DR. NEWMAN AND ROME.
DR. NEWMAN speaks of his just published answer to Mr. Gladstone as if it were very likely to be his " last publica- tion." But if one may judge in any degree of the vitality that is left in a man by the grasp of his thought, the lucidity of his exposition, the imaginative ease of his illustrations, and the accuracy of his memory, there is no sign at all as yet of the end of Dr. Newman's career. And we may trast, on public grounds, that it may still be prolonged for many years. We are living not so much in angry as in excitable religious times, when there is a good deal of hasty thought and speech on religious matters, and we need no one more than a great intellectual mediator between one party and another. No one who understands the English people so thoroughly as Dr. Newman, understands the Roman Catholic Church anything like as well. We venture to predict that no one of Mr. Gladstone's many Roman Catholic correspondents will have so good a chance of making him regret at least some, and perhaps many, of the expressions in his pamphlet, if not even some part of its practical aim, as Dr. Newman. He has shown to demonstration, what we for our parts never doubted, that though the Roman Catholic Church has always been, and always must continue to be while it exists at all, a polity presenting many more points of collision with the ordinary political world, than any other known form of Christian Church, there is no sufficient reason to raise a cry of alarm simply because the Pope has been now declared to have the power to pronounce, with the full authority of a Council over the minds of Roman Catholics, definitions on the subjects of faith and morals on which for manycenttries he has pronounced with exceedingly little chance that the obligation to accept them would be seriously challenged by any genuine Roman Catholic. In deal- ing with' the Syllabus,' Dr. Newman has been particularly suc- cessful; indeed, we have always supposed that a great deal too much was made of that string of condemnations of opinions, very few of which would be sustained in their literal meaning by any ordinary Liberal Protestant, unless by chance he belonged to some very doctrinaire division of the school of Mr. J. S. Mill or of Mr. Herbert Spencer. The common-sense of the position is no doubt this, that to the minds of sincere Roman Catholics who undoubtingly believe in the divine guardianship exercised over Conciliar, and now over Papal, definitions, there can be no new reason for expect. ing violent and imprudent interferences on the part of the Church with the policy of political States, which did not exist before. To them the meaning of the decrees is simply this,— that it will enable the Pope, in future, to warn the faithful of the Roman Catholic Church against the insidious heresies of the day with more binding authority than he would have exercised if he had been liable to be stopped at every step with the de- mand for Conciliar authority for his warning, and told that a new opinion was not to be regarded as a heresy till a Council had condemned it. But Dr. Newman forgets somewhat curiously the point of view of Mr. Gladstone, and of the Protestant world on whose unreasonable panic, as he thinks it, he is commenting. The point of view which most English- men take,—and which, to use a phrase which Dr. Newman, we think, himself introduced, it is almost " a necessity of our position" that we should take,—is that, as there is no such divine assistance, as Roman Catholics suppose, vouchsafed to the Church, nay, that as, on the contrary, the Providence of God is steadily guiding events so as more and more to undermine the authority of that Church, the Vatican decrees may open the way for quite new and very dangerous collisions between the Church and the various States of Europe, for which there will prove to have been no precedent in recent years. All that Dr. Newman has shown is this,—that a Roman Catholic Church as wise as Dr. Newman, might fairly be expected so to interpret and carry out the new decrees as to make them mere safeguards of Roman Catholic theology, in a time when that theology is ex- posed to very new and serious dangers. That we quite admit, and we admit equally that Dr. Newman will and must as- sume that the Roman Catholic Church will be protected by a wisdom infinitely greater than his own. Nay, we go further, we agree heartily with Dr. Newman, that far from its being the business of the modern State to tease and vex the Roman Church into intemperance, as Prince Bismarck is now doing, and as to some extent, we fear, it was the unintentional tendency of Mr. Gladstone's pamphlet to do, it is, on the contrary, the duty of the modern State to wait, no doubt with some anxiety, but still with the utmost tolerance and patience, till the Roman Church does, if she ever does, attack the basis of modern civilisation, and not to anticipate any such attack. For ex- ample, we hold it to be the duty of the modern State to insist on education for all the children of the State,—religious, in a large sense, if it be possible without offence to the conscience of our very divided world, but sound on secular subjects at any rate ; and should the Roman Catholic Church resist this policy without providing any equally sound secular education in con- nection with their own religious teaching,—equally sound, we ean, as tested by independent State inspectors,—the modernm State would be compelled, in common duty to its subjects, to punish the resistance. But there is no necessity at all for going out of the way to anticipate such resistance as this. We agree with Father Newman that, judging by the recent precedents, it is not to be expected. But we cannot agree with Father Newman that the recent precedents are certain to prevail for the future, simply because we cannot agree with him that the divine " assistentia " is really vouchsafed to the Pope. It seems to us, not perhaps so probable as it seems to Mr. Gladstone, but still very probable, that the new power of the Pope will be used with less and less reserve as the cause of the Church seems to grow less and less hopeful. Even Dr. Newman does not deny that the newly-defined prerogative of the Pope puts a very powerful weapon into his hands, which he may or may not use with the discretion and circumspection of recent centuries. Now though we earnestly deprecate any action on the part of statesmen or States having a tendency to provoke an ill-use of the new power, Dr. Newman must be well aware that it is impossible for Protestants to look to the future with any fraction of the same confidence with which those look to it who do believe in the divine assistance by which the prerogative of infallibility is said to be guarded. No doubt it is perfectly true, for instance, that if the Pope be infallible, be cannot define any dogmas inconsistent with the dogmatic definitions of his predecessors. But it is also true that if he be not infallible, he can, and that the result of such definitions would not be simply negative, simply to eonvince Roman Catholics that there is no infallibility in him,--for, as Dr. Newman shows with great elaboration, nothing in the world is more difficult than to say what decisions are and what are not, really incompatible with each other,—but to cause a great ferment of opinion in the Roman Catholic body, a great strife of tongues, and it might well be, &Twat discordant chaos of action, by the perturbing effects of which the civil order of the State might suffer most seriously. The only weak part of Dr. Newman's reply is that he does not look at the newly- centralised power from a Protestant's point of view, but insists on considering it from the point of view of a pious Catholic. Of course a point of view from which a Protestant may well expect much harm and many anarchical blows at the authority of modern States, must appear unreasonable to a Roman Catholic ; but then Mr. Gladstone is not a Catholic. So far, and so far only, Dr. Newman is unreasonable to Mr. Gladstone.
