Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  This was a theme to which he would return twenty years later in an important letter to Louisa Simeon, which Newman sent in June of 1869 when Louisa was 26 and full of doubts about a faith that her smart young Protestant friends could only see as outmoded and irrational.

  Another thought which I wish to put before you is, whether our nature does not tell us that there is something which has more intimate relations with the question of religion than intellectual exercises have, and that is our conscience. We have the idea of duty – duty suggests something or some one to which it is to be referred, to which we are responsible. That something that has dues upon us is to us God. I will not assume it is a personal God, or that it is more than a law (though of course I hold that it is the Living Seeing God) but still the idea of duty, and the terrible anguish of conscience, and the irrepressible distress and confusion of face which the transgression of what we believe to be our duty, cause us, all this is an intimation, a clear evidence, that there is something nearer to religion than intellect; and that, if there is a way of finding religious truth, it lies, not in exercises of the intellect, but close on the side of duty, of conscience, in the observance of the moral law.135

  By the same token, Newman was quick to point out that “You must not suppose that I am denying the intellect its real place in the discovery of truth; but it must ever be borne in mind that its exercise mainly consists in reasoning,—that is, in comparing things, classifying them, and inferring. It ever needs points to start from, first principles, and these it does not provide – but it can no more move one step without these starting points, than a stick, which supports a man, can move without the man’s action …” Here was an argument that he mounted many times, most notably in his Oxford University Sermons (1843) and, then, again, in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870). For Newman, if the intellect could not provide the first principles of religion, “we have to ascertain the starting points for arriving at religious truth. The intellect will be useful in gaining them and after gaining them – but to attempt to see them by means of the intellect is like attempting by the intellect to see the physical facts which are the basis of physical exercises of the intellect, a method of proceeding which was the very mistake of the Aristotelians of the middle age, who, instead of what Bacon calls ‘interrogating nature’ for facts, reasoned out every thing by syllogisms. To gain religious starting points, we must in a parallel way, interrogate our hearts, and (since it is a personal, individual matter,) our own hearts, – interrogate our own consciences, interrogate, I will say, the God who dwells there.” Here is an excellent example of that inspired counsel that is so characteristic of his letters to the female faithful. And, like all of his writing, it is splendidly practical. Newman never wrote to have his readers merely ponder possibilities: he wrote to encourage them to act. So, in his letter to Louisa, he ended by telling her, “I think you must ask the God of Conscience to enable you to do your duty in this matter. I think you should, with prayer to Him for help, meditate upon the Gospels, and on St Paul’s second Epistle to the Corinthians … and this with an earnest desire to know the truth and a sincere intention of following it.”136

  Something about the doubts and difficulties of the young always appealed to Newman. Perhaps because he could sympathize with their disillusionment in confronting what James Joyce once called “that battered cabman’s face, the world.”137 John Hungerford Pollen, who became Newman’s Professor of Fine Arts at the Catholic University in Dublin recalled: “The late Cardinal’s sympathy with the young was a feature of his character … He felt for their generosity, their hopefulness, the trials, the struggles, the disappointments that might be in store for them in the unknown future.”138 When the eldest daughter of his closest undergraduate friend, Mary Anne Frances Bowden was unsure of what path she should take, Newman wrote her one of his most moving letters.

  The Oratory Birmingham June 5 1866

  My dear Child,

  Fanny [Frances Jane Bowden] told me about you, as doubtless she has told you. I will not forget the Masses – they will help you, and you must simply put yourself into God’s hands. As I understood F. you have no call on you to do any thing, or to decide on doing any thing, at this moment. Do you know, though this is of course a trial, yet I have ever felt it a great mercy. One of the greatest of trials is, to have it cast upon one to make up one’s mind, – on some grave question, with great consequences spreading into the future, – and to be in doubt what one ought to do. You have not this trial – it is also a trial to wait and do nothing but how great a mercy is it not to have responsibility! Put your self then, my dear Child, into the hands of your loving Father and Redeemer, who knows and loves you better than you know or love yourself. He has appointed every action of your life. He created you, sustains you, and has marked down the very way and hour when He will take you to Himself. He knows all your thoughts, and feels for you in all your sadness more than any creature can feel, and accepts and makes note of your prayers even before you make them. He will never fail you – and He will give you what is best for you. And though He tries you, and seems to withdraw Himself from you, and afflicts you, still trust in Him, for at length you will see how good and gracious He is, and how well he will provide for you. Be courageous and generous, and give Him your heart, and you will never repent of the sacrifice

