by Edward Short
96 See Introduction to Tract 90, Via Media, 2, 271.
97 LD, 8:147, John Belaney to JHN.
98 John Keble, On Tract 90 (London, 1841), p. 6.
99 R. W. Church, the first and in some respects the best historian of the Oxford Movement, qualified Pusey’s support for Newman by telling Frederic Rogers in a long letter of 14 March 1841: “Pusey, I fear, has been much annoyed. He scarcely agrees with Newman’s view, though he is very kind. A great difficulty with him and with the Bishop is that Newman has committed himself to leaving ‘Ora pro nobis’ an open question. The Moral Philosophy Professor [Sewell] has seized the opportunity to publish a letter, nominally to Pusey, but really to Messrs. Magee and the Irish Evangelicals in which he deeply laments the Tract as incautious, tending to unsettle and shake people’s faith in the English Church, and leading men to receive ‘paradoxes and therefore errors’ …” See LD, 8:111.
100 LD, 8:126, E. B. Pusey to Richard Bagot, Bishop of Oxford (26 March 1841).
101 Pusey to John Keble (21 October 1865) in H. P. Liddon, Life of Pusey (London, 1897), Vol. 4, p. 125.
102 Battiscombe, John Keble, p. 221.
103 R. W. Church, The Oxford Movement, p. 388.
104 The via media, broadly defined, was the theory that Newman cobbled together from the work of seventeenth-century Anglican divines to map out a ‘middle way’ between Catholicism and Protestantism.
105 LD, 8:181, Charles Russell to JHN (21 April 1841).
106 LD, 8:182, JHN to Charles Russell (26 April 1841).
107 Apologia, p. 99.
108 LD, 11:100, JHN to Henry Wilberforce (27 January 1846).
109 Ibid., p. 101.
110 Discussion and Arguments, p. 18.
111 William Tuckwell, Reminiscences of Oxford (London, 1900), p. 166.
112 LD, 6:7, JHN to Martin Routh (6 January 1837).
113 LD, 6:34, JHN to H. E. Manning (24 February 1837).
114 R. W. Church, The Oxford Movement, pp. 392–93.
115 Ibid., p. 296.
116 Ibid., p. 297.
117 Ibid., p. 302.
118 Ibid., p. 304.
119 Ibid., p. 305.
120 Ibid., p. 307.
121 Ibid., p. 308.
122 Ibid., p. 310.
123 Ibid., p. 311.
124 Ibid., p. 313.
125 Ibid., p. 316.
126 Ibid., p. 317.
127 Ibid., p. 318.
128 LD, 10:426, JHN to John Keble (21 November 1844).
129 LD, 8:120, JHN to John Keble (25 March 1841).
130 LD, 8:121, John Keble to JHN (26 March 1841).
131 LD, 8:178, E. B. Pusey to J. R. Hope (18 April 1841).
132 Newman had occasion to invoke the great saint in a letter to his good friend Maria Giberne, written in 1837 when the tide was turning against the Tractarians: “We have nothing to hope or fear from Whig or Conservative Governments – or from Bishops, or from Peers, or from Court, or from other visible power. We must trust our own ήθος, (ethos) that is what is unseen, our unseen gifts and their unseen Author. I do hope we shall be strengthened to develop in new ways, since the ordinary ways are stopped up. Some of the Bishops, as Norwich, are driving fast at a denial of the Creed, which is heresy – and when a bishop is heretical, man, woman, or child has licence to oppose him. The faith is prior and dearer to us than the visible framework which is built upon it. And if we so account it, we shall perchance be blessed to preserve the framework too. It was a worse time after all, when Athanasius was against the whole world, and the whole world against Athanasius.” (See LD, 6:174 (3 December 1837))
133 Correspondence of John Henry Newman with John Keble and others 1839–1845 (London, 1917), p. 133.
134 LD, 8:286, JHN to John Keble (5 October 1841).
135 LD, 8:292, JHN to S. F. Wood (10 October 1841).
136 LD, 8:345, JHN to J. R. Hope (24 November 1841).
137 See Battiscombe, John Keble, p. 227.
138 Ibid., pp. 227–28.
139 LD, 9:279–81, JHN to John Keble (14 March 1843).
140 Correspondence of John Henry Newman with John Keble and others 1839–1845 (London, 1917), p. 216, John Keble to JHN (3 May 1843).
141 Ibid., p. 221, Frederic Rogers to JHN (3 April 1843).
142 LD, 9:327, JHN to John Keble (4 May 1843).
143 LD, 9:328, JHN to John Keble (4 May 1843).
144 Battiscombe, John Keble, p. 240, and Correspondence of John Henry Newman with John Keble and others 1839–1845 (London, 1917), p. 308.
