Introduction{v} THE public rightly regards the Apologia as the most typical and important of the writings of its author. In the first place, it is, in some ways, his most characteristic work. It is instinct with his personality. It is the best exhibition in Newman's published writings of his curious absorption in the drama of his own life. It illustrates the gifts which his greatest enemies have not denied him—his "regal" English style, and his mastery of the methods of effective controversy. It has also special importance in the story of his career, for it marks the critical turning point of his fortunes in later life. When the Kingsley controversy began, Newman's reputation and prospects were at their lowest ebb. He had, since joining the Catholic Church in 1845, been entirely hidden from the public eye, and it is hardly too much to say that the bulk of his fellow countrymen had almost forgotten his existence. He had devoted himself entirely to the duties of his position in his new communion. Yet his work for the Catholic Church had been inadequately appreciated by his co-religionists. The three most considerable enterprises he had undertaken—the Irish University, the translation of the Bible, and his editorship of the Rambler on lines which should enable English Catholics to take an effective share in the thought of the day—had all failed. By an influential group of extremists his orthodoxy was suspected, and they had done their best, not wholly without success, to make Rome itself share their suspicions. He was forgotten by the world at large; he was little esteemed by Catholics themselves. Kingsley's attack gave him the opportunity for setting {vi} himself right alike with the larger public and with the smaller. The opportunity presented difficulties, but it offered a great prize. His chance lay in a battle against heavy odds. Kingsley was a widely popular writer. In accusing the Catholic priesthood of being equivocators and indifferent to truth, he had on his side the widespread prejudice of the English public of 1864. When he added to his original indictment a list of "superstitious" beliefs which Newman himself could not repudiate, he could count on still wider sympathy. But the encounter, though it presented great difficulties, offered, as I have said, a great opportunity. Kingsley's popularity and notoriety would advertise a combat with him, and make it notorious; thus it meant an excellent chance of gaining the attention of the world at large. Moreover Newman, if he defended the Catholic priesthood with conspicuous success, was sure to win, as their champion, quite a new position among his co-religionists. One of the most noteworthy features in the campaign was Newman's keen appreciation of the situation, and of the conditions on which victory depended. He had first to rivet general attention on the contest, and to write without being tedious to the average reader;—to make such a reader ready to follow the dispute further. This he succeeded in doing in the witty pamphlet, published in this volume, in which he summarized his correspondence with Kingsley,—a brief and amusing jeu d'esprit which all could enjoy. That this pamphlet made Kingsley so angry as to forget himself and strike random blows in his retort entitled "What, then, does Dr. Newman mean?" was, probably, a result foreseen by its author: and it was all in Newman's favour. Then Newman had to keep the ball rolling, to avoid any such delay or dullness as might lose for him the general attention he had won. For this purpose it was desirable {vii} that the Apologia should be published in weekly parts, and the first parts had to sustain the note of humorous banter which his pamphlet had struck. This meant work at the very highest pressure. Easy reading means hard writing in such a case. Again, he had to find successfully the tone which could make the advocate of an unpopular cause win general sympathy. It was necessary to bring vividly home to every one the fact that he was deeply wronged, that a serious charge had been brought, that when challenged its bringer had wholly failed to justify it, and had also failed to make any adequate apology for his slander. When once Newman had completely won public sympathy he could say things that could only be told to sympathetic ears. He could then relate the whole story of his life, and could make plain its utter sincerity. The first two parts of the Apologia were brief, brilliant, and full of indignant passion. Then came the bulk of the narrative, so touching to those who had become really interested in the man. Lastly, as an Appendix, came the thirty-nine "blots", as he called them,—with a humorous suggestion in their number of the Anglican articles—in which the worst of Kingsley's random charges were swept away in such a tone of contempt as could only be securely adopted after the reader's sympathy was entirely won. The occasion was great; the work was exacting; but Newman rose to it and emerged triumphant. The Apologia carried the country by storm. It became a classic of the language, and it had to be re-edited that its form, as well as its substance, might befit its permanent character. Its form had to be no longer that appropriate to a controversy of the hour in which rapier thrusts and colloquialisms were suitable weapons, but that of an earnest autobiography which could stand side by side with those of St. Augustine and Rousseau. Its very title {viii} was changed to "History of my Religious Opinions". But his admirers had grown fond of the old title of a book which had been a chief landmark in his life. Apologia pro vita sua eventually reappeared on the title page. The other changes were permanent. The present volume gives to the public for the first time both forms of the work. We here have the Apologia in the dramatic form of its original composition, and we have the work in its final shape as permanent literature. In each form it bears evidence of Newman's keen sense of the fitness of things. What was justified only as a retort made in heat and on the spur of the moment, to words blurted out by Kingsley himself in a moment of anger, was withdrawn. The last chapter was no longer called "General answer to Mr. Kingsley"; it became, "The Position of my mind since 1845." Such omissions and alterations indicate the general principle on which the book was re-edited. Of some specific changes in the text I will speak shortly. The original version will be read with all the greater interest if we call to mind some