by Edward Short
I do not like meeting you again without having said, once for all, what I hope you will not think hollow or false. I cannot disguise from myself how improbable—perhaps impossible—a recurrence to our former terms is. But I wish, before the time has past for such an acknowledgment, to have said how deeply and painfully I feel—and I may say have more or less felt for years—the greatness of what I am losing, and to thank you for all you have done and been to me … I do feel most earnestly how much of anything which I may venture to be thankful for in what I am is of your forming—how more than kind—how tender you have always been to me, and how unlikely it is that I can ever again meet with anything approaching in value to the intimacy which you gave me … I should have been pained at leaving all this unsaid.141
On 4 May 1843, Newman shared with Keble the sense of guilty tergiversation that was only one trial through which his conversion had to proceed. “I have enough consciousness in me of insincerity and double dealing, which I know you abhor, to doubt about the correctness of what I shall tell you of myself. I really cannot say whether I am stating my existing feelings, motives, and views fairly, and whether my memory will not play me false. I cannot hope but I shall seem inconsistent to you—and whether I am or have been I cannot say. I will but observe that it is very difficult to realize one’s own views in certain cases, at the time of acting, which is implied in culpable inconsistency; and difficult again, when conscious of them, to discriminate between passing thoughts and permanent impressions, particularly when they are unwelcome. Some thoughts are like hideous dreams, and we wake from them, and think they will never return; and though they do return, we cannot be sure still that they are more than vague fancies; and till one is so sure they are not, as to be afraid of concealing within what is at variance with one’s professions, one does not like, or rather it is wrong, to mention them to another.”142 In a second letter written on the same day Newman made good on this ominous preamble by announcing to his friend: “At present, I fear, as far as I can realize my own convictions, I consider the Roman Catholic Communion the Church of the Apostles, and that what grace is among us (which, through God’s mercy, is not little) is extraordinary, and from the overflowings of His Dispensation.”143
When Keble received the letters, he took them unopened to an abandoned chalk-pit, “moved,” as Battiscombe nicely put it, “by the animal instinct to hide which is common to all creatures in pain,” and there, after a “grand swallow of pain,” he read the long-dreaded and yet still unbelievable news that his friend was contemplating leaving the Church of England.144 It is one of the great scenes in the Tractarian drama. A full ten days later, Keble finally managed to write back to his friend, meeting his anguished candor with ready empathy. “Believe me, my very dear Newman, that any thought of willful insincerity in you can find no place in my mind. You have been and are in a most difficult position, and I seem to myself in some degree able to enter into your difficulties: and, although one sees of course how an enemy might misrepresent your continuing in the English Priesthood with such an impression on your mind, I have no thought but of love and esteem and regard and gratitude for you in this as in everything …” Still, Keble could not resist making a number of eleventh-hour appeals. Newman should recognize that leaving the English Church would bring him “in every respect nearer … the temptation of going over.” He should remember that “for what is wrong without our fault in the place where God’s Providence has set us, we are not ourselves answerable, but we are for what may be wrong in the position we choose for ourselves.” Then, again, Newman should ask himself whether his recent retraction of his anti-Catholic statements was unduly influencing him. “Do you not think it possible that you may have over-estimated the claims of Rome in your later studies from a kind of feeling that your earlier expressions had done her wrong?” Then, again, by leaving the English Church, Newman would “undo what little good may have been done of late”—a consideration that Jemima also urged her brother to bear in mind. But the most revelatory appeal Keble made was the one to which he would return on numerous occasions in the future. “As to the question itself I am really too ignorant of the parts of history to which you refer to say a word: but can it be that the evidence seems so overpowering as to amount to moral certainty? and if not, ought not but a small probability on the other side to weigh against it practically?”145
Here, Keble was calling on the English theologian Joseph Butler (1692–1752) to try to win back his friend’s eroding loyalty. Butler, whom Newman considered “the greatest name in the Anglican Church,” had a profound influence on the poet Coleridge, Hazlitt, Gladstone, Keble, F. D. Maurice and R. D. Hampden—to name only a few for whom the Analogy of Religion (1736) was a kind of theological vade mecum.146 The trouble was that Keble’s Butler had become something of an oracle of uncertainty, whereas Newman’s remained rooted in probability, a touchstone of certitude. The cross purposes of the two men were evident in their respective readings of Butler. In 1884, Newman had occasion to contrast his own reading of Butler with that of Keble. “As to the question of probability,” Newman wrote to W. S. Lilly, a convert who had been asking him questions about the Grammar of Assent, “I think you have said somewhere(?) that you follow Butler in considering probability to be the guide of life. This has a good sense and a bad. I think Anglicans, even Keble(?) mean by probability a mere practical probability i.e. what is safe to act upon, whether true or not; whereas Catholics hold that it is a real speculative assent (or certitude) to a truth, to which I add speculative, true, but arising, not from demonstration, but from the result of a combination and joint force, equivalent to demonstration, of many separate probabilities, how many and how strong in order to such an equivalence, being left to the judgment,
Equipped with his own more dubious reading of Butler, Keble stressed how uncertain his own judgment had become. “I have one most earnest request to make of you, that you will not in the smallest degree depend on my advice or opinion in this matter … It frightens me to think how rashly and with how small preparation I have been dealing with these great matters, and I have all manner of imaginations as to how my defects may have helped to unsettle people, and in particular to hinder you from finding peace.”149 This was no false modesty. For Keble, his inability to meet Newman’s doubts with any countervailing reassurance left him wracked with guilt and he reproached himself for not being able to reconcile his friend to the Anglican fold, however fissiparous it had become.