145 Correspondence of John Henry Newman with John Keble and others 1839–1845 (London, 1917), pp. 222–24, JHN to John Keble (14 May 1843).
146 See ODNB.
147 LD, 30:415, JHN to W. S. Lilly (15 October 1884).
148 Apologia, pp. 180–81.
149 Correspondence of John Henry Newman with John Keble and others 1839–1845 (London, 1917), p. 224, John Keble to JHN (14 May 1843).
150 LD, 9:349, JHN to John Keble (18 May 1843).
151 LD, 9:349, JHN to John Keble (18 May 1843).
152 Correspondence of John Henry Newman with John Keble and others 1839–1845 (London, 1917), p. 231, JHN to John Keble (30 May 1843).
153 Ibid., p. 231, JHN to John Keble (30 May 1843).
154 Ibid., p. 232, John Keble to JHN (30 May 1843).
155 Ibid., p. 243, John Keble to JHN (16 July 1843).
156 Ibid., p. 245, JHN to John Keble (20 August 1843).
157 Apologia, p. 157.
158 Correspondence of John Henry Newman with John Keble and others 1839–1845 (London, 1917), pp. 255–56, John Keble to JHN (4 September 1843).
159 Ibid., p. 256, John Keble to JHN (4 September 1843).
160 Ibid., pp. 259–60, JHN to John Keble (6 September 1843).
161 Ibid., p. 261, John Keble to JHN (7 September 1843).
162 LD, 10:71 JHN to Henry Edward Manning (24 December 1843).
163 Ibid., pp. 296–97, John Keble to JHN (22 June 1843).
164 Ibid., p. 297, John Keble to JHN (22 January 1844).
165 LD, 10:4–5, JHN to James Hope (2 November 1843).
166 Apologia, p. 120. Speaking of the insight he had gained in 1839 after reading of the Monophysite heresy, Newman wrote: “my new historical fact had already to a certain point a logical force. Down had come the Via Media as a definite theory or scheme, under the blows of St. Leo. My Prophetical Office had come to pieces; not indeed as an argument against ‘Roman errors,’ nor as against Protestantism, but as in behalf of England. I had no longer a distinctive plea for Anglicanism, unless I would be a Monophysite. I had, most painfully, to fall back upon my three original points of belief, which I have spoken so much of in a former passage,—the principle of dogma, the sacramental system, and anti-Romanism. Of these three the first two were better secured in Rome than in the Anglican Church. The Apostolical Succession, the two prominent sacraments, and the primitive Creeds, belonged, indeed, to the latter; but there had been and was far less strictness on matters of dogma and ritual in the Anglican system than in the Roman: in consequence, my main argument for the Anglican claims lay in the positive and special charges, which I could bring against Rome. I had no positive Anglican theory. I was very nearly a pure Protestant. Lutherans had a sort of theology, so had Calvinists; I had none.”
167 Correspondence of John Henry Newman with John Keble and others 1839–1845 (London, 1917), p. 297, John Keble to JHN (22 January 1844).
168 Ronald Knox, Let Dons Delight (London, 1939), p. 183.
169 Correspondence of John Henry Newman with John Keble and others 1839–1845 (London, 1917), p. 298, John Keble to JHN (22 January 1844).
170 LD, 10:422, John Keble to JHN (18 November 1844). Cf. Antony and Cleopatra Act II, Scene II, pp. 217–22:
From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast
Her people out upon her, and Antony,
Enthron’d i’ the market-
place, did sit alone
Whistling to the air; which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too
And made a gap in nature.
