Apologia pro vita sua being a history of his religious opinions
phenomenon, and observing the laws on which it was conducted. Hence the
Sermon, or Essay as it more truly is, is written in a dry and
unimpassioned way: it shows as little of human warmth of feeling as a
Sermon of Bishop Butler's. Yet, under that calm exterior there was a
deep and keen sensitiveness, as I shall now proceed to show.
* * * * *
3. If I mistake not, it was written with a secret thought about myself.
Every one preaches according to his frame of mind, at the time of
preaching. One heaviness especially oppressed me at that season, which
this Writer, twenty years afterwards, has set himself with a good will
to renew: it arose from the sense of the base calumnies which were
heaped upon me on all sides. It is worth observing that this Sermon is
exactly contemporaneous with the report spread by a Bishop (_vid. supr._
p. 181), that I had advised a clergyman converted to Catholicism to
retain his Living. This report was in circulation in February 1843, and
my Sermon was preached on the 19th. In the trouble of mind into which I
was thrown by such calumnies as this, I gained, while I reviewed the
history of the Church, at once an argument and a consolation. My
argument was this: if I, who knew my own innocence, was so blackened by
party prejudice, perhaps those high rulers and those servants of the
Church, in the many ages which intervened between the early Nicene times
and the present, who were laden with such grievous accusations, were
innocent also; and this reflection served to make me tender towards
those great names of the past, to whom weaknesses or crimes were
imputed, and reconciled me to difficulties in ecclesiastical
proceedings, which there were no means now of properly explaining. And
the sympathy thus excited for them, re-acted on myself, and I found
comfort in being able to put myself under the shadow of those who had
suffered as I was suffering, and who seemed to promise me their
recompense, since I had a fellowship in their trial. In a letter to my
Bishop at the time of Tract 90, part of which I have quoted, I said that
I had ever tried to "keep innocency;" and now two years had passed since
then, and men were louder and louder in heaping on me the very charges,
which this Writer repeats out of my Sermon, of "fraud and cunning,"
"craftiness and deceitfulness," "double-dealing," "priestcraft," of
being "mysterious, dark, subtle, designing," when I was all the time
conscious to myself, in my degree, and after my measure, of "sobriety,
self-restraint, and control of word and feeling." I had had experience
how my past success had been imputed to "secret management;" and how,
when I had shown surprise at that success, that surprise again was
imputed to "deceit;" and how my honest heartfelt submission to authority
had been called, as it was called in a Bishop's charge abroad, "mystic
humility;" and how my silence was called an "hypocrisy;" and my
faithfulness to my clerical engagements a secret correspondence with the
enemy. And I found a way of destroying my sensitiveness about these
things which jarred upon my sense of justice, and otherwise would have
been too much for me, by the contemplation of a large law of the Divine
Dispensation, and felt myself more and more able to bear in my own
person a present trial, of which in my past writings I had expressed an
anticipation.
For this feeling and thus speaking this Writer compares me to "Mawworm."
"I found him telling Christians," he says, "that they will always seem
'artificial,' and 'wanting in openness and manliness;' that they will
always be 'a mystery' to the world; and that the world will always think
them rogues; and bidding them glory in what the world (that is, the rest
of their fellow-countrymen) disown, and say with Mawworm, 'I like to be
despised.' Now how was I to know that the preacher ... 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?"--Fanatic and hot-headed young men, who hung on my every
word! If he had undertaken to write a history, and not a romance, he
would have easily found out, as I have said above, that from 1841 I had
severed myself from the younger generation of Oxford, that Dr. Pusey and
I had then closed our theological meetings at his house, that I had
brought my own weekly evening parties to an end, that I preached only by
fits and starts at St. Mary's, so that the attendance of young men was
broken up, that in those very weeks from Christmas till over Easter,
during which this Sermon was preached, I was but five times in the
pulpit there. He would have found, that it was written at a time when I
was shunned rather than sought, when I had great sacrifices in
anticipation, when I was thinking much of myself; that I was ruthlessly
tearing myself away from my own followers, and that, in the musings of
that Sermon, I was at the very utmost only delivering a testimony in my
behalf for time to come, not sowing my rhetoric broadcast for the chance
of present sympathy.
