by Edward Short
Keble spoke for many when he shared with his friend the dismay his conversion would cause among those whom he had formerly led. “Another thought one has is of the utter confusion and perplexity, the astounding prostration of heart and mind, into which so many would be thrown, were their guide and comforter to forsake them all at once, in the very act, as it would seem to them, of giving them directions which they most needed. I really suppose that it would be to thousands quite an indescribable shock, a trial almost too hard to be borne, making them skeptical about everything and everybody …”169 Indeed, in another letter, he spoke of Newman in terms reminiscent of those that Enobarbus used to describe Cleopatra. “Wherever I go, there is some one to whom you have been a channel of untold blessing. You must not be angry, for I feel as if I could not help saying it, and I am sure the very air of England around you would say the same.”170 Of course, this was not lost on Newman. Yet, in his clear-sighted way, he recognized that the unsettling of the faith of the English, such as it was, might not be a bad thing. “People are unsettled as it is,” Newman wrote to Keble on 23 January 1844. “As years go on, they either will become settled, or they will be gradually more and more unsettled. If my thoughts had been led through the early Church to Rome, why should not others? We know nothing of the effects of one’s own hypothetical acts. There have been events ten thousand times more unsettling than the change of individuals now. St. Paul must have unsettled all the good and conscientious people in the Jewish Church. Unsettling may be a blessing, even where minds are not already unsettled.”171 But then Newman confessed something to his old comrade in catholicity that must have given Keble a jolt. “One thing I will add—I sometimes have uncomfortable feelings as if I should not like to die in the English Church. It seems to me that, while Providence gives one time, it is even a call upon one to make use of it in deliberateness and waiting—but that, did He cut short one’s hours of grace, this would be a call to make up one’s mind in what seemed most probable.”172 Here was recognition of the force of probability that Keble would not find in Joseph Butler.
On 8 June 1844, Newman wrote Keble a long letter, sharing with his friend the graces that had seen him through previous trials. “When I was a boy of fifteen, and living a life of sin, with a very profane spirit, He mercifully touched my heart; and with innumerable sins, yet I have not forsaken Him from that time, nor He me. He has upheld me to this hour, and I have called myself His servant.”173 When suffering from severe fever in Sicily and feeling near death, he nonetheless kept crying out, “‘I have not sinned against light.’”174 Afterwards, he sat crying profusely on his bed; Gennaro, his faithful guide asked him what the matter was, and Newman “could but say to him … that I thought God had some work for me.” That work became clear once he returned to England. Keble preached his Sermon on National Apostasy in July of 1833 and the Oxford Movement was launched. Now, however, Newman was assailed with doubt. “I have thought much lately of the words in Bishop Andrewes’ Morning Prayer—‘Despise not the work of Thine own hands,’—he repeats it in various forms, as addressed to Each of the Persons of the Most Holy Trinity. May I not take comfort in this plea which they contain? ‘Thine Hands have made me and fashioned me.’ I look back to past years, or rather to all my years since I was a boy and I say, ‘Is it come to this? Has God forgotten to be gracious? would He have led me on so far to cast me off? what have I done to be given over, if it be such, to a spirit of delusion? Where is my fault? which has been the false step, if such there be?’”175
By making his friend so privy to the doubts of conversion, Newman was preparing him for an understanding of how such doubts could be overcome. Certainly, in no other letters was Newman so intent on involving his correspondent in the lacerating doubts of conversion. In effect, Newman took up such doubts to show how they could be resolved: this is what gives his letters to Keble their apostolic power. “What then is the will of Providence about me?” Newman asks. “The time for argument is passed. I have been in one settled conviction for so long a time, which every thought seems to strengthen. When I fall in with friends who think differently, the temptation to remain quiet becomes stronger, very strong—but I really do not think my conviction is a bit shaken. So then I end as I began—Am I in delusion, given over to a lie? am I deceiving myself convinced when I am not? Does any subtle meaning or temptation, which I cannot detect, govern me, and bias my judgment? But is it possible that Divine Mercy should not wish me, if so, to discover and escape it? Has He led me thus far to destroy me in the wilderness?”176