And from the same point of view, we confess that Dr. Newman seems to us to be a little unreasonable to some of the more uncompromising members of his own Church. He is very severe on "those among us who for years past have conducted themselves as if no responsibility attached to wild words and overbearing deeds, who have stated truths in the most paradoxical form, and stretched prin- ciples till they were close upon snapping ; and who, at length, having done their best to set the house on fire, leave to others the task of putting out the flames." And it is obvious, from the whole tenour of the reply, that he is really alluding to the party in the Church which is chiefly responsible for the Vatican decrees. Now, we quite understand Dr. New- man's great tenderness for the difficulties and dismay of Roman- ising Anglicans at the proposed definitions beforehand, and at the actual definitions when they came. We quite appre- ciate and of course admire his eager wish to put no fresh obstacle in the way of conversions which to his mind are admissions to the only certain haven of peace and truth. But is there not a duty towards persons in doubt and difficulty, who are contemplating a change of faith, which, so far as Father Newman's policy had been adopted, the Church would never have adequately rendered,—namely, to warn them emphatically, in the plain words which alone ordinary people would understand, and not in the flexible and dexterous language of a great master of all the subtleties of theology and ethics, to what sort of system they were really proposing to submit themselves, and to what kind of demands on their faith it was, at all events, not unlikely that they might be exposed ? The Church, even as Dr. Newman explains her demands, must be a hard mistress, enforcing a good deal on all her children which it is by no means easy for them ex aninio to comply with. " So difficult a virtue is faith," says Dr. Newman himself, "even with the special grace of God, in proportion as the reason is exercised, so difficult is it to assent inwardly to propositions verified to us neither by reason nor experience, but depending for their reception on the word of the Church as God's oracle, that she has ever shown the utmost care to contract, as far as possible, the range of truths, and the sense of propositions, of which she demands this absolute reception." Well, that is a matter greatly debated within the Roman Catholic Church itself, Dr. Newman, with many great authorities, holding one view, and other eminent men a different view. But even if it be true, as probably it is, that the latter school exaggerate the magnitude of the demands made on the intellectual submission of believers, it is certainly very pro- bable that Dr. Newman and his school attenuate the number and peremptoriness of those demands. How frequently one hears of Anglicans who have become Roman Catholics, and who later have returned to their old or something less than their old faith, and how frequently one is told by way of apology, that probably these returning Anglicans never were really Roman Catholics, but only imagined themselves to be so. In other words, it is asserted that they never really appreciated beforehand the true genius of the Roman Catholic creed. Possibly not ; but surely that must have arisen from listening to the carefully-modulated and mildly- conceived Romanism of Dr. Newman, rather than to the plainer, stronger, and more sharply-defined accounts of the Ultramontane school. If it is easy to mistake in one direction the language of the latter, it is still easier to mis- take in the opposite direction the language of the former. To our minds Rome does the Protestant world a great service, and even her own converts the very opposite of a disservice, by making them understand vividly, before they join her, the yoke she claims to impose upon their intel- lects. Nothing has had that effect more conspicuously than the teaching of the Ultramontane school, and we believe that without that teaching there might have been far more misunderstanding than there is. Converts, as a rule, import the habits of mind in which they have been trained into their new faith, and find it most difficult and painful, if not sometimes utterly destructive to their belief, to unlearn them. It is well, then,not to under-rate the character of the change required of them, and were all Roman Catholic teachers as tender and subtle as Dr. Newman, that mistake would be oftener made. Englishmen may be apt to exaggerate what they think the idolatrous side of the Roman faith, but they hardly ever appreciate even adequately its steady intellectual pressure. There is fax more danger of that being under-rated than over-rated. And to our minds, the sharp, imperious character attributed by the Ultramontane teaching to the Roman faith is far more likely to convey to Englishmen the practical truth about Rome than the delicate lights and shades, the subtleties, the distinctions, the anxious moderation of Dr. Newman's descriptions. Protestants need distinct warning against Rome. Romaniaing Anglicans need a very difficult lesson as to the tree requirements of the Church they are ap- proaching. Without the Ultraznontanes neither lesson would have been adequately taught. Dr. Newman certainly would never have taught it.
Previous page
