Apologia pro vita sua being a history of his religious opinions
congratulation sent me by Cardinal Acton:--
"Nov. 25, 1845. I hope you will have anticipated, before I express it,
the great gratification which I received from your Eminence's letter.
That gratification, however, was tempered by the apprehension, that kind
and anxious well-wishers at a distance attach more importance to my step
than really belongs to it. To me indeed personally it is of course an
inestimable gain; but persons and things look great at a distance, which
are not so when seen close; and, did your Eminence know me, you would
see that I was one, about whom there has been far more talk for good and
bad than he deserves, and about whose movements far more expectation has
been raised than the event will justify.
"As I never, I do trust, aimed at any thing else than obedience to my
own sense of right, and have been magnified into the leader of a party
without my wishing it or acting as such, so now, much as I may wish to
the contrary, and earnestly as I may labour (as is my duty) to minister
in a humble way to the Catholic Church, yet my powers will, I fear,
disappoint the expectations of both my own friends, and of those who
pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
"If I might ask of your Eminence a favour, it is that you would kindly
moderate those anticipations. Would it were in my power to do, what I do
not aspire to do! At present certainly I cannot look forward to the
future, and, though it would be a good work if I could persuade others
to do as I have done, yet it seems as if I had quite enough to do in
thinking of myself."
Soon, Dr. Wiseman, in whose Vicariate Oxford lay, called me to Oscott;
and I went there with others; afterwards he sent me to Rome, and finally
placed me in Birmingham.
I wrote to a friend:--
"January 20, 1846. You may think how lonely I am. 'Obliviscere populum
tuum et domum patris tui,' has been in my ears for the last twelve
hours. I realize more that we are leaving Littlemore, and it is like
going on the open sea."
I left Oxford for good on Monday, February 23, 1846. On the Saturday and
Sunday before, I was in my house at Littlemore simply by myself, as I
had been for the first day or two when I had originally taken possession
of it. I slept on Sunday night at my dear friend's, Mr. Johnson's, at
the Observatory. Various friends came to see the last of me; Mr.
Copeland, Mr. Church, Mr. Buckle, Mr. Pattison, and Mr. Lewis. Dr. Pusey
too came up to take leave of me; and I called on Dr. Ogle, one of my
very oldest friends, for he was my private Tutor, when I was an
Undergraduate. In him I took leave of my first College, Trinity, which
was so dear to me, and which held on its foundation so many who had been
kind to me both when I was a boy, and all through my Oxford life.
Trinity had never been unkind to me. There used to be much snap-dragon
growing on the walls opposite my freshman's rooms there, and I had for
years taken it as the emblem of my own perpetual residence even unto
death in my University.
On the morning of the 23rd I left the Observatory. I have never seen
Oxford since, excepting its spires, as they are seen from the
railway[19].
[19] At length I revisited Oxford on February 26th, 1878, after an
absence of just 32 years. Vide Additional Note at the end of the volume.
CHAPTER V.
POSITION OF MY MIND SINCE 1845.
From the time that I became a Catholic, of course I have no further
history of my religious opinions to narrate. In saying this, I do not
mean to say that my mind has been idle, or that I have given up thinking
on theological subjects; but that I have had no variations to record,
and have had no anxiety of heart whatever. I have been in perfect peace
and contentment; I never have had one doubt. I was not conscious to
myself, on my conversion, of any change, intellectual or moral, wrought
in my mind. I was not conscious of firmer faith in the fundamental
truths of Revelation, or of more self-command; I had not more fervour;
but it was like coming into port after a rough sea; and my happiness on
that score remains to this day without interruption.
Nor had I any trouble about receiving those additional articles, which
are not found in the Anglican Creed. Some of them I believed already,
but not any one of them was a trial to me. I made a profession of them
upon my reception with the greatest ease, and I have the same ease in
believing them now. I am far of course from denying that every article
of the Christian Creed, whether as held by Catholics or by Protestants,
is beset with intellectual difficulties; and it is simple fact, that,
for myself, I cannot answer those difficulties. Many persons are very
sensitive of the difficulties of Religion; I am as sensitive of them as
any one; but I have never been able to see a connexion between
apprehending those difficulties, however keenly, and multiplying them to
any extent, and on the other hand doubting the doctrines to which they
are attached. Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt, as I
understand the subject; difficulty and doubt are incommensurate. There
of course may be difficulties in the evidence; but I am speaking of
difficulties intrinsic to the doctrines themselves, or to their
relations with each other. A man may be annoyed that he cannot work out
a mathematical problem, of which the answer is or is not given to him,
without doubting that it admits of an answer, or that a certain
particular answer is the true one. Of all points of faith, the being of
a God is, to my own apprehension, encompassed with most difficulty, and
yet borne in upon our minds with most power.