Then, again, there were other reasons why one might put the thought of converting out of one’s head, besides doubt as to the rightness of one’s contemplated move. Keble, who was so attached to family and friends, to the parishioners of Hursley, to everything associated with home, would certainly have agreed with Newman when he observed how “all inducements and temptations are for remaining quiet, and against moving. The loss of friends what a great evil is this! The loss of position, of name, of esteem—such a stultification of myself—such a triumph to others. It is no proud thing to unsay what I have said, to pull down what I have attempted to build up.” In earlier letters, Newman had been rather far-sighted and dispassionate about the impact his conversion might have on others; but as he came closer and closer to taking the actual final step, his strong fellow feeling rose up and he admitted that “what quite pierces me” was “the disturbance of mind which a change would cause to so many—the casting adrift, to the loss both of religious stability and comfort—the temptation to which many would be exposed of scepticism, indifference, and even infidelity.”177
Still, for Newman, despite these doubts, despite this uncertainty, the conviction was “growing more urgent and imperative continually, that the Roman Communion is the only true Church.”178 On June 11th, Keble responded to Newman’s letter, which had come, he wrote, “not unexpected, yet very much like a clap of thunder,” by returning to what he had said before but with renewed dismay: “What shall I and thousands more do? And where shall we go?” Keble’s sense of being cut adrift was deepened by the posthumous publication of Thomas Arnold’s papers. “You will readily understand what is the bitterest part of one’s feelings in the whole matter, both in respect of Arnold and of your change—not that I mean to compare the two subjects in the least degree in point of distressfulness—but in both one has a sad depressing thought, that, if one were or had been other than one is, the anguish might have been averted or mitigated.”179 When it came to keeping Newman from bolting, Battiscombe agreed with Keble’s rueful assessment: if Newman “were to be held to the Church of England it must be by being convinced of the intellectual soundness of her position, and it was just this that Keble could not do for him. As he admitted … Keble had never ‘got up’ the controversy with Rome … An unkind person might say that his reluctance to explore the position was due to an unformulated suspicion as to what such explanation might reveal, but the explanation is a highly improbable one. The truth of the matter was that Keble was too indolent to trouble his head with the study of a subject naturally distasteful to him.”180 Yet it is dubious whether Keble ever truly imagined that Newman was writing to him to elicit arguments for remaining within a fold that he had already largely made up his mind to leave. When he responded to Newman’s long letter of June 8th, for example, Keble wrote: “So long as your letter may be considered as stating a case, I really hardly know what to say. I feel as if I had suggested on former occasions all that I could now say; but I still shrink from the thought of committing myself to Rome, as it is.”181 This clearly indicates that, for Keble, the object of Newman’s letters was to persuade him to consider Rome, not to persuade him to mount convincing arguments in favor of Canterbury.
When Keble expressed regret for not mounting such arguments, he was throwing wool over his own and Newman’s eyes. The only argument he was prepared to make was that there could be no certainty as to whether Canterbury or Rome represented the one true Church. “Do
you not think it possible,” he asked Newman, “that the whole Church may be so lowered by sin, as to hinder one’s finding on earth anything which seems really to answer to the Church of the Scriptures?” When Keble suggested that Newman’s own sermon put this idea into his head, Newman must have repented of the glib exasperation to which he had given expression in his sermon, “Outward and Inward Notes of the Church,” especially when Keble followed this up by asking “will it not be well to prepare yourself for disappointment, lest you fall into something like scepticism?” The idea that one could escape skepticism by embracing doubt was not one that Newman would have found persuasive. But this was precisely what Keble was advocating. “You know I have always fancied that perhaps you were over sanguine in making things square, and did not allow enough for Bishop Butler’s notion of doubt and intellectual difficulty being some men’s intended element and appropriate trial.”182 Here, again, Keble sidestepped the crisis enjoined by Newman’s epistolary witness by trotting out a highly dubious reading of Butler.183