details of its composition. Newman first sketched the plan of the book. The principal heads of narrative and argument were written up in large letters and pasted on the wall opposite to the desk at which he wrote. Determined not to fail the publishers in their weekly number, his work was done at extraordinary pressure, lasting sometimes right through the night. He was found more than once with his head in his hands, crying like a child over the sadness of the memories which his task recalled. "I have now been for five weeks at it," he writes to an intimate friend on May 1st, 1864, "from morning to night, and I shall have three weeks more ... I have to write over and over again from the necessity of digesting and compressing." {ix} The following brief entries in his diary give the dates: "April10. Beginning of my hard work for the Apologia. April 21st. First part of my Apologia out. April 28th. Second part. May 5th. Third part. May 12th. Fourth part. Sometimes at my work for 16 hours running. May 19th. Fifth part. May 20th. At my Apologia for 22 hours running. May 26th. Sixth part out. June 9th. No part published." The delay meant that the narrative was finished, and that a fortnight was allowed by the publishers for the Appendix. "June 12th. Sent back my LAST proof to the printer." The press, led by Mr. Hutton in the Spectator, gave the work an enthusiastic reception. The Saturday Review, which was notoriously free from the favourable bias which Hutton's known admiration for Newman might make people suspect, and which was then at the zenith of its reputation, received it in a tone which fairly represents that of the bulk of the press notices. "A loose and off-hand, and, we may venture to add, an unjustifiable imputation, cast on Dr. Newman by a popular writer, more remarkable for vigorous writing than vigorous thought, has produced one of the most interesting books of the present literary age." Such are the words with which the review in the Saturday opens, and it continues in the same strain, paying tributes to Dr. Newman's "almost unrivalled logical powers" and to his gifts as "one of the finest masters of language" among contemporary writers. The review contains a close and critical examination of Newman's position, from which the writer, naturally enough, dissents most strongly. But it treats his success in the controversy and the great gifts apparent in his writing as beyond question. That a book which frankly defended its author's acceptance of the {x} doctrine of ecclesiastical infallibility, and of specific modern miracles which the public of 1864 for the most part regarded as credible only to narrow, superstitious, and childish minds, should meet with such a reception; and that a man of Kingsley's popularity not only should fail of victory but should be driven out of the field in his endeavour to make capital against his opponent out of such beliefs, is a remarkable testimony to Newman's conduct of the controversy. The rough handling of Kingsley by his opponent was a marked feature in the original Apologia. Frederick Rogers (afterwards Lord Blachford) wrote to Newman in great anxiety lest it might turn public opinion against him. Newman himself felt he was playing a dangerous game, yet that if his angry tone succeeded it would succeed more completely than any other. And it did succeed. It succeeded so completely and issued in such an acknowledged and crushing defeat for Kingsley that Newman's warmest friends found themselves feeling sorry for the man whose attack they had in the first instance deeply resented. A fine literary critic among Newman's Oratorian entourage—Father Ignatius Dudley Ryder—wrote at the time, as quite a young man, the following note of his own impressions on reading Newman's scathing denunciation of his assailant, and on passing afterwards to the touching and beautiful record of past days, for which this polemical annihilation of the invader had cleared the ground. "In reading his tremendous handling of his opponent in the introduction and conclusion of the Apologia, it is impossible, I think, whatever may be one's sympathies, to avoid a sense of honest pity for the victim as for one condemned though by his own rashness to fight with gods or with the elements. It is not merely with him as with one hurled from his chariot in an Homeric onset with the {xi} gaping wound inflicted by a single spear, but his form is crushed and dislocated; and a hostile stream—Simois or peradventure Scamander—hurries him away rejoicing in its strength with the rush of many waters, yet not so far away but that for long, and still beneath the sun of noon or the moon at night, beneath tempestuous gleams or the keen serenity of the stars, we get glimpses of the helpless burden as it is tossed hither and thither in the eddying stream until the darkness swallows it. And so the recent field of death gives birth to a new revelation of life, and we gaze with wonder upon heavy-fruited trees and golden harvest, and our thought dwells almost tenderly upon the first occasion of all this as on one long since dead who was useful in his generation and no one's enemy but his own." One very interesting feature of Newman's own mentality in this connexion remains to be spoken of. When editing the Apologia as a work of permanent literature, he omitted, as I have said, his more angry retorts to the attacks of Mr. Kingsley. Words used in a moment of anger ought not (he felt) to be repeated in cold blood. With most readers these retorts had beyond question contributed largely to his success at the time. They had brought home to the public the fact that a man of religious life who had made great sacrifices for conscience' sake had been accused of indifference to truth, and had deeply resented the accusation. For a moment perhaps the general verdict trembled in the balance. There was just a chance that people might say: "This is too strong. Kingsley has not deserved all this. He may have gone too far, but he has made his apology. With this Newman ought to be contented." In insisting that the apology had been inadequate and merely conventional, Newman was hazarding much on his success in bringing a rather fine distinction home to a rough-and-ready public. In this however he was successful. The anger apparent in his reply aroused a generous sympathy among Englishmen. {xii} There were comparatively few who held that his resentment had gone to an indefensible extreme. All parties agreed that he had been carried away by passionate and indignant resentment which was almost irresistible; one party—by far the larger—sympathized with the anger of a man who had been wronged, the other held with Hort that his treatment of Kingsley was "horribly unchristian". Both sides probably remembered that this was not the first time that Newman had used strong language where a charge stung him deeply. In 1862 a rumour was circulated in the Globe newspaper that he was about to leave the Oratory and rejoin the Church of England. Newman's public denial of the report was no calm lawyer-like disclaimer, but was instinct with indignant passion and ended with the following paragraph: "I do hereby profess ex animo, with an absolute internal assent and consent, that Protestantism is the dreariest of possible religions; that the thought of the Anglican service makes me shiver, and the thought of the Thirty-nine Articles makes me shudder. Return to the Church of England! No! 