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Edward Caldwell Moore by Edward Moore

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Newman had been bred in the deepest reverence for Scripture. In a sense
that reverence never left him, though it changed its form. He saw that
it was absurd to appeal to the Bible in the old way as an infallible
source of doctrine. How could truth be infallibly conveyed in defective
and fallible expressions? Newman's own studies in criticism, by no means
profound, led him to this correct conclusion. This was the end for him
of evangelical Protestantism. The recourse was then to the infallible
Church. Infallible guide and authority one must have. Without these
there can be no religion. To trust to reason and conscience as conveying
something of the light of God is impossible. To wait in patience and to
labour in fortitude for the increase of that light is unendurable. One
must have certainty. There can be no certainty by the processes of the
mind from within. This can come only by miraculous certification from
without.

According to Newman the authority of the Church should never have been
impaired in the Reformation. Or rather, in his view of that movement,
this authority, for truly Christian men, had never been impaired. The
intellect is aggressive, capricious, untrustworthy. Its action in
religious matters is corrosive, dissolving, sceptical. 'Man's energy of
intellect must be smitten hard and thrown back by infallible authority,
if religion is to be saved at all.' Newman's philosophy was utterly
sceptical, although, unlike most absolute philosophical sceptics, he had
a deep religious experience. The most complete secularist, in his
negation of religion, does not differ from Newman in his low opinion of
the value of the surmises of the mind as to the transcendental meaning
of life and the world. He differs from Newman only in lacking that which
to Newman was the most indefeasible thing which he had at all, namely,
religious experience. Newman was the child of his age, though no one
ever abused more fiercely the age of which he was the child. He supposed
that he believed in religion on the basis of authority. Quite the
contrary, he believed in religion because he had religion or, as he
says, in a magnificent passage in one of his parochial sermons, because
religion had him. His scepticism forbade him to recognise that this was
the basis of his belief. His diremption of human nature was absolute.
The soul was of God. The mind was of the devil. He dare not trust his
own intellect concerning this inestimable treasure of his experience. He
dare not trust intellect at all. He knew not whither it might lead him.
The mind cannot be broken to the belief of a power above it. It must
have its stiff neck bent to recognise its Creator.

His whole book, _The Grammar of Assent_, 1870, is pervaded by the
intensest philosophical scepticism. Scepticism supplies its motives,
determines its problems, necessitates its distinctions, rules over the
succession and gradation of its arguments. The whole aim of the work is
to withdraw religion and the proofs of it, from the region of reason
into the realm of conscience and imagination, where the arguments which
reign may satisfy personal experience without alleging objective
validity or being able to bear the criticism which tests it. Again, he
is the perverse, unconscious child of the age which he curses. Had not
Kant and Schleiermacher, Coleridge and Channing sought, does not Ritschl
seek, to remove religion from the realm of metaphysics and to bring it
within the realm of experience? They had, however, pursued the same end
by different means. One is reminded of that saying of Gretchen
concerning Mephistopheles: 'He says the same thing with the pastor, only
in different words.' Newman says the same words, but means a different
thing.