On May 18th Newman again argued that retaining St. Mary’s would be “an offence and a stumbling block.”150 The impossibility of his position could not have been more evident to him. “Persons are keen-sighted enough to make out what I think on certain points, and then they infer that such opinions are compatible with holding situations of trus
t in the Church. This is a very great evil in matter of fact. A number of younger men take the validity of their interpretation of the Articles etc. from me on faith. Is not my present position a cruelty to them, as well as a treachery to the Church?”151 With such honorable qualms Keble could not take issue. “It seems to me that, supposing a person to have no doubt at all of the schismaticalness of the body he belongs to, (e.g. to be as sure of it as one is of Episcopacy) and that impression to continue after long, honest and self-denying endeavours to rid of it, accompanied of course by conscientiousness in other parts of duty … he could not well go on exercising a trust committed to him by that body, every act of which would seem to imply that he does not consider itself in schism.”152 And, again, in advising his friend, Keble tried to imagine how he should act if wracked with the same doubts. “I feel that I should myself be quite unequal to it, and should perhaps be continually liable to be urged into some sudden step, by the sort of calls, often sudden ones, which the situation brings with it. You see therefore that on the whole my leaning is towards your retiring as quietly as you can …”153 That having been said, Keble hastened to assure his friend that he had no such doubts—or perhaps only tolerable doubts. For one, he did not credit “the un-enacted leanings and tendencies” of Bishops with regard to Tract 90. “Formal decisions are in my mind the providential indications for ordinary persons in such perplexities and until such are produced, against me, I shall, as at present advised, uphold No. 90 as sufficiently Anglican. It is true I have strong and evident temptations to deceive myself in this matter, more than you and others; and I do not pretend to say I am comfortable, what right have I to be so? but one can but do as seems best, and say God forgive me.”154 On June 3rd, Newman wrote to Keble to report that Pusey had been suspended for two years for preaching a sermon making reference to the Real Presence. Increasingly, the notion that Anglicanism could be understood in “Catholic” terms was wearing thin.
In July, Keble advised Newman, as he had advised Arnold when he came to him with his doubts, “to withdraw as much as possible for a while from theological study and correspondence, and be as entirely taken up as ever you can with parochial concerns”—though since he also knew that Newman would soon lose Littlemore as a result of resigning St. Mary’s, this was not the most tactful advice.155 In any case, Newman’s response could not have given Keble much confidence in his ability to dispense useful counsel to his friend. “If I were to have any thing more directly practical it should be an hospital,” Newman wrote. “I fear the more parochial duty I took, the more I should realise, and the greater temptation I should be under to give up, our present defective system, which seems to be without the capabilities of improvement.”156 In time, Keble’s own experience would verify the accuracy of that shrewd assessment.
When it became clear that Newman’s doubts would not be dispelled by parochial work or due deliberation, Keble resumed a tack that he had taken previously: he urged Newman to abide his doubts. Newman had sent Keble a sermon, “Outward and Inward Notes of the Church,” (1841) in which he had suggested that where men found themselves in a Church without “Notes of the Kingdom” they might have no alternative but to seek for such Notes within themselves—a last resort, as Newman admitted in his Apologia, “abhorrent both to my nature and to my past professions.”157 Keble’s response to this fairly desperate remedy was tell-tale: “I think that in what you say both of the inward and the outward Notes of that Kingdom, you imply an expectation of rather more certainty than we have a right to look for as to our position …”158 And it followed for Keble that if uncertainty was one’s lot, then one should reconcile oneself to the Church in which one had been born: “I certainly should be glad to see recognized in this or some other part of your Sermons the duty of men’s remaining where they are, not only as long as they have spiritual consolations, but even under any degree of distress and doubt.” But this was precisely what Newman had been doing since 1839, with increasing untenability.