Again, he says: "I found him actually using of such [prelates], (and, as
I thought, of himself and his party likewise,) the words 'They yield
outwardly; to assent inwardly were to betray the faith. Yet they are
called deceitful and double-dealing, because they do as much as they
can, not more than they may.'" This too is a proof of my duplicity! Let
this writer, in his dealings with some one else, go just a little
further than he has gone with me; and let him get into a court of law
for libel; and let him be convicted; and let him still fancy that his
libel, though a libel, was true, and let us then see whether he will not
in such a case "yield outwardly," without assenting internally; and then
again whether we should please him, if we called him "deceitful and
double-dealing," because "he did as much as he could, not more than he
ought to do." But Tract 90 will supply a real illustration of what I
meant. I yielded to the Bishops in outward act, viz. in not defending
the Tract, and in closing the Series; but, not only did I not assent
inwardly to any condemnation of it, but I opposed myself to the
proposition of a condemnation on the part of authority. Yet I was then
by the public called "deceitful and double-dealing," as this Writer
calls me now, "because I did as much as I felt I could do, and not more
than I felt I could honestly do." Many were the publications of the day
and the private letters, which accused me of shuffling, because I closed
the Series of Tracts, yet kept the Tracts on sale, as if I ought to
comply not only with what my Bishop asked, but with what he did not ask,
and perhaps did not wish. However, such teaching, according to this
Writer, was likely to make young men "suspect, that truth was not a
virtue for its own sake, but only for the sake of the spread of
'Catholic opinions,' and the 'salvation of their own souls;' and that
cunning was the weapon which heaven had allowed to them to defend
themselves against the persecuting Protestant public."--p. 16.
And now I draw attention to a further point. He says, "How was I to know
that the preacher ... did not foresee, that [fanatic and hot-headed
young men] would think that they obeyed him, by becoming affected,
artificial, sly, shifty, ready for concealments and _equivocations_?"
"How should he know!" What! I suppose that we are to think every man a
knave till he is proved not to be such. Know! had he no friend to tell
him whether I was "affected" or "artificial" myself? Could he not have
done better than impute _equivocations_ to me, at a time when I was in
no sense answerable for the _amphibologia_ of the Roman casuists? Had he
a single fact which belongs to me personally or by profession to couple
my name with equivocation in 1843? "How should he know" that I was not
sly, smooth, artificial, non-natural! he should know by that common
manly frankness, by which we put confidence in others, till they are
proved to have forfeited it; he should know it by my own words in that
very Sermon, in which I say it is best to be natural, and that reserve
is at best but an unpleasant necessity. For I say there expressly:--
"I do not deny that there is something very engaging in a frank
and unpretending manner; some persons have it more than others;
in _some persons it is a great grace_. But it must be
recollected that I am speaking of _times of persecution and
oppression_ to Christians, such as the text foretells; and then
surely frankness will become nothing else than indignation at
the oppressor, and vehement speech, if it is permitted.
Accordingly, as persons have deep feelings, so they will find
the necessity of self-control, lest they should say what they
ought not."
He sums up thus:
"If [Dr. Newman] would ... persist (as in this Sermon) in
dealing with matters dark, offensive, doubtful, sometimes
actually forbidden, at least according to the notions of the
great majority of English Churchmen; if he would always do so in
a tentative, paltering way, seldom or never letting the world
know how much he believed, how far he intended to go; if, in a
word, his method of teaching was a suspicious one, what wonder
if the minds of men were filled with suspicions of him?"--p. 17.
Now, in the course of my Narrative, I have frankly admitted that I was
tentative in such of my works as fairly allowed of the introduction into
them of religious inquiry; but he is speaking of my Sermons; where,
then, is his proof that in my Sermons I dealt in matters dark,
offensive, doubtful, actually forbidden? He must show that I was
tentative in my Sermons; and he has the range of eight volumes to gather
evidence in. As to the ninth, my University Sermons, of course I was
tentative in them; but not because "I would seldom or never let the
world know how much I believed, or how far I intended to go;" but
because University Sermons are commonly, and allowably, of the nature of
disquisitions, as preached before a learned body; and because in deep
subjects, which had not been fully investigated, I said as much as I
believed, and about as far as I saw I could go; and a man cannot do
more; and I account no man to be a philosopher who attempts to do more.
NOTE D. ON PAGE 213.
SERIES OF SAINTS' LIVES OF 1843-4.
I have here an opportunity of preserving, what otherwise would be lost,
the Catalogue of English Saints which I formed, as preparatory to the
Series of their Lives which was begun in the above years. It is but a
first Essay, and has many obvious imperfections; but it may be useful to
others as a step towards a complete hagiography for England. For
instance St. Osberga is omitted; I suppose because it was not easy to
learn any thing about her. Boniface of Canterbury is inserted, though
passed over by the Bollandists on the ground of the absence of proof of
a _cultus_ having been paid to him. The Saints of Cornwall were too
numerous to be attempted. Among the men of note, not Saints, King Edward
II. is included from piety towards the founder of Oriel College. With
these admissions I present my Paper to the reader.
_Preparing for Publication, in Periodical Numbers, in small 8vo,
The Lives of the English Saints, Edited by the Rev. John Henry
Newman, B.D., Fellow of Oriel College._
It is the compensation of the disorders and perplexities of
these latter times of the Church that we have the history of the
foregoing. We indeed of this day have been reserved to witness a
disorganization of the City of God, which it never entered into
the minds of the early believers to imagine: but we are