Apologia pro vita sua being a history of his religious opinions
in 1821 came upon me as a disappointment as well as a sorrow. I hung
upon the lips of Daniel Wilson, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, as in two
sermons at St. John's Chapel he gave the history of Scott's life and
death. I had been possessed of his "Force of Truth" and Essays from a
boy; his Commentary I bought when I was an under-graduate.
What, I suppose, will strike any reader of Scott's history and writings,
is his bold unworldliness and vigorous independence of mind. He followed
truth wherever it led him, beginning with Unitarianism, and ending in a
zealous faith in the Holy Trinity. It was he who first planted deep in
my mind that fundamental truth of religion. With the assistance of
Scott's Essays, and the admirable work of Jones of Nayland, I made a
collection of Scripture texts in proof of the doctrine, with remarks (I
think) of my own upon them, before I was sixteen; and a few months later
I drew up a series of texts in support of each verse of the Athanasian
Creed. These papers I have still.
Besides his unworldliness, what I also admired in Scott was his resolute
opposition to Antinomianism, and the minutely practical character of his
writings. They show him to be a true Englishman, and I deeply felt his
influence; and for years I used almost as proverbs what I considered to
be the scope and issue of his doctrine, "Holiness rather than peace,"
and "Growth the only evidence of life."
Calvinists make a sharp separation between the elect and the world;
there is much in this that is cognate or parallel to the Catholic
doctrine; but they go on to say, as I understand them, very differently
from Catholicism,--that the converted and the unconverted can be
discriminated by man, that the justified are conscious of their state of
justification, and that the regenerate cannot fall away. Catholics on
the other hand shade and soften the awful antagonism between good and
evil, which is one of their dogmas, by holding that there are different
degrees of justification, that there is a great difference in point of
gravity between sin and sin, that there is the possibility and the
danger of falling away, and that there is no certain knowledge given to
any one that he is simply in a state of grace, and much less that he is
to persevere to the end:--of the Calvinistic tenets the only one which
took root in my mind was the fact of heaven and hell, divine favour and
divine wrath, of the justified and the unjustified. The notion that the
regenerate and the justified were one and the same, and that the
regenerate, as such, had the gift of perseverance, remained with me not
many years, as I have said already.
This main Catholic doctrine of the warfare between the city of God and
the powers of darkness was also deeply impressed upon my mind by a work
of a character very opposite to Calvinism, Law's "Serious Call."
From this time I have held with a full inward assent and belief the
doctrine of eternal punishment, as delivered by our Lord Himself, in as
true a sense as I hold that of eternal happiness; though I have tried in
various ways to make that truth less terrible to the imagination.
Now I come to two other works, which produced a deep impression on me in
the same Autumn of 1816, when I was fifteen years old, each contrary to
each, and planting in me the seeds of an intellectual inconsistency
which disabled me for a long course of years. I read Joseph Milner's
Church History, and was nothing short of enamoured of the long extracts
from St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and the other Fathers which I found
there. I read them as being the religion of the primitive Christians:
but simultaneously with Milner I read Newton on the Prophecies, and in
consequence became most firmly convinced that the Pope was the
Antichrist predicted by Daniel, St. Paul, and St. John. My imagination
was stained by the effects of this doctrine up to the year 1843; it had
been obliterated from my reason and judgment at an earlier date; but the
thought remained upon me as a sort of false conscience. Hence came that
conflict of mind, which so many have felt besides myself;--leading some
men to make a compromise between two ideas, so inconsistent with each
other,--driving others to beat out the one idea or the other from their
minds,--and ending in my own case, after many years of intellectual
unrest, in the gradual decay and extinction of one of them,--I do not
say in its violent death, for why should I not have murdered it sooner,
if I murdered it at all?
I am obliged to mention, though I do it with great reluctance, another
deep imagination, which at this time, the autumn of 1816, took
possession of me,--there can be no mistake about the fact; viz. that it
would be the will of God that I should lead a single life. This
anticipation, which has held its ground almost continuously ever
since,--with the break of a month now and a month then, up to 1829, and,
after that date, without any break at all,--was more or less connected
in my mind with the notion, that my calling in life would require such a
sacrifice as celibacy involved; as, for instance, missionary work among
the heathen, to which I had a great drawing for some years. It also
strengthened my feeling of separation from the visible world, of which I
have spoken above.
In 1822 I came under very different influences from those to which I had
hitherto been subjected. At that time, Mr. Whately, as he was then,
afterwards Archbishop of Dublin, for the few months he remained in
Oxford, which he was leaving for good, showed great kindness to me. He
renewed it in 1825, when he became Principal of Alban Hall, making me
his Vice-Principal and Tutor. Of Dr. Whately I will speak presently: for
from 1822 to 1825 I saw most of the present Provost of Oriel, Dr.
