PROFESSOR NEWMAN ON HIS BROTHER.*

WE regret the publication of this little book. It shows that Professor Newman's estrangement from his brother,—an estrangement doubtless due rather to the prejudice of the elder than to the prepossession of the younger brother, as Cardinal Newman himself indicated, not without some accent of misgiving, in the Apologia,—was so complete that he has read very little of the Cardinal's writings, and has never entered with anything like sympathetic interest into his character. That may be, and we believe it is, attributable

to the mistaken conduct of the elder brother, not to that of the younger ; but still, it surely should have been a

sufficient reason for not writing a book about him as distinct from his creed. No one can complain that Pro-

fessor Newman, holding his brother's faith to have been very misleading and mischievous, should set forth his reasons against it, and should re-enforce, so far as he may, the Protestantism against which his brother's career was one long struggle. But it is one thing to attack a creed, and another thing to attack a man, and an attack of the latter kind should, we think, be made only by those who have taken all the pains they can to understand him. Now, no one who reads this little book can for a moment suppose that Professor Newman

ever did understand his brother, or ever even made a serious effort to understand him. For instance :— "After my return from Turkey in 1883, I found my brother's book on the Arians in my mother's house. Only one passage struck me, and that only do I remember. In writing against Arius, the older bishop against whom Athanasius at length pre- vailed, my brother depreciated the authority of Fathers earlier than Athanasius, because the Church had not yet taught them how to expiess themselves : I feel myself audacious in here trusting my memory, for I have never seen the book since that one glance at it. But I have no time to lose now. He was an early bookworm in Gibbon; Gibbon's sly quotation from a Popish historian had taught him that Romanist erudition pronounced an the Ante- Nicene Fathers unsound. Therefore now my brother uncere- moniously sweeps them away."

Any one who knows Dr. Newman's book on The Arians of the Fourth Century, knows that a more hasty and misleading account of Dr. Newman's conception of the gradual way in

which the mind of the ante-Nicene Fathers awoke to the dis- tinctions between their view and the view that the Son of God was a creature who began to exist at a definite moment in time, could hardly be conceived than is here furnished on the

• Contributions oliiofty to the Early nisfevy of the late Cardinal, Newnan. With comments. By his 'Brother, P. W. Newman, Emeritus Professor of Uni- versity College, London. London; Kogan Paul, Trench, Trlibnor, and Co.

strength of a hasty glance, given more than fifty-seven years ago, and never since renewed. Again :—

" Tho next revelation came to me from two hymns written by my brother on his return home from Italy in November and December, 1832. They are two out of more. They were printed, but perhaps not published till later. I think I met them in my mother's house. I was shocked at thorn. How could he believe himself a faithful Anglican P And why did he not himself give me a copy P Ile perhaps know my temperament and distrusted it. As a little boy, I was a rattling talker ; and if a gentleman petted me, I was soon on his knee, quite at home ; and my father said of me to my mother before the family : 'Never tell a secret to that boy, for it will be sure to leak out from him.' That, by the way. However, when I afterwards put those hymns side by side with the wild violence of my brother against Mr. Kingsley, it

seemed to me almost an insanity My secret comment on these two hymns dates from 1.883, when I first had copies of them, They were only two out of the Lyra Apostolica I never cared to raad more."

Professor Newman has no knowledge, then, of his brother's poems in the Lyra Apostolica, with these two exceptions (which he dates after his brother's return from Italy instead of before his arrival there), and he did not care to know more of them. And yet he indulges in the sharpest criticism on Dr. Newman for not giving copies of them to himself. Does it not seem probable that Dr. Newman may have failed to do so in great measure because he knew that they would not be valued or appreciated? Though the fault of their estrangement doubtless lay originally with the elder brother, it would hardly have been a good way of removing it to offer for his younger brother's criticism poems of which he knew that they could find no sort of echo in that brother's mind. Now, we venture to say that a writer who knows no more of Dr. Newman's view of the gradual rise of clear dogmatic definitio-a than Professor Newman snatched from a hasty glance at one or two pages of The Arians of the Fourth Century, and who knows no more of Dr. Newman's verses than two pieces, and those amongst the least im- pressive and devotional, though not amongst the least remarkable, has no business to attempt an appreciation of the personal aide of his brother's religion. He com- plains, for instance, and not unnaturally, that in the Apologia, his brother merely said : " Dr. Hawkins taught me" this, "the Rev. W. James taught me" that. Well, if he had studied his brother's writings, as one who has felt it his duty to pass sentence upon his motives should, we think, have studied them, he would have learned to understand a good many of the considerations which, in a personal hietory such as the Apologia, it was impossible for Dr. Newman to explain without undue length and elaboration. Forexample, in Tract 85, which even Mr. Leslie Stephen has thought it his duty to read carefully, Professor Newman would have learnt how his brother had been convinced that, once granting the fact of a revelation from God to man, Dr. Newman regarded lati- tudinarianism as intrinsically impossible, inasmuch as it im- plied that though God had adopted an elaborate method for manifesting his will and his nature to us, be had yet left us to grope our way blindly and helplessly in discovering what it was that we were to believe. And even though one differed from another in the most absolute way as to what revelation teaches us, yet in the view of the latitudinarian neither of the two need be culpable for his error. We ourselves conceive that this argument is much too a priori to be conclusive in the sense of bringing us at one bound to so enormous an inference as the existence of some infallible human authority to which we can refer, and are bound to refer, concerning the drift of God's revelation. But undoubtedly an argument it is, and a strong argument, for holding that, a revelation once assumed, it must at least be possible to determine very clearly the general scope and significance of the teaching revealed. What we complain of in Professor Newman. is this, that while he has not taken the trouble to master even the most striking of his brother's writings ; while he dismisses The Arians of the Fourth Century with a contemptuous comment on a few sentences at which he once opened, and to which he has never again returned; while he sweeps away the poems in which the most personal religion of the man is contained, with a scornful attack on two of the least personal and most dogmatic of them,—he yet allows himself to use phrase after phrase which imply his belief in his brother's insincere and theatrical nature. For example :— "But when once ho &opt false colours and avowed himself a Romanist, every year improved his moral position. However much we wonder when one trained in Protestantism changes to Romanism, still we all know that eminently good and a few eminently able men do so change. No one feels unkindly or judges harshly if all is open and honourable. General opinion silently and steadily was setting in in favour of my brother. He had only to leave his reputation to others, and not bring back a. controversy twenty years old and more. Nevertheless, ho wrote to me an unexpected letter, in a gayer tone than usual, to inform me that he should soon publish a book which would show sonic people his conduct in a new light. Probably he did not guess how painfully I had studied his two hymns since 1833, and that I had judged them inexcusable, indefensible from one presenting himself as an Anglican. Of course, I made no reply,. only thought, 'Who will now road the stale controversy P' I do not know the exact year of this, perhaps 1862. But suddenly came from Charles Kingsley words which my brother resented, and from Kingsley a sharp reply. Soon I saw that this quarrel might sell my brother's book ; for he now could pose as a pious retired priest,. assailed about old affairs belonging to a Church which he had long left."

