Apologia pro vita sua being a history of his religious opinions
disown, and say with Mawworm, 'I like to be despised.'
"Now, how was I to know that the preacher, who had the
reputation of being the most acute man of his generation, and of
having a specially intimate acquaintance with the weaknesses of
the human heart, was utterly blind to the broad meaning and the
plain practical result of a Sermon like this, delivered before
fanatic and hot-headed young men, who hung upon his every word?
that he did not foresee that they would think that they obeyed
him by becoming affected, artificial, sly, shifty, ready for
concealments and equivocations?" &c. &c.--Pp. 14-16.
My accuser asked in this passage what did the Sermon _mean_, and why was
it preached. I will here answer this question; and with this view will
speak, first of the _matter_ of the Sermon, then of its _subject_, then
of its _circumstances_.
1. It was one of the last six Sermons which I wrote when I was an
Anglican. It was one of the five Sermons I preached in St. Mary's
between Christmas and Easter, 1843, the year when I gave up my Living.
The MS. of the Sermon is destroyed; but I believe, and my memory too
bears me out, as far as it goes, that the sentence in question about
Celibacy and Confession, of which this writer would make so much, _was
not preached at all_. The Volume, in which this Sermon is found, was
published _after_ that I had given up St. Mary's, when I had no call on
me to restrain the expression of any thing which I might hold: and I
stated an important fact about it in the Advertisement, in these
words:--
"In preparing [these Sermons] for publication, _a few words and
sentences_ have in several places been _added_, which will be
found to express more _of private or personal opinion_, than it
was expedient to introduce into the _instruction_ delivered in
Church to a parochial Congregation. Such introduction, however,
seems unobjectionable in the case of compositions, which are
_detached_ from the sacred place and service to which they once
belonged, and _submitted to the reason_ and judgment of the
general reader."
This Volume of Sermons then cannot be criticized at all as
_preachments_; they are _essays_; essays of a man who, at the time of
publishing them, was _not_ a preacher. Such passages, as that in
question, are just the very ones which I added _upon_ my publishing
them; and, as I always was on my guard in the pulpit against saying any
thing which looked towards Rome, I shall believe that I did not preach
the obnoxious sentence till some one is found to testify that he heard
it.
At the same time I cannot conceive why the mention of Sacramental
Confession, or of Clerical Celibacy, had I made it, was inconsistent
with the position of an Anglican Clergyman. For Sacramental Confession
and Absolution actually form a portion of the Anglican Visitation of the
Sick; and though the 32nd Article says that "Bishops, priests, and
deacons, are not _commanded_ by God's law either to vow the state of
single life or to abstain from marriage," and "therefore it is _lawful_
for them to marry," this proposition I did not dream of denying, nor is
it inconsistent with St. Paul's doctrine, which I held, that it is
"_good_ to abide even as he," i.e. in celibacy.
But I have more to say on this point. This writer says, "I know that men
used to suspect Dr. Newman,--I have been inclined to do so myself,--of
_writing a whole Sermon, not for the sake of the text or of the matter_,
but for the sake of one simple passing hint,--one phrase, one epithet."
Now observe; can there be a plainer testimony borne to the practical
character of my Sermons at St. Mary's than this gratuitous insinuation?
Many a preacher of Tractarian doctrine has been accused of not letting
his parishioners alone, and of teasing them with his private theological
notions. The same report was spread about me twenty years ago as this
writer spreads now, and the world believed that my Sermons at St. Mary's
were full of red-hot Tractarianism. Then strangers came to hear me
preach, and were astonished at their own disappointment. I recollect the
wife of a great prelate from a distance coming to hear me, and then
expressing her surprise to find that I preached nothing but a plain
humdrum Sermon. I recollect how, when on the Sunday before Commemoration
one year, a number of strangers came to hear me, and I preached in my
usual way, residents in Oxford, of high position, were loud in their
satisfaction that on a great occasion, I had made a simple failure, for
after all there was nothing in the Sermon to hear. Well, but they were
not going to let me off, for all my common-sense view of duty.
Accordingly they got up the charitable theory which this Writer revives.
They said that there was a double purpose in those plain addresses of
mine, and that my Sermons were never so artful as when they seemed
common-place; that there were sentences which redeemed their apparent
simplicity and quietness. So they watched during the delivery of a
Sermon, which to them was too practical to be useful, for the concealed
point of it, which they could at least imagine, if they could not
discover. "Men used to suspect Dr. Newman," he says, "of writing a
_whole_ Sermon, _not_ for the sake of _the text or of the matter_, but
for the sake of one single passing hint, ... _one_ phrase, _one_
epithet, _one_ little barbed arrow, which, as he _swept magnificently_
past on the stream of his calm eloquence, _seemingly_ unconscious of all
presences, save those unseen, he delivered unheeded," &c. To all
appearance, he says, I was "unconscious of all presences." He is not
able to deny that the "_whole_ Sermon" had the _appearance_ of being
"_for the sake_ of the text and matter;" therefore he suggests that
perhaps it wasn't.