171 LD, 10:102–03, JHN to John Keble (23 January 1844).
172 LD, 10:103, JHN to John Keble (23 January 1844).
173 LD, 10:260, JHN to John Keble (8 June 1844).
174 LD, 10:261, JHN to John Keble (8 June 1844).
175 LD: 10:260, JHN to John Keble (8 June 1844).
176 LD, 10:262, JHN to John Keble (8 June 1844).
177 LD, 10:262, JHN to John Keble (8 June 1844).
178 LD, 10:26:261, JHN to John Keble (8 June 1844).
179 LD, 10:268, John Keble to JHN (11 June 1844).
180 Battiscombe, John Keble, p. 234.
181 LD, 10:268, John Keble to JHN (11 June 1844).
182 LD, 10:269, John Keble to JHN (12 June 1844).
183 Apropos uncertainty, Archbishop Rowan Williams agrees with Keble, arguing in one of his many books that “church history suffers endemically from misplaced certainty.” And to make his point, the Archbishop asks, “Why should not radical trust in the all-sufficiency of Christ’s work coexist with mistaken, even gravely mistaken ideas about the specific content of Christian doctrine?” While conceding that the English Church’s rejection of authority hampers Anglicans’ attempts to resolve their differences, Williams calls on an authority of his own to argue that these differences may not require resolving. “The greatest of twentieth-century philosophers warned against having a concept of certainty that regarded it as a single and absolute quality of mind attainable by one set of clearly marked methods. Instead, he argued, we need to look at different sorts of uncertainty … Wittgenstein’s reflections on certainty ought to be (but are not all that often) a substantive aid for theologians. Before we ask how certainty is to be guaranteed, we should ask where and how the question, ‘Am I sure?’ posed itself. And rather than looking for one unshakeable foundation for one kind of certainty, we need to look at what in fact is done to answer the particular questions and doubts we face …” Keble would probably be surprised to see his own uncertainty beneath this cascade of blather but it is there nonetheless. See Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past? The Quest for the Historical Church (London, 2005), pp. 88, 77, 90.
184 Tuckwell, Reminiscences of Oxford, p. 18.
185 LD, 10:639–40, JHN to Henry Wilberforce (27 April 1845).
186 See “Thoughts After Lambeth,” in T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London, 1951), p. 369.
187 LD, 10:703, JHN to William Ewart Gladstone (12 June 1845).
188 LD, 10:271, JHN to John Keble (13 June 1844).
189 LD, 10:426, JHN to John Keble (21 November 1844).
190 LD, 10:427, JHN to John Keble (21 November 1844).
191 LD, 10:474, John Keble to JHN (27 December 1844).
192 On the tenth anniversary of the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot (5 November 1615), undertaken by recusants to blow up Parliament, Lancelot Andrewes preached a sermon referring to the plot as trampling on and tearing into pieces “all bands of birth, country, allegiance, nature, blood, humanity and Christianity …” See The Folio Book of Historic Speeches, ed. Ian Pindar (London, 2007), p. 56.
193 LD, 10:774, John Keble to JHN (3 October 1845).
194 J. C. Shairp, John Keble (Edinburgh, 1866), pp. 6–7.
195 See “Preface on the Present Position of English Churchmen” (1847), in John Keble, Sermons, Academical and Occasional (Oxford, 1848), pp. xxvi–xxvii.
196 LD, 28:418, JHN to Lord Coleridge (9 November 1878).
197 LD, 31:180, JHN to William Knight (7 January 1887).
198 Liddon, Life of Pusey, Vol. IV, p. 141.
199 LD, 10:774, John Keble to JHN (3 October 1845).
200 Battiscombe, John Keble, pp. 256–58.
201 Correspondence of John Henry Newman with John Keble and others 1839–1845 (London, 1917), p. 386, John Keble to JHN (3 October 1845).
202 LD, 11:34, JHN to John Keble (14 November 1845).
203 LD, 2:289, JHN to Hurrell Froude (10 September 1830).
Chapter 2 Staying Put: John Keble After 1845
1 LD, 12:25, JHN to Mrs. John Mozley (26 January 1847).
2 LD, 11:74, JHN to Maria Giberne (21 December 1845).
3 Essays Critical and Historical, Vol. II, p. 451.
4 Ibid., pp. 452–53.
5 See Life and Letters of Dean Church, ed. Mary C. Church (London, 1897), pp. 387–88.
6 Ibid., p. 246.
7 LD, 21:121, JHN to Richard Holt Hutton (18 June 1864).
8 Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (London, 2007), p. 449.
9 E. B. Pusey to J. Keble (1 October 1854), in Liddon, Life of Pusey (London, 1893), Vol. 3, pp. 428–29.
10 Ruskin to Henry Acland (May 1851), quoted in Robert Hewison, Ruskin and Venice: Paradise of Cities (New Haven, 2009), p. 201.