That charges Dr. Newman with " posing " in a false attitude. And before a brother should make such a charge as this,— which is, to those who know his writings well, as absurd as it is unjust,—he should at least take some pains to follow the course of his thought. Yet he charges him not only with posing in a false attitude, but with not being "able to understand the force of gentleness and modesty" (p. 117), this allegation being founded on the severity of his reply to Mr. Kingsley, whose attack upon him was entirely unprovoked as well as utterly unsupported by evidence. "His admirers tell me," says Professor Newman, "that he was very Christian. My life has been a long sadness that I never could see it in him.. His hymns in 1832 breathe contempt, defiance, and con-- ceit,"—i.e., the two which Professor Newman took the trouble to read, and remembered because they ran counter to all his own convictions, though he could have found plenty

which breathed a very different spirit. It is evident that Professor Newman has taken no pains to put a kind inter- pretation on his brother's conduct ; and we should not have been surprised, considering that the breach between them.

came in the first instance from the elder brother, at the Pro- fessor's remaining completely silent while the world praised and honoured one who, after being to him a most affectionate

brother, had thrown him off solely on dogmatic grounds.. But if he had written at all, he should have taken some pains to know what he was writing about, and the Professor has taken none. It would be hard to find anything concerning the Cardinal's course of thought which displayed more complete ignorance, and not only ignorance, but indifference to know,. than this little book. Per example, Professor Newman charges his brother with not having accepted "primitive Christianity," even in his Anglican days, but with choosing to prefer Nicene Christianity to the primitive Christianity. He can- not, then, have read even the remarkable sermon on "The Apostolical Christian," in which Newman gives his reasons. for identifying the Christianity of the apostolic age with the Christianity that be called Catholic. Yet this is one of the most characteristic and impressive of all his Anglican writings. We doubt if there is a single one of his brother's writings which Mr. F. W. Newman knows well. Even the Apologia has never been carefully studied, or he could not have written the pages (99 and 100) concerning Dr. Newman's retractation of his hard, words against the Catholic Church. After speculating whether the retractation was published by

some one else without Newman's permission, he says : "What was the truth about this half-and-half publication is an enigma. The Church of Rome must know all about it." As it happened two years and three-quarters before New- man joined the Church of Rome, that is absurd; and, as a matter of fact, he tells us all about the retracts.-

tion in the Apologia, speaking of it as done entirely on his own responsibility, and because he had learned even then to believe that the attacks he had made on Rome were, in his opinion, unjustifiable. Yet the only book of the late Cardinal's of which Professor Newman's criticism be- trays any real knowledge at all, is the Apologia, and that knowledge is of the most careless kind. Professor Newman has a good deal to say about the theory of an infallible Church which is acute; and with a good deal of it we agree ; but he should have limited his attack to his brother's creed, and

not sown broadcast aspersions on his sincerity and humility and genuineness, without making at least something like a decent attempt to understand his character as it has been revealed in writings at least as frank as his own, and a good deal more impressive. But what can we expect from a writer who wants to have the theory of absolution exposed by a Parliamentary discussion on a tentative Bill for making the use of priestly absolution a misdemeanour ? What would he say, we wonder, to a Bill of the same kind to punish prayer to God P Yet there are plenty of rationalists who think the latter as thorough-going a superstition as priestly absolution, and the more fundamental superstition of the two.