'The net is broken, and we are delivered.' I should be a consummate fool (to use a mild term), if in my old age I left 'the land flowing with milk and honey' for the city of confusion and the house of bondage." A similar instance occurred some years after the publication of the Apologia, and made people recall the strength of his language in replying to Kingsley. In 1872 Mr. Capes published in the Guardian a letter which virtually accused Newman of accepting the Vatican definition outwardly while inwardly rejecting it. Newman's published reply was again marked by all the signs of an anger which had carried him away. "I thank Mr. Capes for having put into print what doubtless has often been said behind my back; I do not thank him for the odious words which he has made the {xiii} vehicle of it. I will not dirty my ink by repeating them; but the substance, mildly stated, is this,—that I have all along considered the doctrine of the Pope's Infallibility to be contradicted by the facts of Church history, and that, though convinced of this, I have, in consequence of the Vatican Council, forced myself to do a thing that I never, never fancied would befall me when I became a Catholic—viz., forced myself by some unintelligible quibbles to fancy myself believing what really after all in my heart I could not and did not believe. And that this operation and its result had given me a considerable amount of pain. "I could say much and quote much from what I have written, in comment upon this nasty view of me." After citations from his own earlier writings in which he had clearly avowed his belief in Papal Infallibility, Newman thus summed up the case: "I underwent, then, no change of mind as regards the truth of the doctrine of the Pope's Infallibility in consequence of the Council. It is true I was deeply, though not personally, pained both by the fact and by the circumstances of the definition; and, when it was in contemplation I wrote a most confidential letter, which was surreptitiously gained and published, but of which I have not a word to retract. The feelings of surprise and concern expressed in that letter have nothing to do with a screwing one's conscience to profess what one does not believe, which is Mr. Capes's pleasant account of me. He ought to know better." The supposition which all readers of the angry passages in the Apologia and of these letters, friends of Newman and foes alike, took for granted—that they were ebullitions of temper—was shown eventually to be a mistake. When Newman's private correspondence was published in his Biography, it became quite clear that the language in the letter to the Globe was not, as it seemed at the time, the effect of an ungovernable feeling which carried him away, but had been carefully calculated. "No common denial would have put down the far spread {xiv} impression," he writes to a friend. "I took a course which would destroy it, and, as I think, which alone would be able to destroy it. It is little or nothing to me that people should think me angry, rude, insulting, &c., &c. No common language would have done the work; I had to use language that was unmistakeably my own and could not have been dictated to me ... I have done the work now as I flatter myself, at least for some years to come, and I may not be alive by the time that a new denial might have been necessary." The true rationale of Newman's strong language was vividly brought before his readers on the publication, shortly after the death of Mr. Kingsley, of a letter to Sir William Cope. Newman expressly declared in that letter that he had had no angry feeling whatever towards Mr. Kingsley, but had used the language of anger as the only method of carrying conviction to the public: "As I said in the first pages of my Apologia, it is very difficult to be angry with a man one has never seen. A casual reader would think my language denoted anger, but it did not. I have ever felt from experience that no one would believe me in earnest if I spoke calmly. When again and again I denied the repeated report that I was on the point of coming back to the Church of England, I have uniformly found that if I simply denied it, this only made newspapers repeat the report more confidently; but if I said something sharp, they abused me for scurrility against the Church I had left, but they believed me. Rightly or wrongly, this was the reason why I felt it would not do to be tame and not to show indignation at Mr. Kingsley's charges. Within the last few years I have been obliged to adopt a similar course towards those who said I could not receive the Vatican Decrees. I sent a sharp letter to the Guardian, and of course the Guardian called me names, but it believed me, and did not allow the offence of its correspondent to be repeated." Newman's use of strong language was then due to that close knowledge of the effect produced by words on the {xv} public mind which was so marked a feature in his conduct of the whole controversy. The overmastering passion which carried his readers away was not real but simulated. Doubtless there will be some who will resent this method as histrionic. They will say that Newman was acting a part, that the charm of sincerity is absent from words so carefully calculated. But this appears to me a false estimate. It was no case of using language which he did not consider to be, in itself, justified, with the object of producing a certain controversial effect. On the contrary, he evidently thought an indignant denial and angry language the appropriate retort richly deserved by Kingsley's accusation, and