  Ever Yours affectionately in Xt John H Newman139

  This understanding of the daily choice implicit in Christianity was something Newman’s bishop, William Ullathorne, also appreciated. “There is no master so large-minded, so generous, so well acquainted with you and your requirements as God,” wrote this shrewd, good-hearted, reverant Yorkshireman, who had played so heroic a part in converting the convicts of New South Wales; “no father so loving and bountiful; no friend so free from all jealousy; none who so completely loves you for your greater good. While there is no tyrant so narrow-minded, so proudhearted, so exacting, so suspicious, so utterly bent on keeping you to your own littleness, as the one who we all know so well, of whose tyranny we have had such bitter experience, and who goes by the name of Myself. Yet God or yourself you must choose as your master.”140

  In impressing upon Mary Anne how vital it was for the individual Christian to form a personal relationship with God, without which no love of God was possible, Newman was echoing sentiments to which he gave powerful expression in one of his best sermons, “Love, the One Thing Needful,” which he composed in February 1839. There he enjoined his readers to cherish “a constant sense of the love of your Lord and Saviour in dying on the cross for you,” because “where hearts are in their degree renewed after Christ’s image, there, under His grace, gratitude to Him will increase our love of Him …” And since “Christ showed his love in deed, not in word,” we should be “touched by the Thought of His cross far more by bearing it after him, than by glowing accounts of it.” And here he advised his readers to make their meditations “simple and severe.”

  Think of the Cross when you rise and when you lie down, when you go out and when you come in, when you eat and when you walk and when you converse, when you buy and when you sell, when you labour and when you rest, consecrating and sealing all your doings with this one mental action, the thought of the Crucified.141

  Then, he exhorted his readers to “dwell often upon those His manifold mercies to us and to our brethren, which are the consequences of His coming upon earth; His adorable counsels … the wonders of His grace towards us, from our infancy until now; the gifts He has given us, the aid He has vouchsafed; the answers He has accorded to our prayers …” These personal mercies would put us in mind of more extensive mercies and lead us to “meditate upon … His faithfulness to His promises, and the mysterious mode of their fulfillment; how He has ever led His people forward safely and prosperously … amid so many enemies; what unexpected events have worked His purposes; how evil has been changed into good; how his Saints have been brought on to their perfection in the darkest times.”142 Here, he might have b
een directly invoking many of the women who would join him in making the love of God manifest, even though, when he wrote this, he had scarcely met them.

  It is by such deeds and such thoughts that our services, our repentings, our prayers, our intercourse with men, will become instinct with the spirit of love. Then we do everything thankfully and joyfully, when we are temples of Christ, with His Image set up in us. Then it is that we mix with the world without loving it, for our affections are given to another. We can bear to look on the world’s beauty, for we have no heart for it. We are not disturbed at its frowns, for we live not in its smiles. We rejoice in the House of Prayer, because He is there “whom our soul loveth.” We can condescend to the poor and lowly, for they are the presence of Him who is Invisible. We are patient in bereavement, adversity, or pain, for they are Christ’s tokens.143

  In the wonderful correspondence between Newman and his women friends—which if culled from the letters as a whole would capture the very essence of the man—we can see what a Christ-like affection Newman felt for those good, devoted, brave women, who meant so much to the Church, in its uncertain Second Spring. Newman’s affection for them was an affection they entirely reciprocated. As Joyce Sugg remarks, “His women friends thought the world of him, were delighted when he was made a cardinal and at his death they would instantly have acclaimed him a saint if their opinion had been asked.”144 After Newman’s death in 1890, Miss Bowles actually referred to him as their “lost Saint.”145 Forty years before, Newman had written to a Miss Munro, who was received into the Church by Cardinal Wiseman, “I have nothing of a Saint about me as every one knows, and it is a severe (and salutary) mortification to be thought next door to one. I may have a high view of many things … but this is very different from being what I admire.”146 The female faithful would have begged to differ.

