Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  Thomas Huxley (1825–1895), one of the great proponents of this new light, who famously told Bishop Samuel Wilberforce that he would rather be descended from an ape than a bishop, looked back on what Newman had done for the Anglo-Catholic party that Pusey inherited and saw an ambiguous legacy. “Dr. Newman made his choice and passed over to the Roman Church half a century ago,” Huxley wrote in a piece called “Agnosticism: A Rejoinder” (1899). “Some of those who were essentially in harmony with his views preceded, and many followed him. But many remained: and, as the quondam Puseyite and present Ritualistic party, they are continuing that work of sapping and mining the Protestantism of the Anglican Church which he and his friends so ably commenced. At the present time, they have no little claim to be considered victorious all along the line. I am old enough to recollect the small beginnings of the Tractarian party, and I am amazed when I consider the present position of their heirs. Their little leaven has leavened, if not the whole, yet a very large lump of the Anglican Church; which is now pretty much of a preparatory school for Papistry.” Here, Huxley was at once right and wrong. Yes, the crisis of Tractarianism had forced the Anglo-Catholic party to make a choice between Rome and Agnosticism but, no, Pusey and the Tractarians had not been successful in “sapping and mining the Protestantism of the Anglican Church,” which proved more durable than either Pusey, Newman or Huxley himself would have thought possible. Still Huxley was right about the most important aspect of Newman’s Anglican legacy: Newman “believed that his arguments led either Romeward, or to what ecclesiastics call ‘Infidelity,’ and I call Agnosticism. I believe that he was quite right in this conviction, but while he chooses the one alternative, I choose the other …”248

  In 1879, on Guy Fawkes Day, Newman wrote to his friend, the Anglican clergyman Octavius Ogle, “I was delighted to see your nieces – but when I had parted from their sweet faces, it came upon me, alas, alas, how rudely I had treated your wife, in not asking whether she was at home, when I found [you] were not. But old age is full of absurdities – and just as I tumble down steps, so I am apt to commit all manner of mistakes, especially when I go from home and am thrown into circumstances out of the common.”249 To which Ogle replied: “It is quite a natural outcome of your goodness that you should so kindly think of my wife and trouble yourself to write about her.” And then he added something which encapsulates not only Newman’s long relationship with Pusey but with many Anglicans: “I wonder if you know how much you are loved by England. I wonder if any man, at least of our time, was ever so loved by England – by all religiously minded England. And even the enemies of faith are softened by their feeling for you. And I wonder whether this extraordinary and unparalleled love might not be – was not meant to be – utilized, as one means to draw together into one fold all Englishmen who believe. I can conceive no more powerful nor truer ειρηνικον. But I suppose we shall go on loving you and you will go on being loved by us, and nothing will come of it on earth. But ‘God fulfils Himself in many ways.’ Meanwhile I shall always hope that my dear love for you may be a hallowing influence in all I say and think and do.”250

  Pusey echoed these sentiments when he wrote to an Anglican priest in 1879, “You may assure your friends that nothing either has or can come between my deep love for John Henry Newman.”251 Newman, for his part, summed up his relationship with Pusey and his Anglican difficulties in a postscript to another Anglican priest: “I love Pusey, but that does not suffice for communion.”252 Despite all of Newman’s good efforts, Pusey went to his grave preferring his own “mimic Catholicism” to the real thing.253 Newman had to content himself with less celebrated scalps. In 1866, the convert Thomas Allies wrote him, “There is residing close by me now a Mr Dewar who has just resigned a living in Lincolnshire, and become a Catholic with his wife and family. He tells me that your Letter to Dr Pusey was the first thing to do away with his difficulties as to the worship of our Blessed Lady.”254

  Chapter 4

  The Certainty of Vocation: Newman and the Froudes

  “We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.”

  John Henry Newman to Mrs. William Froude (27 June 1848)

  “Here we find ourselves in this world, with an instinct telling us that it is our duty to serve God, yet without the means of doing so as certain as the instinct is certain. As in the natural order of things a man would starve, if he did not find the means of living, so in like manner it is incumbent on us to look out for, to labour for, and so to gain the spiritual means, by which our souls may live—and this is the very end of our lives.”

