.61 Reding ‘[holds] more practically’ – his thinking is implicated with his ‘practical’ existence, and with his ‘practical’ wisdom. Sheffield thinks in a way that involves his ‘heart’ less – he is concerned more with ‘reduc[ing] things to system’, and is ‘fond of argument’, for itself: ratiocination is more of an end in itself for him, and a ‘pleasure’ in itself; it is somewhat detached from his ‘practical’ existence (he does not ‘lay anything very much to heart’).62 The restlessness of Sheffield is a kind of stimulus to Reding – inducing him to recognize inconsistencies, absurdities, and the like, in the various religious ‘systems’ which they encounter. The disdain of Sheffield for ‘shams’ makes an ‘impression’ on Reding.
He felt that there was truth in [this attitude] at bottom, and a truth new to him. He was not a person to let a truth sleep in his mind; though it did not vegetate very quickly, it was sure ultimately to be pursued into its consequences, and to affect his existing opinions. In the instance before us, he saw Sheffield’s principle was more or less antagonistic to his own favourite maxim, that it was a duty to be pleased with every one. Contradictions could not both be real: when an affirmative was true, a negative was false. All doctrines could not be equally sound: there was a right and a wrong. The theory of dogmatic truth, as opposed to latitudinarianism (he did not know their names or their history, or suspect what was going on within him), had in the course of these his first terms, gradually begun to energise in his mind.63
While Reding ‘had been accustomed … to fix his mind on persons, not on opinions, and to determine to like what was good in every one … [he comes ] to perceive that, to say the least, it was not respectable in any great question to hold false opinions’.64
In his first terms at Oxford, Reding encounters various views inimical to ‘dogmatic truth’. He encounters Bateman, who has ‘much good and much cleverness in him’, but not enough ‘common sense’, who is much taken with Tractarian theory, but who has, in his efforts to apply it, not enough awareness of realities, of the circumstances in which he would apply it, perpetrating various absurdities (he would – according to Sheffield – ‘top’ the ‘existing reality’ of the English Church, which ‘abjures Catholicism’, with ‘a filagree-work of screens, dorsals, pastoral staffs, croziers, mitres, and the like’).65 He encounters a young Evangelical, Freeborn, who maintains that ‘theology [is] itself a mistake, as substituting, as he considered, worthless intellectual notions for the vital truths of religion … for … faith, that is firm belief that God had forgiven you, was the one thing needful; that where that one thing was present, everything else was superfluous … [and] where true faith was present, a person might be anything in profession; an Arminian, a Calvinist, an Episcopalian, a Presbyterian, a Swedenborgian – nay, a Unitarian – he would go further … a Papist, yet be in a state of salvation.’66 White, an acquaintance of Bateman, who is taken with all things Catholic, advocates a different kind of rejection of ‘reason’, insisting that ‘it would be a dull world … if men went by reason: they may think they do, but they d on’t. Really, they are led by their feelings, their affections, by the sense of the beautiful, and the good, and the holy. Religion is the beautiful; the clouds, sun, and sky, the fields and the woods, are religion … . We have no life or poetry in the Church of England; the Catholic Church alone is beautiful.’67 White delights in Catholic ‘worship’ as a spectacle. He does not, in the event, become a Catholic: this pleasure in forms, in ‘the beautiful’, does not conduce, in the event, to a commitment to the ‘dogmatic truth’ animating the forms of Catholic worship. Freeborn, and White, in different ways, reject ‘intellectual notions’. Reding speaks with a friend of his father, Mr Malcolm, who takes the view that ‘theology’ is simply the ‘newest, latest fashion’ – ‘this is a place of fashions’, ‘there always is division, always rivalry’.68 He attends a sermon by Dr Brownside, who maintains that ‘there was no truth or falsehood in the received dogmas in theology; that they were modes … personal, national, or periodic, in which the intellect reasoned upon the great truths of religion’ and ‘that the fault lay, not in holding them, but in insisting on them, which was like insisting on a Hindoo dressing like a Fin’, so that the ‘Anglican formularies’ were ‘our mode of expressing everlasting truths, which might be as well expressed in other ways’, that ‘though the Athanasian Creed was good for us, it did not follow that it was good for our neighbours; rather, that what seemed the very reverse might suit others better, might be their mode of expressing the same truths’.69 Reding takes it that this means ‘every one is what Sheffield calls a sham, more or less … [and while] we can’t do without some outward form of belief; one is not truer than another; that is, all are equally true’ – but he takes it that this is ‘impossible’. ‘It is as true [then] that our Lord is a mere man, as that He is God. He could not possibly mean this; what did he mean?’70 Reflecting on the views of Dr