THE "EDINBURGH REVIEW " ON NEWMAN. T HE current number of the
Edinburgh Review contains one of the most unprofitable contrasts between the characteristics of two very eminent men lately dead, which we can ever remember to have read,—so unprofitable, indeed, that we strongly suspect the well-merited praise bestowed on Bishop Lightfoot to have been bestowed much more for the sake of the opportunity thereby obtained of running down Cardinal Newman, than for the nobler end of deepening the reverence with which a man of great power and (in its way) almost un- rivalled learning is regarded by those who can adequately estimate his gifts. "The time seems ripe," says the Edin- burgh reviewer, " now that the first emotions caused by their death have subsided, for a careful and dispassionate survey of what they each effected during their lives, and for drawing a comparison between their extremely different charac- ters." Well, for just as good a reason, we might say that the time has arrived for " a careful and dispassionate survey " of what Marshal Radetzky and General Grant effected during their lives, and for drawing a compari- son between their extremely different characters, or for forming a careful estimate of what Lord Tennyson and Matthew Arnold effected during their litres, and for drawing a comparison between their extremely different characters. We do not think that any of these comparisons would be at all fruit- ful, any more than it would be of much use to form a careful estimate of what the circle and the square, or the pulley and the wedge, have respectively effected for human civilisa- tion, and to draw a comparison between their extremely different characters. There are such things as incom- mensurables not only in mathematics, but in morals, and the Edinburgh reviewer could hardly have selected better examples of incommensurables than these, even if he had ventured on an elaborate comparison between the poetry of Scott and Shelley, or between the genius of Cowper and Burns. What induced the Edinburgh reviewer to draw the comparison is, that Newman gave up Angli- canism for Roman Catholicism, while Lightfoot (in his view at least) urged his countrymen forward "along the path which reaches from the Middle Ages to the modern period of scientific inquiry." Whether men of science in general,—say Professor Huxley,—would agree in this descrip- tion of Bishop Lightfoot's achievements, we greatly doubt ; but, whether they would or not, it would be as reasonable on that ground alone to institute a comparison between them as to institute an elaborate comparison between a steau er and a sailing-ship, on the ground that one was bound from London to Calcutta, and the other from Calcutta to London. As a matter of fact, we should say that both Newman and Lightfoot held people back from believing that "the modern period of scientific inquiry" has covered the whole ground by which we obtain access to the highest truths. " The modern period of scientific inquiry" has, on the contrary, done a great deal towards undermining the dis- position to believe at all in " Revelation," properly so-called. If the methods by which the great advances of modern science have been secured, are to be recognised as the only methods by which the human mind can approach truth, Christianity, as it was understood and accepted by Lightfoot, disappears as completely as does Christianity in the form in which it was understood and accepted by Newman. No sort of con- juring can identify the grounds on which either Newman or Lightfoot accepted the doctrine of the Incarnation, with the grounds on which John Stuart Mill or Herbert Spencer accepts the principle of the uniformity of Nature, and the canons of inductive reasoning. If God has ever found his way into man's mind at all, it is by inspiring us with a willingness to receive as little children what comes from a source infinitely above ourselves, a source of which we can neither exhaust nor completely analyse the mysterious authority. Lightfoot and Newman differed widely as to the criterion of spiritual authority, and Lightfoot criticised and rejected much which Newman accepted. But Lightfoot did not differ in the least from Newman in maintaining that divine revelation is infinitely above human reason, and that it is the highest exercise of reason to discern the evidence in human his- tory of the interference of a supernatural authority to whose guidance reason must bow. They differed greatly as to what the early Church believed concerning Christ's teaching ; but they did not differ at all in holding that when once you had got to the kernel of truth that gave its life and exalting power and moral purity to th'at belief, you had got to the secret spring of the converse between God and man, and must hold fast by that, whether the logic of induction justified you in accepting it or not. It would have been as idle, in Lightfoot's opinion as in Newman's, to estab- lish the truth of Christian doctrine by virtue of principles de- rived from" the modern period of scientific inquiry." And there- fore, though we may agree with Lightfoot, rather than with Newman, in discriminating emphatically between the primitive Church and the Church of the Middle Ages, and holding that the latter developed germs of superstition which were foreign to the creed of the former, we shall certainly not limit our belief to that alone which "the modern period of scientific inquiry" has investigated and endorsed, if we wish to remain Christians at all.
