Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  There were other female correspondents whose difficulties Newman addressed. To Elizabeth (‘Isy’) Froude (1840–1931), William and Catherine’s daughter, who converted when she was 19 (largely as the result of Newman’s influence) and would go on to marry Baron von Hügel, Newman wrote: “I am not at all surprised that you should be tried in the way you describe,” after she wrote to him of her doubts. “If you were older, your trials would be of a different kind. The wise man says, ‘If thou wouldest serve the Lord, prepare thy soul for temptation.’ What you must do, is to beg our dear Lord to give you what you need. Recollect the man who cried out to Him ‘I do believe, Lord – help my unbelief.’”89 To Louisa Simeon (1843–1895), the convert Sir John Simeon’s daughter, who had begun to have doubts about the faith in 1869 when she was 26, he wrote: “It often strikes me how very different my own generation is from the present. We were gradually brought into the Church – we fought our way – all difficulties of whatever kind met us – were examined and overcome – and we became Catholics as the last step of a long course, with little difficulty because it was only the last difficulty of a series. But you find yourself a Catholic suddenly, so to say, just as you are plunging into a world of opinion and into a conflict of intellectual elements all new to you …”90 Nevertheless, no sooner did he draw this contrast than he discounted it. For Newman, taking hold of the reality of the faith was a difficult business in any generation. “You must begin all thought about religion by mastering what is the fact, that any how the question has an inherent, irradicable [sic] difficulty in it. As in tuning a piano, you may throw the fault here or there, but no theory can any one take up without that difficulty remaining. It will come up in one shape or other. If we say, ‘Well, I will not believe any thing,’ there is a difficulty in believing nothing, an intellectual difficulty. There is a difficulty in doubting; a difficulty in determining there is no truth; in saying that there is a truth, but that no one can find it out; in saying that all religious opinions are true, or one as good as another; a difficulty in saying there is no God; that there is a God but that He has not revealed Himself except in the way of nature; and there is doubtless a difficulty in Christianity. The question is, whether on the whole our reason does not tell us that it is a duty to accept the arguments commonly urged for its truth as sufficient, and a duty in consequence to believe heartily in Scripture and the Church.”91

  Then, again, there were many practical difficulties for those who wished to embrace the Catholic faith in Protestant England. In 1873, Mrs. William Robinson Clark, wife of the Vicar of St Mary Magdalen, Taunton, who was also Rural Dean and a Prebendary of Wells, wrote to Newman of her reluctance to share her strong leanings towards Rome with her husband, whom she understandably feared would not credit them. After assuring her that he was saying Masses for her—“which is a greater service to you than my writing many forms of prayer”—Newman acknowledged that her predicament was indeed a “most painful trial” and “that there are others who have to undergo it … does not make it less.” Doubtless, he recalled the difficulty Catherine Froude faced when she was embracing a faith that she knew her husband William would probably never share. He might even have recalled the torments through which Julia Arnold (née Sorrell) put her husband Thomas Arnold, Matthew’s younger brother, whom Newman tapped to teach English at the Catholic Univeristy in Dublin, when she learned that he had decided to convert. On the day that Arnold was received in Van Diemen’s Land, Julia, who came from the same French Huguenot tradition as Newman’s mother, threw a brick through the window of the Pro-Cathedral.92 Newman wrote to Maria Giberne of Arnold and his wife: “He is a very good amiable fellow, but weak and henpecked. His wife is a Xantippe. From Australia, before he was received there, she sent me two abusive letters, and vowed he never should be a Catholic … When I gave him a professorship at Dublin, she was still unmitigated – and when he came to Edgbaston, she used to nag, nag, nag him, till he almost lost his senses.”93 For Newman, Julia must have seemed a fair example of the female unfaithful. Then, again, he certainly would have recalled how his own conversion estranged him from his siblings, not to mention his many Oxford friends and colleagues. Keble would not speak to him for twenty years after his conversion, nor would Frederic Rogers. With such painful memories in mind, Newman admitted to Mrs. Clark, “I wish it were as easy to relieve you as it is easy to feel for you.” Nevertheless, the advice he gave her was uncompromising. “You say ‘Thank God, I have no longer any doubt about the Catholic Faith, I firmly believe Jesus Christ founded one Church, and that the head of the Church is the Pope.’ Then you are bound to be received into that Church without delay.” And what is more, “you must tell your husband. It does not answer to conceal from him so great an act. He has a right to claim it from you. It is the way for him to trust you—but if you act without telling him, he will think you dishonest … . I know I call you to an heroic act in bidding you be a Catholic—but God can be a stay and guide to you, and a Fount of peace and joy, though no human help can avail.” Yet he sought to impress upon her that her difficulty was not insuperable. “You have a great trial before you, and on you; but even though it were that ‘fiery trial,’ of which St. Peter speaks, God can deliver you from it or preserve you in it.”94 By the same token, he was impelled to counsel catechumens like Mrs. Clark that “one cannot be a catechumen for ever,” despite the fact that she had been advised by Newman’s friend Henry James Coleridge, the Jesuit, to wait two years before making up her mind. Newman advised against waiting because, as he said: “You cannot be at peace till you are a Catholic …”95 Still, Mrs. Clark said nothing to her husband, and when it became clear that she would not make this delicate avowal herself, Newman made it for her. His letter to the vicar of Taunton is a model of tact:

  Reverend Sir,

  I have great difficulty in writing to you, yet I feel I ought to do so.