Newman, for his part, rejected the notion that the object of religious inquiry should be doubt. When he read of his old Oriel colleague Blanco White (1775–1841) being praised for discrediting the Gospels along Straussian lines and embracing skepticism, he was incredulous. An apostate Catholic priest of Irish ancestry, White grew up in Seville before moving to London in 1810, where he was friends with Lord and Lady Holland and the tutor (briefly) of Henry Fox. Gravitating to Oxford in 1826, he became an honorary member of Oriel and a prominent member of the Noetics, before abandoning the Anglican Church for Unitarianism. During White’s stint at Oriel, he and Newman were good friends, sharing a passion for Beethoven and often playing their violins together. They parted ways when Newman campaigned against Peel and Catholic Emancipation, which White considered untenably partisan. They were also on different sides of the Hampden controversy, White being rumored to have inspired Hampden’s heretical Bampton Lectures.184 When White’s autobiography (1845) was posthumously published, Newman found its endorsement of doubt deeply disturbing. “Is this the end of Life? Can there be a greater paradox than this?” Those who hold such views, “really do think it is no harm whatever being an Atheist, so that you are sincerely so and do not cut people’s throats and pick their pockets.”185 T. S. Eliot would similarly marvel at “those who would once have been considered intellectual vagrants,” who “are now pious pilgrims, cheerfully plodding the road from nowhere to nowhere, trolling their hymns, satisfied that they may be ‘on the march.’”186 Nonetheless, it was a mark of Newman’s fairness that although he thought White’s infidelity deplorable he was quick to assure Gladstone that White himself “was a fastidiously honorable man, in word and deed.”187
In his response to his friend’s letter, Newman was too intent on commiserating with Keble over the posthumous publication of Arnold’s papers to disabuse him of his own supposed appetite for doubt. “As to Arnold’s ‘Remains,’” he wrote, “I cannot put myself enough in your place to know the precise points which pain you so acutely—but for myself, there seems much to take comfort in as things are. I do not think the book will produce any great effect in a wrong direction. Of course there is a great deal in it to touch people—but there is so little consistency in his intellectual basis, that I cannot think he will affect readers permanently.” As far as Newman could see, posterity would be grateful to Arnold for his school reforms and ignore the rest. Then Newman summed up his own thoughts about his occasional antagonist with amusing dispatch: “if it is right to speculate on such serious matters, there is something quite of comfort to be gathered from his removal from this scene of action, at the time it took place; as if so good a man should not be suffered to commit himself cominus against truths, which he so little understood.”188
The same witty judiciousness that Newman applied to Dr. Arnold he applied to the via media that he had spent so much time defending. “The only feeling I am at all suspicious of,” Newman wrote to Keble on 21 November 1844, “is … a feeling of intellectual contempt for the paralogisms of our ecclesiastical and theological theory … . What I have asked myself is, ‘Are you not perhaps ashamed to hold a system which is so inconsistent, so untenable?’” Such withering reassessments must have shaken Keble in his own attachment to the via media, but if, as was evidently the case, his attachment remained finally unshaken, he must have seen in Newman’s letter an eerie echo of his own objections to moving. “I cannot deny I should be ashamed of having to profess it,” Newman wrote of what he now considered an untenable system, “yet I think the feeling, whatever be its strength, is not at all able to do so great a thing as to make me tear myself from my friends, from their good opinion, from my reputation for consistency, from my habitual associations, from all that is naturally dear to me.”189 This was strange coming from Newman because, by November, 1844, the self-sacrifices he described were precisely those he was prepared to make to embrace the Catholic Church; it was Keble who was resisting Rome because it would tear him from friends, family, and everything that was dear to him. Newman made his own position clear when he reiterated what he had shared with his friend earlier, that “My sole ascertainable reason for moving is a feeling of indefinite risk to my soul in staying … I don’t think I could die in our Communion. Then the question comes upon one, is not death the test?”190 This was hardly the sort of question he would put to himself if he were truly considering remaining within the Anglican Church. Newman raised these earlier apprehensions about losing family and friends, which he knew were uppermost in Keble’s mind, to goad his friend into testing them against an infinitely more decisive test—the test of death. However one reads Newman’s letters to Keble at this time, one cannot read them as mere introspective effusions from a divided soul. Even while working out his own difficult destiny, Newman continued to conduct his own indirect apostolate on behalf of Keble.
