DR. ABBOTT'S ATTACK ON CARDINAL NEWMAN.

DR. ABBOTT is an eminent scholar, a genuinely Christian- minded writer, and a critic of considerable power. But be is a little too much of the schoolmaster, and when a great writer offends him as Cardinal Newman has offended him by some of his views,—views which are more or less open to sharp criticism, but not open to the kind of criticism which Dr. Abbott indulges in,—he is so indignant that he sets him- self to a sort of theological caning which ill becomes him, and which to a certain extent, we must say, makes him, what it is hard to make a man of Dr. Abbott's power, even ridiculous. In the book which Messrs. Macmillan have just published, to which he gives the name of " Philomythus," whereby he means to describe Newman as a lover of fables, and inflicts a severe moral castigation on him for his delinquencies in this respect, he inserts a general disclaimer of anything like personal criticism, which, like the majority of such disclaimers, is very inconsistent with the general drift of the book. "Nothing will be said in these pages," writes Dr. Abbott, "against Newman as an individual ; and whenever be is described as deceiving and misleading others, it must be also understood that he is represented as doing this in. perfect sincerity, because he has first deceived and misled himself. But the very absence of charges against the man will constitute the severest of charges against the system which made him what he became." "The very absence of charges against the man ! " Why, the first charge made against the man, and made within a few lines of this strange disclaimer, is that Newman's religion was throughout a reli- ion of fear. Besides, whatever the system was "which made him what he became," it was not a system in which he was brought up, but which he himself freely adopted, and may be said to have constructed for himself in a far truer sense than one theologian in a thousand can be said freely to adopt and construct the system in which

he ultimately rests. Newman's sermons, says Dr. Abbott, " appear to exhibit a theologian who feared Christ far more than be loved Him ; who regarded God as a centre of dogma rather than as a loving Father ; and to whom the Gospel brought news not so much of hope as of terror."

And this is the man who wrote " The Dream of Gerontius," a poem which contains one of the most touching and even over- whelming expressions of love for Christ which is to be found

in the whole range of English literature. How far even the verbal disclaimer with which Dr. Abbott prefaces his caning is "entirely sincere," we may judge by such a passage as that on page 137, in which he speaks of Newman's " loose employment of words," and adds :—" By loose,' I do not mean slovenly ; for, on the contrary, it is highly (though uncon- sciously) artistic; but loose' in the sense of ve1•ging on im- moral shiftiness. This mischief arises from a disbelief in the use of words as a means to the attainment of truth. It is this habit in Newman that more than any other has

given rise to the impression that-he-is not entirely sincere. But the main basis for the charge of insincerity is afforded

by his own confession that sometimes he said a little more

than, he meant in order that he might be supposed to mean what he really did mean ; and after all, if a man does his best

to make you understand his real meaning, although he may take a crooked path towards his end, he cannot be accused of real insincerity, but only of contempt for his readers and con- tempt for language in general." The letter to Sir W. H. Cope, referred to to bear out this statement that Newman confessed to having sometimes said more than he meant, does not

in the least bear out the allegation. The letter, which concerns his controversy with Kingsley, and was written a long time afterwards, on the occasion of Kingsley's

death, only asserts that Newman was not angry at the time when he first encountered Mr. Kingsley's accusations, though he may have seemed to be so ; but that he had found

it necessary to express indignation at charges which deserved indignation, if he did not wish to have it supposed that he acquiesced in them. In point of fact, we do not think Dr.

Abbott quite sincere in disclaiming any charge against Newman

of insincerity. The whole book is one long charge of habitual insincerity of mind, all the deeper for being in great measure so ingrained in his habits of thought and practice that it was, in Dr. Abbott's belief, unconscious. But a great part of his attack does in fact imply, in our opinion, conscious

as well as unconscious insincerity. How any man can have written the description of what Dr. Abbott calls the process of "ecclesiastical lubrication," and illustrated it from Newman's letters to Keble about the retention of his in-

cumbency at St. Mary's for a year or two after he had begun to think that he might ultimately be compelled to leave the Anglican Church, and to submit to Rome, we cannot under-

stand. In that and many other chapters of his book, Dr. Abbott, if he judged himself with anything like the

schoolmasterish severity with which he judges Newman, would confess that he is using language very loosely indeed if he does not mean to convey the impression that Dr. Newman picked and chose words for the purpose of imposing both on himself and on others, for the purpose of excusing himself for doing what he suspected to be wrong, and of inducing others to give

him fresh excuses to do what he thought wrong. But whatever Dr. Abbott thinks of Newman, he evidently does not think the worse of himself for taking all possible credit for formally

acquitting Newman of insincerity, and yet conveying to every one who reads the book the impression that Newman was one of the most artistic and sophisticated manipulators of evidence who ever palmed themselves off on the world as religious teachers.

