Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  54 John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua: Being a History of His Religious Opinions, ed. Martin J. Svaglic (Oxford, 1967), p. 90.

  55 LD, 7:369, JHN to W. C. A. Maclaurin (26 July 1840). A clergyman at Elgin and later Dean of Moray and Ross, Maclaurin converted with his wife and family in 1850, after which he suffered great poverty. According to a biographical note in the Letters and Diaries, “In 1851 he hoped to become a professor at the Catholic University, and told Newman that he was about to spend his last five pound note. In 1854 he wrote from Yarmouth giving his name to the University, and still hoping for a professorship.” See LD, 22:368.

  56 J. H. Newman, “The Anglo-American Church,” in Essays Historical and Critical, Vol. 1, 343.

  57 Essays Historical and Critical, Vol. 1, p. 348.

  58 Ibid., p. 349.

  59 Newman was quite accurate about the role that rich traders played in the tone and spread of the American Episcopal Church. “Improved transportation on Hudson River sloops and barges,” James Elliott Lindsley points out in his excellent history of the New York Episcopal Church, “encouraged the growth of small riverbank communities. Many of these hamlets had as seigneur an Episcopalian who had a summer house on the river and was glad to sponsor the beginning of an Episcopal Church for the handful of year-round residents.” See James Elliott Lindsley, This Planed Vine: A Narrative History of the Episcopal Diocese of New York (New York, 1984), p. 156.

  60 “Particulars of the Conversion of Bishop Ives,” from the Paris L’Univers, in The New York Times (11 August 1854).

  61 See “A Remarkable Conversion,” in The New York Times (18 December 1852).

  62 LD, 21:195 JHN to W. J. O’Neil Daunt (13 August 1864).

  63 Levi Silliman Ives, The Trials of a Mind in its Progress to Catholicism: A Letter to his Old Friends (Boston, 1854), p. 229.

  64 Ibid., pp. 230–31.

  65 LD, 11:7, JHN to F. W. Faber (8 October 1845).

  66 Essays Historical and Critical, Vol. I, p. 349.

  67 Letters from America: Alexis de Tocqueville, ed., trans. and introduced by Frederick Brown (New Haven, 2010), pp. 223–24.

  68 Ibid., p. 224.

  69 LD, 13:79, JHN to Henry Wilberforce (7 March 1849).

  70 Brownson dominates Patrick Allitt’s brilliant study of Tractarianism in America in “Tractarians and Transcendentalists,” in his Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome (Ithaca, 1997), pp. 61–85.

  71 Clarence Walworth, The Oxford Movement in America or Glimpses of Life in an American Seminary (New York, 1895), p. 59.

  72 LD, 11:118, JHN to Ambrose St. John (17 February 1846).

  73 See LD, 15:198, note 1.

  74 LD, 16:535, JHN to Mrs. J. W. Bowden (31 August 1855).

  75 “The Secret Power of Divine Grace” (1856), from John Henry Newman, Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, pp. 58–59.

  76 See Waugh to Greene (27 February 1952), in The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory (London, 1980), p. 370.

  77 LD, 30:142, JHN to Lord Braye (29 October 1882).

  78 Newman laid out these objects in a memorandum on the Catholic University in April 1854. See LD, 16:557–61.

  1. To provide means of finishing the education of young men of rank, fortune, or expectations, with a view of putting them on a level with Protestants of the same description.

  2. To provide a Professional education for students of law and medicine; and a liberal education for the mercantile class.

  3. To develop the talents of promising youths in the lower classes.

  4. To form a school of Theology and Canon Law, suited to the needs of a class of students, who may be required to carry on those sciences beyond the point of attainment sufficient for parochial duty.

  5. To provide a series of sound and philosophical Defences of Catholicity and Revelation, in answer to the infidel tenets and arguments, which threaten us at this time.

  6. To create a national Catholic Literature.

  7. To provide school books, and, generally, books of instruction, for the use of Catholics of the United Kingdom, the British Empire and the United States.

  8. To raise the standard, and to systematise the teaching, and to encourage the efforts, of the Schools, already so ably and zealously conducted throughout Ireland.

  9. To give a Catholic tone to Society in the great Towns.

  79 Evelyn Waugh, “The American Epoch in the Catholic Church” (1949), from The Essays, Articles, and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (New York, 1983), p. 385.

  80 See LD, 18:580 (13 March 1858).

  81 LD, 18:580, from the Weekly Register (13 March 1858). Speaking of his own independent role as Rector of the Catholic University, Newman wrote from Dublin: “What a great thing it is to be independent … good people here don’t seem to have comprehended that nothing brought me here, nothing keeps me here, but the simple wish to do some service to Catholic Education. Even the Nation, in puffing me, talks of an honourable or natural ambition. Nor is the irksomeness of being here compensated by having every thing my own way – for the more autocratical I am, the more may fairly be expected of me – which is not pleasant.” See LD, 18:45, JHN to Henry Wilberforce (20 May 1857).

