Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  It is quite true that the Catholic Church claims your absolute submission to her in matters of faith – Unless you believe her doctrines as the word of God revealed to you through her, you can gain no good by professing to be a Catholic – you are not one really. At the same time she does not ask your confidence without giving reasons for claiming it – and one mode of proving her divine authority among others, certainly is that which it has occurred to you to adopt – viz to see whether certain of her doctrines are not like truth, or reasonable, or scriptural, or conformable to the state of the world. You certainly may gain a ground for believing her, through the vraisemblance of her doctrines – but you cannot fully prove them – you can only see their excellence to a certain point – else, what the need of a revelation? a revelation implies the grant of something which could not otherwise be known. If then you have chosen this way of approaching the Church, you must think it enough to prove her doctrines to a certain point – and then your argument will be this, ‘Since I have been able to prove the Catholic doctrines so far, I will take the whole on faith –’ just as you trust an informant who has in other matters already shown he has a claim to be trusted.

  And then he made reference to the “notes of the Church” that animated so much of his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845): “The more obvious reasons for believing the Church to come from God are its great notes, as they are called—such as its antiquity, universality, its unchangeableness through so many revolutions and controversies, its adaptation to our wants. The more you think on these subjects, the more, under God’s grace, will you be led to see that the Catholic Church is God’s guide to you.”110 As it happened, Mrs. Phillips proved an apt catechumen. In August 1851, she finally converted with her children (a boy and two girls) and when her brothers threatened to bring the children up Protestant, she absconded with them to the Continent. Having made her point, she returned to England, where she formed a small hospital in Edgbaston, near the Oratory. One of her friends was the sister of A. P. Stanley, Arnold’s biographer, Mary Stanley, who wrote to her when she was serving as a nurse in the Crimea: “Will you tell Dr. Newman when next you see him how much I hope soon to make his acquaintance for his first Volume of sermons were the first sermons I ever read with any pleasure; and the one on ‘Obedience the best remedy for religious perplexity’ has been my stay in many troubles.”111 Doubtless, she found great practical counsel in Newman’s assurance that, “To all those who are perplexed in any way soever, who wish for light but cannot find it, one precept must be given,—obey.” Indeed, for Newman, by resolving “to obey God, in the ordinary businesses of life, we are at once interested by realities which withdraw our minds from vague fears and uncertain indefinite surmises about the future.” Certainly he had taken this advice himself when he was faced with very harrowing “indefinite surmises” before the Achilli trial.112

  After publishing his Grammar of Assent in 1870, Newman was gratified to hear that his frequent correspondent, the governess Miss Holmes, had read the book. “It will please me much,” he wrote, “if you say of the last 100 pages what you say for the chapter on certitude – for they were written especially for those who can’t go into questions of the inspiration of Scripture, authenticity of books, passages in the Fathers etc etc … .” Indeed, Newman had written his highly unconventional treatise “especially for such ladies as are bullied by infidels and do not know how to answer them …” He “wanted to show that, keeping to broad facts of history, which every one knows and no one can doubt, there is evidence and reason enough for an honest inquirer to believe in revelation.”113 A solitary woman who never stayed long with any of the families that engaged her, Miss Holmes sought Newman out in 1840 after reading his sermons and converted in 1844. Although initially opposed to her converting, convinced that she was relying more on impulse than settled conviction, Newman soon came to see her Catholic faith as the still center in her otherwise itinerant, precarious life. If he warmed to her intelligence, he worried about her restlessness. When she found employment with the Blounts in Mapledurham, Oxfordshire, in 1864, Newman wrote to her: “I write you a line to congratulate you on your having got to Mapledurham. Now don’t leave it, please. Don’t be angry, if I say that you like strangers at first, but you tire of them, when they become acquaintances. No one, but yourself, can know the penances which you undergo in any family, be it ever so near perfection – much more in families which are not perfect – but you can’t tell how it distresses me when I see one like yourself, who deserve so much better things, tossing on the waves – and this distress both makes me pleased, as now, that you have come into port again, and desirous that in port you should continue.”114 In the case of the Grammar of Assent, she apparently had no trouble grasping Newman’s argument with respect to certainty, which baffled many of his more learned friends, including John Dalgairns (1818–1876), the Oratorian who would later become the Superior of the London Oratory, and T. W. Allies (1813–1903), an Old Etonian and former Fellow of Wadham College whom Newman appointed Lecturer of History at the Catholic University.115 Newman also admired her pluck, even though some of her letters must have tried his patience. In one she wrote: “Your letter today has revealed to me that I have been making an idol of you, and henceforward I shall pray to have strength to do without you. You write to tell me, you have nothing to say to me. Ah, Mr. Newman, this is more like a Brutus than a Christian Father. I had presentiment that your letter would be painful, and I don’t think any thing ever hurt me more.”116 Newman’s response was full of forbearing charm. “My dear Miss Holmes, rouse yourself to better thoughts—resign yourself to things as they are … Exert that strong sense and vigor of mind with which you are so largely gifted. Aim at subduing yourself, and ruling your feelings, and attaining equanimity. All this will seem very cold to you, but in Lent one may bear it.”117

