BOOKS.

DR. NEWMAN'S ANGLICAN ESSAYS.*

THESE essays of Dr. Newman's were almost all of them written and published while he was still a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and a member of the Established Church,—most of them for the British Critic, one of them for the Tracts for the Times, and only one (that on Keble) just after his conversion for the Dublin Re- view. They are now republished by their author,—chiefly that he may accompany this reprint of his former defence of his position as an Anglican,--a reprint which would be sure to be made in any case, and to be used 'against his authority as a Roman Catho- lic,—by such explanations as would show why his former conclu- * Essays, Critical and Historical. By John Henry Newman, Formerly follow of Oriel College, Oxford. 2 vole. London : Basil Montagu Pickering. 1871. dons had ceased to approve themselves to his own judgment. This accordingly he has done, so far as it was needed,—for of course many of his Anglican principles, many of those at least which,

were not controversial in relation to Rome, need no correction from him now,—and we have accordingly in these two volumes fifteen essays of considerable interest, of which fourteen are more on-

less theological, accompanied by very interesting notes marking what Dr. Newman now regards as the weak points of his former- positions. With only two of these essays will it be desirable for- us to deal ; for many of them are so identified with the peculiar standing ground of the high Anglican movement, that their argu- ments and modes of thought would only have weight with those completely imbued with the ideas of Dr. Pusey's party in the Estab- lished Church,—ideas which we need hardly say are far less intel- lectually apprehensible to us than the ideas of the Roman Catholic- Church itself. And this leads us to observe that while we know no writings in the English language so pure and classical in their- style, so full of refined and sustained power, of exalted feeling,.

and of subtle knowledge of human character, as the Oxford and Littlomore sermons of Dr. Newman, and esteem them indeed.

superior in everything but eloquence and a certain rapidity and freedom of style to the volumes of urinous which he has published since lie became a Catholic, the critical essays published during the same period appear to us just as much more cramped and embarrassed than his essays and lectures of recent date.. Perhaps this may be due in some degree to the fact that criticism,—' reviewing ' in the narrower sense,—is the intention, of nearly all these essays, and that a mind so powerful and original as Dr. Newman's moves with difficulty on the lines of thought prescribed to it by another, aud would find it much easier to present the same subjects from a point of view of its own. choosing. It is also, we think, due in some degree to the constant sense of difficulty with which Dr. Newman,—whose ultimate basis in religious creed was dogmatic authority, while his conservative affection for the Anglican Church compelled him to exhaust every plea for her ecclesiastical identity with the Church of the Fathers before abandoning her,—met, even in his own mind, the obvious superficial objections to the dogmatic authority of a Church who- has for some centuries known her own theology so very imper- fectly, and hardly made any preparations or taken any care to enforce it at all. Certain it is that most of these essays have an anxious and difficult movement about them quite foreign to Dr. Newman's usual style, as if the author were picking his way blindfold, like the accused in the old ordeal, over heated plough-

shares,—or rather, perhaps, were risking a cause which he loved,. and believed in his heart to be the cause of right, on the trust- worthiness of his own lance and shield. Dr. Newman's Anglican. criticisms, then, seem to us to have less ease, loss freedom, less. richness of illustration, and less breadth of thought, than any others of his writings known to us, and to explain better than anything else from his pen a celebrated poetic portrait of Dr.. Newman, drawn while he was still an Anglican :- " And amongst ua one

Who most has suffered, takes dejectedly His seat upon the intellectual throne ; And all his store of sad experience he Lays bare of wretched days ; Tells us his misery's birth and growth and signs, And how the dying spark of hope was fed, And how the breast was soothed and how the head, And all his hourly-varied anodynes."

That never seemed to us in the least a true description of the author of the Oxford Sermons, of the poems in the Lyre Apostolica, of the Development of Christian Doctrine, of Loss and Gain, or of the various and vigorous books of more recent days, especially the Apologia pro Vita Sufi, for in all these there has been a depth of power, an elasticity of faith, a richness of imagination, and a fountain of inward strength approach.. ing at times to rapture, quite inconsistent with the spiritual valetudinarianism Mr. Arnold has here painted for us. Ba in these Anglican criticisms there is at least a preponderance of embarrassed thought and eo many oare-worn reconnaissances of hostile positions as help us at least in some degree to understand how such a conception of Dr. Newman should have gained public

acceptance.

