ISAAC WILLIAMS ON CARDINAL NEWMAN. T HE autobiography of Isaac Williams,—one
of the true Puseyites who was never, properly speaking, a New- manite, though he was for many years Newman's curate, and to the last a warmly attached friend,—bas just been edited by his brother-in-law, the Venerable Sir George Prevost, and published by Messrs. Longman, and it bears out most literally the estimate of him which the late Dean of St. Paul's has given us in his charming book on the Oxford Movement. "He caught," says Dean Church, " from Mr. Keble, like Fronde [Richard Hurrell Fronde], two characteristic habits of mind,—a strong depreciation of mere intellect compared with the less showy excellences of faithfulness to conscience and duty; and a horror and hatred of everything that seemed like display, or the desire of applause or of immediate effect. Intellectual depredators of intellect may deceive themselves, and do not always escape the snare which they fear; but in Isaac Williams there was a very genuine carrying-out of the Psalmist's words : ' Surely I have behaved and quieted myself ; I refrain my soul and keep it low, as a child that is weaned from its mother.' This fear of display in a man of singularly delicate and fastidious taste came to have something forced and morbid in it. It seemed sometimes as if in preaching or talking be aimed at being dull and clumsy. But in all that he did and wrote, he aimed at being true at all costs, and in the very depth of his heart; and though in his words we may wish sometimes for what we should feel to be more natural and healthy in tone, we never can doubt that we are in the presence of one who shrank from all conscious unreality, like poison." The little autobio- graphy itself,—hardly an autobiography, so limited is it in the field which it covers,—answers precisely to this description of Isaac Williams's character. Indeed the Dean had evidently had access to it before he wrote. It may be said to be almost oppressively unpretentious, and its one great object seems to have been to insist that Newman gave a totally false direction to the Oxford Movement ; not only that his con- version misrepresented its true drift, but that his essentially alien genius overpowered and perverted its moral character. Isaac Williams took his whole stamp from the Kebles, not chiefly even from John Keble, more still, it would seem, from Thomas Keble, who was John Keble with all his deep devotional feeling, but minus his poetic imagination ; and this want of poetic imagination, we can well believe, was almost a merit in the eyes of a man who regarded anything like dis-
tinction and popularity as a misfortune, if not exactly a fault. Isaac Williams was the most accomplished writer of Latin verse of his day ; indeed, he tells us that in his early College years, he thought in Latin, and had to translate his Latin verse into English when he first attempted English versification. Yet his English poetry has a humility which gives it a distinction of its own. Our readers will best under- stand the shrinking, and yet loving reserve of the man, if we quote one of the most characteristic of his little poems, a poem on " The Mole : "-
" THE FELLOW-LABOURER.
My little mole, two callings have we two, One master: where old earth is hardest bound, And shrub stretching his limbs with much ado, Thou art there with thy mattock and thy hoe, And many-fingered shovel ; yet no sound Speaks of thy whereabouts, nor heard nor found Save in thy mountain monuments ; kind to you Should we be, fellow-labourers of the ground. My little miner with the velvet coat, We are 'mid things we deem not; didst e'er note Blue sky, and flower, and field, or the sweet throat Of birds around thee ? To our work again: Round us too tents are spread unseen by men, And companies too bright for human ken."
There is not a little phraseology there which, as Dean Church says, almost aims at being " clumsy ;" and yet, what an impression the whole gives us of the man's religion of reserve ! When he published the Tract No. 80, on " Reserve in Religious Teaching," a great hubbub arose, as if he had advocated a kind of Jesuitical suppression of truth. In fact, the tract expressed the essence of his own religions attitude, his dread of overstatement, of superficial statement, of premature state- ment, in short of anything like unreality in religious teaching, a feeling which is little more than that eagerness for modesty and carefulness, and for the gradual unfolding of what is most sacred, which is more or less prefigured in this comparison of his religious work to the modest labours of the mole.