  I know I shall pain you most deeply, and may seem intrusive, but I cannot help that.

  Now for perhaps two years, perhaps more, Mrs. Clark from time to time has written to me on the Subject of Religion. I have urged her on several occasions to let you know, she wrote to me and from her keen feeling of the distress it would cause you, she has put off doing so.

  Some months ago on her way from Liverpool she called on me and she fully determined to tell you on getting home but I understand she did not.

  It is almost rude in me to say how grave a trial I feel this must be to you but I do not like you to think, as you otherwise may that I am unfeeling.

  I write because you ought to know that Mrs. Clark has seen me – also because I do not see more than one termination to her present state of (I may say) anguish. I have never till now been able to say to her ‘You ought to join the Catholic Church.’ I did not know enough about her state of mind. She’s not sure she might not after becoming a Catholic change her mind and go back after a while, but I don’t think that now. I think she is really drawn by the highest motives to be a Catholic and that she would be faithful to the religion she chose.

  With much respect and begging your forgiveness, if I have erred in judgment in what I have said or in writing at all, I am …96

  The Vicar’s response was, in its way, even more tactful, even though it gave short shrift to his wife’s difficulties.

  Vicarage, Taunton June 10, 1877

  My dear Sir

  I thank you most sincerely for your kind letter. I had often wished to have one from you; but I little thought it would come in this way.

  It was quite natural that my wife should apply to you, and I could have wished nothing better than that she should have your answers to her difficulties, if she had been straight-forward in the matter.

  I need not say how great a trouble it is to me. But it is the greatest to know that she has been led to this by no real intellectual or spiritual difficulties. She imagines that she has long had doubts about the English Church. This is an entire delusion – she has simply ‘drifted’; and I doubt whether she
grasps, at this moment, one of the real difficulties of the question.

  But I need not trouble you with my troubles. What even now she will do I cannot tell. She never had much power of thought and her memory and other intellectual powers have been weakened by illness, so that she is – or seems to be – of one mind today, of another tomorrow.

  But I leave it all in the hands of One who orders all things well; and I want only to say to you that I have no complaint to make of yourself, and that I thank you most sincerely for your letter.

  Perhaps – when these earthly shadows have passed away – we may meet where I can without reserve have you as a teacher; for then the veil will be removed from the one or the other; but even here I can say how truly I am yours respectfully

  W. R. Clark97

  What is striking here is how dismissive the Vicar was of his wife’s hard-earned convictions. As far as he could see, she had been led to Roman Catholicism “by no real intellectual or spiritual difficulties:” she was simply delusive. Yet, far from being the response of a merely flippant husband, this was the inveterate response of an entire Anglican society to anyone who chose Rome over Canterbury. Even Newman, when he was contemplating conversion, feared that he might be in the grip of delusion.98 Ten days after converting, on October 19, 1845, Newman wrote Edward Badeley (1803–1868), his legal adviser and friend: “Six years ago the Catholicity of the Church of Rome broke on my mind suddenly and clearly. I have never shaken off the impression, though for a long while I dreaded to allow it, lest it should be a delusion. Nay the dread of delusion has kept me where I was till the last month.”99 The convert Thomas Francis Knox (1822–1882), who was one of the more learned of the English Oratorians and briefly served as Superior of the London Oratory, took his revenge against the Anglican impudence of regarding conversions to Rome as Satanic delusions by telling Pusey that the English Church itself was “a delusion of Satan.”100

  Mrs. Clark was not alone in her reluctance to tell an immovably Protestant spouse about a change of religion that could only make for unpleasant division. The Earl of Dunraven (1841–1926), the Tory politician and yachtsman, who had been born at Adare Manor in County Limerick and later reported on the Franco-Prussian war for the Daily Telegraph, after traveling to America to engage in big game hunting with Buffalo Bill Cody, wrote Newman in 1854, after he had requested his public support of the Catholic University in Dublin: “… it appears to me simply to amount to a public declaration of Catholicism: and as I most solemnly, in the sight of God believe that my doing so would cause my wife’s death: I cannot, and will not do it.” Of course, this did not mean that he despaired of converting completely; only that he needed more time. Again, he wrote to Newman: “I know she has been making efforts to look the thing in the face, and prays to have strength to do God’s will: I also feel latterly I have felt more earnestly my own desire to place myself unreservedly under His guidance in the matter; and more at present I cannot do—Oh pray forgive me if I have written any thing amiss.”101 Lord Dunraven’s wife was Florence Elizabeth (1841–1916), second daughter of Lord Charles Lennox Kerr. After her husband converted in 1855, she bowed to the inevitable but remained staunchly Protestant herself. On the peculiar difficulties of converting without one’s spouse, Lord Dunraven and Mrs. Clark could have exchanged lively notes.