Brownside, Reding discerns a likeness between those views, and the opinions of the Evangelical Freeborn, with his distrust of ‘theology’, his insistence that ‘where true faith was present, a person might be anything in profession’.71 Reding asks a junior tutor, Mr Vincent, whether ‘Dr. Brownside was considered a safe divine to follow’.72 Vincent aspires to a perfect ‘mean’, avoiding ‘parties’, forming his own views, but ‘to obtain [this mean], thought it enough to flee from extremes, without having any very definite mean to flee to’, and who has ‘not clearness of intellect enough to pursue a truth to its limits, nor boldness enough to hold it in its simplicity’, expatiating on truisms, ‘converting pompous nothings into oracles’.73 To the question of Reding, as to whether Dr Brownside is a ‘safe divine to follow’, Vincent replies that Reding should ‘accept the good which his sermons offer, without committing yourself to the bad’.74 To this, Reding observes that ‘he had to learn before he could judge; and that he wished very much to know … what the true Church-of-England doctrine was on a number of points which perplexed him’.75
Reding learns that a friend of his, Willis, has become a Catholic. He meets Willis in London, ‘in company with a person apparently two or three years older’, Morley, who has ‘ever been a Catholic’, and who declares that ‘the Catholic faith is one, and that no other Church has faith. The Church of England has no faith. You, my dear sir, have no faith.’76 Willis asks Reding, ‘Have you faith in your Church?’ and then insists, ‘I know you well enough to know you have not.’77 Reding replies, ‘Do you mean I have no worship? and does not worship presuppose faith? I have much to learn, I am conscious; but I wish to learn it from the Church under whose shadow my lot is cast, and with whom I am content.’78 Willis takes the admission, by Reding, that he wishes ‘to learn’, as an admission that he ‘has no faith’ – ‘He confesses … that he has no faith; he confesses that he is in doubt’ – and urges him to convert forthwith.79 Reding replies, again, that he has ‘no doubt that he was in the place where Providence wished him to be; but, even if he had … he should certainly think that Christ called him in the way and method of careful examination – that prudence was the divinely appointed means of coming at the truth’.80 Willis retorts – ‘Such prudence as St. Thomas’s, I suppose, when he determined to see before believing.’81 Morley then suggests – ‘with a great ignorance of Protestants or how they were to be treated’ – that Reding might be experiencing a struggle between ‘conviction and motives of this world’.82 Reding is not moved by the importunacy of Willis and Morley. Afterwards, musing that ‘he had let out his secret state of mind’, Reding then reflects that ‘he had nothing to let out.
He had indeed implied that he was inquiring after religious truth; but every Protestant inquires … . This was the very difference between Protestants and Catholics. Catholics begin with faith; Protestants with inquiry … . He wished this had but struck him during the conversation, but it was a relief that it struck him now; it reconciled him to his position.83 If Willis and Morley do not move Reding to consider converting, they do make him aware that he is ‘inquiring’.
Reding is disposed to think that there is such a thing as ‘dogmatic truth’; and he wishes to ‘learn it from the Church under whose shadow [his] lot is cast’. He is disappointed, though, in his wish to ascertain ‘what the true Church-of-England doctrine’ is, when he attends some lectures on the thirty-nine Articles. The lectures concern the history of the formulation of the Articles, and Reding comes to perceive that ‘the profession of faith contained in the Articles was but a patchwork of bits of orthodoxy, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Zuinglism; and this too on no principle; that it was but the work of accident, if there be such a thing as accident’, so that ‘this historical fact did but clench the difficulty, or rather impossibility, of saying what the faith of the English Church was’.84 With regard to the interpretation of the Articles, ‘there was an imposing weight of external testimony in favour of opposite interpretations’.85 Reding does not reveal his perplexities to Sheffield (he ‘had a strong anticipation that this would have been making matters worse’) but, instead, asks Bateman how he could ‘sign’ the Articles, not on faith, but ‘on reason’ when ‘they were unintelligible’ – ‘how could he prove what he could not construe?’86 Bateman recommends the view which Newman had himself set out in Tract 90 – the view that, as there is no unanimity in ‘the collective voice of Bishops, Deans, Professors’ in the English Church, nor in the intention of ‘the writers themselves of the Articles’, nor in ‘the Convocations which ratified them’ (which were ‘of different sentiments’), and as ‘the Anglican Church’ is ‘a part of the one Church Catholic’, so the Articles are to be interpreted as an expression of the ‘Catholic Creed’, ‘the whole Catholic Creed, the acknowledged doctrine of the Fathers, of St. Ignatius, St. Cyprian, St. Augustin, St. Ambrose, is the form, is the one true sense and interpretation of the Articles’.87 Yet Bateman is obliged to acknowledge that this is not a ‘received view’; and Reding observes that ‘I don’t see but it might have done, had it been tolerably sanctioned; but you have no sanction to show me. It is, as it stands, a mere theory struck out by individuals. Our Church might have adopted this mode of interpreting the Articles; but from what you tell me, it certainly has not done so.’88 Reding, then, is left feeling that, while he would ascertain ‘dogmatic truth’, his church does not present him with any ‘acknowledged doctrine’.89