  Chapter 7

  Newman and Gladstone

  Gladstone and Newman—unlike that other famous pair, Gladstone and Disraeli—had much in common. Their letters and diaries illuminate much about the religious character of one of the most religious societies that England ever produced. Even the Fabian historian Sir Robert Ensor, writing in the mid-1930s, conceded, in a typically backhanded way, that “No one will ever understand Victorian England who does not appreciate that among highly civilized, in contradistinction to more primitive, countries it was one of the most religious that the world has known.”1 When it became clear that that society was giving way to what Newman described as the “great apostasia,” both Newman and Gladstone became trenchant critics of the rise of unbelief. Both were bibliophiles.2 Both were redoubtable leaders. In March 1877, when he had just completed The American, Henry James wrote to his brother William describing a dinner he had attended with Gladstone, Lord Houghton, Dr. Schliemann (“the excavator of old Mycenae”), and Tennyson (who talked of nothing but port wine and tobacco): “I was glad of a chance to feel the ‘personality’ of a great political leader … That of Gladstone is fascinating—his urbanity extreme—his eye that of a man of genius—& his apparent self surrender to what he is talking of, without a flaw. He made a great impression on me—greater than any I have seen here.”3

  Newman never felt at ease hobnobbing with the famous or powerful.4 He certainly never attended celebrity dinners, though Gladstone tried for years to get him to attend celebrity breakfasts. One of the most amusing aspects of their correspondence is how frequently Gladstone tried to get Newman to play the ecclesiastical lion and the inveteracy with which he politely declined. That was a role he conceded to Manning. Yet, for all his distaste for the trappings of leadership, Newman led a revival of religious life in England that inspired the hearts and minds of nearly everyone who came into contact with him. Indeed, it is still in progress. As the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson, wrote, after hearing Newman preach at St. Chad’s in 1848, “Surely, if there is a man whom God has raised up in his generation with more than common power to glorify His name, this man is he.”5

  A good portion of the power of both men came from their voices. Gladstone was one of the few great orators never left speaking to green benches and red boxes.6 And by all accounts he was even more impressive in the open air. T. P. O’Connor described him at 76 so enthralling a crowd in Liverpool that it was almost like “the trailing of a miraculous saint among masses of idolaters.”7 Newman was no orator and certainly never meant to inspire idolatry but nearly every one who ever met him or heard him preach remarked on the beauty of his voice. The Irish poet Aubrey de Vere recalled it as “so distinct that you could count each vowel and consonant in every word.”8 Sir John Coleridge, one of the judges at the Achilli trial, recalled it as “a sweet musical, almost unearthly voice … so unlike any other we had heard.”9

  Both men mulled over major projects for decades before bringing them to fruition. It was a conversation with the French historian Guizot in 1845 that first inspired Gladstone to try to improve conditions in Ireland.10 Over thirty years later, after Gladstone had disestablished the Church of Ireland (1869) and passed the first Land Act (1870), he wrote to the French historian to thank him for his fertile suggestion.

  It is very unlikely that you shall remember a visit I paid you, I think at Passy in the autumn of 1845, with a message from Lord Aberdeen about international copyright. The Maynooth Act had just been passed. Its author, I think, meant it to be final. I had myself regarded it as seminal. And you in congratulating me upon it, as I well remember, said we should have the sympathies of Europe in the work of giving Ireland justice—a remark which evidently included more than the measure just passed, and which I have ever after saved and pondered. It helped me on towards what has since been done.11

  Similarly, it was in an epistolary debate with his brother Charles in the spring and summer of 1825 that Newman began delving into the relation between faith and reason that he would return to fifty years later in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870). Of course, that brilliant book was based on years of counseling the believing and the unbelieving. Yet in the letters he wrote to his brother when he was 24, Newman got at the root of apostasy. “A dislike of the contents of Scripture is at the bottom of unbelief; and since those contents must be rejected by fair means or foul, it is plain that in order to do this the evidences must in some sort be attacked …”12