Assuming the reduction of religion to experience, in which Kant and
Schleiermacher would have agreed, and asserting the worthlessness of
mentality, which they would have denied, we are not surprised to hear
Newman say that without Catholicism doubt is invincible. 'The Church's
infallibility is the provision adopted by the mercy of the Creator to
preserve religion in the world. Outside the Catholic Church all things
tend to atheism. The Catholic Church is the one face to face antagonist,
able to withstand and baffle the fierce energy of passion and the
all-dissolving scepticism of the mind. I am a Catholic by virtue of my
belief in God. If I should be asked why I believe in God, I should
answer, because I believe in myself. I find it impossible to believe in
myself, without believing also in the existence of him who lives as a
personal, all-seeing, all-judging being in my conscience.' These
passages are mainly taken from the _Apologia_, written long after Newman
had gone over to the Roman Church. They perfectly describe the attitude
of his mind toward the Anglican Church, so long as he believed this, and
not the Roman, to be the true Church. He had once thought that a man
could hold a position midway between the Protestantism which he
repudiated and the Romanism which he still resisted. He stayed in the
_via media_ so long as he could. But in 1839 he began to have doubts
about the Anglican order of succession. The catholicity of Rome began to
overshadow the apostolicity of Anglicanism. The Anglican formularies
cannot be at variance with the teachings of the authoritative and
universal Church. This is the problem which the last of the _Tracts_,
_Tract Ninety_, sets itself. It is one of those which Newman wrote. One
must find the sense of the Roman Church in the Thirty-Nine Articles.
This tract is prefaced by an extraordinary disquisition upon reserve in
the communication of religious knowledge. God's revelations of himself
to mankind have always been a kind of veil. Truth is the reward of
holiness. The Fathers were holy men. Therefore what the Fathers said
must be true. The principle of reserve the Articles illustrate. They do
not mean what they say. They were written in an uncatholic age, that is,
in the age of the Reformation. They were written by Catholic men. Else
how can the Church of England be now a Catholic Church? Through their
reserve they were acceptable in an uncatholic age. They cannot be
uncatholic in spirit, else how should they be identical in meaning with
the great Catholic creeds? Then follows an exposition of every important
article of the thirty-nine, an effort to interpret each in the sense of
the Roman Catholic Church of to-day. Four tutors published a protest
against the tract. Formal censure was passed upon it. It was now evident
to Newman that his place in the leadership of the Oxford Movement was
gone. From this time, the spring of 1841, he says he was on his deathbed
as regards the Church of England. He withdrew to Littlemore and
established a brotherhood there. In the autumn of 1843 he resigned the
parochial charge of St. Mary's at Oxford. On the 9th of October 1845 he
was formally admitted to the Roman Church. On the 6th of October Ernest
Renan had formally severed his connexion with that Church.

It is a strange thing that in his _Essay on the Development of Christian
Doctrine_, written in 1845, Newman himself should have advanced
substantially Hampden's contention. Here are written many things
concerning the development of doctrine which commend themselves to minds
conversant with the application of historical criticism to the whole
dogmatic structure of the Christian ages. The purpose is with Newman
entirely polemical, the issue exactly that which one would not have
foreseen. Precisely because the development of doctrine is so obvious,
because no historical point can be found at which the growth of doctrine
ceased and the rule of faith was once for all settled, therefore an
infallible authority outside of the development must have existed from
the beginning, to provide a means of distinguishing true development
from false. This infallible guide is, of course, the Church. It seems
incredible that Newman could escape applying to the Church the same
argument which he had so skilfully applied to Scripture and dogmatic
history. Similar is the case with the argument of the _Grammar of
Assent_. 'No man is certain of a truth who can endure the thought of its
contrary.' If the reason why I cannot endure the thought of the
contradictory of a belief which I have made my own, is that so to think
brings me pain and darkness, this does not prove my truth. If my belief
ever had its origin in reason, it must be ever refutable by reason. It
is not corroborated by the fact that I do not wish to see anything that
would refute it.[8] This last fact may be in the highest degree an act
of arbitrariness. To make the impossibility of thinking the opposite,
the test of truth, and then to shut one's eyes to those evidences which
might compel one to think the opposite, is the essence of irrationality.
One attains by this method indefinite assertiveness, but not certainty.
Newman lived in some seclusion in the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in
Birmingham for many years. A few distinguished men, and a number of his
followers, in all not more than a hundred and fifty, went over to the
Roman Church after him. The defection was never so great as, in the
first shock, it was supposed that it would be. The outward influence of
Newman upon the Anglican Church then ceased. But the ideas which he put
forth have certainly been of great influence in that Church to this day.
Most men know the portrait of the great cardinal, the wide forehead,
ploughed deep with horizontal furrows, the pale cheek, down which 'long
lines of shadow slope, which years and anxious thought and suffering
give.' One looks into the wonderful face of those last days--Newman
lived to his ninetieth year--and wonders if he found in the infallible
Church the peace which he so earnestly sought.

[Footnote 8: Fairbairn, _Catholicism, Roman and Anglican_, p. 157.]