  82 See Thomas Jefferson Jenkins, The Judges of Faith and Godless Schools. A compilation of evidence against secular schools the world over, especially against common state schools in the United States of America, wherever entirely withdrawn from the influence of the authority of the Catholic Church (New York, 1882).

  83 In March 2009, Father John Jenkins, C.S.C., President of Notre Dame, invited President Hussein Obama to Notre Dame to receive an honorary law degree and address the graduating class.

  84 LD, 30:405, JHN to Thomas Jefferson Jenkins (3 October 1882).

  85 John Henry Newman, “God’s Will the End of Life,” in Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations, ed. James Tolhurst (South Bend, 2002), pp. 113–14.

  86 See Catholic News Agency story, “Bishop D’Arcy will not attend Notre Dame commencement featuring Obama” (24 March 2009).

  87 See LD, 15:363, for reference to a meeting of the clergy and laity of New York, held on 14 March 1853: … in support of the exiled Archbishop of Bogotá and Newman. Archbishop Hughes spoke of how Newman, whom he called a “doctor of the Catholic Church,” “might have looked forward to the highest honours of that high, wealthy and powerful religious community to which he belonged; but, weighing the things of time against those of eternity … he espoused the cause of that scattered and down trodden flock, the remnant of once Catholic England. Nor has he done this with impunity …” The Archbishop then described Newman’s suffering during the Achilli trial, and appealed for a collection, “a purse for his private use.” (The Tablet, XIV, 9 April 1853, p. 228, quoting the New York Freeman’s Journal)

  88 See D. J. Taylor, Thackeray: The Life of a Literary Man (London, 1999), p. 330.

  89 Ibid., p. 332.

  90 LD, 16:284–85, JHN to Francis Kenrick, Archbishop of Baltimore (November, 1854).

  91 See John Adams to Benjamin Rush (17 August 1812), in Old Family Letters, ed. Alexander Biddle (Philadelphia, 1892), p. 420.

  92 LD, 31:85–86, JHN to Cardinal Gibbons (10 October 1885).

  93 LD, 31:86, Cardinal Gibbons to JHN (24 October 1885).

  94 Positio for the Cause of John Henry Newman’s Canonization (Rome, 1989), p. 432.

  Chapter 10 On the Track of Truth: Newman and Richard Holt Hutton

  1 LD, 21:100, JHN to R. W. Church (23 April 1864).

  2 See LD, 20:29. In “Essays and Reviews London 1860,” The Quarterly Review, Vol. CIX, p. 217 (January 1861), pp. 248–305, Samuel Wilberforce wrote: “Now we are not about to justify Number 90. So far from it, we consider it to be a singularly characteristic specimen of that unfortunate subtlety of mind which has since led its author into so many assertions and contradictions and acts, which with the largest judgment of charity a plain man must find it hard to justify from the charge of moral d
ishonesty, except upon what we believe to be in this case the true plea – to use the ugliest word which we can employ – that of intellectual eccentricity.” Wilberforce went on to contrast “the amount of latitude conceded by these condemned views with those which are advocated in the Essays and Reviews,” p. 279. See also Newman’s letter of 5 December 1864 to Samuel Wilberforce, and notes there.

  3 LD, 20:29, JHN to Sister Mary Gabriel Du Boulay (18 August 1861).

  4 LD, 20:30, JHN to Sister Mary Gabriel Du Boulay (18 August 1861).

  5 Ibid., p. 31.

  6 LD, 20:571, JHN to Messrs. Macmillan & Co. (30 December 1863).

  7 LD, 21:96, JHN to Sir Frederic Rogers (18 April 1864).

  8 R. H. Hutton, “Father Newman’s Sarcasm,” in the Spectator (20 February 1864), p. 206.

  9 LD, 21:55, JHN to RHH (22 February 1864).

  10 LD, 21:60, RHH to JHN (25 February 1864).

  11 Loss and Gain (London, 1847), pp. 327–29.

  12 LD, 25:441, M. Arnold to JHN (29 November 1871).

  13 LD, 30:284, Mark Pattison to JHN (28 December 1883).

  14 Walter Bagehot to JHN (1 April 1868), in The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, ed. Norman St. John-Stevas (London, 1986), Vol. 13, pp. 627–28.

  15 LD, 25:303, RHH to JHN (21 March 1871).

  16 Morley, quoted in Malcolm Woodfield, R.H. Hutton: Critic and Theologian: The Writings of R.H. Hutton on Newman, Arnold, Tennyson, Wordsworth, and George Eliot (Oxford, 1986), p. 1.

