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ARCHDEACON RARE'S CONTEST WITS ROME.* IT has been Archdeacon Hare's praiseworthy practice for some years past to avail himself of his ecclesiastical office in order to communicate to his clergy, for their instruction and guidance, the results of his reflection and reading so far as they bear upon the religions controversies and Church politics of the day. He not only pronounces dicta ex cathedra' , but furnishes his less learned brethren with the evidence and reasoning in detail upon which those dicta are based, in the shape in which they are perhaps most available for immediate use—that of notes, often swelling into elaborate essays, and copiously strewed with quotations from the writers whose authority he has to adduce or whose opinions to confute. In the case of a writer whose learning was less genuine and extensive than Mr. Hare's is well known to be, such a practice would be superfluous or tedious; but he draws from original sources, and traverses such a wide and curious field, that to skim the notes to his charges is as pleasant as to dip into Butler, Southey, Kenelm Digby, or Disraeli the Unofficial ; and to master them would be a good way towards becoming at once a well-informed theologian and
i an adept n the religious and ecclesiastical politics of the last dozen years. In his Charge of 1851, he dealt chiefly with the war waging between the Church of England and the Romish communion in England; and in the notes to the Charge now just published, selecting Dr. Newman as the champion of the Papal party, he goes at great length into the points dwelt on in that father's famous Lectures on the Difficulties of the Anglicans, and on the present position of Catholics in England,—two works which will ever be memorable as exemplifications at once of the nature of Ultra- Catholicism in the middle of the nineteenth century, and of the character of intellect for which it possesses irresistible attractions. For if the fullest and purest development of so-called Catholic prin- ciples be sought, it is scarcely in Italy or in Spain that one would look for it, but among the new converts, whose zeal and faith and hope and love are all warm and fresh from the first embraces of their ideal mother, ere yet the actual has had time to mar and to intrude upon the charms enhanced by the longing of an absent love, and in this country, where the presence of a rival and domi- nant church operates to suppress or modify whatever is offensive to the taste, the intellect, or the morals of a cultivated European community. And Catholics themselves would scarcely select a more favourable type, take him altogether, than John Henry New- man, of the highest class of men who find the doctrines, discipline, and practices of the Papal Church concordant with their reason and conscience, and promotive of their happiness, peace of mind, and general wellbeing.
Archdeacon Hare 18 no vulgar controversialist. A man whose
intellect is raised higher above the narrowness, or whose heart is more free from the rancour of Exeter Hall, it would not be easy to find. A gentleman, a philosopher, a scholar, he enters the arena of religious polemics to vindicate truth, honesty, and sound reason, and to•protest against such violations of them all as go far to turn intellectual error into crime and mistakes of judgment into wilful and therefore moral perversion. Vehement the Arch- deacon undoubtedly is; not shrinking from hitting a hard blow where his object requires the prostration of his adversary, and not perhaps altogether without the natural relish of the secular Eng- lishman for a stand-up fight without the gloves; but no malice is apparent in his combativeness, and a generous temper is continu- ally breaking forth in his fiercest onslaughts. How little he is to be confounded with ordinary Protestant champions of the platform and the pulpit, may be seen from a touching passage in allusion to the recent 'defection of his friend Archdeacon Manning. Few of us would retain so vividly, or at least express so warmly, our sense of the excellences of one who had left us and gone over to our adversaries, whether the desertion were on a question concerning the disputes of this world or of the unseen.
"We in this diocese, when we are speaking this year of those who have
abandoned their spiritual mother to give themselves up to the Romish schism, are not speaking of strangers, are not speaking of those who are per- sonally indifferent to us. Alas! by a mysterious dispensation, through the dark gloom of which my eyes have vainly striven to pierce, we have to mourn over the loss, we have to mourn over the defection and desertion, of one whom we have long been accustomed to honour, to reverence, to love,—of one who for the last ten years has taken a leading part in every measure adopted for the good of the diocese,—of one to whose eloquence we have so often listened with delight, sanctified by the holy purposes that eloquence was ever used to promote,—of one the clearness of whose spiritual vision it seemed like presumption to distrust, and the purity of whose heart, the sanctity of whose motives, no one knowing him can question. For myself, associated as I have been with him officially, and having found one of the chief blessings of my office in that association,—accustomed to work along with him in so many undertakings, to receive encouragement and help from his godly wisdom, and, notwithstanding many strong differences and almost oppositions of opinion, to take sweet counsel together, and walk in the house of God as brothers,—I can only wonder at the inscrutable dispensation by which such a man has been allowed to fall under so withering, soul-deadening a spell, and repeat with awe to myself and to my friends, Let him who thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.'
