The same entrain which carried Ward away when he sat down to a piano possessed him whenever he embarked on a religious discussion. ‘The thing that was utterly abhorrent to him,’ said one of his friends, ‘was to stop short.’ Given the premises, he would follow out their implications with the mercilessness of a medieval monk, and when he had reached the last limits of argument be ready to maintain whatever propositions he might find there with his dying breath. He had the extreme innocence of a child and a mathematician. Captivated by the glittering eye of Newman, he swallowed whole the supernatural conception of the universe which Newman had evolved, accepted it as a fundamental premise, and began at once to deduce from it whatsoever there might be to be deduced. His very first deductions included irrefutable proofs of (1) God’s particular providence for individuals; (2) the real efficacy of intercessory prayer; (3) the reality of our communion with the saints departed; (4) the constant presence and assistance of the angels of God. Later on he explained mathematically the importance of the Ember Days. ‘Who can tell,’ he added, ‘the degree of blessing lost to us in this land by neglecting, as we alone of Christian Churches do neglect, these holy days? He then proceeded to convict the Reformers, not only of rebellion, but ‘ – for my own part I see not how we can avoid adding – of perjury.’ Every day his arguments became more extreme, more rigorously exact, and more distressing to his master. Newman was in the position of a cautious commander-in-chief being hurried into an engagement against his will by a dashing cavalry officer. Ward forced him forward step by step towards – no! he could not bear it; he shuddered and drew back. But it was of no avail. In vain did Keble and Pusey wring their hands and stretch forth their pleading arms to their now vanishing brother. The fatal moment was fast approaching. Ward at last published a devastating book in which he proved conclusively by a series of syllogisms that the only proper course for the Church of England was to repent in sackcloth and ashes her separation from the Communion of Rome. The reckless author was deprived of his degree by an outraged University, and a few weeks later was received into the Catholic Church.
Newman, in a kind of despair, had flung himself into the labours of historical compilation. His views of history had changed since the days when as an undergraduate he had feasted on the worldly pages of Gibbon. ‘Revealed religion,’ he now thought, ‘furnishes facts to other sciences, which those sciences, left to themselves, would never reach. Thus, in the science of history, the preservation of our race in Noah’s Ark is an historical fact, which history never would arrive at without revelation.’ With these principles to guide him, he plunged with his disciples into a prolonged study of the English Saints. Biographies soon appeared of St Bega, St Adamnan, St Gundleus, St Guthlake, Brother Drithelm, St Amphibalus, St Wulstan, St Ebba, St Neot, St Ninian, and Cunibert the Hermit. Their austerities, their virginity, and their miraculous powers were described in detail. The public learnt with astonishment that St Ninian had turned a staff into a tree, that St German had stopped a cock from crowing, and that a child had been raised from the dead to convert St Helier. The series has subsequently been continued by a more modern writer whose relation of the history of the blessed St Maël contains, perhaps, even more matter for edification than Newman’s biographies. At the time, indeed, those works caused considerable scandal. Clergymen denounced them in pamphlets. St Cuthbert was described by his biographer as having ‘carried the jealousy of women, characteristic of all the saints, to an extraordinary pitch’. An example was given: whenever he held a spiritual conversation with St Ebba, he was careful to spend the ensuing hours of darkness ‘in prayer, up to his neck in water’. ‘Persons who invent such tales,’ wrote one indignant commentator,
cast very grave and just suspicions on the purity of their own minds. And young persons, who talk and think in this way, are in extreme danger of falling into sinful habits. As to the volume before us, the authors have, in their fanatical panegyrics of virginity, made use of language downright profane.
One of the disciples at Littlemore was James Anthony Froude, the younger brother of Hurrell, and it fell to his lot to be responsible for the biography of St Neot. While he was composing it, he began to feel some qualms. Saints who lighted fires with icicles, changed bandits into wolves, and floated across the Irish Channel on altar-stones, produced a disturbing effect on his historical conscience. But he had promised his services to Newman, and he determined to carry through the work in the spirit in which he had begun it. He did so; but he thought it proper to add the following sentence by way of conclusion: ‘That is all, and indeed rather more than all, that is known to men of the blessed St Neot; but not more than is known to the angels in heaven.’