To us the most interesting of these criticisms are the two on "The

iutrocluction of Rationalistic Principles into Revealed Religion," a republication of one of the Tracts for the Times, in the first volume,—and that on " Private Judgment," in the second volume, both of which carry us a good way beyond the specific doctrine of the Anglican party, and which have, too, the advantage, for our purpose, of being very closely connected in subject-matter. It will be convenient to take the principle of the second essay first. Dr. Newman begins, then, with observing that, much as we hear in praise of ' private judgment,' there is a good deal more distrust felt of it by the conscience of society in relation to religious matters whenever it leads to a change of faith, than at all accords with this general panegyric. A man who has changed his religion and become a convert, whether from one shade of Protestantism to another, or from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism, or vice versa, -so far from being admired for his exercise of private judgment, is usually treated with a great amount of mistrust. We say of such a convert, Dr. Newman observes with his characteristic dramatic insight, "No wonder, such a one has lived so long abroad ;" or, 4C he is of such a very imaginative turn ;" or " he is so excitable and odd ;" or, " what could he do? all his family turned ;" or, "it was a re- action inconsequence of an injudicious education ;" or, " trade makes men cold ;" or, "a little learning makes men shallow in their reli- gion ;" in other words, the impression of mankind is that men change their religion,—even though it be a change from what we disagree with to what we agree with,—from extra-rational feelings or motives, otherwise we should not look so distrustfully on such changes, even when they are in the right direction. Dr. Newman accepts this view, and even adds that no man can know anything of himself without suspecting all kinds of imperfect and irrational bias in everything he does,—will know his own tendency to be led away by superficial sentiment, or to be misled by half-knowledge, or to be unconsciously swayed by some worldly principle ; and therefore no wise man would trust the mere adventure of his own judgment in so difficult a matter as a change of religion, unless he could find some warrant for supposing he was under divine guid- ance. We must, therefore, look how far changes of religion through private judgment are treated in revelation. Now the most common changes of faith are such as that of Lydia, whose heart was opened while she heard St. Paul preach, the result being that she was baptized and her household, i.e., a number of servants or slaves, who, no doubt, simply followed their mistress, without attempting to form a separate judgment of their own. Here was a case, then, of change of religion with extremely little of ' inquiry' in it. Lydia herself felt her heart stirred and was baptized, and as Lydia did, so did her servants. In the same way exaotly, national conversions, when thousands at a time were baptized, must have been due to extremely little of intel- lectual inquiry and investigation, extremely little of private judg- ment' in the modern Protestant sense. Such, more or less, too, was the character of the conversion of three thousand at once on the day of Pentecost, which was more made on a public than a 'private' j udg- ment, as being due to the social impulse of a large company of men in whom a new application of old religious principles probably pro- laced the change. But there are some cases in which something more like our ' private judgment' was appealed to, as when our Lord tells the Jews to "search the Scriptures," on the ground that they testified of him, and the Bereans are said to be more noble than the Thessalonican Jews, in that they " searched the Scriptures daily, whether those things were so." Yet, observes Dr. Newman, these passages, further examined, will show that they sanction not a direct inquiry about doctrine, but about the notes or signs by which a true teacher of doctrine was to be recognized : —" Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think yo have eternal life, and they are they which testify of Me." " Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed Me, for he wrote of Me." In other words, private judgment in religious matters is used in revelation not to seek truth directly, but the living teachers of truth. And in fact, "it is much easier to form a correct and rapid judgment of persons than of books or of doctrines." "There is something in the sight of persons or of bodies of men which speaks to us for approval or disapprobation with a distinctness to which pen and ink are unequal. This is just the kind of evidence which is needed for use, in cases in which private judgment is divinely Intended to be the means of our conversion."

So far the essay on private judgment, in which Dr. New- man concludes that the exercise of private judgment, as guided by God, is intended to help us to discern who is the divinely inspired living teacher of religion, not directly what is the divine doctrine itself. In the essay on Rationalism he virtually assumes the result at which he arrives in the other essay, for he .defines the rationalistic tendency as that which measures reve- lation by human reason, and is disposed to reject whatever .does not justify itself to human reason, even though the ra- tionalist has previously determined who is the true organ of revelation, and to whom he should listen as the medium of the oracles of God :••••••44 To rationalize in matters of Revelation is to make our reason the standard and measure of the doctrines re- vealed; to stipulate that those doctrines should be such as to carry

with them their own justification ; to reject them, if they come in collision with our existing opinions or habits of thought, or are with difficulty harmonized with our existing stock of knowledge."