  After Mrs. Clark was received into the Church in October of 1877, Newman praised the courage she showed in going through with her conversion under such painful circumstances. “It is such trial as yours which makes one feel what it was that the early martyrs suffered. I have not forgotten you in my prayers, and I earnestly hope and trust and am sure that a portion of that special comfort from the Paraclete which was given to them will be given to you …”102 The heroics of daily life meant a good deal to Newman.103

  He wrote many of his letters to the female faithful to convince them that quotidian perfection was possible if they persevered.104 As he told his dear friend Maria Giberne, when she was finding it difficult to persevere in her new life as a Visitationist nun, “Though I am not a religious, I can easily understand the temptation which may come upon even the most holy souls, or rather especially upon holy souls, to think they have made a mistake in taking vows of perfection. But the thought must not distress you. Only consider what troubles of mind would have come on you, had you not become a nun. Ah, you would have said, I was called, and I did not respond etc etc.”105 At the same time, when he was not yet fifty, he explained to Mary Holmes, the governess, with whom he would correspond off and on for over thirty years, why perseverance was so necessary.

  As time goes on you will know yourself better and better. Time does that for us, not only by the increase of experience, but by the withdrawal of those natural assistances to devotion and selfsurrender which youth furnishes. When the spirits are high and the mind fervent, though we may have waywardnesses and perversenesses which we have not afterwards, yet we have something to battle against them. But when men get old, as I do, then they see how little grace is in them, and how much what seemed grace was but nature. Then the soul is left to lassitude, torpor, dejection, and coldness which is its real state, with no natural impulses affections or imaginations to rouse it, and things which in youth seemed easy then become difficult. Then it finds how little self command it has, and how little it can throw off the tempter when he comes behind and places it in a certain direction or position, or throws it down, or places his foot upon it. Then it understands at length its own nothingness, and that it has less grace than it had but it has nothing but grace to aid it. It is the sign of a saint to grow; common minds, even though they are in the grace of God, dwindle, (i.e. seem to do so) as time goes on. The energy of grace alone can make a soul strong in age.106

  Nine years later, Newman would make an entry in his journal that made clear just how necessary it was to renew “the energy of grace:”

  O my God, not as a matter of sentiment, nor as a matter of literary exhibition, do I put this down. O rid me of this frightful cowardice, for this is at the bottom of all my ills. When I was young, I was bold, because I was ignorant—now I have lost my boldness, because I have … advanced in experience. I am able to count the cost, better than I did, of being brave for Thy sake, and therefore I shrink from sacrifices. Here is a second reason, over and above the deadness of my soul, why I have so little faith or love in me.107

  One thing that distinguished the counselor in Newman was that he never gave advice, however demanding, that he was not prepared to take himself. When he was awaiting the impending verdict of the Achilli trial, in which he was forced to defend himself against the libel charge of a defrocked Italian Dominican, a pathological rapist, whom the Evangelical Alliance had brought over to England in 1850 to defame the Roman Church in a series of popular lectures, Newman wrote to Sister Mary Agnes Philip Moore, “My only pain is that of reading the too kind letters of my friends—and that I assure you is real pain. Last November when I had before me a boundless ocean of expense, responsibility, and trouble, and in February again, when the horizon was indefinitely removed from me, then I felt pain—but I have no pain at all now. When November comes, for what I know, I may have pain for a day or two, but I cannot tell. I am sure so many prayers ought to make me better, and I am sensible they do not—and this is pain—but it is not the trial and its consequences that pain me. For twenty years I have been writing in verse and prose about suffering for the Truth’s sake, and I have no right to complain, if, after having almost courted the world’s injustice, I suffer it.”108 Here was perseverance ex corde.

  Newman was also good about counseling his female correspondents in another kind of perseverance: learning to exercise the patience necessary to know when they were unready for conversion. In 1878, when Stella Austin, a writer of children’s stories, shared with Newman her difficulties about Catholicism—which included her doubts about transubstantiation—Newman was careful to remind her that “no one ought to join the Church till he is convinced—and your business i
s to pray to God to enlighten you, to give you honesty in inquiry, to go right on, not swerving from unpleasant conclusions, and to make you brave, when conviction comes. He will be with you, don’t doubt Him. That you may do His will and so save your soul is the sincere prayer of Yours very truly John H. Newman.”109 Miss Austen converted in 1885. When Lucy Agnes Vaughan Phillips—the sister of Charles John Vaughan, Headmaster of Harrow School, and the wife of George Peregrine Phillips, an Evangelical clergyman, who died in 1837, at the age of 35—visited Newman in 1851 and shared with him her interest in converting, he wrote her a letter setting out both the claims and the obligations of Catholicism, which were clearly meant to dissuade her from taking any ill-considered steps.