After his father dies, Reding resolves not to think about the ‘doubts, inquiries, surmises, views, which had of late haunted him on theological subjects’ – all of which ‘seemed like so many shams’. A year and a half passes, but though Reding has ‘his thoughts turned away from religious controversy for two years’ nevertheless, ‘his religious views [are] progressing, unknown to himself, the whole time’: ‘a single discussion with a friend … would bring out what he really did hold to his own apprehension’.90 One such discussion occurs when Reding converses with his tutor, Carlton, about the ideal of celibacy. He remarks that since he was ‘a boy at school’ he has ‘fancied that I should never marry. Not that the feeling has never intermitted, but it is the habit of my mind. My general thoughts run in that one way, that I shall never marry. If I did, I should dread Thalaba’s punishment.’91 (In Thalaba, the wife of Thalaba is taken from him on his wedding night. Reding expresses, in this, the fear, which he mentions to his sister, Mary, that ‘did I give my heart to any creature, I should be withdrawing it from God’ – incurring ‘punishment’.) Carlton observes that ‘you are making a great blunder if you are for introducing celibacy into the Anglican Church … the whole genius, structure, working of our Church goes the other way’.92 The conversation turns to the question of whether the spiritual, supernatural life might involve a renunciation of certain natural goods: Carlton maintains that ‘I have been accustomed to consider Christianity as the perfection of man as a whole, body, soul, and spirit … . Spirit, or the principle of religious faith and obedience, should be the master principle, the hegemonicon. To this both intellect and body are subservient; but as this supremacy does not imply the ill-usage, the bondage of the intellect, neither does it of the body; both should be well treated’; Reding responds, ‘what is faith but the submission of the intellect? and as “every high thought is brought into captivity,” so are we expressly told to bring the body into subjection too. They are both well treated, when they are treated so as to be made fit instruments of the sovereign principle … . Perhaps our highest perfection here is penance.’93 Reding sets out, it is observed, ‘what really were the Catholic doctrines and usages of penance, purgatory, councils of perfection, mortification of self, and clerical celibacy’, though he has not ‘given names to these opinions’.94 There is that, in the ‘Catholic doctrines’, which corresponds to opinions arising, in Reding, with ‘the growth of the mind’. (Newman comments on this – ‘we see what is meant when a person says that the Catholic system comes home to his mind, fulfils his ideas of religion, satisfies his sympathies, and the like; and thereupon becomes a Catholic … the person in question does not, strictly speaking, judge of the external system presented to him by his private ideas, but he brings in the dicta of that system to confirm and to justify certain private judgments and personal feelings and habits already existing … the mighty Creed … justifies his thoughts, explains his feelings … . Then he submits himself to the Catholic Church, not by a process of criticism, but as a pupil to a teacher.’95 The ‘Creed’ is not justified by ‘private judgements and personal feelings’ – rather, it ‘justifies’ and ‘explains’ them. It makes sense of those ‘judgements’ and ‘feelings’; and to have those feelings is to wish to make sense of them.) Others, accordingly, detect in Reding ‘the presence of something … very unlike the Church of England … something which had a body in it … which had much behind it which made itself felt’.96 Meanwhile, Sheffield mentions in conversation with Reding that he considers ‘belief in the Athanasian Creed’ – which affirms the doctrine of the Trinity – to be a mere ‘party opinion’. Reflecting on the ‘hollowness of it all’, the ‘hollowness’ – so he thinks – of much profession in the Church of England, Sheffield declares ‘surely one has no need to believe what so many people either disbelieve or disregard’.97 Reding mentions to Carlton his difficulty in subscribing to the Articles, and when Carlton suggests that he should ‘act as if [the English Church] were infallible, from a sense of duty’, Reding replies, ‘If I am to make a Church infallible … if I must give up private judgment, if I must act on faith, there is a Church which has a greater claim on us all than the Church of England.’98 When Carlton asks him, ‘where did you get these notions?’ Reding replies ‘somebody has said that they were in the air. I have talked to no one, except one or two arguments I had with different persons in my first year. I have driven the subject from me; but when I once begin, you see it will out.’99 (The ‘somebody’ who ‘has said that they were in the air’ might be Newman himself, who had declared, in his 1839 article on ‘The State of Religious Parties’ for the British Critic, that the spirit of the ‘movement’ was ‘in the air’, ‘unapproachable and incapable of being grasped, as being the result of causes far deeper than political or other visible agencies – the spiritual awakening of spiritual wants’.)100