  Newman could not abide being idolized. “I am not venerable, and nothing can make me so,” he told Miss Holmes on another occasion. “Do not suffer any illusive notions about me …”118 At the same time, he was annoyed when he got wind of the idolatrous attention that Pusey was being paid, which the Canon of Christ Church did not discourage, especially in his female acolytes. One of these was Catherine Ward (1813–1897), whose life would crisscross with those of other contemporaries dear to Newman. The third daughter of Seth Stephen Ward of Camberwell, Catherine lived at Norland House, Clifton, with the family of her brother-in-law, Samuel Wayte, whose son, Samuel William, was a Fellow, later President, of Trinity College, Oxford, where Newman was an undergraduate from 1817 to 1820 and later received an honorary degree in 1877. In 1839 she had begun reading his sermons, and in 1845 she put herself under the spiritual direction of Edward Pusey, who, after Newman’s secession from the Anglican Church in 1845, was the de facto leader of the Tractarian party within the Established Church. In 1848, Catherine wrote lengthy letters to Newman describing her tumultuous religious history and explaining how she was drawn to Catholicism after listening to Pusey describe his Anglo-Catholic pastiche of Catholicism—what Newman called his “mimic Catholicism.”119 In 1849, a year after Newman’s extensive correspondence with her began, she converted to Rome. After converting, she sent altar hangings for Newman’s first church in Alcester Street. In 1857, she married George Tylee (1807–1865), a retired Major-General, who had become a Catholic in 1847, after being influenced by his Cambridge friend, John Joseph Gordon (1811–1853), one of Newman’s most trusted and beloved Oratorians, who, like so many of his dearest friends, died young. After George Tylee’s death in Rome, Catherine lived on at Clifton, where she died in 1897.

