by Edward Short
His differences with Hutton notwithstanding, Newman continued to try to share with him the rational grounds for adherence to the Roman Church, though at the same time he was careful to stress that “I never shall wish you to become a Catholic, merely to get rid of your painful doubts. I don’t believe that it is a sufficient motive—and I do see at least the danger of their reviving when you were in the Church, if you had not them die a natural death before you came into it.” As had been the case when he was an Anglican, the Catholic Newman always dissuaded the impetuous from taking steps that they might later regret. Nevertheless, he was open enough with Hutton to share with him the news that “There is a report in this place among the Priests that ‘a gentleman named Hutton connected with the Spectator, has been secretly received into the Catholic Church.’ I mention this to put you on your guard, what you say and to whom.”93
It was some mark of the high regard in which Newman held Hutton that he should have written to him the day after he completed his Grammar of Assent to apprise him of the long genesis of that brilliant book, a book which spoke directly to precisely the issue of authority and personal belief that Hutton had broached six years before. “For twenty years I have begun and left off an inquiry again and again, which yesterday I finished … as far as I am able to carry it out. I began it in my Oxford University Sermons; I tried it in 1850 – and at several later dates, in 1859, in 1861, indeed I do not know when I have not wished to attempt it – but, though my fundamental ideas were ever the same, I could not carry them out. Now at last I have done all that I can do according to my measure … Those who are told what pains it has cost me, will wonder, when they see it, that it is not worth more than they will find it to be – But I have said to myself, in such difficult subjects on which opinions vary so much … the testimony of even one mind is worth something as a fact or phenomenon. I have said in one page of it, that on such subjects, egotism is the truest modesty, because it does not dogmatise – and though I do not rate my performance high I cannot be sorry that I committed myself to it.”94 Unfortunately, this crucial personal aspect of the book did not attract as much critical attention from Hutton as it deserved. His long review focuses almost entirely on the argument from probability, which only exacerbated his resistance to the Church’s claims of infallibility. “You remark in one place that a single clear instance of error disproves infallibility,” Hutton wrote to Newman in April, 1870, less than a month after the book appeared, “as of course it does. But does not this render it all but impossible for any one who comes to the study of ecclesiastical history without the most absolute faith in a principle of human authority somewhere, ever to believe in what may be so easily disproved and what is so impossible to prove except a priori? … The pain of uncertainty, terrible as it is, is no proof of the existence of a human source of certainty.”95 Although clearly unpersuaded by Newman’s argument from probability, disputing whether “the outcome of combined probability is a real proof,” Hutton praised the book’s last chapter, in which Newman charted the rise of Christianity.
Newman graciously thanked Hutton for his review, going so far as to say that it was “a great pleasure to me to find how exactly you have translated me, in some places with a happiness of statement which I feel I had not hit myself,” though, in the same letter, he also called attention to a number of Hutton’s misstatements. Still, for Newman, these did not diminish the fact that Hutton had written one of the best contemporary responses to the book. “You have paid me the great compliment of reading it with attention, a compliment which I cannot expect ordinary reviewers to pay me, to whom, however, I am truly grateful for the good will and kindness they have shown to me, and for praise more than is my due, though it has been vague, not distinctive.”96
Despite the relative substance of Hutton’s review, it was only in the obituary he wrote on Newman for the Spectator that Hutton demonstrated that he had finally absorbed the true achievement of the Grammar of Assent. “There have been many more masterly thinkers of the kind which men call ‘systematic,’” Hutton wrote. “But Newman perceived more vividly than any English thinker of our century the weakness of what is called systematic thought, and the faint influence exerted by any abstract system over the practical life of men.” Then, again, together with Newman’s distrust of abstraction, Hutton admired his insights into how the faithful actually perceive and practice their religious faith. “There is no religious thinker in our country … of any century, who has apprehended more clearly how various and how mixed and unrecognised by men in general, are the elements of motive and perception which go to make up practical genius, the genius for doing successfully what most men only try to do and wish to do. The implicit reason by which those are practically guided who succeed in what they attempt, as distinguished from the explicit theoretic reason … had never been analyzed by any English thinker as it was analyzed by Newman … and this was the great source of his religious influence … He could justify theoretically the potent implicit reason of man against the fruitless and formal explicit reason. He could show how much more powerful was the combination of humility, trust, imagination, feeling, perception, in apprehending the revealed mind and will of God, than the didactic and formal proofs to which the popular religious appeals of our day usually have recourse.”97
