Page images
PDF
EPUB

on him in that way had not his docile, plastic, and receptive mind already been poisoned against the Reformation by Froude. "The Reform agitation was going on around me as I wrote. The Whigs had come into power; Lord Grey had told the Bishops to set their house in order" (it greatly needed it), " and some of the Prelates had been insulted and threatened in the streets of London." (They were mostly against reform.) "The vital question was, How were we to keep the Church from being liberalised? There was such apathy on the subject in some quarters, such imbecile alarm in others; the true principles of Churchmanship seemed so radically decayed" (Newman's were at any rate different from those taught by the formularies of the English Church), "and there was such distraction in the councils of the clergy. Blomfield, the Bishop of London of the day, an active and open-hearted man, had been for years engaged in diluting the high orthodoxy of the Church by the introduction of members of the Evangelical body into places of influence and trust. He had deeply offended men who agreed in opinion with myself by an off-hand saying (as was reported) to the effect that belief in the Apostolic Succession had gone out with the

Nonjurors. 'We can count you,' he said to some of the gravest and most venerated persons of the old school. And the Evangelical party itself, with their late successes, seemed to have lost that simplicity and unworldliness which I admired so much in Milner and Scott." (He did not look for it: he had only to go to Cambridge and find it in Simeon and his innumerable disciples.) "It was not that I did

not venerate such men as Ryder, the then Bishop of Lichfield, and others of similar sentiments, but I thought little of the Evangelicals as a class. I thought they played into the hands of the Liberals. With the Establishment thus divided and threatened, thus ignorant of its true strength, I compared that fresh vigorous power of which I was reading in the first centuries" (third and fourth). "In her triumphant zeal on behalf of that Primeval Mystery, to which I had had so great a devotion from my youth, I recognised the movement of my Spiritual Mother. cessu patuit Dea' ('She was plainly a Goddess as she walked'). The self-conquest of her Ascetics, the patience of her Martyrs, the irresistible determination of her Bishops, the joyous swing of her advance, both exalted and abashed me. I said to myself, Look on this picture and

[ocr errors]

• In

on that'; I felt affection for my own Church, but not tenderness; I felt dismay at her prospects, anger and scorn at her do-nothing perplexity. I thought that if Liberalism once got a footing within her, it was sure of victory in the event. I saw that Reformation principles were powerless to rescue her. As to leaving her, the thought never crossed my imagination; still I always kept before me that there was something greater than the Established Church, and that was the Church Catholic and Apostolic, set up from the beginning, of which she was but the local presence and organ.' She was nothing unless she was this. She must be dealt with strongly, or she would be lost. There was need of a second Reformation."

It is difficult, with all possible admiration for Newman's genius and character, to say whether the want of discrimination or the confidence of this passage is the greater. is the greater. Here is a young man of about thirty, ready to set to rights the Church of Cranmer, Ridley, Parker, Whitgift, Jewell, Cosin, and Andrewes. He makes no attempt to understand what Reformation principles are; he simply puts them aside with a

1 The Churches of the early ages were mutually independent,

wave of his hand, and disparages every influence of the day except his own. He does not know what the principles of the "Catholic" Church are which were not acknowledged at the Reformation (he is prepared to dig them out by search from the Fathers): he has a profound attraction towards Romish Christianity; and he has so consummate a belief that he is right, and will be right, that when others do not agree with him he exclaims, Hippocleides doesn't care!" Here are all the elements for grave mischief.

[ocr errors]

In 1832 and 1833 he was travelling with Froude and Froude's father in the south of

Europe for Froude's health. When himself very

66 6

ill, he conceived that he had a mission. shall not die, for I have not sinned against light.' I have never been able to make out at all what I meant." Another day: "I sat down on my bed and began to sob bitterly. My servant, who had acted as my nurse, asked what ailed me. I could only answer, I have a work to do in England.'

In this vague and mystic condition he reached his mother's house at Iffley on June 9th, 1833, and five days afterwards Keble preached his assize sermon at St. Mary's on National Apostasy. It was in reference to the dealings

of the Whigs with the bishoprics had been at

[blocks in formation]

a sweep suppressed, and Church people were told to be thankful that things were no worse. It was time to move if there was to be any moving at all." The Irish Church was overloaded with rich bishoprics; and if it would not reform itself, it does not seem unreasonable that the Crown should be advised by Parliament to carry out the reform. No doctrine was touched. However, the reform seemed in the highest degree Erastian, and the panic amongst Keble, Froude, William Palmer, Hugh Rose, and others produced the Tracts for the Times. To Rose, Newman characteristically dedicated one of his volumes of sermons as the man who "when hearts were failing bade us stir up the gift that was in us, and betake ourselves to our true Mother." To betake ourselves to the Lord of the Church would have been the true course and right expression. Newman's phrase seems to put the Church in the place of Christ.

at

The first meeting of the friends was between July 25th and 29th at Rose's rectory Hadleigh. It was resolved to fight for the doctrine of Apostolical Succession and the

« PreviousContinue »