  John Henry Newman to Louisa Simeon (24 May 1869)

  In his sermon, “God’s Will the End of Life” (1849), Newman gave eloquent expression to his understanding of the primacy of vocation at a time when his own vocation had been profoundly renewed.

  Everyone who breathes, high and low, educated and ignorant, young and old, man and woman, has a mission, has a work. We are not sent into this world for nothing; we are not born at random; we are not here, that we may go to bed at night, and get up in the morning, toil for our bread, eat and drink, laugh and joke, sin when we have a mind, and reform when we are tired of sinning, rear a family and die. God sees every one of us; He creates every soul … for a purpose. He needs, He deigns to need, every one of us. He has an end for each of us; we are all equal in His sight, and we are placed in our different ranks and stations, not to get what we can out of them for ourselves, but to labor in them for Him. As Christ has His work, we too have ours; as He rejoiced to do His work, we must rejoice in ours also.1

  This sense of vocation was uppermost in his thoughts when he was preparing to leave Littlemore, three months after he was received into the Catholic Church. On Christmas Eve 1845, he wrote to his dear friend Catherine Froude, “You may think what a pain it is to quit this neighborhood. I am now beginning my thirtieth year since my matriculation. Thus I have spent nearly two thirds of my life here … Yet I have no position in this place and no calling. I have no better reason for staying than at any place along the road, beyond the fact that I am here. It comes upon us all that life is short, and that one must not stay all the day idle, when there is one that hires us, and work to be done.”2 In the long correspondence that Newman conducted with Catherine and her husband William Froude, he would return to this theme of vocation again and again. From the first, Newman saw in Catherine a woman with his own unbiddable respect for truth, who was ready to sacrifice even family ties to co-operate with God’s grace. As it happened, all but one of her four children eventually followed her into the Catholic Church. The one portrait we have of her, which hangs in Newman’s bedroom at the Birmingham Oratory, captures an elegant, intelligent, handsome woman, who, as she looks up from the book she is reading, turns to the viewer an amused expression: sitting for her portrait clearly appealed to her sense of the absurd. There was also an admirable humility about her: she characterized herself in one letter to Newman as “an ignorant, weak-minded person,” and yet one “with the most fervent wish to know and believe the Truth.”3 It is clear from the letters that Newman sent her and from her surviving responses that she was someone whom Newman found deeply sympathetic. In William, he saw not only a talented engineer but a loving father and devoted husband, a kind, fair-minded, conscientious man, who was nonetheless convinced, as he told Newman, that “all the really high cast minds, which are engaged in the advancement of science and also pursue it in that really philosophical spirit which alone serves to consolidate the advances made, all treat their own conclusions with a scepticism as profound, and as corroding as that with which they treat Theology.” William had in mind such men as T. H. Huxley, Frederic Harrison, Herbert Spencer, John Morley, James Fitzjames Stephen and his brother, Leslie Stephen. Huxley epitomized the thought of these men when he wrote that, for “the improver of natural knowledge … scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.”4 One reason why Newman was intent on sharing his
sense of vocation with William was that he saw him as representative of those “engaged in the advancement of science,” who, then as now, regarded faith as an untenable because unscientific prejudice. Newman might not have entirely agreed with William in considering these men “high cast minds”—in one letter to his friend, he admitted, “I have long thought your great men in science to be open to the charge of superciliousness”5—but he knew their influence, and he wished to parry their arguments.6 In 1849, in his sermon “Faith and Doubt,” Newman summarized the cult of skepticism to which William and so many others subscribed. For these men, “it is a fault ever to make up our mind once for all on any religious subject whatever …” Indeed, “however sacred a doctrine may be, and however evident to us—let us say, for instance, the divinity of our Lord, or the existence of God—we ought always to reserve to ourselves the liberty of doubting about it.” For Newman, “so extravagant a position … confutes itself …”7 Yet for over thirty years, Newman vigorously debated the matter with William, trying to make him see that thoroughgoing skepticism is as unsustainable in religion as it is in any other arena. Newman’s biographer Ian Ker captured the essence of what Newman meant when he pointed out how “Newman’s treatment of doubt anticipates Wittgenstein’s fundamental insight into the absurdity of universal skepticism, since to doubt everything is to nullify the language of doubt itself.”8 Accordingly, Newman rejected Descartes’ metaphysics by arguing that it was credulity, not doubt, that enabled us to advance in knowledge.