representing truly his own view though not any lively personal feeling. He was using the words appropriate to the situation, as an old man, past all lively feeling, may express in answer to some exceptional public testimonial overpowering emotions of gratitude, of which he is physically incapable, and which are yet the feelings appropriate to the situation. And the case was similar in the other instances to which I have referred. The anonymous assailant in the Globe was unknown to him. He may have been, for all Newman knew, a mere crank, or an Exeter Hall fanatic like the late Mr. Kensit, with whom no one feels angry. Nevertheless the words as they stood in the newspaper fully deserved the vehemence and indignation conveyed by his letter. As to the letter of 1872 to the Guardian, it is likely enough that his sympathy with Mr. Capes's religious trials precluded any angry feeling at the time of writing. Yet people knew that Capes had been a more or less intimate friend; and probably anything short of an angry denial on Newman's part would have been open to the interpretation that, though he felt in duty bound formally to disclaim the accusation that he did not accept the Vatican decrees in his heart, his real feeling was {xvi} much what Mr. Capes had represented it to be. It is noteworthy that in the sweeping current of his angry disclaimer, Newman slips in a clause to the effect that he has not a word to retract of his strong letter to Bishop Ullathorne in which he deplored the prospect of the definition. Thus the letter to the Guardian, while couched in rhetorical terms which satisfied the indignation of loyal Catholics, cannot possibly be charged with misrepresenting Newman's own attitude in the smallest degree. The Kingsley case was one which called for the language of anger yet more obviously than the other two. A very popular writer was attacking Newman and bringing charges against the Catholic priesthood, which widespread prejudice made Englishmen very ready to credit. Newman had, therefore, to fight against great odds. He had to win over public opinion by bringing home to it the injustice of Kingsley's method. If he did not feel carried away by anger against a man whom he did not know personally, and whose reputation made any such attack on the Catholic Church from his pen almost the mechanical exhibition of an idée fixe, this was surely no reason for refraining from bringing home to the public by the only means in his power, the indignation such charges objectively merited. Theft may be due in an individual to kleptomania, yet theft must be reprobated by all the force of public opinion; we must endorse that opinion on occasions even though we cannot feel any moral animus against the kleptomaniac. Englishmen in general would not be saying, "Kingsley so hates the Church of Rome that he cannot help making unfair charges." On the contrary, they would take Kingsley's words as a damaging expression of the conviction of an honest man; and it was in this, their objective aspect, that they had to be answered. One or two further changes in the text which have no {xvii} relation to Mr. Kingsley may here be noted. One of them relates to my own father. Mr. Hutton, Abbé Bremond, and other students of Newman, have commented in some surprise on the fact that my father's name is never mentioned in the Apologia. When I was quite a boy I was reading the first edition of the Apologia when it was not many years old, and my father said to me: "Page 277 [Note 1] and the following pages are mainly a description of me. When I read them I realized for the first time how much I had irritated Newman at Oxford. He does not mention my name, and that is partly because of his present displeasure with me. But also it has a more friendly reason, for he did not wish to pass criticisms on me by name. He mentions Oakeley who was identified with my views at Oxford, and then excepts him personally from his criticisms." The passage he specially pointed to as evidencing Newman's irritation in Oxford days, was that in which he intimates that the representatives of the avowedly Roman section of the Movement worried him by incessant argument and publicly claimed his assent—which they had forcibly extorted—to their own conclusions. My father said that he himself was the typical logician referred to in the passage. "To come to me with methods of logic," Newman writes, "had in it the nature of a provocation." And again: "It might so happen that I got simply confused by the very clearness of the logic which was administered to me and thus gave my sanction to conclusions which really were not mine: and when the report of those conclusions came round to me through others I had to unsay them. And then again perhaps I did not like to see men scared or scandalized by unfeeling logical influences which would not have touched them to the day of their death had they not been made to eat them. And then I felt altogether {xviii} the force of the maxim of St. Ambrose: Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum." [Note 2] An old letter to Pusey, quoted two pages later, in which the attempt of an unnamed A.B. to "force" him beyond what he "can fairly accept" is stigmatized as a "nuisance", obviously referred to the same trial. In the later editions the name "Ward" was inserted in place of A.B., so that it could no longer be said that my father was unmentioned. At the same time the text was changed, in one case by getting rid of a colloquialism which savoured of irritation;—"forced to recognize them" was substituted for "made to eat them". The other change—"strength of the logic" in place of "clearness of the logic"—does not seem to me an improvement, though its cause was obvious. It was doubtless designed to get rid of the apparent paradox that the "clearness" of my father's logic could have the effect of "confusing" Newman. "Strength" of logic, on the other hand, might, like strong wine, have a confusing effect. Yet to confuse by its clearness was in fact, I think, at times just the effect of my father's reasoning. His arguments were clear as those of Euclid, and they were most confusing when one felt that they apparently demonstrated a conclusion which was obviously false. One could not at once see the point at which he had left out relevant facts which should have modified his conclusion; yet these facts were present subconsciously in one's mind. The combination of the clearest demonstration from premisses of which one was conscious, with latent knowledge