Meanwhile the English Roman Catholics were growing impatient; was the great conversion never coming, for which they had prayed so fervently and so long? Dr Wiseman, at the head of them, was watching and waiting with special eagerness. His hand was held out under the ripening fruit; the delicious morsel seemed to be trembling on its stalk; and yet it did not fall. At last, unable to bear the suspense any longer, he dispatched to Littlemore Father Smith, an old pupil of Newman’s, who had lately joined the Roman communion, with instructions that he should do his best, under cover of a simple visit of friendship, to discover how the land lay. Father Smith was received somewhat coldly, and the conversation ran entirely on topics which had nothing to do with religion. When the company separated before dinner, he was beginning to think that his errand had been useless; but on their reassembling he suddenly noticed that Newman had changed his trousers, and that the colour of the pair which he was now wearing was grey. At the earliest moment, the emissary rushed back post-haste to Dr Wiseman. ‘All is well,’ he exclaimed; ‘Newman no longer considers that he is in Anglican orders.’ ‘Praise be to God!’ answered Dr Wiseman. ‘But how do you know?’ Father Smith described what he had seen. ‘Oh, is that all? My dear father, how can you be so foolish?’ But Father Smith was not to be shaken. ‘I know the man,’ he said, ‘and I know what it means. Newman will come, and he will come soon.’
And Father Smith was right. A few weeks later, Newman suddenly slipped off to a priest, and all was over. Perhaps he would have hesitated longer still, if he could have foreseen how he was to pass the next thirty years of his unfortunate existence; but the future was hidden, and all that was certain was that the past had gone for ever, and that his eyes would rest no more upon the snapdragons of Trinity. The Oxford Movement was now ended. The University breathed such a sigh of relief as usually follows the difficult explosion of a hard piece of matter from a living organism, and actually began to attend to education. As for the Church of England, she had tasted blood, and it was clear that she would never again be content with a vegetable diet. Her clergy, however, maintained the reputation for judicious compromise, for they followed Newman up to the very point beyond which his conclusions were logical, and, while they intoned, confessed, swung incense, and burnt candles with the exhilaration of converts, they yet managed to do so with a subtle nuance which showed that they had nothing to do with Rome. Various individuals underwent more violent changes. Several had preceded Newman into the Roman fold; among others an unhappy Mr Sibthorpe, who subsequently changed his mind, and returned to the Church of his fathers, and then – perhaps it was only natural – changed his mind again. Many more followed Newman, and Dr Wiseman was particularly pleased by the conversion of a Mr Morris, who, as he said, was ‘the author of the essay, which won the prize, on the best method of proving Christianity to the Hindoos’. Hurrell Froude had died before Newman had read the fatal article on St Augustine; but his brother, James Anthony, together with Arthur Clough, the poet, went through an experience which was more distressing in those days than it has since become: they lost their faith. With this difference, however, that while in Froude’s case the loss of his faith turned out to be rather like the loss of a heavy portmanteau, which one afterwards discovers to have been full of old rags and brickbats, Clough was made so uneasy by the loss of his
that he went on looking for it everywhere as long as he lived; but somehow he never could find it. On the other hand, Keble and Pusey continued for the rest of their lives to dance in an exemplary manner upon the tight-rope of High Anglicanism; in such an exemplary manner, indeed, that the tight-rope has its dancers still.