People say that the doctrine of Transubstantiation is difficult to
believe; I did not believe the doctrine till I was a Catholic. I had no
difficulty in believing it, as soon as I believed that the Catholic
Roman Church was the oracle of God, and that she had declared this
doctrine to be part of the original revelation. It is difficult,
impossible, to imagine, I grant;--but how is it difficult to believe?
Yet Macaulay thought it so difficult to believe, that he had need of a
believer in it of talents as eminent as Sir Thomas More, before he could
bring himself to conceive that the Catholics of an enlightened age could
resist "the overwhelming force of the argument against it." "Sir Thomas
More," he says, "is one of the choice specimens of wisdom and virtue;
and the doctrine of transubstantiation is a kind of proof charge. A
faith which stands that test, will stand any test." But for myself, I
cannot indeed prove it, I cannot tell _how_ it is; but I say, "Why
should it not be? What's to hinder it? What do I know of substance or
matter? just as much as the greatest philosophers, and that is nothing
at all;"--so much is this the case, that there is a rising school of
philosophy now, which considers phenomena to constitute the whole of our
knowledge in physics. The Catholic doctrine leaves phenomena alone. It
does not say that the phenomena go; on the contrary, it says that they
remain; nor does it say that the same phenomena are in several places at
once. It deals with what no one on earth knows any thing about, the
material substances themselves. And, in like manner, of that majestic
Article of the Anglican as well as of the Catholic Creed,--the doctrine
of the Trinity in Unity. What do I know of the Essence of the Divine
Being? I know that my abstract idea of three is simply incompatible with
my idea of one; but when I come to the question of concrete fact, I have
no means of proving that there is not a sense in which one and three can
equally be predicated of the Incommunicable God.
But I am going to take upon myself the responsibility of more than the
mere Creed of the Church; as the parties accusing me are determined I
shall do. They say, that now, in that I am a Catholic, though I may not
have offences of my own against honesty to answer for, yet, at least, I
am answerable for the offences of others, of my co-religionists, of my
brother priests, of the Church herself. I am quite willing to accept the
responsibility; and, as I have been able, as I trust, by means of a few
words, to dissipate, in the minds of all those who do not begin with
disbelieving me, the suspicion with which so many Protestants start, in
forming their judgment of Catholics, viz. that our Creed is actually set
up in inevitable superstition and hypocrisy, as the original sin of
Catholicism; so now I will proceed, as before, identifying myself with
the Church and vindicating it,--not of course denying the enormous mass
of sin and error which exists of necessity in that world-wide multiform
Communion,--but going to the proof of this one point, that its system is
in no sense dishonest, and that therefore the upholders and teachers of
that system, as such, have a claim to be acquitted in their own persons
of that odious imputation.
* * * * *
Starting then with the being of a God, (which, as I have said, is as
certain to me as the certainty of my own existence, though when I try to
put the grounds of that certainty into logical shape I find a difficulty
in doing so in mood and figure to my satisfaction,) I look out of myself
into the world of men, and there I see a sight which fills me with
unspeakable distress. The world seems simply to give the lie to that
great truth, of which my whole being is so full; and the effect upon me
is, in consequence, as a matter of necessity, as confusing as if it
denied that I am in existence myself. If I looked into a mirror, and did
not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes
upon me, when I look into this living busy world, and see no reflexion
of its Creator. This is, to me, one of those great difficulties of this
absolute primary truth, to which I referred just now. Were it not for
this voice, speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I should
be an atheist, or a pantheist, or a polytheist when I looked into the
world. I am speaking for myself only; and I am far from denying the real
force of the arguments in proof of a God, drawn from the general facts
of human society and the course of history, but these do not warm me or
enlighten me; they do not take away the winter of my desolation, or make
the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being
rejoice. The sight of the world is nothing else than the prophet's
scroll, full of "lamentations, and mourning, and woe."
To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history,
the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual
alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments,
forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random
achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing
facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the
blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the
progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final
causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his
short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments
of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental
anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries,
the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the
whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle's words,
"having no hope and without God in the world,"--all this is a vision to
dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound
mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution.
What shall be said to this heart-piercing, reason-bewildering fact? I
can only answer, that either there is no Creator, or this living society