MODERNISM


It was said that the Oxford Movement furnished the rationale of the
reaction. Many causes, of course, combine to make the situation of the
Roman Church and the status of religion in the Latin countries of the
Continent the lamentable one that it is. That position is worst in those
countries where the Roman Church has most nearly had free play. The
alienation both of the intellectual and civil life from organised
religion is grave. That the Roman Church occupies in England to-day a
position more favourable than in almost any nation on the Continent, and
better than it occupied in England at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, is due in large measure to the general influence of the
movement with which we have been dealing. The Anglican Church was at the
beginning of the nineteenth century preponderantly evangelical,
low-church and conscious of itself as Protestant. At the beginning of
the twentieth it is dominantly ritualistic and disposed to minimise its
relation to the Reformation. This resurgence of Catholic principles is
another effect of the movement of which we speak. Other factors must
have wrought for this result besides the body of arguments which Newman
and his compeers offered. The argument itself, the mere intellectual
factor, is not adequate. There is an inherent contradiction in the
effort to ground in reason an authority which is to take the place of
reason. Yet round and round this circle all the labours of John Henry
Newman go. Cardinal Manning felt this. The victory of the Church was not
to be won by argument. It is well known that Newman opposed the decree
of infallibility. It cannot be said that upon this point his arguments
had great weight. If one assumes that truth comes to us externally
through representatives of God, and if the truth is that which they
assert, then in the last analysis what they assert is truth. If one has
given in to such authority because one distrusts his reason, then it is
querulous to complain that the deliverances of authority do not comport
with reason. There may be, of course, the greatest interest in the
struggle as to the instance in which this authority is to be lodged.
This interest attaches to the age-long struggle between Pope and
Council. It attaches to the dramatic struggle of Doellinger, Dupanloup,
Lord Acton and the rest, in 1870. Once the Church has spoken there is,
for the advocate of authoritative religion, no logic but to submit.

Similarly as to the _Encyclical_ and _Syllabus of Errors_ of 1864, which
forecast the present conflict concerning Modernism. The _Syllabus_ had a
different atmosphere from that which any Englishman in the sixties would
have given it. Had not Newman, however, made passionate warfare on the
liberalism of the modern world? Was it not merely a question of degrees?
Was Gladstone's attitude intelligible? The contrast of two principles in
life and religion, the principles of authority and of the spirit, is
being brought home to men's consciousness as it has never been before.
One reads _Il Santo_ and learns concerning the death of Fogazzaro, one
looks into the literature relating to Tyrrell, one sees the fate of
Loisy, comparing the really majestic achievement in his works and the
spirit of his _Simple Reflections_ with the _Encyclical Pascendi_, 1907.
One understands why these men have done what they could to remain within
the Roman Church. One recalls the attitude of Doellinger to the
inauguration of the Old Catholic Movement, reflects upon the relative
futility of the Old Catholic Church, and upon the position of Hyacinthe
Loyson. One appreciates the feeling of these men that it is impossible,
from without, to influence as they would the Church which they have
loved. The present difficulty of influencing it from within seems almost
insuperable. The history of Modernism as an effective contention in the
world of Christian thought seems scarcely begun. The opposition to
Modernism is not yet a part of the history of thought.


ROBERTSON


In no life are reflected more perfectly the spiritual conflicts of the
fifth decade of the nineteenth century than in that of Frederick W.
Robertson. No mind worked itself more triumphantly out of these
difficulties. Descended from a family of Scottish soldiers, evangelical
in piety, a student in Oxford in 1837, repelled by the Oxford Movement,
he undertook his ministry under a morbid sense of responsibility. He
reacted violently against his evangelicalism. He travelled abroad, read
enormously, was plunged into an agony which threatened mentally to undo
him. He took his charge at Brighton in 1847, still only thirty-one years
old, and at once shone forth in the splendour of his genius. A martyr to
disease and petty persecution, dying at thirty-seven, he yet left the
impress of one of the greatest preachers whom the Church of England has
produced. He left no formal literary work such as he had designed. Of
his sermons we have almost none from his own manuscripts. Yet his
influence is to-day almost as intense as when the sermons were
delivered. It is, before all, the wealth and depth of his thought, the
reality of the content of the sermons, which commands admiration. They
are a classic refutation of the remark that one cannot preach theology.
Out of them, even in their fragmentary state, a well-articulated system
might be made. He brought to his age the living message of a man upon
whom the best light of his age had shone.