4
MANNING was now thirty-eight, and it was clear that he was the rising man in the Church of England. He had many powerful connections: he was the brother-in-law of Samuel Wilberforce, who had been lately made a bishop; he was a close friend of Mr Gladstone, who was a Cabinet Minister; and he was becoming well known in the influential circles of society in London. His talent for affairs was recognized not only in the Church, but in the world at large, and he busied himself with matters of such varied scope as National Education, the administration of the Poor Law, and the Employment of Women. Mr Gladstone kept up an intimate correspondence with him on these and on other subjects, mingling in his letters the details of practical statesmanship with the speculations of a religious thinker. ‘Sir James Graham,’ he wrote, in a discussion of the bastardy clauses of the Poor Law,
is much pleased with the tone of your two communications. He is disposed, without putting an end to the application of the workhouse test against the mother, to make the remedy against the putative father ‘real and effective’ for expenses incurred in the workhouse. I am not enough acquainted to know whether it would be advisable to go further. You have not proposed it; and I am disposed to believe that only with a revived and improved discipline in the Church can we hope for any generally effective check upon lawless lust.
‘I agree with you eminently,’ he writes, in a later letter,
in your doctine of filtration. But it sometimes occurs to me, though the question may seem a strange one, how far was the Reformation, but especially the Continental Reformation, designed by God, in the region of final causes, for that purification of the Roman Church which it has actually realized?
In his archdeaconry, Manning lived to the full the active life of a country clergyman. His slim, athletic figure was seen everywhere – in the streets of Chichester, or on the lawns of the neighbouring rectories, or galloping over the downs in breeches and gaiters, or cutting brilliant figures on the ice. He was an excellent judge of horse-flesh, and the pair of greys which drew his hooded phaeton so swiftly through the lanes were the admiration of the county. His features were already beginning to assume their ascetic cast, but the spirit of youth had not yet fled from them, so that he seemed to combine the attractions of dignity and grace. He was a good talker, a sympathetic listener, a man who understood the difficult art of preserving all the vigour of a manly character and yet never giving offence. No wonder that his sermons drew crowds, no wonder that his spiritual advice was sought for eagerly by an ever-growing group of penitents, no wonder that men would say, when his name was mentioned, ‘Oh, Manning! No power on earth can keep him from a bishopric!’
Such was the fair outward seeming of the Archdeacon’s life; but the inward reality was different. The more active, the more fortunate, the more full of happy promise his existence became, the more persistently was his secret imagination haunted by a dreadful vision – the lake that burneth for ever with brimstone and fire. The temptations of the Evil One are many, Manning knew; and he knew also that, for him at least, the most subtle and terrible of all temptations was the temptation of worldly success. He tried to reassure himself, but it was in vain. He committed his thoughts to a diary, weighing scrupulously his every motive, examining with relentless searchings into the depths of his heart. Perhaps, after all, his longings for preferment were merely legitimate hopes for ‘an elevation into a sphere of higher usefulness’. But no, there was something more than that. ‘I do feel pleasure,’ he noted, ‘in honour, precedence, elevation, the society of great people, and all this is very shameful and mean.’ After Newman’s conversion, he almost convinced himself that his ‘visions of an ecclesiastical future’ were justified by the role that he would play as a ‘healer of the breach in the Church of England’. Mr Gladstone agreed with him; but there was One higher than Mr Gladstone, and did He agree?
I am pierced by anxious thoughts. God knows what my desires have been and are, and why they are crossed…. I am flattering myself with a fancy about depth and reality…. The great question is: Is God enough for you now? And if you are as now even to the end of life, will it suffice you?… Certainly I would rather choose to be stayed on God, than to be in the thrones of the world and the Church. Nothing else will go into Eternity.
In a moment of ambition, he had applied for the Readership of Lincoln’s Inn, but, owing chiefly to the hostile influence of the Record, the appointment had gone elsewhere. A little later, a more important position was offered to him – the office of sub-almoner to the Queen, which had just been vacated by the Archbishop of York, and was almost certain to lead to a mitre. The offer threw Manning into an agony of self-examination. He drew up elaborate tables, after the manner of Robinson Crusoe, with the reasons for and against his acceptance of the post:
For
Against
1. That it comes unsought.
1. Not therefore to be accepted. Such things are trials as well as leadings.
2. That it is honourable.
2. Being what I am, ought I not therefore to decline it –
(1) as humiliation;
(2) as revenge on myself for Lincoln’s Inn;
(3) as a testimony?