We say this while agreeing to a considerable extent with Dr. Abbott's criticism on the evidence for the special ecclesiastical I miracles to which Cardinal Newman gave his very doubtful and hesitating support. But what we do not in the least agree in, is that Cardinal Newman's treatment of those miracles was of a kind to persuade ordinary people to accept them as miracu- lous. On the contrary, we hold that nine people out of ten who have read his essays would say that they very much doubted how far Dr. Newman himself, at the time he wrote these essays, believed in any one of the miracles, as miracles, except the cure of the blind man at Milan described by St. Ambrose, and the supernatural hindrance to the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple under the Emperor Julian. And as Dr. Abbott him- self evidently thinks that the former event was one of the kind which he himself accepts,—though not as miraculous,— under the classification of faith-healing, and that there is a good deal of plausibility, to say the least, in holding that something quite out of the way, and which any one who was satisfied on other grounds of the existence of miraculous events in the history of the Church might not unreasonably ascribe to miraculous causes, did happen to cause the failure of the rebuilding of the Temple, we deny altogether that Cardinal Newman's treatment of these ecclesiastical miracles was decep- tive and insincere. It reflected most naturally and candidly his own hesitating attitude of mind. Dr. Abbott is very unfair in writing as if, at the time these essays were published, and even at the time at which Newman's " Apologia " was composed, there was any of the ground which certainly exists now, for attributing the marvels which are now called " faith-healing " to natural, though very obscure, causes. The scientific mind has not long awakened to the belief that mere suggestion, in special conditions of the nervous system, is a vera caasa of great physical and physiological changes. Twenty-five years ago, and still more, thirty-eight years ago, the notion that the stigmata, for instance, could be produced on the skin by mere emotional expectation of them, would have been ridiculed by physiologists as absurd in the highest degree, It is only within. the last year or two that scientific men as a class have begun to believe that the idea of a blister, suggested to a mind the nervous organisation of which is in a morbid state, may produce a real blister; and whether that be true or not, which we do not pretend to say, it is most unfair to treat Cardinal Newman's assumption in 1842.43 of all remarkable cases of faith-healing as miraculous, as a similar assumption might quite reasonably-be treated at the present day. Still more unfair is it for Dr. Abbott to read New- man's appendix to the " Apologia," written twenty years after he became a Roman Catholic, in strict connection with the essays written three years before he became a Roman Catholic, and attack him on the strength of the admission which he had made while still an Anglican that a vast multitude of ecclesiastical impostures had been palmed off on the Church as miraculous. It was quite natural, we should say it was quite reasonable, that when once Newman had convinced himself that the gift of miracle was almost as much limited to the Roman Catholic Church as he held that the gift of sacramental grace was limited to the Roman Catholic Church, he should change his mind greatly as to the probable proportion of true and false miracles which is to be found in the external records of that Church. After all, Newman was quite right in asserting that an ordinary man's disposition to accept as true any individual fact does depend far more on subjective belief in the real existence of the class to which that fact belongs, than it does on the examination of the detailed evidence in the particular case. Supposing one of the new school of physicians to have convinced himself that the healing power of suggestion under what used to be called mesmeric, or what is now called hypnotic influence, actually exists, and he would say, we take it, as to all the allegations concerning such phenomena, just what Cardinal Newman said as to ecclesiastical miracles believe that the class really exists, and I cannot deny that this may be, though it may not be, a true example of it. In our opinion, Cardinal Newman would have done better if, in defence of the real existence of the type, he had appealed to modern instances, such as the great Port Royal miracle, or several of the alleged Lourdes miracles, of which Professor Huxley has said that there is far more positive evidence for them than for any individual Christian miracle. But given the subjective convic- tion that the class really exists, we cannot hold that Cardinal

Newman took any unreasonable view, for a Catholic, of the weight of the evidence in particular cases.

But what seems to us to show the unfairness of Dr. Abbott's attitude most convincingly, is his charge of self-deception and " lubrication " in relation to Newman's reasons for not resigning the vicarage of St. Mary's in 1842. According to Dr. Abbott, a more monstrous manipulation of conscientious conviction on the part of a religious man could hardly be conceived. Now, this is a case in which Dr. Abbott knows the result. The result was to delay by just a year, or a year and a half, and no longer, the resignation of the living which, according to Dr. Abbott, New- man manipulated his conscience so cruelly in order to enable himself to keep. Yet there was every reason why he should have been very reserved in taking action of this kind. He was far from certain of the condition of his own mind. Any pre- mature action of his would have caused premature action in a number of others. So far as we can judge, Newman had nothing to gain but an extended period of painful suspense by the delay, —for no one, not even Dr. Abbott, suspects him of any dislike to surrender the emoluments of the living a year or two sooner. And to accuse him of all this artificial " lubrication " of his moral position in order to justify him in dragging out a year or two longer of most painful suspense, seems to us a superfluity of naughtiness of which only a pedantic theorist, anxious to verify his own view of Newman's character, could be guilty. Newman's life is before the world. Is there any evidence on which it can be shown that he ever dallied with a temptation which he ought to have sternly resisted P Nay, is there any evidence that he ever indulged in that super- stitious and abject prostration of mind before a severe Judge of which Dr. Abbott accuses him ? We should describe New- man's habitual spiritual attitude as that of a man confident in the loving guidance of God, and exulting in that freedom with which those who know themselves to be sons and not servants, habitually rejoice.