of other premisses inconsistent with the conclusion, was most confusing. In later years Newman went yet further in avowing the truth of my father's inferences from the text of the Apologia. In a letter to myself of January 1885, he writes: {xix} "Your father was never a High Churchman, never a Tractarian, never a Puseyite, never a Newmanite. What his line was is described in the Apologia, pp. 163 seq." pages exactly corresponding in the then current edition of the Apologia to those pointed out to me by my father himself in the original edition. Yet further light was thrown on Newman's annoyance at the pressure of W. G. Ward's logic, by a passage in Dean Church's Oxford Movement, published in 1890, which runs as follows: "Mr. Ward was in the habit of appealing to Mr. Newman to pronounce on the soundness of his principles and inferences with the view of getting Mr. Newman's sanction for them against more timid or more dissatisfied friends; and he would come down with great glee on objectors to some new and startling position, with the reply 'Newman says so.' ... Mr. Ward was continually forcing on Mr. Newman so-called irresistible inferences: 'If you say so and so, surely you must also say something more?' Avowedly ignorant of facts, and depending for them on others, he was only concerned with logical consistency. And accordingly Mr. Newman, with whom producible logical consistency was indeed a great thing, but with whom it was very far from being everything, had continually to accept conclusions which he would rather have kept in abeyance, to make admissions which were used without their qualifications, to push on and sanction extreme ideas which he himself shrank from because they were extreme. But it was all over with his command of time, his liberty to make up his mind slowly on the great decision. He had to go at Mr. Ward's pace and not his own. He had to take Mr. Ward's questions, not when he wanted to have them and at his own time, but at Mr. Ward's. No one can tell how much this state of things affected the working of Mr. Newman's mind in that pause of hesitation before the final step; how far it accelerated the view which he ultimately took of his position. No one can tell, for many {xx} other influences were mixed up with this one. But there is no doubt that Mr. Newman felt the annoyance and the unfairness of this perpetual questioning for the benefit of Mr. Ward's theories, and there can be little doubt that, in effect, it drove him onwards and cut short his time of waiting. Engineers tell us that, in the case of a ship rolling in a sea-way, when the periodic times of the ship's roll coincide with those of the undulations of the waves, a condition of things arises highly dangerous to the ship's stability. So the agitations of Mr. Newman's mind were reinforced by the impulses of Mr. Ward's." Another change in the text has some relation to my father, though a less direct one. Newman had used the opportunity given him by Kingsley's attack to point out that there was a "violent ultra party" among Catholics, "which exalts opinions into dogmas, and has it principally at heart to destroy every school of thought but its own." And his correspondence shows that in this part of his treatment he was aiming at what he held to be my father's exaggerations as to the import of Papal Infallibility and other cognate matters [Note 3]. His words applied, I think, in reality more closely to passages in the writings of M. Louis Veuillot of the Univers than to anything my father published. Newman pointed out that the Holy See has no magical power of teaching new truth infallibly, but represents the conservative element which preserves the original deposit of faith. He held that, properly understood, the claim to infallibility made by the Catholic Church was even a persuasive claim in view of the tendency of free discussion on the fundamental truths of religion to issue simply in unbelief. Yet to exaggerate the Church's claim beyond a certain point was to make it incredible. The appeal presented to reason and imagination alike by the Catholic Church as the "concrete representative of things invisible" {xxi} bearing witness to the unseen world amid the confused voices and uncertain results of speculation was cogent. The exponents of an exaggerated Ultramontanism were turning what was winning and persuasive into something impossible and grotesque. In their intellectual analysis of religion they were claiming a completeness of truth for the orthodox, a completeness of error for the unorthodox, which patent facts obviously disproved. In the wave of success which had come after the Apologia had appeared, he could emphasize more clearly than he had thought wise while he was writing it, some of his contentions against writers who were, he considered, ignoring patent facts of history and making rational apologetic in some departments difficult or impossible. One new passage, on the value and partial truth of the writings of men who may, nevertheless, have fallen into heresy, is a noteworthy one. Newman's thesis is that "individuals, and not the Holy See, have taken the initiative, and given the lead to the Catholic mind, in theological inquiry", and that the function of Rome is mainly conservative—not to originate Catholic thought, but rather to check premature or false developments. He signalizes St. Augustine and the African Church as the best early exponents of the Latin ideas, and adds the following passage in later editions: "Moreover, of the African divines, the first in order of time, and not the least influential, is the strong-minded and heterodox Tertullian. Nor is the Eastern intellect, as such, without its share in the formation of the Latin teaching. The free thought of Origen is visible in the writings of the Western Doctors, Hilary and Ambrose; and the independent mind of Jerome has enriched his own vigorous commentaries on Scripture, from the stores of the scarcely orthodox Eusebius. Heretical questionings have been transmuted by the living power of the Church into salutary truths." {xxii} The further variations between the different editions witness mainly to Newman's extreme care in revising all that he wrote. They are well worth studying in detail, but call for no further remarks here. The interest in the Apologia was not confined to Englishmen. Newman's University Sermons and his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine had long existed in a French form. And his French admirers wished to have the Apologia