  By the same token, Newman never discounted genuine scientific inquiry: it was only skepticism masquerading as science that met with his disapproval. In a lively memoir, Sir Rowland Blennerhassett, a Kerry born liberal Catholic who was friendly with Lord Acton and Ignaz Döllinger, opposed Parnell’s Home Rule nationalism, and took a deep interest in Irish education and land law, recalled conversations he had had with Newman at the Oratory in 1860:

  I remember distinctly getting at once the impression from my very first conversation with Newman that the opinion then very commonly held as to his position on the intellect of the modern world was quite erroneous, and I was confirmed in this view some little time afterwards. He spoke to me about Mr. Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species.’ I saw clearly from the tone of his observations that both Roman Catholics and Anglicans were equally wrong in their views of his attitude to free scientific inquiry. Nothing could be more mistaken than to imagine that he looked at it askance, or felt any alarm whatever as to its ultimate effects on Christian faith. That was certainly not perceived by the world at large in 1860. Even men who knew him fairly well were quite mistaken about him. They imagined he closed his mind to the teachings of science and that he clung to the Church of Rome out of fear of free inquiry. I am afraid that even at the present moment there are some who ought to know better who still misunderstand him in this respect. They mistake the critical faculty which made it impossible for him to accept as gospel scientific propositions which may be true but are still unproven for a cowardly and untruthful state of mind which must culminate in hopeless obscurantism.9

  Another reason why Newman showed William and his doubts such solicitude was to return his loyalty: “I never forget the aid William afforded me when I was lowest, at the time of the Achilli matter,” he told Catherine in 1873.10 Joyce Sugg, in her engaging book, Ever Yours Affly: John Henry Newman and his Female Circle, points out that William “was one of the multitude of friends who contributed to Newman’s heavy expenses and to the fine imposed on him.”11 And yet perhaps the most fundamental reason why Newman corresponded with William at such length and over so many years about such a deeply personal matter was that he loved the man and would not abandon him to his sophistical doubts. “Whatever pain it is to me to think of our actual differences of opinion,” he told his intransigent friend on Christmas Eve, 1859, “I feel no separation from you in my heart, and, please God, never shall.”12

  Charles Stephen Dessain, the great founding editor of Newman’s letters and diaries, said that the “fundamental interest of Newman’s life” was “his devotion to the cause of Revealed Religion.”13 In this chapter, I shall show how Newman shared this lifelong vocation with Catherine and William Froude by sharing with them his insights into such matters as faith and reason, certitude and assent, the vitality of grace, the life of prayer, and, not least, the difficulties felt by Anglicans in trying to submit to the Catholic Church. I shall also show how these insights informed the writing of An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), which, in exemplifying Newman’s personal approach to philosophy, reaffirmed that “It is in the experience of daily life that the power of religion is learnt.”14 Before looking at Newman’s correspondence with his two friends, I shall briefly place Catherine and William in some biographical context.

  Catherine Froude née Holdsworth (1810–1878) was the daughter of Arthur Howe Holdsworth (1780–1860), who was educated at Eton, elected M.P. for the rotten borough of Dartmouth between 1802 and 1820, and Governor of Dartmouth College from 1807 until his death. She met Newman in 1836 at Dartington in Devon, where Archdeacon Froude was rector, and began corresponding with him in 1838. A good sense of her witty, playful, searching intelligence can be gleaned from Newman’s letters and diaries. In one letter, Hurrell Froude told Newman that Catherine had heard—“as proof of unfeeling bigotry in you”—that he had refused to see his brother Frank on his return from Persia. He also told his friend that she “was sapping hard at your Arians,”—that is to say, The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833), Newman’s first book, which first exhibited Newman’s abiding interest in the development of dogma and put Catherine on the road to conversion. Her friendship with Newman was very close. “Dear Fr Newman,” she wrote in 1862, after she had known him for nearly thirty years, “You are dearer to me than anyone in the world, after my husband and children and my dear sister. – What would I give to be able to help you!”15