Two years after his Spectator review of the Grammar, Hutton confessed to dissatisfaction with his own restless faith. If he could not agree with Newman on the certainties of the Catholic Church, neither could he deny that they had a definite allure in the burgeoning unbelief that was coming to characterize late nineteenth-century Britain. “The tendency of the religion of the day to dissipate itself in the vaguest sentiment and smoke oppresses me more and more, and often makes me turn to your Church with a vague passionate yearning that I feel to be dangerous and even distrustful of God, for surely the knowledge of the truth should not come from a mere repulsion against error, and if God could bring Christianity out of the society of the heathen world, He can much more teach us, after a very much longer period of incredulity and skepticism than we have yet gone through, what the divine truth is at which we find it so hard to get. I feel as if the tendencies of the day were all witnessing against the only truth I can firmly grasp, and telling me that that at least is not what the common sense of mankind will accept. But when I look more narrowly at your Church I see nothing but what daunts me still more on the other side, – an apparent utter disregard of evidence in fixing the Creed in the days when the Creed acquired its first hold on the mind. Can you doubt that the early Fathers and even the Evangelists themselves, like the Saints of all days, supplemented the deficiencies of their intellectual case for many of their facts from the depth of their devotional feeling, and did not even question the right of the religious spirit, to keep to its facts in this, as we know now, utterly misleading fashion? … The duty of restraining one’s belief within the limits of what is warranted by evidence seems to me to have been hardly at all understood in the first days of the Church, and though it is the most painful of duties surely it is a duty?”98 Then Hutton invoked one of Newman’s own most provocative statements to deplore the seemingly inexorable rise of apostasy.99 “I feel heartily with you that I would prefer to see England bigoted, superstitious, gloomy, almost cruel, to seeing her without faith in the supernatural, but it is the most difficult of earthly problems to combine the religious spirit with the spirit of intellectual severity as to the objective conditions of belief.” This returned Hutton to Newman’s argument from probability in the Grammar. “The more I think of it the less can I understand how any accumulation of mere probabilities is to amount to mathematical certainty, or how moral certainty, short of mathematical, can be in the strictest sense certainly at all. If you put the letters of a line of Virgil into a box and after shaking them well up draw them out one by one, there is of course a mathematical possibility that you would draw them out in the old order; indeed there is just as much chance of that particular arrangement as of any other
specified arrangement, and therefore there is of course a possibility. But no accumulation of practical probabilities such as you describe in the Grammar of Assent could come as near to certainty as the opinion of the man who expects that the letters will not be drawn out in that order, is, and yet his opinion is certainly not certain …”100 Here, one can see that it was less the Protestant than the student of Martineau in Hutton that refused to accede to the claims of the Church.
Nevertheless, Newman gamely set about fielding Hutton’s objections. After admitting that “I cannot quite disguise from myself that it fatigues me to think accurately,” Newman tried various other tacks with his scrupulous friend. As to Hutton’s doubts about the accuracy of the Creed, Newman replied that he had “looked at St Francis’s exposition of the Creed. That it is fresh, impressive, beautiful, suited to its hearers, I suppose will be generally allowed; but, as to the truth of every word of it, well, it seems to me a Meditation on the Creed, a quickening of it into substance and reality … St Francis impressed it as a living fact upon the hearts of his audience. It is in his hands reason elevated by imagination.” If this explanation did not satisfy Hutton, Newman had another: “the living intelligence of the prudent man decides that a certain conclusion is trustworthy, or imposes on him the duty of believing it. He is not able, be he ever so logical, to express how much and what evidence in a logical shape is just sufficient, neither more or less, to impose a conclusion on his assent; he only sees that logically a certain modicum of evidence would be too little, and another modicum superfluously much, and that in this particular case it is his duty to himself to receive it as true on that particular evidence which he has, though he cannot compare it with other supposable evidence or assign precisely its logical value …” Moreover, Newman reminded Hutton, that it was “a fact of human nature” that “we all make acts of certitude without logical measurements … if on our best and most serious judgment we think a fact claims our assent, we give it, and feel ourselves bound to give it. Thus though I am not a physiologist, or a medical practioner, or an undertaker, I am downright certain … that I shall die, and should be a fool, if I were not.”101
