BOOKS.
DR. NEWMAN'S OXFORD SERMONS.* As this reissue of Dr. Newman's "parochial and plain" sermons preached at Oxford is now nearly completed, only one of the eight volumes remaining to appear, it seems the right time to say something of their adaptation for the wants of the generation which only knows him as the greatest of the Roman Catholic converts. We do not pretend to have read as yet all or nearly all the sermons in these seven volumes. With some we were familiar long ago. With many we have made acquaintance for the first time in this reissue ; but each of them is a separate work in itself, and in all there are a set of common assumptions and common features which reappear so frequently that, for the purpose of estimating their general character, tendency, and influence, it is impossible to regard them as if they were chapters in a continuous treatise. The Rector of Farnham (Essex) who has republished them, has we think, done well. Certainly no sermons representing so vividly the real inner scenery of the preacher's mind have been preached in our generation. With the most perfect and unaffected simplicity of style, they combine every other trace of coming from a mind filled to overflowing with the faith and thoughts they express. There is none of the "made" eloquence of Church dignitaries, nor of the dry monotone of priests officially rehearsing a lesson. It is a life, and an intense life, and not merely a creed, which speaks in these volumes. That it is, however, not only a life, but also a creed, and in many respects, as we hold, a false creed,—false chiefly by its misinterpretation of and comparative contempt for the new intellectual forces of our own day,—is the chief, though
• Parochial and Plain Sermons. By John Henry Newman, RD., formally Vicar of St. Mary's, Oxford, eight NON. New edition. Bivington. 1868.
a great, deduction from their value. Let us make some attempt at separating those elements of thought in Dr. Newman's sermons which have given him so singular a power over his own day, from those elements of thought which have separated him from it and driven him out of sympathy with, we do not mean merely the noisy, but the most sincere and earnest of those of his countrymen who have most cared not only to know truth, but to live for it.
On the first side of the account we must note that Dr. Newman has never treated revelation as a mere expression of the arbitrary or even purely inscrutable will of God, but always as expressing the deepest and most immutable distinctions in moral fact and nature, distinctions which could not be excluded from operating their inevitable consequences, whether a particular decree of revelation had been proclaimed or not. He is a realist in the sense of believ- ing that all religious distinctions are distinctions not created either by our minds or even for our minds, but deeply rooted in the moral constitution of all moral beings. He is so far thoroughly scientific in his conceptions of theology. He regards the moral constitution of the universe not as a sic-volo, sic-jubeo of the Almighty's, but as a chain of causes all in the closest connection, of which one could not be separated from another without a general overthrow of the moral foundations of human life. Thus in the very first sermon of this long series, Dr. Newman aims at showing that there is nothing arbitrary in the law which makes holiness here the neces- sary condition of happiness hereafter,—that it is not a law of the divine Will, so to say, so much as a law of the divine Nature. Dr. Newman, with his usual force, impresses on us how miserable an unrighteous and unholy man would be if he could be admitted into closer communion with God without any change in his inner nature ; how he would find in the divine world "no pur- suits but those which he bad disliked or despised, nothing which bound him to aught else in the universe, and made him feel at home, nothing which he could enter into and rest upon." "A careless, a sensual, an unbelieving mind, a mind destitute of the love and fear of God, with narrow views and earthly aims, a low standard of duty, and a benighted conscience, a mind contented with itself and unresigned to God's will, would feel as little pleasure at the last day at the words 'Enter into the joy of thy Lord' as it does now at the words 'Let us pray." Nothing could more forcibly illustrate than that, the joylessness of divine life to those unpre- pared for divine life,—the divergence of moral desires, of hopes, and fears, and longings, between the mind which seeks God and the mind which does not. It is not a mere decree of God's that the latter must suffer ; it is of the essence of its own nature, no less than of His. Dr. Newman says in another page of the same sermon, that, as it is part of the physical constitution of nature that straw ignites and burns away at a heat which leaves iron unaltered in form and substance, so it is of the moral constitution of nature that certain orders of minds must be simply inflamed and thrown into suffering by the very influences which are per- fectly in harmony with the nature of others.
Nor is Dr. Newman only a realist in treating religious truth as the outcome of distinctions so deep in nature that no mere decree even of the Divine Will could change them. He is also a realist in treating human faith, and human thought and language on religious subjects, as worthless, unless they mark out and point to spiritual causes and tendencies infinitely deeper and more full of meaning than any mere acts and thoughts of ours. Just as the scientific man trusts not to the signs by which he reasons, but to the forces of which those signs are the mere calculus, Dr. Newman constantly teaches that faith is the act of trusting yourself to great and permanent spiritual forces, the tidal power of which, and not the power of your acts of faith, is commissionell by God to carry you into the clearer light. He uniformly speaks of faith as a "venture," an act of the soul by which it throws itself on what is beyond its own power, by which it gives itself up without either the power or the right to know the full consequences, gives itself up to some power higher than itself and beyond itself, as a man trusts himself to the sea, or to a railway, or to any natural power beyond his own control. He speaks uniformly, just as a writer of a very different school spoke in a very remarkable parable in the Pall Mall Gazette of Thursday week, of faith as action, not feeling, but action which is taken in light "neither clear nor dark," as a venture of which we cannot count the consequences, and yet a venture for the highest end of life. To use his own words, it consists in risking "what we have for what we have not ; and doing so in a noble, generous way, not indeed rashly or lightly, still without knowing accurately what we are doing, not knowing either what we give up, nor, again, what we shall gain ; uncertain about our reward, uncertain about the extent of sacrifice, in all respects leaning, waiting upon Him, trusting in Him to fulfil his promise, trusting in Him to enable us to fulfil our own vows, and so in all respects proceeding without carefulness or anxiety about the future.l. And as Dr. Newman is a true realist in speaking of acts of faith as ventures made in the dark, at least as to results, for the highest end possible to us, and in reliance upon forces which are not our own and to which we implicitly trust ourselves by our acts of faith, so again he is a true realist in speaking of human language. In the very fine sermon on " Unreal Words," he points out almost in the same strain as does the author of the fine parable above alluded to, how much unreal language men use, aud how specially unreal it is on religious subjects, and how worse than worthless, mischievous, so far as it is unreal, i.e, without resting on a basis of facts. But Dr. Newman goes further in his realism than this. Ile recognizes that no words on the subject of religion can be wholly real, any more than words on the subject of half-discovered forces in physical nature. They are as real as they can be, if they rest on facts, though they quite fail to express the full force and bearing of those facts. Dr. Newman points out that words may be, so to say, more real than those who use them are aware of. They may be the indices of powers and forces far beyond what those who use them suspect, because those who use them have only got a superficial glimpse into the action and heart of those forces. Just as 'weight' meant a great deal more than Newton himself knew when he first began to suspect what the moon's weight really meant, and as the idea of which the word was the index carried him far beyond his own meaning when he first used it, so Dr. Newman points out that moral professions often mean far more than those who make them know, and thus commit the soul to the larger meaning, not to the less, embarking those who use them on enter- prizes far beyond their immediate intention, nay, far beyond their immediate strength. In this way words express powers outside the speaker, powers which have, when he speaks, only just taken hold of him superficially, but which, being divine powers, strengthen and tighten their grasp, till they carry those who half carelessly used them whither they had no intention of going. "We ever promise things greater than we master, and we wait on God to enable us to perform them. Our promising involves a prayer for light and strength." $ In all these respects Dr. Newman's teaching in these sermons seems to us realist in the truest and most modern sense of the term,—in that sense in which modern science has taught us to understand the full depth of realism. And it is by virtue of this intellectual sympathy with the sincerest teaching of modern times, that Dr. Newman, applying the same spirit to moral and religious subjects, has exerted so great and so wholesome an influence on English theology.