  17 The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, Vol. 15, p. 86.

  18 Matthew Arnold to his Eldest Sister, afterwards Mrs. Forster (May 1848), in Letters of Matthew Arnold 1848–1888, ed. George W. E. Russell (London, 1895), Vol. 1, p. 10.

  19 Garrod in Arnold: Poetry and Prose with an introduction and notes by E. K. Chambers (Oxford, 1939), p. xxxiv.

  20 ODNB. See also Roy Jenkins, Asquith (London, 1964), p. 32: “Asquith’s Spectator period lasted ten years. It began, tentatively, even before his call to the bar, and it continued, perhaps with lessening intensity towards the end, until 1886, the year of the Home Rule split in the Liberal Party. Although Hutton had hitherto been a Gladstone man almost without reserve, the paper then took a firmly Unionist line against the Prime Minister, and Asquith thought that political divergence on an issue of such importance made it necessary for him to sever his connection.”

  21 Hutton, the Spectator (29 June 1861), p. 697, quoted in Woodfield, R.H. Hutton: Critic and Theologian, p. 18.

  22 Rise and Progress of Universities (London, 1872), pp. 13–14.

  23 James Martineau (November 1849), quoted in Woodfield, R.H. Hutton: Critic and Theologian, p. 6.

  24 See Woodfield, R.H. Hutton: Critic and Theologian, pp. 12–13.

  25 “The Genius of Tennyson,” in A Victorian Spectator: Uncollected Writings of R.H. Hutton, ed. Tener and Woodfield (Bristol, 1989), p. 254.

  26 See The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F. L. Cross (Oxford, 1957), p. 1142.

  27 R. H. Hutton, “Dr. Newman’s Poems,” Spectator (25 January 1868), p. 103.

  28 “Thin Pessimism,” in A Victorian Spectator: Uncollected Writings of R.H. Hutton, ed. Tener and Woodfield (Bristol, 1989), p. 242.

  29 R. H. Hutton, “Cardinal Newman,” The Contemporary Review (London, 1884), Volume 45, p. 665.

  30 R. H. Hutton, Cardinal Newman (London, 1891), p. 190.

  31 See James Joyce to Harriet Weaver (1 May 1935), in Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York, 1957), pp. 365–66. As Gilbert notes in his introduction, Joyce “had a habit of reciting [from the works of Newman] to his friends in the mellow after-dinner hour at Les Trianons or Fouquet’s (his favorite Parisian restaurants) …”

  32 R. H. Hutton, Cardinal Newman (London, 1891), p. 194. As early as 1846, Newman wrote to Frederick Faber: “I have long felt special reverence and admiration for the character of St Ph. [Philip] Neri …” (LD, 11:105, 1 February 1846).

  33 Ibid., p. 207.

  34 Ibid., p. 213.

  35 R. H. Hutton, “Cardinal Newman,” in the Contemporary Review, Vol. 45 (May, 1884), p. 660.

  36 See Woodfield’s entry on Hutton in the ODNB.

  37 James Martineau, quoted in Malcolm Woodfield, R.H. Hutton: Critic and Theologian, p. 3. See also the old DNB Supplement, Vol. 22, p. 892.

  38 Jeremy Morris, F.D. Maurice and the Crisis of Christian Authority (Oxford, 2005), p. 59.

  39 F. D. Maurice, Three Letters to the Rev. William Palmer (London, 1842), p. 16, quoted in Morris, F.D. Maurice and the Crisis of Christian Authority, p. 95.

  40 LD, 5:180, JHN to F. W. Hook (21 December 1835).

  41 LD, 20:416, JHN to F. D. Maurice (1 March 1863).

  42 “Romanism, Protestantism and Anglicanism,” in R. H. Hutton, Theological Essays (London, 1902), p. 418.

  43 LD, 21:95, RHH to JHN (29 March 1864).

  44 Gladstone was representative of the pro-South sentiment of the English during the American Civil War. At Newcastle in October 1862, he declared: “Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either, they have made a nation.” See Gladstone, quoted in T. K. Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation: England 1846–1886 (Oxford, 1998), p. 230.

  45 R. H. Hutton, Essays on Some of the Modern Guides to English Thought in Matters of Faith (London, 1891), pp. 92–93.

  46 R. H. Hutton, Aspects of Religious and Scientific Thought (London, 1899), p. 337.

  47 Ibid,, pp. 342–44.

  48 R. H. Hutton, Aspects of Religious and Scientific Thought, pp. 15–16.

  49 LD, 24:225, RHH to JHN (25 February 1869).

  50 Wilfrid Ward, William George Ward and the Catholic Revival (London, 1893), pp. 309–10.

  51 Ibid., p. 314.

  52 R. H. Hutton, “William George Ward,” in the Spectator (8 July 1882), p. 891.

  53 LD, 24:226, JHN to RHH (27 February 1869).

  54 LD, 25:303, RHH to JHN (27 February 1869).

  55 LD, 28:11, JHN to R. W. Church (11 January 1876).

  56 R. H. Hutton, Cardinal Newman (London, 1891), pp. 207–08.

  57 LD, 21:60–61, JHN to RHH (24 February 1864).

  58 “Father Newman’s Sarcasm,” in the Spectator (20 February 1864), p. 207.