What we should not hesitate to maintain is that most men of the higher type,—of the type of Newman and Lightfoot, — are strictly moral incommensurables, that you can no more compare them profitably with each other than you can compare profitably Shelley with Browning, or Coleridge with Crabbe. Lightfoot was a very great critic. His patristic learning was, in its own limited field, far more accurate and keen than Newman's, whose genius was, in the sense in which we use the word of Lightfoot, not critical at all. At the same time, if you come to ask what was the relative amount of influence exerted by the two men in " turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just," we should not hesitate for a moment to say that New- man's was so much more, so immeasurably more, than that of the great English Bishop, that it is idle and almost im- pertinent to institute any comparison between them at all. In his own field, Lightfoot was much greater than New- man. Any sensible man who knew both their writings on such a subject as the authenticity of the Ignatian epistles, or Justin Martyr's " Memorials of the Apostles," would regard Lightfoot as a sure and trustworthy guide, which Newman neither was nor so much as claimed to be. But if you come to compare the two men in relation to the power which they exerted in bringing home the living force of Revelation to the minds of a generation which was beginning to distrust Revelation altogether and to fall back on what is called "Natural Religion," then we should hold that Newman's Oxford sermons are a mine of treasure such as Bishop Light- foot never conceived, and which no one would have been more eager to admit that he had never oven conceived than Bishop Lightfoot himself. No doubt Newman mingled a great deal of what all Anglicans would regard as misleading suggestion with his powerful and passionate appeals to the human con- science and spirit. No doubt he frequently revivified the Apostolic teaching with a superfluous, and perhaps dangerous, scorn for those elements of human knowledge with which the Apostles were- not concerned, but with whioh our own age is deeply concerned. Still, nobody who believes as both he and Bishop Lightfoot believed,—that if you were compelled to .choose between the guidance of Revelation and the guidance of modern science, as to the whole conduct, external and internal, of human life, Revelation would yield far the most safe and fruitful guidance of the two,—can deny that even Newman's one-sidedness is infinitely preferable to the one- sidedness of scientific agnosticism. The genius of the man showed itself in his marvellous power of bringing home the meaning of Revelation to the mon of to-day. And judged by this achievement, we do not hesitate to say that he did for us what Bishop Lightfoot, with all his great and manly gifts, had not anything like the same power to do, and never would have claimed for a moment that he had the same power to do, though he could apply a far more searching and enlightened criticism to the records of the Apostolic and sub-Apostolic age. The Edinburgh reviewer seems to us to show as much incompetence in his contrast as be shows want of sincerity when he enumerates as Cardinal Newman's " merits " what he is perfectly aware, that with one exception, all his readers will regard as the gravest possible flaws His merits are these : a poetical and romantic temperament; a complete mastery of all the captivating arts of rhetoric ; a touching (if very sly) trick of making a clean confession of some childish folly, and then turning sweetly round to know what harm he has done ; and, above all, a saintly mysticism, at first puerile, but ultimately senile." In other words, Cardinal Newman's only merits were his poetical and romantic temperament, for the rhetorical trickiness into which, as it is supposed, it betrayed him, cannot be enumerated among his merits except in bitter irony. Had not the Reviewer better have said at once that his only merit was the gift which gave him the power to deceive ? That is what he really means, and he could not have better proved his complete inability to understand one of the greatest men of the day, the one, more- over, who, far more even than Carlyle, because with much less bluster, has taught the Englishmen of this generation the hatefulness of Cant, the spiritual evil of "unreal words." Of course, to any one who holds, as we suppose this reviewer holds, that Roman Catholicism is worse than agnosticism,- -that it would be much better to conform the mind to the principles elaborated by "the modern period of scientific inquiry," even at the cost of losing faith in God altogether, as so many do, than to accept such a faith as Newman's,—the mere proof that Roman Catholicism is'incommensurable with science, is sufficient to proclaim the Cardinal not a leader, but a misles.der, of thought. But, for our part, we hold that Catholics and Protestants hive a common cause against the scientific agnosticism which declares that all our knowledge has the same origin, and that Revelation and spiritual authority have no meaning for the new epoch. We hold that men of totally different genius are not more incommensurable with each other, that Newman and Lightfoot are not more incommensurable as regards the cast of their powers, nay, that Newman and his Edin- burgh reviewer are not more utterly beyond the application of any common measure, than the various wholly incommensurable faculties which are bound up together in the nature of every reasonable being. To suppose that the avenues by which the divine mind reaches the human mind, will admit of the same analysis as the faculties by which we explore the laws of -physics or physiology, is as absurd and unreasonable as to suppose that the means by which a parent gains his child's trust are the same as those by which the same child learns the multiplication-table or the rules of cricket. Humanity is full of mutually incommensurable faculties ; and of the mysteries which arise out of this elementary truth the Edinburgh reviewer appears to have no more conception than he has of Bishop Lightfoot's ground for believing in the Incarnation. If he imagines that that ground was what "the modern period of scientific inquiry" would class under the head of science, we hold that he understands Bishop Light- foot hardly better than he understands Cardinal Newman, and that is much the same as saying that he does not understand him at all.
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