11 John Keble, “On Eucharistical Adoration,” p. 174.
12 Keble, quoted in Georgina Battiscombe, John Keble: A Study in Limitations (London, 1963), p. 238.
13 LD, 30:74–75, JHN to Lord Blachford (4 April 1882).
14 LD, 11:227–28, JHN to T. F. Knox (20 August 1846).
15 Manning quoted Keble as saying this: see Battiscombe, John Keble, p. 303.
16 See ODNB, 22:314.
17 Battiscombe, John Keble, p. 278.
18 Ibid., p. 281.
19 Ibid., pp. 280–81.
20 Ibid., pp. 278–80.
21 LD, 11:60–61, JHN to A. J. Hanmer (11 December 1845).
22 John Coleridge, Memoir of the late Rev. John Keble (London, 1869), Vol. 2, p. 446.
23 Keble to Robert Wilberforce (19 August 1851), quoted in Battiscombe, John Keble, p. 306.
24 See David Newsome, The Wilberforces and Henry Manning: The Parting of Friends (London, 1966), p. 406.
25 LD, 17:537, Letter from Robert Wilberforce to JHN, quoted in JHN to The Editor of the Weekly Register (8 March 1857).
26 JK to J. T. Coleridge (25 October 1847) Bodleian Library MS Eng. lett. d. 135 f. 354.
27 LD, 13:295, JHN to A. J. Hanmer (18 November 1849).
28 Apologia, pp. 155–56.
29 John Coleridge, Memoir of the late Rev. John Keble (London, 1869), Vol. 2, p. 501.
30 LD, 20:501, John Keble to JHN (4 August 1863).
31 LD, 20:502–03, JHN to John Keble (15 August 1863).
32 Charles Kingsley, quoted in the Editor’s Introduction to Apologia, pp. xix–xx.
33 See Apologia, p. 6
34 LD, 21:98, JHN to William Copeland (19 April 1864).
35 LD, 21:103, John Keble to JHN (25 April 1864).
36 LD, 21:103, JHN to John Keble (27 April 1864).
37 LD, 21:103–04, JHN to John Keble (27 April 1864).
38 LD, 21:143, John Keble to JHN (28 June 1864).
39 LD, 21:143, John Keble to JHN (28 June 1864).
40 LD, 22:67, JHN to John Keble (8 October 1865).
41 Letter to Pusey, p. 7.
42 LD, 22:51, JHN to Ambrose St. John (13 September 1865). The brackets in this quote mark later interpolations made by Newman to his original letter.
43 LD, 22:147, John Keble to JHN (3 February 1866).
44 LD, 22:148, JHN to John Keble (7 February 1866).
45 LD, 22:202, JHN to Henry James Coleridge (3 April 1866).
46 LD, 23:43, JHN to Pusey (31 January 1867).
47 LD, 26:376, JHN to H. A. Woodgate (18 October 1873).
48 LD, 22:208, JHN to Charlotte Wood (8 April 1866).
49 LD, 27:370–73, JHN to Maria Trench (29 October 1875).
50 LD, 28:358, John to Edward Stuart Keble (20 May 1878).
51 Williams, quoted in Battiscombe, John Keble, p. 275.
52 LD, 28:372–73, “Notice to Letters 1843–1845.”
53 When Newman learned through his friend Lord Emly that Anthony Trollope was suffering from asthma, he sent him a specific of saltpetre. Trollo
pe wrote back to Newman, thanking him and telling him “how great has been the pleasure which I have received from understanding that you have occasionally read and been amused by my novels. It is when I hear that such men as yourself have been gratified that I feel I have not worked in vain; but there is no man as to whom I can say that his good opinion would give me such intense gratification as your own.” See LD, 29:155 Anthony Trollope to JHN (27 October 1882). On the same day, Trollope wrote to Emly: “I am infinitely obliged to Cardinal Newman for his kindness in regard to my asthma. I have ventured to write to tell him so. In regard to his specific, though it shall have full loyal attention from me, I fear that it will do but little for me; not because it is inoperative, but because I am not in want of it. I find all fumigatory receipts to be of no avail, because I have not fallen into the period which they affect. Great spasmodic want of breath is the evil which affects me, and which at night sometimes becomes very hard to bear. I am indeed obliged to sit upright so as to catch my breath or to remedy the disease by taking chloral. But my throat is never so affected as to be touched by any kind of smoking. As before said, however, I will try saltpetre in the form recommended by the Cardinal and you no doubt will hear the result. I can hardly tell you the amount of pleasure which I have received from the Cardinal’s opinions of my novels.” See The Letters of Anthony Trollope, ed. Bradford Allen Booth (Oxford, 1951), pp. 494–95.
54 LD, 22:234, JHN to Emily Bowles (15 May 1866).
55 LD, 28:158, Julia Arnold to JHN (5 November 1876). See also Bernard Bergonzi, A Victorian Wanderer: The Life of Thomas Arnold the Younger (Oxford, 2003), p. 189: “Julia was a good hater with an energetically vituperative style, but here, as on other occasions, she gives the impression of being, in Mary’s words, ‘not really in her right mind.’ Newman commented dryly, ‘It was fitting, by way of contrast, that so sweet and amiable a fellow as Arnold should have such a yoke fellow—but except as an aesthetic contrast, it is marvelous that such a pair should be.’” See LD, 28:157. Arnold must often have been consoled by those memorable lines from The Winter’s Tale: “… Should all despair/That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind/Would hang themselves.” Act 1, Sc. 2, 1, 198.
56 LD, 22:208, JHN to Charlotte Wood (8 April 1866).
57 LD, 22:216, JHN to Emily Bowles (16 April 1866).
58 LD, 28:20, JHN to Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle (27 January 1876).