In January 1884, Hutton wrote Newman a letter demonstrating that if Hutton himself could not entirely enter into the Cardinal’s point of view, there were others in London who could. “My dear Lord Cardinal,” Hutton wrote, “I cannot resist the pleasure of telling you how warmly the working men received my lecture on you yesterday, and as the whole charm consisted in my quotations of your own words, of which I gave a long string threaded together by a very slender thread of narrative and criticism, you would have seen at once how heartily you are admired and loved and reverenced even among the Protestants of the working class. When I referred to the lines by which, among Protestants, you are best known, (‘Lead kindly Light’) there was a perfect thunder of applause, if so large a word be applicable at all to a meeting in which probably the total number was not 300, as the room would hardly hold more though it was full to overflowing. Knowing how sincerely you love your own countrymen, – especially I think those of the working class, – I think it would have been a great gratification to you if you could have been present without being seen last night. To me it was really a vivid delight to see how they entered into the beauty of every passage I read.”102 Newman’s response was comically subdued: “I feel your great kindness in your late pains to introduce what I have written to a class of men to whom I am not known. The prejudice against Catholics is so great in England that to get thoughtful men to think well of an individual Catholic is to do a service to the Catholic Religion. But, apart from this, as I have felt pain at the false reports, which have been spread about concerning me, so I cannot but be relieved, when I am placed in a favourable light, and feel grateful to those who have so placed me.” And with that modest expression of thanks, Newman signed off, only adding: “You will not refuse the only return I can make you, a Cardinal’s blessing.”103 In May of that same year, Newman, who cherished so many anniversaries, wrote: “It is about 20 years since I wrote to thank you for your notice in the September of my Apologia on its first publication. I dare say it was against the etiquette of the literary world, for no one was kind enough to answer me but you. In consequence I called on you at your Office …”104 Newman visited Hutton in the Spectator offices on 10 May 1864, a visit which Hutton treasured “as one of the white days of my life.”105
His most moving letter to Hutton, however, and the one that sums up the special regard he felt for his old defender, was the one he sent him on 29 December 1872.
My dear Mr Hutton
I have nothing to write to you about, but I am led at this season to send you the religious greetings and good wishes which it suggests, to assure you that, though I seem to be careless about those who desire to have more light than they have in regard to religious truths, yet I do really sympathise with them very much, and ever have them in mind.
I know how honestly you try to approve yourself to God – and this is a claim on the reverence of any one who knows or reads you. There are many things as to which I most seriously differ from you but I believe you to be one of those to whom the angels on Christmas night sent greeting as ‘hominibus bonæ voluntatis’ and it is a pleasure and a duty for all who could be their companions hereafter to follow their pattern of comprehensive charity here. I cannot feel so hopefully and tenderly to many of those whom you defend or patronize as I do to you – and what you write perplexes me often – but when a man is really and truly seeking the Pearl of great price, how can one help joining oneself in heart and spirit with him?
Most truly Yrs John H. Newman106
In conclusion, what bound Hutton and Newman together was their shared interest in the truth of religion at a time when unbelief was gaining enormous ground. The challenges to religion mounted by the age’s various skeptics inspired in both men a critical interest in the grounds for faith, even though their approaches to those grounds often sharply differed. Moreover, Newman took particular interest in the editor of the Spectator not only because he showed such sympathetic insight into his work but because he encouraged Newman to hope that the faith of the English, which he had accounted so negligible in Loss and Gain, might yet revive. In a passage which made a deep impression on Hutton when he was a young man, Newman had one of his characters in the novel say: “Englishmen have many gifts, faith they have not. Other nations, inferior to them in many things, still have faith. Nothing will stand in place of it; not a sense of the beauty of Catholicism, or of its awfulness, or of its antiquity; not an appreciation of the sympathy which it shows towards sinners; not an admiration of the Martyrs and early Fathers, and a delight in their writings. Individuals may display a touching gentleness, or a conscientiousness which demands our reverence; still, till they have faith, they have not the foundation, and their superstructure will fall. They will not be blessed, they will effect nothing in religious matters, till they begin by an act of unreserved faith in the word of God, whatever it be; till they go out of themselves; till they cease to make something within them their standard; till they oblige their will to perfect what reason leaves sufficient, indeed, but incomplete. And when they shall recognise this defect in themselves, and try to remedy it, then they will recognise much more;—they will be on the road very shortly to be Catholics.”107 Once Hutton came into his ken, Newman began to hope that more English pilgrims might find this road.