  In her first letter to Newman, Catherine described how she had begun to doubt Anglicanism, despite the instruction she was taking from Pusey. As her trust in the Church of England fell, her interest in Catholicism rose. “One great truth which draws me to her,” she said, apropos the Roman Church, “is that wonderful Sacramental system, so lost, confused, almost vilified in the Church of England and t
ho’ Dr. Pusey and others hold it, and give me leave to hold it, yet it is in such an isolated manner that I cannot feel it as a truth of the Church but only as held by individuals—in fact the Church of England as Dr. Pusey holds it, seems more like an Ideal Church, than real one.”120 Newman wrote her back a series of letters, which, taken together, are a kind of dress rehearsal for those sections in his King William Street lectures, later published as Anglican Difficulties (1850), where he pointed out the incoherence of Puseyite Anglo-Catholicism. Specifically, he argued that “the Anglican Church cannot take support from the high religious excellence of individuals who are found in her” because “the direction of their holy feelings, views, and works is, not towards that Church, but away from it, and bears testimony consequently, not to it, but against it; whereas the whole company of Catholic Saints … are the natural fulfilment of the idea, the due exemplification of the teaching, of the Catholic Church. Who will say that fasting, devotion, and the like are in any sense the fruit of the historical, real, tangible Church of England? Is not the idea of an Anglican Bishop or clergyman, that of a gentleman, a scholar, a good father of a family, a well conducted, kindhearted, religiously minded man, and little more?”121 This was a point which many of his female friends were in a unique position to verify because in their charitable work they could see that the Anglican Church meant nothing to the lower orders, a fact for which there is ample corroboration in Henry Mayhew’s study of the London poor. Speaking of the religion of the costermongers, for example, he wrote: “An intelligent and trustworthy man, until very recently actively engaged in costermongering, computed that not three in one hundred costermongers had ever been in the interior of a church, or any place of worship, or knew what was meant by Christianity.”122 For Newman, the fact that most clergymen of the Church of England tended to be removed from the poor put them beyond the pale of sanctity.123 “Take a really true specimen of an Anglican, a fair specimen; e.g. … the Bishop of London or Dr Hook; they are not the tenth, the twentieth, the infinitesmal part of a Saint; you could not multiply them up until they became saints; they tend to something different; their perfection is something different.” Nor was Pusey representative of anything saintly within the Church of England. For Newman, it was self-evident that “no one would call [Pusey] a specimen of the Church of England; he is undeniably foreign, outlandish; whereas everyone would call St Carlo or St Francis de Sales, a specimen of the Catholic Church; I mean a specimen of its teaching, its profession, its aim. Is Dr Pusey more like a Monk or a Dignitary? is he of the Anglican type? How then can such as he be witnesses for the sanctity and divine life of the Anglican Church? As well might you say that the Irish character was cool, self possessed, patient, and unimaginative, because the Duke of Wellington is an Irishman.”124

  Newman, on the other hand, was revered by the Birmingham poor, who, according to an article in the Daily Mail felt a “great personal attachment” to him, arising “from the knowledge of his simple and sanctified life and his kindly love for the poor,” an attachment which “was illustrated by their great anxiety to secure a seat in the church whenever of late years some great occasion had given rise to his Eminence being present.”125

  For Newman, to see the deficiencies of Anglo-Catholicism, one had only to take into account its chief architect. “Dear Dr Pusey does not witness by his virtues for his Church, he witnesses for himself, he witnesses for his own opinions,” he told Catherine. Of course, Pusey and the remaining Tractarian faithful denied this. “But since he himself would shrink from such a conclusion, since he refers us to his Church and considers that he puts forth its doctrine not his own, I want to know what single individual that ever belonged to the Anglican Church does he follow. Not Laud, for Laud on the scaffold avowed himself an honest Protestant; not Hooker, for he gives up the Real Presence; not Taylor, for he blames both the Athanasian and Nicene Creeds; not Bull, for he considers that Transubstantiation ‘bids defiance to all the reason and sense of mankind;’ not Ussher, for he was a Calvinist; not Jewell, for he gave up the Priesthood; nor the Articles, for Dr P. puts an interpretation on them; nor the Prayer Book, for he believes about twice as much as the Prayer Book contains. Who before him ever joined the circle of Roman doctrine to the Anglican ritual and polity?” Here was that rhetorical panache that Newman’s opponents found so tiresome and so unanswerable. Nevertheless, Newman wished to reassure his correspondent that he did “enter into and sympathize” with her “severe struggle of thought and feeling;” and he would remember her in his daily Mass, and, as he said, “earnestly trust you will soon be brought out of your difficulties …”126 When, subsequently, she wrote regarding Our Lady, Newman wrote back in his helpful way, “As to her being the sole hope of sinners, this, I conceive, is literally true, in the sense in which such words are commonly used—Thus the sole cause of salvation is God, the sole cause is Christ, the sole cause is a certain illness or accident, the sole cause is baptism, the sole cause is faith … In like manner our Lady has a delegated omnipotence in her own sphere, i.e., of intercession …”127 In a later letter, he returned to this basal reality: “devotion to the Blessed Virgin is the ordinary way to heaven, and the absence of it is at least a bad symptom of the state of our faith.”128