Hawkins, at that time Vicar of St. Mary's; and, when I took orders in
1824 and had a curacy in Oxford, then, during the Long Vacations, I was
especially thrown into his company. I can say with a full heart that I
love him, and have never ceased to love him; and I thus preface what
otherwise might sound rude, that in the course of the many years in
which we were together afterwards, he provoked me very much from time to
time, though I am perfectly certain that I have provoked him a great
deal more. Moreover, in me such provocation was unbecoming, both because
he was the Head of my College, and because, in the first years that I
knew him, he had been in many ways of great service to my mind.
He was the first who taught me to weigh my words, and to be cautious in
my statements. He led me to that mode of limiting and clearing my sense
in discussion and in controversy, and of distinguishing between cognate
ideas, and of obviating mistakes by anticipation, which to my surprise
has been since considered, even in quarters friendly to me, to savour of
the polemics of Rome. He is a man of most exact mind himself, and he
used to snub me severely, on reading, as he was kind enough to do, the
first Sermons that I wrote, and other compositions which I was engaged
upon.
Then as to doctrine, he was the means of great additions to my belief.
As I have noticed elsewhere, he gave me the "Treatise on Apostolical
Preaching," by Sumner, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, from which I
was led to give up my remaining Calvinism, and to receive the doctrine
of Baptismal Regeneration. In many other ways too he was of use to me,
on subjects semi-religious and semi-scholastic.
It was Dr. Hawkins too who taught me to anticipate that, before many
years were over, there would be an attack made upon the books and the
canon of Scripture, I was brought to the same belief by the conversation
of Mr. Blanco White, who also led me to have freer views on the subject
of inspiration than were usual in the Church of England at the time.
There is one other principle, which I gained from Dr. Hawkins, more
directly bearing upon Catholicism, than any that I have mentioned; and
that is the doctrine of Tradition. When I was an Under-graduate, I heard
him preach in the University Pulpit his celebrated sermon on the
subject, and recollect how long it appeared to me, though he was at that
time a very striking preacher; but, when I read it and studied it as his
gift, it made a most serious impression upon me. He does not go one
step, I think, beyond the high Anglican doctrine, nay he does not reach
it; but he does his work thoroughly, and his view was in him original,
and his subject was a novel one at the time. He lays down a proposition,
self-evident as soon as stated, to those who have at all examined the
structure of Scripture, viz. that the sacred text was never intended to
teach doctrine, but only to prove it, and that, if we would learn
doctrine, we must have recourse to the formularies of the Church; for
instance to the Catechism, and to the Creeds. He considers, that, after
learning from them the doctrines of Christianity, the inquirer must
verify them by Scripture. This view, most true in its outline, most
fruitful in its consequences, opened upon me a large field of thought.
Dr. Whately held it too. One of its effects was to strike at the root of
the principle on which the Bible Society was set up. I belonged to its
Oxford Association; it became a matter of time when I should withdraw my
name from its subscription-list, though I did not do so at once.
It is with pleasure that I pay here a tribute to the memory of the Rev.
William James, then Fellow of Oriel; who, about the year 1823, taught me
the doctrine of Apostolical Succession, in the course of a walk, I
think, round Christ Church meadow; I recollect being somewhat impatient
of the subject at the time.
It was at about this date, I suppose, that I read Bishop Butler's
Analogy; the study of which has been to so many, as it was to me, an era
in their religious opinions. Its inculcation of a visible Church, the
oracle of truth and a pattern of sanctity, of the duties of external
religion, and of the historical character of Revelation, are
characteristics of this great work which strike the reader at once; for
myself, if I may attempt to determine what I most gained from it, it lay
in two points, which I shall have an opportunity of dwelling on in the
sequel; they are the underlying principles of a great portion of my
teaching. First, the very idea of an analogy between the separate works
of God leads to the conclusion that the system which is of less
importance is economically or sacramentally connected with the more
momentous system[2], and of this conclusion the theory, to which I was
inclined as a boy, viz. the unreality of material phenomena, is an
ultimate resolution. At this time I did not make the distinction between
matter itself and its phenomena, which is so necessary and so obvious in
discussing the subject. Secondly, Butler's doctrine that Probability is
the guide of life, led me, at least under the teaching to which a few
years later I was introduced, to the question of the logical cogency of
Faith, on which I have written so much. Thus to Butler I trace those two
principles of my teaching, which have led to a charge against me both of
fancifulness and of scepticism.
[2] It is significant that Butler begins his work with a quotation from
Origen.
And now as to Dr. Whately. I owe him a great deal. He was a man of
generous and warm heart. He was particularly loyal to his friends, and
to use the common phrase, "all his geese were swans." While I was still
awkward and timid in 1822, he took me by the hand, and acted towards me
the part of a gentle and encouraging instructor. He, emphatically,
opened my mind, and taught me to think and to use my reason. After being
first noticed by him in 1822, I became very intimate with him in 1825,