" As regards Revealed Truth, it is not Rationalism to set about to ascertain, by the exercise of reason, what things are attainable by reason, and what are not; nor, in the absence of an express Revelation, to inquire into the truths of Religion, as they come to us by nature ; nor to determine what proofs are necessary for the acceptance of a Revela- tion, if it be given; nor to reject a Revelation on the plea of insufficient proof ; nor, after recognizing it as divine, to investigate the moaning of its declarations, and to interpret its language ; nor to nee its doctrines, as fur as they can be fairly used, in inquiring into its divinity ; nor to compare and connect them with our previous knowledge, with a view of making them parts of a whole ; nor to bring them into dependence on each other, to trace their mutual relations, and to pursue them to their legitimate issues. This is not Rationalism ; but it is Rationalism to accept the Revelation, and then to explain it away ; to speak of it as the Word of God, and to treat it as the word of man ; to refuse to let it speak for itself ; to claim to be told the why and the how of God's deal- ings with us, as therein described, and to assign to Him a motive and a scope of our own ; to stumble at the partial knowledge which Ho may give us of them ; to put aside what is obscure, as if it had not been said at all ; to accept ono-half of what has been told us, and not the other half ; to assume that the contents of Revelation are also its proof ; to frame some gratuitous hypothesis about them, and then to garble, gloss, and colour them, to trim, clip, pare away, and twist them, in order to bring them into conformity with the idea to which we have subjected them."

And Dr. Newman illustrates his definition of Rationalism by a criti- cism of Mr. Erskine's doctrine that all Revelation is "manifestation," is light, and that nothing can be of the essence of Revelation which does not at once make good its hold on the human mind as a source of immediate spiritual attraction. He, on the contrary, maintains that not only a mystery—which is not light, but for the time only a visible gloom—ought to be held, and held reverentially, by every one who has accepted the revelation in which it is embodied, but that oven that which more than puzzles, which to some extent offends our finite reason, should be accepted on the authority of a revealing power once admitted as divine.

It will be seen at once in how close a connection Dr. Newman's

view, that it is the divine teacher, not the divine doctrine, whom we are enabled to find by " private judgment," stands with this definition of Rationalism as the system which rejects amongst the alleged contents of a Revelation all that does not at once commend itself to the mind of the human recipient. If we could not, in Dr. Nowinan's opinion, judge of the living organ of inspiration by surer tests than those by which we can directly judge of the truth of its contents, it could not be our duty to subordinate such moral

judgment as we have as to those contents, to such moral judgment as we had formed as to their source. It is only because we have surely identified the voice of certain teachers with the voice of God, that we are bound to accept their words, even when they say, what, if we judged only by the substance of the revelation, would either simply puzzle, or even, it may be, strongly repel us.

We do not deny that there is much truth in Dr. Newman's statement that men are so formed as to judge much more surely and truly of the character of a living teacher than directly of the truth of the lessons he communicates, though the latter is, of course, one of the most important elements in judging of the former. Still

less do we deny that if once we can be satisfied that any such teacher speaks the mind of God, we are bound to accept mys- teries which do not carry their own illuminating power with them, no less than truths which do, just as the child accepts from the parent a great deal of what is to him mysterious warning.and guidance, of which he only finds the full value long afterwards.

But there are two great difficulties in making such an application of these principles to our religious life as Dr. Newman intends ;- one is, that in the extremely dubious state of much of the external evidence as to the details of Revelation, it is by no means possible to assume with any certainty that prophet, or apostle, or Christ

did say all that Scripture reports, so that internal evidence becomes of very considerable importance even for the purpose of supporting the contents of Revelation ; just as the child who had to infer his father's wish from the comparison of apparently very different and sometimes inconsistent reports would be in a very different posi- tion from one who heard it directly from his own mouth. The other difficulty is, that it is hardly possible to extend the principle as to the greater ease of .discovering a divine teacher than a divine truth from individuals to bodies of men, i.e., from inspired man to in- spired institutions, because with relation to the latter there is no room for that simplicity and depth of moral impression which helps us to know of men whether or not they have :tehxeawoprldes, of eternal life.' Could worthy persons of the present day in a

position corresponding to Lydia's, to take Dr. Newman's example, judge between an institution headed (in England) by Archbishop Manning, an institution headed by Archbishop Tait, and an institution headed by the Wesleyan Conference, with any confi- dence which of the three was God's appointed divine teacher to instruct them in the Christian Revelation? And if not, the whole advantage of resolving the problem as to the contents of Revela- tion into the simpler problem as to the organ of Revelation, is lost to us.

Few as there are of these essays which do not contain thoughts and suggestions much wider and deeper than any peculiar to the Anglican creed from the point of which they were written,—we may mention parenthetically that the supplementary note as to the Igna- tian Epistles is a wonderfully acute bit of historical criticism,—their value will be diminished to the ordinary reader by the fact that, as an Anglican, Dr. Newman necessarily took a much narrower view of the issues between doubt and faith, than he has taken since he entered the Roman Catholic Church. Before that time, his imagination, in mapping out the intellectual issues of theology, followed, as it were, the direction of artificial embaukmeuts, canals, and viaducts ; since then it has apparently seen how completely insignificant these are as compared with the courses of the great rivers and natural watersheds of thought, on which, in fact, the more artificial lines of communication aro dependent, and by which they are determined.