Nevertheless, the appeals in Newman’s letters fell on deaf ears: Keble would not be budged. “I want very much to thank you for your two kind letters,” he wrote on December 27th, “and for thinking so much of me in all your perplexities … Certainly it is a sad unsettled world: the two lessons out of Isaiah for Christmas Eve struck me as a melancholy contrast between what this part of Christendom is and what it might be; but is it better elsewhere?”191 Then, on 3 October 1845, Keble wrote to Newman to tell him “I feel as if I had something to say to you, although I don’t know what it will be; but Charlotte’s illness having for the present abated, I find that I am better able than I have been for near a fortnight past to think and speak coherently of other things, and what can I think of so much as you, dear friend, and the αγωνία which awaits us with regard to you …” Obviously, Keble had been turning over in his own mind what Newman had said about death being the test as to whether one should move. This was accentuated by the fact that his brother Tom’s life was “hanging by a thread.” And “At such times,” Keble wrote, “one seems in a way to see deeper into realities, and I must own to you that the impression on my own mind of the reality of things I have been brought up among, and of its being my own fault not theirs, whereinsoever I am found wanting,—this impression seems to deepen in me as Death draws nearer, and I find it harder and harder to imagine that persons such as I have seen and heard of lately should be permitted to live and die deceiving themselves in such a point, as whether they are aliens to the grace of God’s Sacraments or no.” So, Newman had his answer, though it was not the one he wished to hear. Instead, with redoubled insistence, Keble threw back at Newman precisely the argument of hearth and home, of “all bands of birth,” as Lancelot Andrewes put it, that his friend had tried to expose as insufficient.192 Speaking for his fellow Tractarians, or at least those prepared to remain loyal to the Church of England, Keble wrote: “everything has fallen out so as to foster the delusion, if delusion it be, that we are not quite aliens, not living among unrealities. Yet you have no doubt the other way.” Again, Keble insisted, in these matters uncertainty ruled, and
this argued against moving. “It is very mysterious, very bewildering indeed; but, being so, one’s duty seems clearly pointed out: to abide where one is, till some call come upon one. If this were merely my own reason or feeling, I should mistrust it altogether, knowing, alas! that I am far indeed from the person to whom guidance is promised, but when I see the faith of others, such as I know them to be, and so very near to me as God has set them, I am sure that it would be a kind of impiety to dream of separating myself from them.”193
The Scotsman J. C. Shairp, the friend of Arthur Hugh Clough and Matthew Arnold, responded similarly when he first encountered what was for him the Tractarians’ strange new insistence on the sacraments and the apostolical succession. “Well,” he recalled thinking, “if all you say be true, then I never can have known a Christian. For up to this time I have lived among people who were strangers to all these things.” No arguments would budge this central objection. Speaking of his youthful self, Shairp recalled, “It would have taken something stronger to make him break faith with all that was most sacred in his early recollections. Beautiful examples of Presbyterian piety had stamped impressions on his memory not to be effaced by sacerdotal theories or subtleties of the schools.”194 If Shairp viewed the via media with the settled opposition of an adherent to the Kirk, Keble and most of the English looked even more askance at Roman Catholicism. For Keble, when an Englishman converted, he was willy-nilly “deciding on his own authority what are the limits of the Kingdom of Christ, what the evangelical terms of salvation. He is pronouncing not only on the truth, but on the importance also, of many and various propositions, which being in debate among those who call themselves Catholics, are settled under anathema by the Roman councils. He is consigning millions, who had no other thought than to live and die true subjects of the visible Catholic Church, to the comparatively forlorn hope of incurable ignorance and uncovenanted mercy.”195 This was similar to the feeling that Newman recognized in his sister Jemima’s refusal to consider the claims of Rome. When he wrote to Lord Coleridge towards the end of his life that he could “quite understand … good people not becoming Catholics, from the home feeling which was so strong in Keble …,” he got at something fundamental not only about Keble but about most of the Anglican English.196 The campaign to brand the old faith foreign, mounted first by the Henrician and then the Elizabethan Reformation, had succeeded only too well; by the nineteenth century most English people regarded it as the antithesis of home. And yet Newman always looked forward to the time when these divisions would be obliterated. When Shairp died in 1887, Newman wrote to a mutual friend: