Apologia pro vita sua being a history of his religious opinions
consult, no written explanations of particular treatises or of
tracts which at the time gave offence, hardly any minutes of
definite transactions or conversations, and few contemporary
memoranda, I fear, of the feelings or motives under which, from
time to time I acted. I have an abundance of letters from
friends with some copies or drafts of my answers to them, but
they are for the most part unsorted; and, till this process has
taken place, they are even too numerous and various to be
available at a moment for my purpose. Then, as to the volumes
which I have published, they would in many ways serve me, were I
well up in them: but though I took great pains in their
composition, I have thought little about them, when they were
once out of my hands, and for the most part the last time I read
them has been when I revised their last proof sheets.
Under these circumstances my sketch will of course be
incomplete. I now for the first time contemplate my course as a
whole; it is a first essay, but it will contain, I trust, no
serious or substantial mistake, and so far will answer the
purpose for which I write it. I purpose to set nothing down in
it as certain, of which I have not a clear memory, or some
written memorial, or the corroboration of some friend. There are
witnesses enough up and down the country to verify, or correct,
or complete it; and letters moreover of my own in abundance,
unless they have been destroyed.
Moreover, I mean to be simply personal and historical: I am not
expounding Catholic doctrine, I am doing no more than explaining
myself, and my opinions and actions. I wish, as far as I am
able, simply to state facts, whether they are ultimately
determined to be for me or against me. Of course there will be
room enough for contrariety of judgment among my readers, as to
the necessity, or appositeness, or value, or good taste, or
religious prudence, of the details which I shall introduce. I
may be accused of laying stress on little things, of being
beside the mark, of going into impertinent or ridiculous
details, of sounding my own praise, of giving scandal; but this
is a case above all others, in which I am bound to follow my own
lights and to speak out my own heart. It is not at all pleasant
for me to be egotistical; nor to be criticized for being so. It
is not pleasant to reveal to high and low, young and old, what
has gone on within me from my early years. It is not pleasant to
be giving to every shallow or flippant disputant the advantage
over me of knowing my most private thoughts, I might even say
the intercourse between myself and my Maker. But I do not like
to be called to my face a liar and a knave; nor should I be
doing my duty to my faith or to my name, if I were to suffer it.
I know I have done nothing to deserve such an insult, and if I
prove this, as I hope to do, I must not care for such incidental
annoyances as are involved in the process.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
History of my Religious Opinions up to 1833
CHAPTER II.
History of my Religious Opinions from 1833 to 1839
CHAPTER III.
History of my Religious Opinions from 1839 to 1841
CHAPTER IV.
History of my Religious Opinions from 1841 to 1845
CHAPTER V.
Position of my Mind since 1845
NOTES.
Note A. On page 14. Liberalism
B. On page 23. Ecclesiastical Miracles
C. On page 153. Sermon on Wisdom and Innocence
D. On page 213. Series of Saints' Lives of 1843-4
E. On page 227. Anglican Church
F. On page 269. The Economy
G. On page 279. Lying and Equivocation
SUPPLEMENTAL MATTER.
1. Chronological List of Letters and Papers quoted in this Narrative
2. List of the Author's Works
3. Letter to him from his Diocesan
4. Addresses from bodies of Clergy and Laity
ADDITIONAL NOTES.
Note 1, on page 12. Correspondence with Archbishop Whately in 1834
2, on page 90. Extract of a Letter from the Rev. E. Smedley in 1828
3, on page 185. Extract of a Letter of the Rev. Francis Faber about 1849
4, on pages 194-196. The late Very Rev. Dr. Russell
5, on page 232. Extract of a Letter from the Rev. John Keble in 1844
6, on page 237. Extract from the _Times_ concerning the Author's visit
to Oxford in 1878
7, on page 302. The oil of St. Walburga
8, on page 323. Boniface of Canterbury
MY RELIGIOUS OPINIONS.
CHAPTER I.
HISTORY OF MY RELIGIOUS OPINIONS TO THE YEAR 1833.
It may easily be conceived how great a trial it is to me to write the
following history of myself; but I must not shrink from the task. The
words, "Secretum meum mihi," keep ringing in my ears; but as men draw
towards their end, they care less for disclosures. Nor is it the least
part of my trial, to anticipate that, upon first reading what I have
written, my friends may consider much in it irrelevant to my purpose;
yet I cannot help thinking that, viewed as a whole, it will effect what
I propose to myself in giving it to the public.
* * * * *
I was brought up from a child to take great delight in reading the
Bible; but I had no formed religious convictions till I was fifteen. Of
course I had a perfect knowledge of my Catechism.
After I was grown up, I put on paper my recollections of the thoughts
and feelings on religious subjects, which I had at the time that I was a
child and a boy,--such as had remained on my mind with sufficient
prominence to make me then consider them worth recording. Out of these,
written in the Long Vacation of 1820, and transcribed with additions in
1823, I select two, which are at once the most definite among them, and
also have a bearing on my later convictions.