  William Froude (1810–1879), whom Catherine married in 1839, was the brother not only of Newman’s close friend Hurrell but also of Anthony, whose history of Tudor England expressly refuted the Tractarian critique of the English Reformation. “In his History,” J. W. Burrow wrote in his lively book on Victorian historiography, Anthony “was to defend the Dissolution, applaud the Reformers, and damn Queen Mary of Scots and all ‘sentimental’ Catholic versions of English history. Froude, in fact, came to hold a stance unprecedented in English historiography: friendly to Puritanism and to strong monarchy, hostile to the monasteries and by no means tender to early capitalism. It is perhaps no wonder that [J. R.] Green described his History as disfigured … by paradox.”16 Since Hurrell and indeed Archdeacon Froude also thought in paradoxical terms—Hurrell was fond of telling the Fellows of Oriel’s Senior Common Room that “The cultivation of right principles has a tendency to make men dull and stupid”— Anthony was upholding a family tradition, though his entirely favorable view of Henry VIII and his Reformation could not have been more different from that of his Tractarian brother, who particularly condemned the Reformers’ Erastianism.17 In 1892, Anthony was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, a post he assumed after the death of E. A. Freeman, his most relentless critic.18 If Hurrell and Anthony were alike in taking their opposite positions with a certain flippant élan, William was at once more methodical and more eccentric. At Oriel, Thomas Mozley remembered William as the college chemist. “His rooms on the floor over Newman’s were easily distinguishable to visitors entering the college, by the stains of sulphuric acid … extending from the window sills to the ground. The Provost must sometimes have had to explain this appearance to his inquiring guests …” Mozley also recalled William making laughing-gas in his rooms, which caused “one of the sweetest tempered men I ever knew” to put up his fists and make “menacing gestures at the company” and another to imagine himself “a regiment of cavalry performing rapid evolutions.” Then William asked Mozley to help him navigate a small boat he had refurbished. He “took a small Oxford sailin
g boat, strengthened its frame, decked it fore and aft, and himself made a pump with which he could discharge the water as fast as a waterman standing in the river could throw it in with a bucket. He gave much study and pains to the work, putting it to severe tests. His intention was to sail down the Thames and the Channel, up the Dart, and surprise his father at Dartington.” But alas Mozley knew nothing of navigation and the voyage was scrapped, though it says something for William’s pertinacity that the boat did eventually makes its way to Dartington.19 Nonetheless, for all his quirkiness, Froude was undoubtedly clever. After briefly falling under Newman’s sway at Oriel, where he received a First in Mathematics, William went on to become a brilliant railway and naval engineer, whose work on the rolling of ships still guides shipbuilders. At Chelston Cross, his whimsical country house in Torquay, he built a splendid flying staircase starting from the balcony round the hall and extending to the floor above. The Admiralty also furnished him with a large covered experimental tank, where William performed his meticulous nautical tests. As both a railway and a naval engineer, William worked under the greatest of all Victorian engineers, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859), about whom Samuel Smiles wrote: “He was the very Napoleon of engineers, thinking more of glory than of profit, and of victory than of dividends. He would do everything on the most splendid scale, and was alike ambitious of making the best possible steam-ship and the best possible railway.”20 According to his biographer, Brunel’s “conventional religious belief” was “weakened by the natural scepticism of a ruthlessly logical and inquiring mind.”21 And yet if Brunel had not tempered his skepticism with faith, and very staunch faith at that, it is questionable how many of his engineering projects would have succeeded. As Smiles attests, “it is impossible to doubt the good faith of the engineer; if shareholders suffered, he suffered with them. The public at least have certainly no ground of complaint; for it is unquestionable that both railway traveling and steam navigation were greatly advanced by the speculative ability of Mr. Brunel …”22