Though Reding avoids controversy, or any ostentatious gestures – and though he has no intention of leaving the English Church – his unsettled state is not unnoticed: he is called before the vice-principal, questioned about his religious opinions, and, when Reding gives an answer to a question about the intercession of saints that displeases the vice-principal, he is sent down (‘your mind has been perverted – I fear I must use a stronger term, debauched – by the sophistries and jesuistries which unhappily have found entrance among us’).101 While he is staying with his family, he spends time with Bateman, ‘lately appointed curate of a neighbouring parish’, who introduces him to his friend, Campbell, who has ‘the same religious sentiments on the whole as Bateman’.102 Campbell maintains that ‘a belief … that there is something bad, corrupt, perilous in the Church of Rome – that there is a spirit of Antichrist living in her, energising in her, and ruling her – is necessary to a man’s being a good Anglican’.
You must believe this, or you ought to go to Rome … . Without this strong repulsion you will not withstand the great claims, the overcoming attractions, of the Church of Rome. She is our mother – oh, that word “mother”! – a mighty mother! She opens her arms … . Why don’t I rush into her arms? Because I feel that she is ruled by a spirit which is not she.103
Bateman, Campbell, and Reding discuss Willis, and certain rumours that, disappointed with Rome, he will be returning to the English Church. On his way home from his conversation with Bateman and Campbell, Reding encounters a ‘penitent’ by a ‘wooden Cross’, who vanishes at his approach, and he is moved to pray that ‘whatever the trial, whatever the loss, he might have grace to follow whithersoever God should call him’.104 A short time afterwards, Bateman invites Willis to dinner, with the aim of persuading him to return to the English Church – during which Bateman and Campbell disagree on the question of whether the ‘rubrics’ in the Prayer Book are now ‘binding’, and on the question of whether the ‘branches of the Church are divided’ (making Bateman fret, inwardly, on what ‘a bad impression it must make on Willis; I saw it did; he could hardly keep from smiling; but Campbell has no tact at all’).105 Bateman invites Willis to dinner again. Bateman maintains that Willis must have been ‘shocked’ at the ‘corruptions in worship’, which he will have encountered in Catholicism – Willis replies, ‘If I come to the Church with faith in her, whatever I see there, even if it surprises me, is but a trial of my faith.’106 Bateman then insists that ‘it is quite impossible that the worship paid by Roman Catholics to the Blessed Mary should not interfere with the supreme adoration due to the Creator alone’ – Willis replies that ‘you are judging à priori; you know nothing of the state of the case from experience, but you say, “It must be; it can’t be otherwise” [whereas] … a Catholic, who acts, and does not speculate, feels the truth of the contrary’.107 When Bateman, finally, asks, ‘what keeps you?’ ‘how can you justify the Mass, as it is performed abroad; how can it be called a “reasonable service” when all parties conspire to gabble it over as if it mattered not a jot who attended to it, or even understood it?’108 Willis declares, ‘Ah, that faith should be necessary in such a matter, and that what is so natural and becoming under the circumstances, should have need of an explanation!’ – but he then offers an ‘explanation’ of the Mass.109
It is not a mere form of words, – it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth. It is, not the invocation merely, but, if I dare use the word, the evocation of the Eternal. He becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble. This is that awful event which is the scope, and is the interpretation, of every part of the solemnity. Words are necessary, but as means, not as ends; they are not mere addresses to the throne of grace, they are instruments of what is far higher, of consecration, of sacrifice. They hurry on as if impatient to fulfil their mission. Quickly they go, the whole is quick; for they are all parts of one integral action. Quickly they go; for they are awful words of sacrifice, they are a work too great to delay upon; as when it was said in the beginning: ‘What thou doest, do quickly.’ Quickly they pass; for the Lord Jesus goes with them, as He passed along the lake in the days of His flesh, quickly calling first one and then another. Quickly they pass; because as the lightning which shineth from one part of heaven unto the other, so is the coming of the Son of Man. Quickly they pass; for they are as the words of Moses, when the Lord came down in the cloud, calling on the Name of the Lord as He passed by, ‘the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth’. And as Moses on the mountain, so we too ‘make haste and bow our heads to the earth, and adore’. So we, all around, each in his place, look out for the great Advent, ‘waiting for the moving of the water’. Each in his place, with his own heart, with his own wants, with his own thoughts, with his own intention, with his own prayers, separate but concordant, watching what is going on, watching its progress, uniting in its consummation; – not painfully and hopelessly following a hard form of prayer from beginning to end, but, like a concert of musical instruments, each different, but concurring in a sweet harmony, we take our part with God’s priest, supporting him, yet guided by him. There are little children there, and old men, and simple labourers, and students in seminaries, priests preparing for Mass, priests making their thanksgiving; there are innocent maidens, and there are penitent sinners; but out of these many minds rises one eucharistic hymn, and the great Action is the measure and scope of it.110
Bateman and Reding are moved by this ‘burst of enthusiasm’. On parting from Willis, on his way home, Reding feels ‘possessed, he knew not how, by a high superhuman power, which seemed able to push through mountains, and to walk the sea’.111 As he walks home, he starts saying to himself, ‘half unconsciously’, ‘O mighty mother’.
‘O mighty Mother! I come, O mighty Mother! I come; but I am far from home. Spare me a little; I come with what speed I may, but I am slow of foot, and not as others, O mighty Mother!’ By the time he had walked two miles in this excitement, bodily and mental, he felt himself, as was not wonderful, considerably exhausted. He slackened his pace, and gradually came to himself, but still he went on, as if mechanically, ‘O mighty Mother!’ Suddenly he cried, ‘Hallo! where did I get these words? Willis did not use them. Well, I must be on my guard against these wild ways. Any one can be an enthusiast; enthusiasm is not truth … O mighty Mother! … Alas, I know where my heart is! but I must go by reason … . O mighty Mother!’112
Willis, on parting from Reding, had described the ‘Roman church’ as ‘the Mother of us all’, but the phrase ‘mighty Mother’ is a phrase Reding has taken, not from Willis, but from Campbell, who had maintained that one can recognize Rome to be a ‘mighty Mother’, while nevertheless feeling that there is a ‘spirit of Antichrist living in her’. (A half recollection of this admonition may be what moves Reding to ‘guard against’ too much ‘enthusiasm’, and to resolve to ‘go by reason’.) Returning to Oxford, Reding presents himself for his examinations, but, owing to his scruples about subscribing to the thirty-nine Articles, defers taking his degree. Carlton advises him to start ‘reading with some clergyman in the country; thus he would at once be preparing for orders, and clearing his mind on the points which at present troubled him; besides, he might thus have some opportunity for parochial duty, which would have a tranquillising and sobering effect on his mind’.113
Reding stays with Campbell; just over two years pass; but his conviction that Rome is the true church strengthens. Despite the opposition of his family, and friends (Campbell tells Reding that he fears that ‘if you take this step, you will find yourself in the hands of a Circe, who will change you, make a brute of you’) Reding resolves to be received into the Church of Rome.114 He makes a final visit to Oxford, to bid his former tutor, Carlton, farewell. Reding tells Carlton that he has attained to his conviction ‘with great deliberation’ that it has ‘remained on [his] mind as a mere intellectual conclusion for a year or two’, and that he is now to ‘change it into a practical resolve’.115 His reading has convinced him that he ‘going to a Church which … is nearer the Apostolic Church than any existing one; which is the continuation of the Apostolic Church, if it has been continued at all. And seeing it to be like the Apostolic Church, I believe it to be the same. Reason has gone first, faith is to follow.’116 He declares that God ‘calls’ him. Carlton rejoins that this is ‘dissenting language’; Reding insists it is ‘Scripture language’; and then Carlton observes that ‘people don’t in Scripture say “I’m called”; the calling was an act from without, the act of other s, not an inward feeling.’117 When Reding asks, ‘How is a person to get at truth, now, when there can be no simple outward call?’ Carlton remarks that this is ‘pretty good intimation … that we are to remain where Providence has placed us’.118 Reding then asks whether ‘members of the Church of England [are] to seek the truth, or have they it given them from the first’, and when Carlton replies that they are ‘to seek’, Reding declares that ‘they tell us to seek, they give us rules for seeking, they make us exert our private judgment; but directly we come to any conclusion but theirs, they turn round and talk to us of our “providential position”’.119 He then asks, ‘do you think that members of the English Church do seek it in that way which Scripture enjoins upon all seekers?’
I don’t believe the bulk of the English clergy, the bulk of Oxford residents, Heads of houses, Fellows of Colleges (with all their good points, which I am not the man to deny), have ever sought the truth. They have taken what they found, and have used no private judgment at all … they have never sought, they have never judged; they are where they are, not because it is true, but because they find themselves there, because it is their “providential position” and a pleasant one into the bargain.120
Reding is troubled after his conversation with Carlton – not least because he feels he may have become ‘excited’.
He began to question whether he really had evidence enough for the step he was taking, and the temptation assailed him that he was giving up this world without gaining the next. Carlton evidently thought him excited; what if it were true? Perhaps his convictions were, after all, a dream; what did they rest upon? He tried to recall his best arguments, and could not. Was there, after all, any such thing as truth? … . Better men than he had lived and died in the English Church. And then what if, as Campbell had said, all his so-called convictions were to vanish just as he entered the Roman pale, as they had done on his father’s death?121
He reflects, though, that ‘the deliberate conclusions of years ought not to be set aside by the troubled thoughts of an hour’ and, for the moment, he puts ‘the whole subject from him’.122 Taking a train to London, he encounters a Catholic priest, and begins conversing with him about faith. The priest observes that ‘either we believed the whole revealed message, or really we believed no part of it; that we ought to believe what the Church proposed to us on the word of the Church’.123 A Unitarian, then, disregarding those parts of Scripture which intimate the divine nature of Christ, does not receive ‘as God’s word that which he professes to receive, when he passes over and gets rid of so much that is in that word’.124 Reding acknowledges that, in such a case, ‘his ultimate standard of truth is not the Scripture, but, unconsciously to himself, some view of things in his mind which is to him the measure of Scripture’.125 The priest insists that Anglicans equally ‘pass over’ parts of Scripture – ‘such passages as “the Church the pillar and ground of the truth”; or, “whosesoever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven”’.126 Reding observes that ‘in fact, we do not profess to have faith in the mere text of Scripture … . The Anglican doctrine is to interpret Scripture by the Church; therefore we have faith, like Catholics, not in Scripture simply, but in the whole word committed to the Church, of which Scripture is a part.’127 The priest replies, ‘Where, is that “word” of the Church which the persons you speak of believe in? and when do they exercise their belief? Is it not an undeniable fact, that, so far from all Anglican clergymen agreeing together in faith, what the first says, the second will unsay? so that an Anglican cannot, if he would, have faith in them, and necessarily, though he would not, chooses between them.’128 Reding then asks, ‘Is there evidence enough for faith?’129 The priest remarks, ‘If there is evidence enough to believe Scripture, and we see that there is … [then] there is more than enough to believe the Church. The evidence is not in fault; all it requires is to be brought home or applied to the mind; if belief does not then follow, the fault lies with the will … . There is quite evidence enough for a moral conviction that the Catholic or Roman Church, and none other, is the voice of God.’130 The ‘light’ of this ‘moral conviction’ is the clearest ‘light’ one can have, before joining the Church.
Certainty, in its highest sense, is the reward of those who, by an act of the will, and at the dictate of reason and prudence, embrace the truth, when nature, like a coward, shrinks. You must make a venture; faith is a venture before a man is a Catholic; it is a gift after it. You approach the Church in the way of reason, you enter into it in the light of the Spirit.131
Nothing will stand in place of [faith]; not a sense of the beauty of Catholicism, or of its awfulness, or of its antiquity; not an appreciation of the sympathy which it shows towards sinners; not an admiration of the Martyrs and early Fathers, and a delight in their writings. Individuals may display a touching gentleness, or a conscientiousness which demands our reverence; still, till they have faith, they have not the foundation, and their superstructure will fall. They will not be blessed, they will effect nothing in religious matters, till they begin by an act of unreserved faith in the word of God, whatever it be; till they go out of themselves; till they cease to make something within them their standard; till they oblige their will to perfect what reason leaves sufficient, indeed, but incomplete. And when they shall recognise this defect in themselves, and try to remedy it, then they will recognise much more; – they will be on the road very shortly to be Catholics.132
At this, Reding feels ‘restored to himself’.133 Arriving in London, he rents a room at a bookshop, to prepare himself for being received into the Church, but is troubled by numerous visitors – most of them sectarians of one sort or another, who, hearing about his intention to leave the Anglican Church, wish to convert him to their own opinions. His final visitor, Mr Malcolm, an old family friend, declares him a ‘foolish boy’ – ‘You must have your hobby; it might have been a worse.’134 After this, Reding decides to stay at a Passionist convent, where he attends a Mass – apprehending, in ‘the Blessed Sacrament … the Great Presence, which makes a Catholic Church different from every other place in the world’.135 He meets with one of the priests at the convent, and declares his wish to be received into the Church.