Hutton, for his part, wrote a number of retrospective appraisals of Newman’s career, which show that his difficulties with the authority of the Church were negligible compared to Newman’s manifold achievement. In his Spectator obituary, he wrote that “We have lost … our greatest Englishman in Cardinal Newman … whose life has been more completely the outcome of consistent, deep, and coherent purpose, than that of any other man of genius whom this century of ours has seen. No where has there been a life so completely all of a piece, so patiently carved out of one pure block of purpose …”108 And in a long essay
for the Contemporary Review written in 1884, he argued that there were three major aspects to this “consistent, deep, and coherent purpose.” First, Newman remained faithful throughout his life to the “profound belief that Christianity is a religion of humility.” For Newman, without humility, true faith was impossible. “When I see a person hasty and violent, harsh and high-minded, careless of what others feel, and disdainful of what they think,” he wrote in one of his sermons, “when I see such a one proceeding to inquire into religious subjects, I am sure beforehand he cannot go right—he will not be led into all the truth—it is contrary to the nature of things and the experience of the world, that he should find what he is seeking. I should say the same were he seeking to find out what to believe or do in any other matter not religious,—but especially in any such important and solemn inquiry; for the fear of the Lord (humbleness, teachableness, reverence towards Him) is the very beginning of wisdom, as Solomon tells us; it leads us to think over things modestly and honestly, to examine patiently, to bear doubt and uncertainty, to wait perseveringly for an increase of light, to be slow to speak, and to be deliberate in deciding.”109 Here, Hutton saw the antithesis to that intellectual hubris, which animated so many of the positivists of his generation. Moreover, Hutton saw in Newman’s great and consistent purpose an opposition to Liberalism. “The drift of Christian teaching seemed to him to involve not only great humility and teachableness, not only willingness to bear humiliation in seeking for guidance of revelation, but a revulsion against that glorification of good nature and of modern enlightenment, which was in those days so prevalent—as, for instance, amongst the Whig magnates …” In this, Hutton had in mind principally Sir Robert Peel and Lord Brougham, the Liberal founders of the Tamworth Reading Room, which held up knowledge—and, pointedly, non-denominational knowledge—as the approved conqueror of “those two giants, the pride and the passion of man.”110 For Hutton, “Newman’s whole nature protested against the doctrine that an amiable disposition and the desire for information are the secrets of human regeneration.” And here Hutton quoted one of Newman’s most provocative salvos: “I will not shrink from uttering my firm conviction, that it would be a gain to this country, were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion, than at present it shows itself to be. Not, of course, that I think the tempers of mind herein implied desirable, which would be an evident absurdity; but I think them infinitely more desirable and more promising than a heathen obduracy, and a cold, self-sufficient, self-wise tranquillity.”111 Hutton approved “Newman’s belief that even the unenlightened and unregulated starts and terrors of conscience have in them far more of the kind of error which is akin to truth, than have the conceits and superstitious exaltations of the age of reason …” 112 This, again, showed the extent to which the lessons of the Grammar of Assent, which Hutton had initially questioned, informed his understanding of the character and scale of Newman’s achievement. Hutton also recognized that “Newman had from the first the greatest horror of anything like worldly Christianity …” And here he quoted from a sermon that highlights another extraordinary aspect of Newman: his deep understanding of the world’s worship of prestige, which was an essential feature of his understanding of the springs of skepticism. “I do not know any thing more dreadful than a state of mind which is, perhaps, the characteristic of this country, and which the prosperity of this country so miserably fosters. I mean that ambitious spirit, to use a great word, but I know no other word to express my meaning—that low ambition which sets every one on the look-out to succeed and to rise in life, to amass money, to gain power, to depress his rivals, to triumph over his hitherto superiors, to affect a consequence and a gentility which he had not before, to affect to have an opinion on high subjects, to pretend to form a judgment upon sacred things, to choose his religion, to approve and condemn according to his taste, to become a partizan in extensive measures for the supposed temporal benefit of the community, to indulge the vision of great things which are to come, great improvements, great wonders: all things vast, all things new,—this most fearfully earthly and grovelling spirit is likely, alas! to extend itself more and more among our countrymen,—an intense, sleepless, restless, never-wearied, never-satisfied, pursuit of Mammon in one shape or other, to the exclusion of all deep, all holy, all calm, all reverent thoughts.”113 For Hutton, this highlighted another of Newman’s striking attributes: his ability to perceive and understand the very worldly vanities he renounced, which gave his life so much of its ungainsayable distinction. Not even those obituary writers most contemptuous of his Catholic faith could call into question his integrity. “In a century in which physical discovery and material well-being have usurped and almost absorbed the admiration of mankind,” Hutton concluded in his biography, “such a life as that of Cardinal Newman stands out in strange and almost majestic … contrast to the eager and agitated turmoil of confused passions, hesitating ideals, tentative virtues, and groping philanthropies, amidst which it has been lived.”114 In the end, despite their unresolved differences, Hutton attested to the power of Newman’s personal influence, which had been such a force in his own life. For Hutton, “the mere knowledge that he was living in the quiet Oratory at Edgbaston helped men to realise that the spiritual world is even more real than the material world, and that in that lonely, austere, and yet gracious figure, God had made a sign to Great Britain that the great purpose of life is a purpose to which this life hardly more than introduces us.”115