PHILLIPS BROOKS


Something of the same sort may be said concerning Phillips Brooks. He
inherited on his father's side the sober rationalism and the humane and
secular interest of the earlier Unitarianism, on his mother's side the
intensity of evangelical pietism with the Calvinistic form of thought.
The conflict of these opposing tendencies in New England was at that
time so great that Brooks's parents sought refuge with the low-church
element in the Episcopal Church. Brooks's education at Harvard College,
where he took his degree in 1855, as also at Alexandria, and still more,
his reading and experience, made him sympathetic with that which, in
England in those years, was called the Broad Church party. He was deeply
influenced by Campbell and Maurice. Later well known in England, he was
the compeer of the best spirits of his generation there. Deepened by the
experience of the great war, he held in succession two pulpits of large
influence, dying as Bishop of Massachusetts in 1893. There is a
theological note about his preaching, as in the case of Robertson. Often
it is the same note. Brooks had passed through no such crisis as had
Robertson. He had flowered into the greatness of rational belief. His
sermons are a contribution to the thinking of his age. We have much
finished material of this kind from his own hand, and a book or two
besides. His service through many years as preacher to his university
was of inestimable worth. The presentation of ever-advancing thought to
a great public constituency is one of the most difficult of tasks. It is
also one of the most necessary. The fusion of such thoughtfulness with
spiritual impulse has rarely been more perfectly achieved than in the
preaching of Phillips Brooks.


THE BROAD CHURCH


We have used the phrase, the Broad Church party. Stanley had employed
the adjective to describe the real character of the English Church, over
against the antithesis of the Low Church and the High. The designation
adhered to a group of which Stanley was himself a type. They were not
bound together in a party. They had no ecclesiastical end in view. They
were of a common spirit. It was not the spirit of evangelicalism. Still
less was it that of the Tractarians. It was that which Robertson had
manifested. It aimed to hold the faith with an open mind in all the
intellectual movement of the age. Maurice should be enumerated here,
with reservations. Kingsley beyond question belonged to this group.
There was great ardour among them for the improvement of social
conditions, a sense of the social mission of Christianity. There grew up
what was called a Christian Socialist movement, which, however, never
attained or sought a political standing. The Broad Church movement
seemed, at one time, assured of ascendancy in the Church of England. Its
aims appeared congruous with the spirit of the times. Yet Dean Fremantle
esteems himself perhaps the last survivor of an illustrious company.

The men who in 1860 published the volume known as _Essays and Reviews_
would be classed with the Broad Church. In its authorship were
associated seven scholars, mostly Oxford men. Some one described _Essays
and Reviews_ as the _Tract Ninety_ of the Broad Church. It stirred
public sentiment and brought the authors into conflict with authority in
a somewhat similar way. The living antagonism of the Broad Church was
surely with the Tractarians rather than with the evangelicals. Yet the
most significant of the essays, those on miracles and on prophecy,
touched opinions common to both these groups. Jowett, later Master of
Balliol, contributed an essay on the 'Interpretation of Scripture.' It
hardly belongs to Jowett's best work. Yet the controversy then
precipitated may have had to do with Jowett's adherence to Platonic
studies instead of his devoting himself to theology. The most decisive
of the papers was that of Baden Powell on the 'Study of the Evidences of
Christianity.' It was mainly a discussion of the miracle. It was radical
and conclusive. The essay closes with an allusion to Darwin's _Origin of
Species_, which had then just appeared. Baden Powell died shortly after
its publication. The fight came on Rowland Williams's paper upon
Bunson's _Biblical Researches_. It was really upon the prophecies and
their use in 'Christian Evidences.' Baron Bunsen was not a great
archaeologist, but he brought to the attention of English readers that
which was being done in Germany in this field. Williams used the
archaeological material to rectify the current theological notions
concerning ancient history. A certain type of English mind has always
shown zeal for the interpretation of prophecy. Williams's thesis,
briefly put, was this: the Bible does not always give the history of the
past with accuracy; it does not give the history of the future at all;
prophecy means spiritual teaching, not secular prognostication. A reader
of our day may naturally feel that Wilson, with his paper on the
'National Church,' made the greatest contribution. He built indeed upon
Coleridge, but he had a larger horizon. He knew the arguments of the
great Frenchmen of his day and of their English imitators who, in Benn's
phrase, narrowed and perverted the ideal of a world-wide humanity into
that of a Church founded on dogmas and administered by clericals. Wilson
argued that in Jesus' teaching the basis of the religious community is
ethical. The Church is but the instrument for carrying out the will of
God as manifest in the moral law. The realisation of the will of God
must extend beyond the limits of the Church's activity, however widely
these are drawn. There arose a violent agitation. Williams and Wilson
were prosecuted. The case was tried in the Court of Arches. Williams was
defended by no less a person than Fitzjames Stephen. The two divines
were sentenced to a year's suspension. This decision was reversed by the
Lord Chancellor. Fitzjames Stephen had argued that if the men most
interested in the church, namely, its clergy, are the only men who
may be punished for serious discussion of the facts and truths of
religion, then respect on the part of the world for the Church is at an
end. By this discussion the English clergy, even if Anglo-Catholic, are
in a very different position from the Roman priests, over whom
encyclicals, even if not executed, are always suspended.