"Our whole Church cannot but mourn over the loss of one of the holiest
of her sons, over one who seemed to have a special gift for winning hearts to God. The thought that such a man—of whom it might hava been ex- pected that he would be specially secured by the gifts both of nature and of grace from the blindness which surrenders the reason and conscience to the corruptions and tyranny of Rome—has yet become a victim to the pestilence • The Contest with Rome ; a Charge to the Clergy of the Arehdeaconry of Lewes delivered at the Ordinary Visitation in 1851. With Notes especially in Answer to Dr. Newman's recent Lectures. By Julius Charles Htae, M.A. Published by Parker and Son. which has been stalking through our Church,—while it convinces us hosi terrible the power of that pestilence must needs be, should at the same time withhold us from judging too severely of those who have deserted us along with him. It may increase our horror of the pestilence itself; it may strengthen our conviction of the necessity of guarding against its deadly fury ; but it should at all events teach us that we ought not to impute evil motives or absolute silliness to those who have fallen into the selfsame error with Henry Manning." Into the multifarious topics of the present Charge, resting on a substratum of notes of several times its own breadth, it is not within our limits to follow. Sufficient indication of the matter to be found there will be given by stating, that Dr. Newman's errors are shown to spring mainly from two sourees,—an inca- pacity or extreme carelessness in the investigation of the historical facts upon which his conclusions are based, and a relentless push- ing of merely logical or syllogistic inferences, when either the premises have been hastily adopted, or the heart and the prac- tical reason should come in to check or modify the conclusions before they can be applied to men and human life. The general mode in vogue with the Tractarian party of using and citing evi- dence, is admirably described in a note on Dr. Newman's manner of dealing with history. "The whole practice of the Catenee Patruni, by which the Tractarians from the first tried to establish their propositions, arose from the same intellectual want. When ideas are merely the results of comparison and abstraction and generalization and classification, we need a multitude of witnesses to help us in constructing them. But what would the Duke of Wellington have said to a man who brought him a eatena of generals to tell him what he was to do ? or what would Shakspere have made out of a catena of poets and critics? The intuitive mind proceeds at once to the truth, and bursts the este= by which authority would bind it. Nay, Dr. Newman himself had too much life in him to submit permanently to this bondage. In his Essay, on Development he has burst all his old came asunder ; though, from not knowing what better to substitute for them—not knowing that the truth makes free, and that this freedom is its own divine law—he has taken shelter from the waywardness and frowardness of his own under- standing by girding himself with the chain of an absolute authority. Yet in this essay also the old tendency displays itself. In every part of it. he tries to establish his propositions by scraping together every kind of authority with which his great reading will supply him ; and these are often con- strained to bear witness to propositions they never dreamt of. For he rejects all the processes of ordinary criticism. He seldom think, of cross-examining his witnesses, of asking what they meant to say, what Wtheir position, in- tellectual and moral, they could not but say ; though very often he puts his own meaning, not seldom a very incongruous one, into their words. Indeed, this mode of dealing with history, and with the writers of former times, is that which is habitual among Romanists, as any one familiar with their writings must be aware. They rake up whatever they Can find that appears to favour: their purpose. Whether it be really favourable, they do not in- quire. They repudiate criticism as uncatholic, as Protestant. Their Cations are, that an opinions held by their Church must be true, and that everybody, who ever spoke the truth must have said what their Church says. This is their mode of obtaining what they call a Catholic consensus. This process, in another region of literature, is exemplified continually and bYten very beautifully, in The Broad Stone oef Honour, and still more in the later
writings of its author. • "That such a method, if method it can be called, is altogether lawless and chaotic—that it may be made to favour any arbitrary result—is plain. Take a sentence or two here and there from this father, and a couple of ex- pressions from another ; add half a canon of this council, a couple of in- cidents out of some ecclesiastical historian, an anecdote from a chronicler, two conjectures of some critic, and half-a-dozen drachms of a schoolman ; mix them up in rhetoric quant. suff., and shake them well together, —and thus we get at a theological development. But who except the prescriber can tell what the result will be ? and may not he produce any result he chooses ? Yet this is held out as the method by which we are to be preserved from drawing false inferences from the words of Scripture."
This passage indicates the sort of knowledge which should be spread among our people to counteract the insidious advances of superstition and priestly pretension. A propagandism which pro- ceeds by gross perversions of history, and gross violation of histo- rical methods, is surely best met by a general knowledge of his- tory, and by inculcation of the true historical method. Dr. New- man may be presumed to know best the audience of " Anglicans " whom he in main part created, and whom he particularly addressed in his Lectures; and it is evident that he reckons on such ignorance of history among them as will allow him to make statements which it is lamentable to suppose any body of educated Englishmen could listen to without shouts of ridicule and groans of indignation. Here again, by quite a new path, are we led to perceive that a re- verence for facts is to be the characteristic of progress in our age; as those who are most retrogressive are forcing us, if we would counteract them, to search into the truth of facts, as the battle- ground on which, if at all, they are to be opposed and defeated. For those of our adult population who are brought into contact with proselytizing Romauists, or are interested in the ques- tions between the Churches, the notes to this volume will be both useful and agreeable reading. Those especially who may have been puzzled by the audacious paradoxes and reckless cleverness of Newman's Lectures, will here find audacious paradox overthrown by a learned and accurate statement of the truth, and reckless cleverness supplanted by sound sense and high feeling. The change from the Romish priest to the Protestant clergyman is like changing from a brilliant argument in a, stifling crowded Court of Chancery, to a walk by the sea-shore with one's manly well-informed friend, divested of wig and gown and all manner of sophistries and chicaneries.
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