There is, however, as a matter of course, in one who has become a Roman Catholic, another side to Dr. Newman's teach- ing, by virtue of which he has separated himself from all which is sincerest and best in the intellectual teaching of the day. And the root of all his errors seems to us to be this, that he practically applies his theory that faith,—the act,—is a ' ven- ture,' i.e., that we are morally bound to do much of the con- sequences of which we are necessarily kept in the dark, to the intellectual side of faith, not simply to the act of trust, but to the belief of creeds. Now here, as it seems to us, is the beginning of all sorts of insincerities. In action you may and mast trust your- self to the highest motive which God puts into your heart, at a risk. But in intellectual belief there is no such thing legitimately as silencing a doubt. if you risk pain to do right, you do not play any tricks with yourself ; you know that you are incurring a risk of suffering, and prefer to do it for the sake of the motive. But to risk error, in order to believe right, is a contradiction in terms. You cannot believe right unless you open your mind fully to all the risks of error, and look your uncertainties, your insoluble diffi- culties, in the face as fully as your certainties. Dr. Newman seems to us to make obedience the root, not only of moral and religious action, but of moral and religious thought. But in order to do so, he has to assume that we all have an intellectual authority over us as clear and articulate as the moral authority which speaks to our conscience. He speaks of dissent § as necessarily sin, though not always conscious sin. He speaks of the right to differ from the Church as very much the same as the right "to damn your- self " ; he identifies the submission to Church authority with the submissiou to God's voice, and even makes the reliance on the sac- rament of ordination a duty of the same order, and resting upon the same sort of foundation, as the duty of prayer. In other words, lie sets out with a complicated Church organization as set t Vol. IV. p., 259. IVol. V., p. 43. IVol. In., pp. 203, 217. over the conscience in the same sense as God's moral law, and assumes that a churchman may verify for himself the moral validity of apostolical succession just as truly as an ordi- nary soul may verify for itself the value of prayer, or as a chemist may verify for himself the significance and value of the laws of chemical affinity fl All this network of assumptions strikes us as having its root in the notion that obedience is even more the root of our intellectual than of our moral life,—since Dr. Newman would not ask us to obey any moral command which does not appeal to our conscience, whereas he imposes on our intellects a ready-made ecclesiastical system of the most complex kind, which it is quite impossible for any rational being to accept as a whole without knowing that he is going on a mere probability or possi- bility,—and, as it seems to us, on a strong improbability. And in thus rooting the intellectual act of belief in obedience, he has done what his great intellect could never have done if it had once been imbued with any sympathy with the science of the day. No wonder that in the striking sermon on "The Religion of the Age" (Vol. I.), he tells us at once that man can find out nothing about himself by studying the outward universe, and that he himself would think the religion of the age much better than it is, if it were less merely amiable, and had more of the zeal and fear which, in excess, give rise to bigotry and superstition than it has. The truth is that Dr. Newman has no sympathy at all with that latitudinarianism which arises from a genuinely scientific spirit of doubt carried into the region of ecclesiastical authority. He may be quite right in saying that the study of the material universe can never teach man his duty, but it can teach man his ignorance and the mistakes of intellectual theory to which his intellect is liable. It is the spirit of science much more than the spirit of selfishness and self-will that has made it impossible to the present age to accept the intel- lectual authority of any church organization. We know that in point of fact the principle of " obedience " to such authorities has led the intellect into all sorts of pitfalls. We know that we are on the track of physical laws which are inconsistent not only with the physical assumptions of Churches, but with the physical assumptions of many of the writers of revelation. We ought not to accept a mere intellectual guess out of obedience to anybody. Obedience is no duty except in relation to a moral claim. An intellectual conviction may come through obedience to a moral claim, but it cannot come from any act of intellectual obedience, for the words have no meaning. You may feel confident that a special authority on intellectual subjects is right, through having usually found him right, but you cannot obey him intellectually, you can only be convinced and persuaded by him. This assumption of Dr. Newman's that obedience is at the root of our intellectual faith, seems to us what vitiates a wide vein of reasoning in his sermons, and what has led him into the Roman Church, where there is at least an authority with some intellectual prestige to obey.
We have said nothing of the exquisite manner of these sermons, the manner of a mind at once tender and holy, at once loving and austere, at once real and dramatic, at once full of insight into human nature and full of the humility which springs from a higher source ; but the following touching and musical passage will say more for Dr. Newman's manner than any words of ours. It is from a sermon called "Christ Manifested in Remem- brance ":— " Lot a person who trusts he is on the whole serving God acceptably look back upon his past life, and he will find bow critical wore moments and acts which at the timo seemed the most indifferent : as, for instance, the school ho was aont to as a child, the occasion of his falling in with those persons who have most benefited him, the accidents which deter- mined his calling or prospects, whatever they were. God's hand is ever over His own, and lie loads them forward by a way they know not of. The utmost they can do is to believe, what they cannot see now, what they shall see hereafter ; and as believing, to act together with God towards it. And hence perchance it is, that years that are past bear in retrospect so much of fragrance with them, though at the time perhaps we saw little in them to take pleasure in ; or rather we did not, could not realize that we were receiving pleasure, though we received it. We received pleasure, because we were in the presence of God, but we knew it not ; we knew not what we received ; we did not bring home to our- selves or reflect upon the pleasure we were receiving ; but afterwards, when enjoyment is past, reflection comes in. We feel at the timo ; we recognize and reason afterwards. Such, I say, is the sweetness and softness with which days long passed away fall upon the memory, and strike us. The most ordinary years, when we seemed to be living for nothing, these shine forth to us in their very regularity and orderly course. What was sameness at the time, is now stability ; what was dull- ness, is now a soothing calm ; what seemed unprofitable, has now its treasure in itself ; what was but monotony, is now harmony ; all is pleas- ing and comfortable, and we regard it all with affection."
t, vol. in., p.193.
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