  In one of her letters, Catherine echoed one of the most persistent objections of the English to the Roman Church when she observed that “Infidelity prevails more where Roman Catholic religion prevails …” Newman was inclined to agree, though he recognized that verifying such things was not easy. “If I were to judge antecedently, I should grant this; for where there is the greatest light, shadows are strongest. He who can reject the Truth, not unnaturally is punished with fanatical hatred of it. And again, there is nothing else to go to then; Protestantism does not exist, or is despised as a half way house, and a sort of hypocrisy. But I am very doubtful about the fact; for really it seems to me as if the greater portion of the thinking class (par excellence) in England at present are very near professed infidels.”129

  When Catherine wrote to say that she had read Newman’s Essay on the Development of Doctrine (1845), but was unsure as to why the Roman Church alone should possess what he called “the notes of the Church,” he wrote back: “The Notes of the Church do not depend on the particular doctrine of this or that divine, but are such as … approve themselves to the mass of mankind, as being involved in the notion of a revelation. It is nothing to the purpose then that this communion or that says that itself has the Notes of the Church; or that the divines of this or that say so; for the fact is to be decided, not by any such private judgment, but by the consent of the world.”130 Here was another affirmation of Augustine’s great maxim, which was so instrumental in Newman’s conversion: ‘Securus judicat orbis terrarum’—‘The universal Church is in its judgments secure of its truth.’131 “If Anglicans say that they have catholicity, that does not decide the question, any more than their saying that they are in the Church. Nor does it decide it, on the other hand, for a Roman Catholic to say that his communion has the Notes, or that his communion is the Church. The appeal and the decision lie with the bulk of mankind. Take then the Roman Church, and take the Anglican in a large town; let each call itself the Church, and just see what the people say to it. They may prefer the Anglican, as more Scriptural, as not being corrupt … but they will all say, or will show they feel, that the Roman Church, whether corrupted, whether perverted, (which is a question of opinion) yet in matter of fact is the continuation of that old Church, called Catholic, which has been in the world from time immemorial, which has been in the world so long that you cannot say when it was not in the world, to which you can assign no date short of the Apostles.”132 This readiness to concede the corruptions of the Church was typical of a man who had not converted to Rome because he imagined the Church, in its human aspects, incorruptible. “There are now, as at all times,” he told Catherine, “a thousand disorders within and without the Church –her head is in exile – her subject countries in political str
ife – her members full of imperfection – but there is that in her which is what she peculiarly promises, which no other body promises, and in which she does not deceive; she can present a Creed, she alone can do what a Messenger from heaven ought to do; and her children feel this and are satisfied. If you join the Catholic Church for fine services, for splendid temples, for outward show or appearance of any kind, if it were in you an indulgence of sentiment or imagination, you might in this event be disappointed; – you cannot be disappointed in seeking in it those great attributes which our reason tells us belong to the oracle of heaven and the Vicar of Christ.”133

  During the course of their correspondence, Catherine questioned the miracles of the Church. Newman was adamant that when it came to these and other objections, inquiry could be prolonged indefinitely, which prompted him to ask his correspondent: “And are you not in the way to be one of those who ever seek and therefore never find?” Here, he might have been thinking of his brother Frank, who succumbed to lifelong seeking, with calamitous consequences for his Christian faith. “Alas,” Newman assured Mrs. Ward, “I can believe how wayward the mind may be under the fearful pressure of perplexities in faith, but how many there are in the Anglican Church who would leap for joy to attain that intellectual conviction which you have possessed …” Moreover, he was adamant that it was wrongheaded to treat the truths of faith as though they were abstruse propositions, which somehow required ingenious unriddling. “As to the question of inquiring about religion, surely religion is not like the ‘philosophy of Plato and Aristotle,’ for the learned only,” he insisted. “What a condemnation of any man’s religious system, for him to allow that it is like a heathen science. To the poor is the Gospel preached. Accordingly the notes of the Church are simple and easy, and obvious to all capacities.”134