* * * * *
2. And now as to the subject of the Sermon. The Sermons of which the
Volume consists are such as are, more or less, exceptions to the rule
which I ordinarily observed, as to the subjects which I introduced into
the pulpit of St. Mary's. They are not purely ethical or doctrinal. They
were for the most part caused by circumstances of the day or of the
moment, and they belong to various years. One was written in 1832, two
in 1836, two in 1838, five in 1840, five in 1841, four in 1842, seven in
1843. Many of them are engaged on one subject, viz. in viewing the
Church in its relation to the world. By the world was meant, not simply
those multitudes which were not in the Church, but the existing body of
human society, whether in the Church or not, whether Catholics,
Protestants, Greeks, or Mahometans, theists or idolaters, as being ruled
by principles, maxims, and instincts of their own, that is, of an
unregenerate nature, whatever their supernatural privileges might be,
greater or less, according to their form of religion. This view of the
relation of the Church to the world as taken apart from questions of
ecclesiastical politics, as they may be called, is often brought out in
my Sermons. Two occur to me at once; No. 3 of my Plain Sermons, which
was written in 1829, and No. 15 of my Third Volume of Parochial, written
in 1835. On the other hand, by Church I meant,--in common with all
writers connected with the Tract Movement, whatever their shades of
opinion, and with the whole body of English divines, except those of the
Puritan or Evangelical School,--the whole of Christendom, from the
Apostles' time till now, whatever their later divisions into Latin,
Greek, and Anglican. I have explained this view of the subject above at
pp. 69-71 of this Volume. When then I speak, in the particular Sermon
before us, of the members, or the rulers, or the action of "the Church,"
I mean neither the Latin, nor the Greek, nor the English, taken by
itself, but of the whole Church as one body: of Italy as one with
England, of the Saxon or Norman as one with the Caroline Church. _This_
was specially the one Church, and the points in which one branch or one
period differed from another were not and could not be Notes of the
Church, because Notes necessarily belong to the whole of the Church
every where and always.
This being my doctrine as to the relation of the Church to the world, I
laid down in the Sermon three principles concerning it, and there left
the matter. The first is, that Divine Wisdom had framed for its action
laws, which man, if left to himself, would have antecedently pronounced
to be the worst possible for its success, and which in all ages have
been called by the world, as they were in the Apostles' days,
"foolishness;" that man ever relies on physical and material force, and
on carnal inducements as Mahomet with his sword and his houris, or
indeed almost as that theory of religion, called, since the Sermon was
written, "muscular Christianity;" but that our Lord, on the contrary,
has substituted meekness for haughtiness, passiveness for violence, and
innocence for craft: and that the event has shown the high wisdom of
such an economy, for it has brought to light a set of natural laws,
unknown before, by which the seeming paradox that weakness should be
stronger than might, and simplicity than worldly policy, is readily
explained.
Secondly, I said that men of the world, judging by the event, and not
recognizing the secret causes of the success, viz. a higher order of
natural laws,--natural, though their source and action were
supernatural, (for "the meek inherit the earth," by means of a meekness
which comes from above,)--these men, I say, concluded, that the success
which they witnessed must arise from some evil secret which the world
had not mastered,--by means of magic, as they said in the first ages, by
cunning as they say now. And accordingly they thought that the humility
and inoffensiveness of Christians, or of Churchmen, was a mere pretence
and blind to cover the real causes of that success, which Christians
could explain and would not; and that they were simply hypocrites.
Thirdly, I suggested that shrewd ecclesiastics, who knew very well that
there was neither magic nor craft in the matter, and, from their
intimate acquaintance with what actually went on within the Church,
discerned what were the real causes of its success, were of course under
the temptation of substituting reason for conscience, and, instead of
simply obeying the command, were led to do good that good might come,
that is, to act _in order_ to secure success, and not from a motive of
faith. Some, I said, did yield to the temptation more or less, and their
motives became mixed; and in this way the world in a more subtle shape
had got into the Church; and hence it had come to pass, that, looking at
its history from first to last, we could not possibly draw the line
between good and evil there, and say either that every thing was to be
defended, or certain things to be condemned. I expressed the difficulty,
which I supposed to be inherent in the Church, in the following words. I
said, "_Priestcraft has ever been considered the badge_, and its
imputation is a kind of Note of the Church: and _in part indeed truly_,
because the presence of powerful enemies, and the sense of their own
weakness, _has sometimes tempted Christians to the abuse, instead of the
use of Christian wisdom, to be wise without being harmless_; but partly,
nay, for the most part, not truly, but slanderously, and merely because
the world called their wisdom craft, when it was found to be a match for
its own numbers and power."
Such is the substance of the Sermon: and as to the main drift of it, it
was this; that I was, there and elsewhere, scrutinizing the course of
the Church as a whole, as if philosophically, as an historical