Keble’s other conjecture confirmed suspicions that Newman was already considering. “Then ought not all people to suspect that it is at least as much their own fault as their Church’s, if they do not find Christ’s tokens there? And, if there be danger of evil spirits seducing us either way, is not the danger less on the side of patience and acquiescence? …”159 Reading this, Newman must have felt immured in an echo chamber. Still, for the benefit of Keble, Newman clarified his doubts, not about Rome but about Canterbury. “I suppose the Catholic theory is, that creeds, sacraments, succession, etc. are nothing without unity … . The only way I have ever attempted to answer this, is by arguing that we really were, or in one sense were, in unity with the rest of the Church—but, as you know, I never have been thoroughly satisfied with my arguments, and grew more and more to suspect them.”160 Keble’s response showed how much the strain of keeping up with Newman was telling on him. “Your letters, as you may suppose, make me rather giddy …”161 The letter Newman wrote to the Bishop of Oxford on 7 September 1843 could only have intensified Keble’s vertigo, for it was on that day that Newman asked his Lordship’s permission to resign St. Mary’s. On Christmas Eve, 1843, Newman wrote to Manning a letter which clearly showed that he was beginning to think of his Anglican work with a sort of retrospective defensiveness. “I own indeed to great presumption and recklessness in my work on ecclesiastical subjects,” he wrote to then Archdeacon Manning, “yet still I have honestly trusted our Church and wished to defend her as she wishes to be defended. I wasn’t surely wrong in defending her on that basis which our divines have ever built and on which alone they can pretend to build. And how could I forsee that when I examined that basis I should feel it to require a system different from hers and that the Fathers to which she led me would lead me from her?” Of course, this did not mean that in December 1843, Newman had already converted. “Surely I will remain where I am as long as I can. I think it is right to do. If my misgivings are from above, I shall be carried on in spite of my resistance.”162 But every day he was moving closer and closer to Rome. The end of Newman’s ordeal was in sight, while Keble’s had only begun.
On 22 January 1844, Keble admitted to his friend that “It is a long time since we had any communication, and something within me tells me, it is a heartless thing to let Christmas and New Year come and go, and not say one word to you, to whom under God one is indebted for so very much of the comfort and hope which they have been allowed to bring with them … I think and think, it seems all to no purpose; for when I come to set it down, it will be only telling you over again what you have yourself told me and others. These, however, are some of my impressions:”163 And here Keble made clear that Newman was not the only one suffering excruciating doubts.
First, I feel more strongly with every month’s, week’s, day’s experience, the danger of tempting God, and the deep responsibility I should have to bear, were I to forsake this communion; and yet with the same lapse of time one seems to feel more and more the truth and beauty and majesty of so much which they have and we seem at least to have not …164
This passage should be borne in mind when readers consider the extent of Keble’s understanding of the claims of Rome, or, put another way, the extent to which his ignorance of those claims can be regarded as invincible. But it also exemplifies the states of mind that Newman described to James Hope in a letter of 2 November 1843. “I did not explain sufficiently the state of mind of those who are in danger,” Newman wrote to Hope. “I only spoke of those who are convinced that our Church was external to the Church Catholic, though they felt it unsafe to trust their own private convictions. And you seemed to put the dilemma, ‘Either men are in doubt or not: if in doubt, they ought to be quiet; if not in doubt, how is it that they stay with us?’ But there are two other states of mind which might be mentioned. (1) Those who are unconsciously near Rome, and whose despair about our Church, if anyhow caused, would at once develop into a state of conscious approximation and quasi-resolution to go over. (2) Those w
ho feel they can with a safe conscience remain with us, while they are allowed to testify in behalf of Catholicism, and to promote its interests; i.e., as if by such acts they are included, in the position of catechumens.”165 This is a fascinating letter because it describes at once the Keble who was “unconsciously near Rome.” despairing of Anglicanism and ready to approach a “quasi-resolution to go over”—the Keble, in other words, to whom Newman was appealing in his pivotal correspondence between 1841 and 1844—and the Keble who eventually chose to remain within the English Church with the object of bringing it closer to what he regarded as its true catholic identity.
Still, what Newman did not mention in this otherwise acute analysis was the hurdle standing in the way of any Englishman contemplating conversion (which, in his own case, as he recognized, had been extremely difficult to scale) and that was anti-Romanism.166 And it was this ingrained bias that convinced Anglicans that all arguments in favor of Rome must be not only delusions but satanic delusions. The “Evil One,” Keble told Newman, might be endeavoring “to ruin the good work, supposing it begun, in the English Church, by laying hold of any undiscerned weakness or ill tendency in the agents to entice or drive them out of it. Such tendencies one can imagine in your case; among the rest a certain restlessness, a longing after something more, something analogous to a very exquisite ear in music, which would keep you, I should think, in spite of yourself, intellectually and morally dissatisfied, wherever you were …”167 Newman, in other words, might be contemplating leaving the English Church because the devil had set him to search for an ideal phantasmal Church—a charge which would be made by others interested in discrediting his conversion. In his historical jeu d’esprit Let Dons Delight (1939), Ronald Knox has a High Churchman admonish a Rome-leaning Tractarian with arguments that echo those of Keble and Gladstone. Anglicanism, Dr. Greene tells his fellow dons in 1838, “has come down to us in our history as a part of English life, as the religion of a nation, adapted to its temper and modeled by its history; it is from that that it derives its substance; it is the religion of Englishmen or it is nothing … We all know the dog in Aesop, who dropped his bone while he jumped after what was only a reflection in the water. So it is with you gentlemen; you neglect to preserve the Church of England as it is in fact, while you are running after an ideal church which is not there.”168