We are not altogether surprised, then, to find Isaac Williams asserting that from the first, coming fresh as be did from the school of the Kebles,—indeed, from that of the plainer of the two Kebles, Thomas Keble,—he was more or less shocked by Newman's apparent eagerness for effect. "I can remember a strong feeling of difference I first felt on
acting with Newman, from what I had been accustomed to;
that he was in the habit of looking for effect, for what was sensibly effective, which from the Bisley and Fairford school, I had been long habituated to avoid. I had been taught there to do one's duty in faith, and leave the effect to God, and that all the more earnestly, because there were no sympathies from without to answer. There was a felt but unexpressed dissonance of this kind, but perhaps it became afterwards harmonised as we acted together." (p. 54.) Again :—" The domestic and poetic and social element in our Newman's character appeared to me providentially intended to correct that constitutional restlessness of intellect, that want of balance and repose in the soul, which appears the malady of both brothers [viz., John Henry and Frank W. New- man]. But our Newman, partly from circumstances, and partly under the false guise of mortification, has stifled those his domestic affections, thereby greatly increasing this his intellectual malady, whereas I never thought so highly of him, and he never seemed to me so high and saint-like in his character, as when he was with his mother and sisters. The softness and repose of his character then came out, and so corrected that restless intellect to which he has been a prey." And further on in the autobiography, Isaac Williams goes on to assert, what we suppose to be a matter of fact, that " of all who took any part, however slight and trivial, in the "Tracts for the Times," I can make out fourteen, and I do not think there were any more,—Fronde, Newman, John and Thomas Keble, Arthur Perceval, John Bowden, Isaac Williams, Pusey, Benjamin Harrison (since Archdeacon), William Palmer (author of the Origins Liturgics;), Thomas
Mozley, Sir George Prevost, Anthony Buller, and R. F. Wilson,"—and that of these, Newman was the only one who entered the Church of Rome. The secessions were all amongst the younger of Newman's followers, not amongst his colleagues in starting the movement of 1833. The seceders, he says, "were persons who looked upon him at a slight distance, or mixed with him on feelings of inferiority as younger or less intimate, and especially such as sat under him." None of his original colleagues followed him. From
all this Isaac Williams infers that " the Movement " was essentially revolutionised by Newman's influence ; that it was Puseyite, and would have remained Puseyite, had not Newman's " restless " intellect diverted it from its true course.
Isaac Williams may perhaps be right. But what would Pnseyism have been without Newman, without his tracts, without his sermons, without his enthusiasm, without his charm ? Would it have been even as much as the Simeonite movement at Cambridge ? Would the Christian world at large ever have heard of it at all ? In our opinion, Newman's dominant idea, the idea of the Church as not simply the witness, but, according to St. Paul's incidental hyperbole, "the pillar and ground" of the truth, misled him. If submission to the Church is the only means by which access to revealed truth can be obtained, it follows, as Newman ultimately inferred, that the Church must share God's infallibility, and that every deliberate resistance to the voice of the Church is resistance to God. That was just what his Puseyite colleagues began by preaching, but what their domestic instincts forbade them to push to its true end. They were full of filial feeling to their own mother, the Church, though they could never bear to think of their own mother's unfilial conduct to the Roman Catholic Church, and repudiated the name " Protestant " as they would have repudiated the adjective " nnfilial." They felt, nevertheless, that many of the changes which the Protestant revolution had introduced, suited them. They treasured the quiet domestic life and domestic affections. They had no desire to become members 'of religious Orders. They thought, with Wordsworth, that those are the really wise who never roam, but are "true to the kindred points of Heaven and home." They almost all of them married. They distrusted the ambitious and exalted types of religion. Like Isaac Williams, they loved the humility of the mole. And no doubt, for the great majority of men, they were right. Domestic life is the natural life of average men, and the domestic affections are the best pro- tection for the religions affections.
Still, it is childish to deny that Newman had a great deal to say for himself. No one can assert that our Lord, who " had not where to lay his head," was " true to the kindred points of Heaven and home." The Apostles, when they were told to go and baptise all nations, were not told to be "true to the kindred points of Heaven and home." The institution of the the Church, as the Puseyites took it up, and as Newman alone developed it, was not precisely a domestic institution. Even the Evangelicals have perceived that the spiritual affections sometimes require the mortification of the domestic affections, and that a Church which would be, as the Church once was, -" the missionary of nations, the associate of history, the patron of art, the vanquisher of the sword," cannot always be "true to the kindred points of Heaven and home." Isaac Williams's criticism of Newman, though very characteristic and significant, is hardly the final judgment on Cardinal Newman.
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