3.
Reding comes to the view that the English Church does not require of him his faith; it does not require of him an allegiance to something more than himself, or more than the society to which he belongs. The priest with whom he speaks on the train to London tells him that, in making an act of faith, he must ‘go out’ of himself, and take something other than what is ‘within’ him as his ‘standard’. His going ‘out’ of himself does not involve, however, a negation of all that he is, or a subjection to something wholly alien. His ‘moral conviction’ that Rome is the true Church has emerged out of his efforts to ‘go by reason’; his enquiries into the history of the Church have issued in a sense that Rome is the ‘continuation’ of the ‘Apostolic’ Church. What is more, he senses there is something ‘congenial’ to him in ‘the Catholic system’; the ‘progress’ of his views – actuated by his devotional life, the ‘intellectual acts, conclusions, and judgments [which] accompany [his] worship and obedience’ – is such that the ‘dicta’ of the Catholic system ‘confirm and … justify … [his] private judgments and personal feelings and habits’. If he must ‘go out’ of himself – and take a ‘standard’ other than himself, or his own judgment – this will not involve a negation of all that he is; there is a sense, rather, that the accord of ‘the Catholic system’ with his ‘private judgments and personal feelings and habits’ is such that there is a fulfilment, a realization, of those ‘feelings and habits’, in his acceptance of that ‘system’. What is more, he declares that ‘my belief in the Church of Rome is part of myself: I cannot act against it without acting against God’. His belief is ‘part of’ himself, and it is, equally, the ‘voice [of God] calling’: it is ultimately God who makes certain ‘grounds’ for belief ‘seem convincing’, who forms the ‘reason’ of the one who feels those ‘grounds’ to be ‘convincing’. He must take a ‘standard’ other than what is ‘within’ him, but what is within him is, equally, the ‘voice’ of another, the ‘voice’ of God, and if he must ‘go out’ of himself, to take a ‘standard’ which is other than what is ‘within’ him, that ‘standard’ is not alien to what is innermost in him.
Notes
1 John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain (1848; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 2
2 Loss and Gain, 3.
3 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 95.
4 Ibid., 96.
5 Ibid., 131.
6 Loss and Gain, 5–6.
7 Ibid., 142.
8 ‘The Immortality of the Soul’, in PPS i, 20.
9 Ibid., 21.
10 Loss and Gain, 5.
11 Ibid., 6.
12 ‘Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training’, in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions [hereafter SPVO] (1874; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 4–5.
13 ‘Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training’, in SPVO, 14.
14 Loss and Gain, 86.
15 Ibid., 229.
16 Ibid. (A sardonic response to the question of Reding – ‘Was this … the communion of Saints?’ – would be – ‘No, this is youthful enthusiasm, tinged, possibly, with unconscious homoerotic feeling.’ Newman himself, in his 1839 British Critic article on the ‘state of parties in the English Church’, reflecting on the ‘excitement of the feelings’ associated with the Oxford movement, would observe, ‘as to what are earthly, what heavenly feelings, and who is to discriminate between them, this is quite another question, on which men of different sentiments will decide differently’.)
17 ‘The Communion of Saints’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons iv [hereafter PPS iv] (1839; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 170.
18 ‘The Communion of Saints’, in PPS iv, 170.
19 Ibid., 176.
20 ‘The Church a Home for the Lonely’, in PPS iv, 190.
21 Ibid., 198.
22 ‘The Visible Church an Encouragement to Faith’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons iii [hereafter PPS iii] (1836; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 238, 239, 240.
23 ‘The Visible Church an Encouragement to Faith’, in PPS iii, 241.
24 Ibid., 243.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 243, 245.
27 Ibid., 245–6, 247–8.
28 Ibid., 251.
29 Ibid., 240.
30 Loss and Gain, 229.
31 Ibid., 145.
32 ‘Divine Decrees’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons ii [hereafter PPS ii] (1835; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 123, 124.