in their own language. A translation appeared in 1866 and had to be reprinted in 1868. Newman showed the same interest in meeting the requirements of his new public and adapting the work to their needs as he had done in re-editing it for English readers. He wrote two Appendixes for the French edition, which are so interesting that I here append them, as completing the picture which this volume aims at presenting of the history of the Apologia in its various phases. The first is on the constitution and history of the Church of England: "There is, perhaps, no other institution in which the English have shown their love of compromise in political and social affairs so strikingly as in the established national Church. Luther, Calvin and Zwingli, all enemies of Rome, were equally the enemies of one another. Of other Protestant sects the Erastians, Puritans and Arminians are also different and hostile. But it is no exaggeration to say that the Anglican ecclesiastical Establishment is an amalgamation of all these varieties of Protestantism, to which a considerable amount of Catholicism is superadded. The Establishment is the outcome of the action which Henry VIII, the ministers of Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth, the Cavaliers, the Puritans, the Latitudinarians of 1688, and the Methodists of the Eighteenth Century successively brought to bear on religion. It has a hierarchy dating from the Middle Ages, richly endowed, exalted by its civil position, formidable by its political influence. The Established Church has preserved the rites, the prayers and the {xxiii} symbols of the ancient Church. She draws her articles of faith from Lutheran and Zwinglian sources; her translation of the Bible savours of Calvinism. She can boast of having had in her bosom, especially in the seventeenth century, a succession of theologians of great learning and proud to make terms with the doctrines and practices of the primitive Church. The great Bossuet, contemplating her doctors, said that it was impossible that the English should not one day come back to the faith of their fathers; and De Maistre hailed the Anglican communion as being destined to play a great part in the reconciliation and reunion of Christendom. This remarkable Church has always been in the closest dependence on the civil power and has always gloried in this. It has ever regarded the Papal power with fear, with resentment and with aversion, and it has never won the heart of the people. In this it has shown itself consistent throughout the course of its existence; in other concerns it has either had no opinions or has constantly changed them. In the sixteenth century it was Calvinist; in the first half of the seventeenth it was Arminian and quasi-Catholic; towards the close of that century and at the beginning of the next it was latitudinarian. In the middle of the eighteenth century it was described by Lord Chatham as having 'a papistical ritual and prayer-book, Calvinist articles of faith and an Arminian clergy'. In our days it contains three powerful parties in which are embodied the three principles of religion which appear constantly and from the beginning of its history in one form or another; the Catholic principle, the Protestant principle, and the sceptical principle. Each of these, it is hardly necessary to say, is violently opposed to the other two. Firstly: the apostolic or Tractarian party, which is now moving in the direction of Catholicism further than at any other time, or in any previous manifestation; to such an extent, that, in studying this party among its most advanced adherents, one may say that it differs in nothing from Catholicism except in the doctrine of Papal supremacy. The party arose in the seventeenth century, at the courts of James I and Charles I; it was almost extinguished by {xiv} the doctrines of Locke and by the ascent to the throne of William III and the House of Hanover. But in the course of the eighteenth century its principles were taught and silently transmitted by the 'non-jurors', a sect of learned and zealous men who, preserving the episcopal succession, separated themselves from the Church of England when summoned to take the oath of fidelity to William III. In our day it has been seen to revive and form a numerous and increasing party in the Church of England, by means of the movement started by the writings entitled: Tracts for the Times, (and thence called Tractarian,) of which there is such constant mention in this book. Secondly: the Evangelical party which maintains all the biblical societies and most of the associations for protestant missions throughout the world. The origin of this party may be traced back to the puritans, who began to show themselves in the last years of Queen Elizabeth's reign. It was almost entirely thrown out of the Church of England at the time of the restoration of Charles II in 1660. It took refuge among the dissenters from that Church and was expiring little by little when its doctrines were revived with great vigour by the celebrated preachers Whitfield and Wesley, both pastors of the Anglican Church and founders of the powerful sect of the Methodists. These doctrines, while creating a sect outside the established Church, exercised at the same time an important influence in the bosom of that Church itself, and developed there little by little until it formed the evangelical party, which is today by far the most important of the three schools which we are trying to describe. Thirdly: the Liberal party, known in previous centuries by the less honourable name of Latitudinarian. It broke off from the quasi-Catholic party, or Court party, in the reign of Charles I, and was fed and extended by the introduction into England of the principles of Grotius and of the Arminians of Holland. We have already referred to the philosophy of Locke as having had an influence in the same direction. This party took the side of the revolution of 1688, and supported the Whigs, William III, and the House of Hanover. The spirit of its principles is opposed to extension and proselytism; and, although it has numbered {xxv} in its ranks remarkable writers among the Anglican theologians, it had had but few votaries until ten years ago, when, irritated by the success of the Tractarians, taking advantage of the conversion of some of their principal leaders to the Roman Church, and aided by the importation of German literature into England, this party suddenly came before the public view and was propagated