Similar was the issue in the case of Colenso, Bishop of Natal. Equipped
mainly with Cambridge mathematics added to purest self-devotion, he had
been sent out as a missionary bishop. In the process of the translation
of the Pentateuch for his Zulus, he had come to reflect upon the problem
which the Old Testament presents. In a manner which is altogether
marvellous he worked out critical conclusions parallel to those of Old
Testament scholars on the Continent. He was never really an expert, but
in his main contention he was right. He adhered to his opinion despite
severe pressure and was not removed from the episcopate. With such
guarantees it would be strange indeed if we could not say that biblical
studies entered in Great Britain, as also in America, on a development
in which scholars of these nations are not behind the best scholars of
the world. The trials for heresy of Robertson Smith in Edinburgh and of
Dr. Briggs in New York have now little living interest. Yet biblical
studies in Scotland and America were incalculably furthered by those
discussions. The publication of a book like _Supernatural Religion_,
1872, illustrates a proclivity not uncommon in self-conscious liberal
circles, for taking up a contention just when those who made it and have
lived with it have decided to lay it down. However, the names of Hatch
and Lightfoot alone, not to mention the living, are sufficient to
warrant the assertions above made.

* * * * *

More than once in these chapters we have spoken of the service rendered
to the progress of Christian thought by the criticism and interpretation
of religion at the hands of literary men. That country and age may be
esteemed fortunate in which religion occupies a place such that it
compels the attention of men of genius. In the history of culture this
has by no means always been the case. That these men do not always speak
the language of edification is of minor consequence. What is of infinite
worth is that the largest minds of the generation shall engage
themselves with the topic of religion. A history of thought concerning
Christianity cannot but reckon with the opinions, for example, of
Carlyle, of Emerson, of Matthew Arnold--to mention only types.


CARLYLE


Carlyle has pictured for us his early home at Ecclefechan on the Border;
his father, a stone mason of the highest character; his mother with her
frugal, pious ways; the minister, from whom he learned Latin, 'the
priestliest man I ever beheld in any ecclesiastical guise.' The picture
of his mother never faded from his memory. Carlyle was destined for the
Church. Such had been his mother's prayer. He took his arts course in
Edinburgh. In the university, he says, 'there was much talk about
progress of the species, dark ages, and the like, but the hungry young
looked to their spiritual nurses and were bidden to eat the east wind.'
He entered Divinity Hall, but already, in 1816, prohibitive doubts had
arisen in his mind. Irving sought to help him. Irving was not the man
for the task. The Christianity of the Church had become intellectually
incredible to Carlyle. For a time he was acutely miserable, bordering
upon despair. He has described his spiritual deliverance: 'Precisely
that befel me which the Methodists call their conversion, the
deliverance of their souls from the devil and the pit. There burst forth
a sacred flame of joy in me.' With _Sartor Resartus_ his message to the
world began. It was printed in _Fraser's Magazine_ in 1833, but not
published separately until 1838. His difficulty in finding a publisher
embittered him. Style had something to do with this, the newness of his
message had more. Then for twenty years he poured forth his message.
Never did a man carry such a pair of eyes into the great world of London
or set a more peremptory mark upon its notabilities. His best work was
done before 1851. His later years were darkened with much misery of
body. No one can allege that he ever had a happy mind.

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