1. "I used to wish the Arabian Tales were true: my imagination ran on
unknown influences, on magical powers, and talismans.... I thought life
might be a dream, or I an Angel, and all this world a deception, my
fellow-angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and
deceiving me with the semblance of a material world."
Again: "Reading in the Spring of 1816 a sentence from [Dr. Watts's]
'Remnants of Time,' entitled 'the Saints unknown to the world,' to the
effect, that 'there is nothing in their figure or countenance to
distinguish them,' &c., &c., I supposed he spoke of Angels who lived in
the world, as it were disguised."
2. The other remark is this: "I was very superstitious, and for some
time previous to my conversion" [when I was fifteen] "used constantly to
cross myself on going into the dark."
Of course I must have got this practice from some external source or
other; but I can make no sort of conjecture whence; and certainly no one
had ever spoken to me on the subject of the Catholic religion, which I
only knew by name. The French master was an _émigré_ Priest, but he was
simply made a butt, as French masters too commonly were in that day, and
spoke English very imperfectly. There was a Catholic family in the
village, old maiden ladies we used to think; but I knew nothing about
them. I have of late years heard that there were one or two Catholic
boys in the school; but either we were carefully kept from knowing this,
or the knowledge of it made simply no impression on our minds. My
brother will bear witness how free the school was from Catholic ideas.
I had once been into Warwick Street Chapel, with my father, who, I
believe, wanted to hear some piece of music; all that I bore away from
it was the recollection of a pulpit and a preacher, and a boy swinging a
censer.
When I was at Littlemore, I was looking over old copy-books of my school
days, and I found among them my first Latin verse-book; and in the first
page of it there was a device which almost took my breath away with
surprise. I have the book before me now, and have just been showing it
to others. I have written in the first page, in my school-boy hand,
"John. H. Newman, February 11th, 1811, Verse Book;" then follow my first
Verses. Between "Verse" and "Book" I have drawn the figure of a solid
cross upright, and next to it is, what may indeed be meant for a
necklace, but what I cannot make out to be any thing else than a set of
beads suspended, with a little cross attached. At this time I was not
quite ten years old. I suppose I got these ideas from some romance, Mrs.
Radcliffe's or Miss Porter's; or from some religious picture; but the
strange thing is, how, among the thousand objects which meet a boy's
eyes, these in particular should so have fixed themselves in my mind,
that I made them thus practically my own. I am certain there was nothing
in the churches I attended, or the prayer books I read, to suggest them.
It must be recollected that Anglican churches and prayer books were not
decorated in those days as I believe they are now.
When I was fourteen, I read Paine's Tracts against the Old Testament,
and found pleasure in thinking of the objections which were contained in
them. Also, I read some of Hume's Essays; and perhaps that on Miracles.
So at least I gave my Father to understand; but perhaps it was a brag.
Also, I recollect copying out some French verses, perhaps Voltaire's, in
denial of the immortality of the soul, and saying to myself something
like "How dreadful, but how plausible!"
When I was fifteen, (in the autumn of 1816,) a great change of thought
took place in me. I fell under the influences of a definite Creed, and
received into my intellect impressions of dogma, which, through God's
mercy, have never been effaced or obscured. Above and beyond the
conversations and sermons of the excellent man, long dead, the Rev.
Walter Mayers, of Pembroke College, Oxford, who was the human means of
this beginning of divine faith in me, was the effect of the books which
he put into my hands, all of the school of Calvin. One of the first
books I read was a work of Romaine's; I neither recollect the title nor
the contents, except one doctrine, which of course I do not include
among those which I believe to have come from a divine source, viz. the
doctrine of final perseverance. I received it at once, and believed that
the inward conversion of which I was conscious, (and of which I still am
more certain than that I have hands and feet,) would last into the next
life, and that I was elected to eternal glory. I have no consciousness
that this belief had any tendency whatever to lead me to be careless
about pleasing God. I retained it till the age of twenty-one, when it
gradually faded away; but I believe that it had some influence on my
opinions, in the direction of those childish imaginations which I have
already mentioned, viz. in isolating me from the objects which
surrounded me, in confirming me in my mistrust of the reality of
material phenomena, and making me rest in the thought of two and two
only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my
Creator;--for while I considered myself predestined to salvation, my
mind did not dwell upon others, as fancying them simply passed over, not
predestined to eternal death. I only thought of the mercy to myself.
The detestable doctrine last mentioned is simply denied and abjured,
unless my memory strangely deceives me, by the writer who made a deeper
impression on my mind than any other, and to whom (humanly speaking) I
almost owe my soul,--Thomas Scott of Aston Sandford. I so admired and
delighted in his writings, that, when I was an under-graduate, I thought
of making a visit to his Parsonage, in order to see a man whom I so
deeply revered. I hardly think I could have given up the idea of this
expedition, even after I had taken my degree; for the news of his death