among the best educated classes with a rapidity so astonishing that it is almost justifiable to believe that in the coming generation the religious world will be divided between the Deists and the Catholics. The principles and arguments of the Liberals do not even stop at deism. If the Anglican communion were composed solely of these three parties it could not exist. It would be broken up by its internal dissensions. But there is in its bosom a party more numerous by far than these three theological ones—a party which, created by the legal position of the Church, profiting by its riches and by the institutions of its creed, is the counter weight and the chain which secures the whole. It is the party of order, the party of Conservatives, or Tories as they have hitherto been called. It is not a religious party, not that it has not a great number of religious men in its ranks, but because its principles and its mots d'ordre are political or at least ecclesiastical rather than theological. Its members are neither Tractarians, nor Evangelicals, nor Liberals; or, if they are, it is in a very mild and very unaggressive form; because, in the eyes of the world their chief characteristic consists in their being advocates of an Establishment and of the Establishment, and they are more zealous for the preservation of a national Church than solicitous for the beliefs which that national Church professes. We said above that the great principle of the Anglican Church was its confidence in the protection of the civil power and its docility in serving it, which its enemies call its Erastianism. Now if on the one hand this respect for the civil power be its great principle, the principle of Erastianism is, on the other hand, embodied in so numerous a party whether among the clergy or the laity, that the word 'party' is scarcely adequate. It constitutes the mass of the Church. The clergy in particular—Bishops, Deans, Chapters, Rectors—are always distinguished by their {xxvi} Toryism on all English questions. In the seventeenth century they professed the divine right of kings; they have ever since gloried in the doctrine: 'The King is the head of the Church;' and their after-dinner toast: 'The Church and the King' has been their formula of protestation for maintaining in the kingdom of England the theoretical predominance of the spiritual over the temporal. They have always testified an extreme aversion for what they term the power usurped by the Pope. Their chief theological dogma is that the Bible contains all necessary truths, and that every Christian is individually capable of discovering them there for his own use. They preach Christ as the only mediator, redemption by His death, the renewal of man by His Spirit, the necessity for good works. This great assembly of men, true representatives of that English common sense which is so famous for its good as for its evil consequences, mostly regard every kind of theology, every theological school, and in particular the three schools which we have tried to portray, with mistrust. In the seventeenth century they combated the Puritans; at the close of that century they combated the Latitudinarians; in the middle of the eighteenth century they combated the Methodists and the members of the Evangelical party; and in our own times they have made an energetic stand at first against the Tractarians and today against the Liberals. This party of order in the Established Church has necessarily many subdivisions. The country clergy, rejoicing in great ease, in intimate relations with the county gentlemen of their neighbourhood and always benevolent and charitable, are much respected and beloved by the lower classes on account of their position, but not for the influence of their doctrine. But amongst ecclesiastics who enjoy great revenues and have not much to do (such as the members of the Cathedral chapters), many have long since deteriorated in the pursuit of their personal advantage. Those who held high positions in great towns have been led to adopt the habits of a great position and of external display, and have boasted a formal orthodoxy which was cold and almost entirely devoid of interior life. These self-indulgent pastors have for a long time been nick-named 'two-bottle orthodox', as though their greatest {xxvii} religious zeal manifested itself in the drinking of port wine to the health of 'the Church and King'. The pompous dignitaries of great town parishes have also been surnamed the 'high and dry' school or Church. It still remains for us to explain three words which are in opposition to each other and which will find their place in this book: High Church; Low Church; Broad Church. The last of these denominations offers no difficulty: the word 'broad' answers to that of 'latitudinarian', and by Broad Church is understood the Liberal party. But the denominations of High and Low Church cannot be understood without explanation. The doctrinal appellation of 'High Church' signifies the teaching which aims at asserting the prerogatives and authority of the Church; but not so much its invisible powers as its privileges and gifts as a visible body; and, since in the Anglican religion these temporal privileges have always depended on the civil power, it happens accidentally that a partisan of the High Church is almost an Erastian; that is to say, a man who denies the spiritual power pertaining to the Church and maintains that the Church is one of the branches of the civil government. Thus, a Calvinist may be a partisan of the High Church, as was Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of Elizabeth, and as was also Hooker, the Master of the Temple [Note 4], at any rate during his youth. The Low Church is obviously the opposite to the High Church. If then the High Church party is the party which upholds the Church and the King, the Low Church party is the one which anathematises that Erastian doctrine and considers it anti-Christian to give the State any power whatsoever over the Church of God; it was thus that formerly the Puritans and the Independents preferred Cromwell to King Charles. Today, however, since the Puritans have ceased to exist in England, the denomination of Low Church has ceased to represent an ecclesiastical idea, and designates a theological party, becoming synonymous with the Evangelical party. In consequence, an analogous {xxviii} change has taken place in the meaning of the name 'High Church'. Instead of denoting solely the partisans of the 'Church and the King', or the Erastians, it has come to have a theological signification and to denote the semi-Catholic party. Thus it often happens in our own days that even the Tractarians are called partisans of the High Church, although they began by denouncing Erastianism, and although, in their early days, they were violently opposed at Oxford by the High Church party or Established Church." With the above should be read a shorter note, designed for the same readers, on the University of Oxford: "The University of Oxford has been the intellectual centre of England ever since the Middle Ages. Six centuries ago Paris alone surpassed it as an ecclesiastical school and it was the mother of the great theologians, Scotus, Alexander of Hales, and Occam. Even in those times it was a kind of representative of the political parties of the nation. An old rhymed couplet gives evidence of that:
In the centuries following the Reformation, Oxford has always been the head quarters of the Tory or Conservative party, which has been described above as the most considerable in the Established Church. It was there that the Protestant reformers, Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer, were burnt alive in the time of Queen Mary; it was there that King Charles I found his most steadfast support against his Parliament. It was there that the non-jurors and other supporters of the Stuarts sought a refuge for their opinions when the House of Hanover had taken possession of the kingdom; and, while remaining eminently conservative in its religious and political teaching, it has nevertheless so completely sustained the intellectual vigour of its first ages, that, even in the course of the last century, it has given birth to each of the three theological parties that exist today in the Established Church, and to which the conservative spirit which so specially characterises it, is naturally so opposed. The Evangelical party of today owes {xxix} its origin to Whitfield and Wesley, who, towards the middle of the last century, began their religious life as Oxford students. Oxford was again, as this volume proves, the sole mother and nurse of Tractarianism; and the Liberalism which today inundates the English intelligent classes sprang rather from Oxford than from any other source. Let us proceed to its academic constitution. There, too, Oxford has preserved this character of the Middle Ages which nearly all the continental universities have lost. It comprehends a certain number of separate societies which bear the distinctive names of colleges and halls, and each of which has its separate and independent rights and privileges. Its position cannot be better described than by comparing it to the political constitution of the United States of America. Just as the different States are, or have hitherto been, independent within their proper limitations and are nevertheless included in the dominion of the republic, so each of the Oxford colleges is a separate corporation legally and actually independent of all the others, although they are all constituent parts of the same university. These colleges were in the beginning inns or hostels intended for the reception of students who had come from afar. Little by little they took the form of separate societies, and, obtaining the patronage of important people, whether ecclesiastics or nobles, they acquired a legal existence (status) and were richly endowed. Other colleges have their origin in the monasteries with which the university was abundantly provided. Today there exist about twenty colleges and five halls. The difference between a college and a hall is that the college is a corporation possessing endowments and having its own complete administration, and that the hall is not a corporation. Mention is made in this work of Oriel College, founded in 1326 by King Edward II; of Trinity College, founded in the sixteenth century on the site of a Benedictine house; of Pembroke College, whose origin is more modern; and of Alban Hall, the antiquity of which goes back further than that of the two first. The corporate rights of a college rest with a head and with Fellows, whose position answers to that of the Dean and Canons of a cathedral. And this head is designated by different titles, such as Provost of Oriel, {xxx} President of Trinity, Master of Pembroke, and Principal of Alban Hall. The head of the university itself is the Chancellor, who is generally a great nobleman, or a considerable statesman, elected to the position by the members of the university. The three most recent Chancellors have been Lord Grenville, so celebrated in the beginning of the history of this century, the Duke of Wellington, and Lord Derby, now the head of the Conservative party. The acting governor of the university is the Vice-Chancellor who is chosen, according to custom, from among the heads of the colleges in turn and holds his office for four years." It is interesting to note that when classifying, in another Appendix to the French edition, the Anglican writers named in the Apologia, Newman gives Rose, Hook, and Perceval,—all of them among the founders of the Oxford Movement,—as members, not of the Anglo-Catholic party, but of "the party of the High Church or of the Established Church considered separately from the three theological parties". Palmer, on the other hand, like Pusey and Keble, is classed with the Anglo-Catholics. The above notes are, of course, nearly half a century old. It would be instructive if some student of the fortunes of the Church of England, as accurate as Newman, were to trace the causes which have made one of Newman's statements so completely inapplicable to the present day,—the statement that the clergy, and especially the high dignitaries, are "always distinguished for their Toryism on all English questions". The alliance of Bishops of the Established Church with the democracy is, as we are reminded by this statement, a modern development, and the important part played by the episcopal bench in passing the Parliament Bill would probably have suggested some interesting reflections to Newman could he have foreseen it. WILFRID WARD. Top | Contents | Biographies | Works | Home Notes1. This corresponds with p. 259 of the present
edition. 2. Vide infra, p. 264. 3. Life of Newman, vol.
ii. p. 92. 4. This title was given to a
preacher directed to preach on certain days in a very curious little
church which formerly belonged to the Templars.—Note by John Henry
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