CARDINAL NEWMAN'S TWO STAGES.

THE _Record has republished, and the Guardian of last Wednesday has copied, those five letters of Mr. Newman's written to that journal in October and November, 1833, a few months after the commencement of the Tractarian movement, in which he urged upon English Churchmen the revival of our Church's ancient discipline, and especially the practice of excommunication, as an absolute duty of the Christian Church, and as the only means of competing suc- cessfully with the Church of Rome, of which, as usual at that period, he spoke very severely. As the editor of the Guardian very justly remarks in his prefatory note to the republished letters, they bear out completely the view taken in the

remarkable paper communicated to the Guardian of August 13th on "Cardinal Newman's Course," that at least one great moving principle in Newman's career, perhaps the most potent of its moving principles, was his passionate desire to reproduce in the Church of the present day the religious and spiritual life of the New Testament. The earnestness with which Newman presses the direct command conveyed in Matthew xviii., 15-17, to bring the influence of the Church to bear on individual sinners, the scorn with which he treats the arguments of expediency on the other side, the insight with which he anticipates and de- lineates the various objections,—how men will look grave when the word " excommunication " is mentioned, and will say, 'It is a serious matter,' and so dismiss it,—and the peremptoriness with which he answers the plea of the difficulty of the revival proposed, "I answer that Christian obedience is a course of difficulty from beginning to end,"—are all exceedingly characteristic of this period of Newman's life, the period in which he was most anxious not to fail in zeal and severity, not to let a weak amiability relax the sternness of his obedience to divine authority, not to dissolve religious fear in sentimental charity. This was the period which he commenced by writing the remarkable lines insisting on the power to hate what should be hated, as the condition sine quit non of the power to love what should be loved :—

" And wouldst thou reach, rash scholar mine,

Love's high unruffled state P Awake, thy easy dreams resign, First learn thee how to hate ;— Hatred of sin, and Zeal, and Fear, Lead up the Holy Hill; Track them till Charity appear A self-denial still.

Dim is the philosophic flame By thoughts severe unfed ; Book-lore ne'er served, when trial came, Nor gifts, when faith was dead."

And Newman followed his own counsel. He did track "Hatred of sin, and Zeal, and Fear," till " Charity " appeared a very emphatic kind of self-denial. In the "Apologia," Newman tells us that he persuaded a lady not to attend her own sister's marriage, because that sister had turned Dissenter ; and he

would hold no communication with his brother; he took as stern a line against the presumption of Rome as he did against the indolence and apathy of the English Church; he denounced Bishop Hampden's lukewarm dogmatism ; he kept clear of Whately ; he preached the preferability of even superstition and gloom, to empty geniality and enlightenment ; he wielded the naked sword with much more energy than the peacemaker's olive-branch of conciliation.

But there was a very different period of his life, which commenced after the earlier fervours of his Roman Catholi- cism were over, say within ten years of his conversion. And of this there is evidence in the same Guardian which contains the five letters to the _Record. At the time when the Vatican Council was about to assemble, when Bishop Temple had just been appointed to the See of Exeter, Newman received from the late Mr. Ellacombe, Vicar of Bitten, a confidential lament over the new Bishop's doctrinal shortcomings, and especially, as it would appear, over his inadequate appreciation of the principle of divine grace as the sole ground of right action. Why Mr. Ellacombe confided his anxieties to the head of a Roman Catholic Oratory, it is not easy to say, probably

because he thought that there at all events he might depend on finding the fullest sympathy. But instead of condolences, Mr. Ellacombe received from Dr. Newman a very earnest but kind exhortation not to be in too great a hurry to condemn his new Bishop before he had fully appreciated his theological

teaching :—

" I do not know your Bishop, and am not sure that he is an easy man to know. I do not at all wonder at your great anxiety about him. He may, however, be one of those who dislike what, when I was young, B. Wilberforce and H. Fronde used to call '180 degree sermons,' that is, sermons which were resolved to bring in the whole circuit of theology in the space of twenty minutes. We used to think it was the great fault of Evangelicals—that they would not let religious topics come in naturally, but accused a man of not being sound in religion, if he dared to speak of sanctification without justification, regeneration, &c., &c. Now it may be that Dr. Temple has a way of preaching on the immediate subject which is before him, and lets other topics take their chance. At the same time I grant that grace is not a subject which he ought to leave out on the occasions you mention. On the whole, if I may venture to speak on the subject, I think it wise as well as kind, to give him a fair trial, and not to expect evil from him. There is no doubt he has many very high qualities. I do not like to think he would deny the necessity of Divine grace, and I should trust you will find him saying all he ought to say when he is actually upon the subject. It will concern me very much to find you disappointed."