33 ‘The Visible Church for the Sake of the Elect’, in PPS iv, 153, 155, 158–9.
34 Diff i, 85, 86.
35 Loss and Gain, 201.
36 Ibid., 202.
37 Ibid., 204.
38 Ibid., 297.
39 ‘John Keble’, in ECH ii, 442–3.
40 Difficulties felt by Anglicans, 233, 236–7.
41 Loss and Gain, 74.
42 Ibid., 74, 75.
43 Ibid., 75.
44 ‘The Thought of God, the Stay of the Soul’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons v [hereafter PPS v] (1840; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 318.
45 Loss and Gain, 161.
46 Ibid., 75.
47 Ibid., 112.
48 Ibid., 113.
49 LD x, 474. Quoted in Edward Short, Newman and his Contemporaries (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2011), 60.
50 LD x, 474.
51 See Edward Short, Newman and his Contemporaries (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2011), 51–2.
52 Quoted in Edward Short, Newman and his Contemporaries, 55.
53 In his Discourse on ‘Faith and Doubt’, in Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations (1849) Newman maintains that ‘members’ of the ‘Established religion … ground their duty of continuance in their communion, not on faith in it, but on attachment to it, which is a very different thing; utterly different, for there are very many reasons why they should feel a very great liking for the religion in which they have been brought up. Its portions of Catholic teaching, its “decency and order,” the pure and beautiful English of its prayers, its literature, the piety found among its members, the influence of superiors and friends, its historical associations, its domestic character, the charm of a country life, the remembrance of past years, – there is all this and much more to attach the mind to the national worship. But attachment is not trust, nor is to obey the same as to look up to, and to rely upon; nor do I think that any thoughtful or educated man can simply believe or confide in the word of the Established Church. I never met any such person who did, or said he did, and I do not think that such a person is possible.’ ‘Faith and Doubt’, in Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations (1849; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1906), 230–1.
54 ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’, in Essays, Critical and Historical i [hereafter ECH i] (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 275.
55 ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’, in ECH i, 275.
56 Loss and Gain, 236–7.
57 Ibid., 16–17.
58 Ibid., 9.
59 Ian Ker has brought out well this aspect of the satire of Loss and Gain in ‘Newman the Satirist’, in Newman after a Hundred Years, ed. by Ian Ker and Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 1–20.
60 Loss and Gain, 7, 17.
61 Ibid., 7.
62 Ibid., 17.
63 Ibid., 26–7.
64 Ibid., 48.
65 Ibid., 18, 39, 191.
66 Ibid., 30.
67 Ibid., 33.
68 Ibid., 24, 25.
69 Ibid., 51, 52.
70 Ibid., 52–3.
71 Ibid., 30.
72 Ibid., 59.
73 Ibid., 54.
74 Ibid., 60.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid., 79.
77 Ibid., 80.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid., 81.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid., 81–2.
83 Ibid., 82–3.
84 Ibid., 89–90.
85 Ibid., 90.
86 Ibid., 92.
87 Ibid., 95.
88 Ibid., 97.
89 Ibid., 95.
90 Ibid., 142.
91 Ibid., 136.
92 Ibid.
93 Ibid., 139–40, 142.
94 Ibid., 142–3.
95 Ibid., 143.
96 Ibid.
97 Ibid., 152.
98 Ibid., 155.
99 Ibid., 155–6.
100 ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’, in ECH i, 272.
101 Loss and Gain, 168.
102 Ibid., 185, 191.
103 Ibid., 193–4.
104 Ibid., 201.
105 Ibid., 207, 211, 213.
106 Ibid., 216, 217.
107 Ibid., 218.
108 Ibid., 225.
109 Ibid., 226.
110 Ibid., 226–7.
111 Ibid., 229.
112 Ibid.
113 Ibid., 231–2.
114 Ibid., 238.
115 Ibid., 252.
116 Ibid., 251.
117 Ibid., 253.
118 Ibid.
119 Ibid.
120 Ibid., 253–4.
121 Ibid., 258.
122 Ibid.
123 Ibid., 261.
124 Ibid.
125 Ibid.
126 Ibid.
127 Ibid.
128 Ibid.
129 Ibid., 263.
130 Ibid., 264.
131 Ibid., 264–5.
132 Ibid., 265.
133 Ibid.
134 Ibid., 289.
135 Ibid., 294.