And so on. He found in the end ten ‘negative reasons’, with no affirmative ones to balance them, and, after a week’s deliberation, he rejected the offer.
But peace of mind was as far off from him as ever. First the bitter thought came to him that ‘in all this Satan tells me I am doing it to be thought mortified and holy’; and then he was obsessed by the still bitterer feelings of ineradicable disappointment and regret. He had lost a great opportunity, and it brought him small comfort to consider that ‘in the region of counsels, self-chastisement, humiliation, self-discipline, penance, and of the Cross’ he had perhaps done right.
The crisis passed, but it was succeeded by a fiercer one. Manning was taken seriously ill, and became convinced that he might die at any moment. The entries in his Diary grew more elaborate than ever; his remorse for the past, his resolutions for the future, his protestations of submission to the will of God, filled page after page of parallel columns, headings and sub-headings, numbered clauses, and analytical tables. ‘How do I feel about Death?’ he wrote.
Certainly great fear –
1. Because of the uncertainty of our state before God.
2. Because of the consciousness –
(1) of great sins past,
(2) of great sinfulness,
(3) of most shallow repentance.
What shall I do?
He decided to mortify himself, to read St Thomas Aquinas, and to make his ‘night prayers forty instead of thirty minutes’. He determined during Lent ‘to use no pleasant bread (except on Sundays and feasts) such as cake and sweetmeat’; but he added the proviso ‘I do not include plain biscuits’. Opposite this entry appears the word ‘kept’. And yet his backslidings were many. Looking back over a single week, he was obliged to register ‘petulance twice’ and ‘complacent visions’. He heard his curate being commended for bringing so many souls to God during Lent, and he ‘could not bear it’; but the remorse was terrible: ‘I abhorred myself on the spot, and looked upward for help.’ He made out list upon list of the Almighty’s special mercies towards him, and they included his creation, his regeneration, and (No. 5)
the preservation of my life six times to my knowledge –
(1) In illness at the age of nine.
(2) In the water.
(3) By a runaway horse at Oxford.
(4) By the same.
(5) By falling nearly through the ceiling of a church.
(6) Again by a fall off a horse. And I know not how often in shooting, riding, etc.
&nb
sp; At last he became convalescent; but the spiritual experiences of those agitated weeks left an indelible mark upon his mind, and prepared the way for the great change which was to follow.
For he had other doubts besides those which held him in torment as to his own salvation; he was in doubt about the whole framework of his faith. Newman’s conversion, he found, had meant something more to him than he had first realized. It had seemed to come as a call to the redoubling of his Anglican activities; but supposing, in reality, it were a call towards something very different – towards an abandonment of those activities altogether? It might be ‘a trial’, or again it might be a ‘leading’; how was he to judge? Already, before his illness, these doubts had begun to take possession of his mind. ‘I am conscious to myself.’ he wrote in his Diary, ‘of an extensively changed feeling towards. the Church of Rome…. The Church of England seems to me to be diseased: 1. Organically (six sub-headings). 2. Functionally (seven sub-headings).… Wherever it seems healthy it approximates the system of Rome.’ Then thoughts of the Virgin Mary suddenly began to assail him –
(1) If John the Baptist were sanctified from the womb, how much more the B.V.!
(2) If Enoch and Elijah were exempted from death, why not the B.V. from sin?
(3) It is a strange way of loving the Son to slight the mother!
The arguments seemed irresistible, and a few weeks later the following entry occurs –
Strange thoughts have visited me:
(1) I have felt that the Episcopate of the Church of England is secularized and bound down beyond hope…
(6) I feel as if a light had fallen upon me. My feeling about the Roman Church is not intellectual. I have intellectual difficulties, but the great moral difficulties seem melting.
(7) Something keeps rising and saying, ‘You will end in the Roman Church’.
He noted altogether twenty-five of these ‘strange thoughts’. His mind hovered anxiously round –
Eminent Victorians Page 5