  Perhaps the greatest bond that Gladstone and Newman shared was their debt to Oxford, to what Newman recalled as “its splendour and its sweetness.”13 G. M. Young said that Gladstone remained a Christ Church man of the 1830s all his days.14 Translating Aristotle at the feet of Mr. Biscoe, his classical tutor, made an indelible impression, which one can see “in those analytic and deductive memoranda which the poor Queen had to have translated before she could make head or tail of them.”15 When the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford sent him a card on his deathbed, acknowledging the years of service he had given as the university’s MP, Gladstone dictated his response to his youngest daughter: “There is no expression of Christian sympathy that I value more than that of the ancient university of Oxford, the God-fearing, God-sustaining university of Oxford … My most earnest prayers are hers to the uttermost and to the last.”16

  The impact Oxford had on Newman was equally profound—it taught him to think, it made him a Catholic. Twenty years after deciding to leave the place to join what he called the “One True Fold”17 he could still confide in a friend: “You can’t tell how very much down I am at the thought of going to Oxford … the very seeing Oxford again, since I am not one with it, would be a cruel thing—it is like the dead coming to the dead. O dear, dear, how I dread it.”18 When he finally returned to accept his honorary Trinity fellowship in February 1878, he met his old tutor, Thomas Short, now 89, lunching on lamb chops, and found his old rooms occupied by a young man who had theatrical pin-ups on the walls. The diplomat James Bryce heard an after-dinner speech Newman gave during his visit and recalled “the aged face worn deep with the lines of thought, struggle and sorrow. The story of a momentous per
iod in the history of the University and of religion in England seemed to be written there.”19

  Another story of that “momentous period” that has not been given the attention it deserves is the long association of Gladstone and Newman, particularly why Newman was so indulgent towards Gladstone, a man who struck many of his contemporaries—Disraeli and Queen Victoria come most readily to mind but there were many others—as hypocritical, self-righteous, reckless, erratic, even unbalanced. “I sometimes think him rather mad,” Victoria’s secretary, Henry Ponsonby, once said, “earnestly mad, and taking up a view with an intensity which scarcely allows him to suppose there can be any truth on the other side.”20 Salisbury saw Gladstone’s self-righteousness as impervious to doubt: “The process of self-deceit goes on in his mind without the faintest self-consciousness or self-suspicion. The result is that it goes on without check or stint.”21 One of Gladstone’s college tutors told William Allingham, the Irish poet and diarist, that when he complemented old Mr. Gladstone on his son’s academic success, the old man looked grave and replied: “I have no doubt of William’s ability; I wish I were equally sure of his stability.”22 Newman, by contrast, went out of his way to defend Gladstone, to make excuses for him when his enemies or even his own Party were intent on scapegoating him, to attribute only the best motives to his often dubious positions. He saw more in the man than the sanctimony and instability that so many others saw.

  Gladstone’s view of Newman would always be complex, but no reading of the development of that view can be complete without starting with some account of how he responded to Newman’s conversion.