And for the remaining twenty years of his life, there is no doubt that Dr. Newman grew more and more disposed to soften

the rigours of his earlier teaching, and to view with lenity and hope even the spiritual prospects of the Church which he had

abandoned, though he never hesitated for a moment in his belief that he had found the true Church in the Church of Rome.

What was the explanation of the change ? To some extent, no doubt, it was the ordinary explanation of the difference between the enthusiasm of hope and the actual teaching of experience ; but there was certainly something more in it

besides this. In his earlier days, it is evident enough that Newman thought suffering, penance, the willing rejection of this world's joys, to be main conditions of divine grace, and

that a Church could not be in the enjoyment of God's favour which did not visibly sacrifice this world with a sort of vehemence and ardour for the sake of the next. He saw plainly that the primitive Christianity of the apostolic days made this sacrifice and made it with a sort of exhilaration, and he saw what heroic virtues and noble simplicity of vigilance it fostered. He thought that the same type of Christianity could be continued through all the ages of the Christian Church, not simply as an ideal to be set before the world, but as the life of a whole community transmissible in its full severity from age to age. When he actually joined the Roman Church, it is obvious that to some extent he was undeceived, that if he found higher ideals of the saintly life in it than he had left in the Church of his earlier days, he also found perhaps, taking one Roman Catholic country with another, a distinctly laxer treatment of the average level of Christian duty, than even that to which he had been accustomed in the Anglican Church. He found that a great dread existed of anything like too stringent a treat- ment of the average conscience by the average priest ; he found probably that very light penances were generally im- posed for what he would have held to be very grievous Sins; that the rule with the Roman Catholic priesthood was not to alarm the weakness of human nature, but to encourage it to bear the yoke of the confessional; and no doubt he may have discovered that, on the whole, the severity of life for which he had so ardently pleaded was confined to the few severe monastic orders, and that the average religious life of the Church lie had left was two or three steps higher than the average religious life of the Church be had entered. Though he found a priesthood enduring cheerfully a very much more serious kind of self-denial than the rectors and vicars, with wives and daughters and "pony-carriages," in whom he had thought it so hard to discover the working of apostolic principles, and though he found a few monastic orders of the most genuinely ascetic kind, yet, on the other hand, he found the average standard of spiritual obligation enforced on the Roman Catholic laity, and especially in Roman Catholic countries, to be what he would have regarded as a very humble, not to say a very low one. He found the excommunication which he had so earnestly desired to revive, a very rare and often almost disused expedient for enforcing discipline. He found that professions of penitence were hardly ever distrusted, however uniformly they ended in relapse ; he found that, as a rule, those who made no professions of penitence abstained altogether from the ministrations of their Church, so that there was no oppor- tunity of excommunicating them ; and, on the whole, that the priests were only too glad by even extreme indulgence to win back deserters to at least an outward conformity to the Church's rules. Indeed, he probably satisfied himself that though for the intenser kind of religions nature,—the nature really bent on being "hid with Christ in God,"—his adopted Church was the more apostolic, yet for average lay- men sincerely intending to lead a Christian life, but not equal to anything like contemplative piety, the achieve- ments of the English Church are not inferior to those of the Roman Catholic Church. This is, of course, a purely conjectural explanation of the much more genial and gentle tone which Newman certainly adopted in later life towards the Church he had abandoned, than the tone of his early years as a Catholic. But we suspect that it is the true explanation ; that he was not altogether satisfied with the working of Roman Catholic " discipline " on average consciences ; that, like all rather lax discipline, he found that it fostered a very easy-going morality, a morality of a kind rather to lull the conscience to sleep than to spur it into more vivid life. At all events, it is hardly possible to deny the fact that Newman did soften greatly towards the Church he had abandoned, and indulge far greater hopes for its future, towards the end of his own ascetic course, than he did for some years after the date of his first conversion.