  59 LD, 21:60, JHN to RHH (26 February 1864).

  60 LD, 21:67–68, RHH to JHN (28 February 1864). The article to which Hutton refers is “Father Newman’s Sarcasm,” in the Spectator (20 February 1864), pp. 206–08.

  61 See Ian Ker, “The Personal Nature of Religious Belief,” in Healing the Wounds of Humanity: The Spirituality of John Henry Newman (London, 1993), pp. 1–9.

  62 Malcolm Woodfield, R.H. Hutton: Critic and Theologian, p. 47.

  63 Loss and Gain, pp. 327–29.

  64 LD, 21:68, RHH to JHN (28 February 1863).

  65 R. H. Hutton, “Frederick Denison Maurice,” in Essays on Some of the Modern Guides to English Thought in Matters of Faith (London, 1891), p. 318.

  66 LD, 25:32, JHN to RHH (16 February 1870). See LD, 31:xiii: In the Contemporary Review for May 1885 there appeared an article by the Congregationalist A. M. Fairbairn, Principal of Airedale Theological College, Bradford, which accused Newman of philosophical scepticism and of withdrawing the proofs of religion from the realm of reason into that of conscience and imagination. Hutton claimed the direct opposite: that Newman parried philosophical skepticism by showing how faith was corroborated by conscience and imagination.

  67 Apologia, pp. 251–53.

  68 LD, 21:68–9, JHN to RHH (3 March 1864).

  69 LD, 21:90 JHN to RHH (27 March 1864).

  70 R. H. Hutton, “Roman Catholic Casuistry and Protestant Prejudice,” in the Spectator (26 March 1864), p. 358.

  71 “The Use of Paradox,” in R. H. Hutton, Brief Literary Criticisms (London, 1906), p. 40.

  72 “Unreal Words” (1839), in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Book 5, Sermon 3.

  73 R. H. Hutton, �
�‘Unreal Words’ in Religious Belief,” in the Spectator (24 July 1886), p. 984.

  74 “Mr Arnold’s Lay Sermons,” in R. H. Hutton, Aspects of Religious and Scientific Thought (London, 1899), pp. 322–29.

  75 R. H. Hutton, “Dr. Newman’s Apology,” in the Spectator (4 June 1864), p. 655.

  76 Malcolm Woodfield, “Victorian Weekly Reviews and Reviewing After 1860: R. H. Hutton and the Spectator,” in The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 16, Literary Periodicals Special Number (1986), p. 79.

  77 “Dr. Newman’s Apology,” in the Spectator (11 June 1864), p. 683.

  78 LD, 21:120, RHH to JHN (15 June 1864).

  79 “Dr. Newman’s Apology” (4 June 1864), p. 655.

  80 LD, 9:274 JHN to Mary Holmes (8 March 1843).

  81 “It is not by logic that God has deemed to save his people.” This is the epigraph from St. Ambrose’s De Fide ad Gratianum Augustum that Newman used for his Grammar of Assent. In the Apologia, Newman admits, “I had a great dislike of paper-logic. For myself, it was not logic that carried me on; as well might one say that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather. It is the concrete being who reasons …” (Apologia, p. 155).

  82 LD, 21:121, RHH to JHN (15 June 1864).

  83 Anglican Difficulties, p. 88: “If I let you plead the sensible effects of supernatural grace, as exemplified in yourselves, in proof that your religion is true, I must allow the plea to others to whom by your theory you are bound to deny it. Are you willing to place yourselves on the same footing with Wesleyans? yet what is the difference? or rather, have they not more remarkable phenomena in their history, symptomatic of the presence of grace among them, than you can show in yours? Which, then, is the right explanation of your feelings and your experience,—mine, which I have extracted from received Catholic teaching; or yours, which is an expedient for the occasion, and cannot be made to tell for your own Apostolical authority without telling for those who are rebels against it? Survey the rise of Methodism, and say candidly, whether those who made light of your ordinances, abandoned them, or at least disbelieved their virtue, have not had among them evidences of that very same grace which you claim for yourselves, and which you consider a proof of your acceptance with God. Really I am obliged in candour to allow, whatever part the evil spirit had in the work, whatever gross admixture of earth polluted it, whatever extravagance there was to excite ridicule or disgust, whether it was Christian virtue or the excellence of unaided man, whatever was the spiritual state of the subjects of it, whatever their end and their final account, yet there were higher and nobler vestiges or semblances of grace and truth in Methodism than there have been among you.”