  When Gladstone read Tract 90 in February 1841, he saw nothing objectionable about it. By the end of that rancorous year, however, he could only marvel at the division that was rending the Church of England. “God help this labouring Church, and send us no more of such disastrous years. Tract 90 … the Jerusalem Bishopric, Sibthorp’s sad defection, and Oxford at deadly strife with herself upon the question of whether a connection with the Tracts is or is not a disqualification for holding a Poetry Professorship! Hitherto the sacred principle of communion had bound us all together, and had even gathered strength amidst the agitation and conflict of private opinions, but these shocks sadly strain the vessel.”23 When Gladstone learned of Newman’s growing doubts about the English Church in the years following Tract 90 from his good friend Henry Manning, who shared with him Newman’s candid letters on Anglicanism, Gladstone responded with “a heavy heart.”24 After September 1843, when Newman resigned the living of St. Mary’s, Gladstone’s concern took a critical turn. “I am persuaded that this powerful man has suffered and is suffering much … from exclusiveness of mental habit, and from affections partly wounded through cruelty, partly overwrought into morbid action from gloating as it were continually and immediately upon the most absorbing and exciting subjects.”25 This described what Gladstone himself was undergoing, not the calm deliberate judicious scrutiny to which Newman was subjecting his convictions. Still, for Gladstone, it was one thing for impulsive young Oxford men to defect to Rome after the outcry against Tract 90, but now that Newman himself seemed to be inclining in that direction, he was aghast. When Manning showed Gladstone the letter that Newman had written him on 25 October 1843, Gladstone could scarcely take it in. “I am so bewildered and overthrown I am wholly unfit … I cannot make this letter hang together.” Newman had written to Manning with unambiguous finality, “I must tell you then frankly, lest I combat arguments which to me, alas, are shadows, that it is from no disappointment, irritation, or impatience, that I have … resigned St. Mary’s—but because I think the Church of Rome the Catholic Church, and ours not a part of the Catholic Church, because not in communion with Rome, and feel that I could not honestly be a teacher in it any longer.”26 For Gladstone, Newman’s potential defection was bad enough but what made it worse was to hear the erstwhile champion of Catholic Anglicanism repudiating the claim of the English Church to any part in the Catholic Church. On October 28th, Gladstone wrote back to Manning: “Alas! alas! for your letter and enclosures of this morning! My first thought is, ‘I stagger to and fro like a drunken man, and am at my wit’s end’.” Nevertheless, Gladstone held out hope that all might not be lost: “even out of the enormity of the mischief arises some gleam of consolation … . I cling to the hope that what he terms his conviction is not a conclusion finally seated in his mind, but one which he sees advancing upon him without the means of resistance or escape.”27 By 1843, Newman might no longer be the reliable hammer of Rome that he had been in the early Tracts, where even Gladstone found him “too free in the epithets of protest and censure,” but he was still an immense credit to the English Church, whose defection would be an incomparable loss.28 Indeed, for Gladstone, Newman’s wavering put the whole nation on tenterhooks; it was nothing less than “the greatest crisis & sharpest that the Church has known since the Reformation.—for such I do, for one, feel would be the crisis of the apostasy of a man whose intellectual stature is among the very first of his age, and who has indisputably headed the most powerful movement and the nearest to the seat of life that the Church has known, at least for two centuries.”29 With so much in the balance, some providential change of mind, some miraculous change of heart might still reclaim him. The very fact that Newman had been entertaining his doubts about the Catholic legitimacy of the English Church since 1839 might still work against Rome. Perhaps he was deliberately holding out for some reassurance from the Anglican Church. “He has waited probably in the hope of its being changed—perhaps he might wait still—& God’s inexhaustible mercy may overflow upon him & us.”30 Gladstone would have been more hopeful still if he had known that Newman himself had questioned whether he might be under some delusion in suspecting Rome to be the one true Church. In all events, Gladstone was not prepared to concede defeat. “What is wanted,” he wrote to Manning in December 1843, “is that cords of silk should one by one be thrown over him to bind him to the Church. Every manifestation of sympathy and confidence in him, as a man, must have some small effect.”31 When Newman discontinued his work on the Lives of the English Saints—in response to criticism that he and his collaborators were depicting the saints in ways that were too Romish—he wrote to James Hope, who was also a good friend of Gladstone’s: “I am glad that Gladstone is pleased with what I did. I did all I could under my then engagements and promises. Had such opinions as his and Pusey’s happened to come sooner, I should have given up the whole plan. At the same time I do not think I have more than thrown it back, and when it revives, of course it will be in less safe hands than mine. Also, G. ought to be aware, as I daresay he is, that a series of thwartings such as I have experienced … but realizes, verifies, substantizes, a φαντασία [impression] of the English Church very unfavourable to her Catholicity.” This was the ungainsayable logic that Gladstone would never concede. Newman could put himself in Gladstone’s shoes because he, too, had tried to resist making concessions to the same remorseless logic of the inalienably Protestant Established Church but, as he told Hope, his resistance had given out. “If a person is deeply convinced in his reason that her claims to Catholicity are untenable, but fears to trust his reason, such events, when they come upon him again and again, seem to do just what is wanting: [they] corroborate his reason … They force upon his imagination and familiarize his moral perception with the conclusions of his intellect. Propositions become facts.”32