Outspoken Essays by William Ralph Inge

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Of the Modernists, a few will secede, others will remain in the Church,
though in open revolt against the Vatican; but the majority will be
silenced, and will make a lip-submission to authority. The disastrous
results of the rebellion, and of the means taken to crush it, will be
apparent in the deterioration of the priesthood. Modern thought, it will
be said, has now been definitely condemned by the Church; war has been
openly declared against progress. Many who, before the crisis of the
last few years, believed it possible to enter the Roman Catholic
priesthood without any sacrifice of intellectual honesty, will in the
future find it impossible to do so. We may expect to see this result
most palpable in France, where men think logically, and are but little
influenced by custom and prejudice. Unless the Republican Government
blows the dying embers into a blaze by unjust persecution, it is to be
feared that Catholicism in that country may soon become 'une quantite
negligeable.' The prospects of the Church in Italy and Spain do not seem
very much better. In fact the only comfort which we can suggest to those
who regret the decline of an august institution, is that decadent
autocracies have often shown an astonishing toughness. But as head of
the universal Church, in any true sense of the word, Rome has finished
her life.

A more vital question, for those at least who are Christians, but not
Roman Catholics, is in what shape the Christian religion will emerge
from the assaults upon traditional beliefs which science and historical
criticism are pressing home. We have given our reasons for rejecting the
Modernist attempt at reconstruction. In the first place, we do not feel
that we are required by sane criticism to surrender nearly all that M.
Loisy has surrendered. We believe that the kingdom of God which Christ
preached was something much more than a patriotic dream. We believe that
He did speak as never man spake, so that those who heard Him were
convinced that He was more than man. We believe, in short, that the
object of our worship was a historical figure. Nothing has yet come to
light, or is likely to come to light, which prevents us from identifying
the Christ of history with the Christ of faith, or the Christ of
experience.

But, if too much is surrendered on one side, too much is taken back on
the other. The contention that the progress of knowledge has left the
traditional beliefs and cultus of Catholics untouched is untenable. It
is not too much to say that the whole edifice of supernaturalistic
dualism under which Catholic piety has sheltered itself for fifteen
hundred years has fallen in ruins to the ground. There is still enough
superstition left to win a certain vogue for miraculous cures at
Lourdes, and split hailstones at Remiremont. But that kind of religion
is doomed, and will not survive three generations of sound secular
education given equally to both sexes. The craving for signs and
wonders--that broad road which attracts so many converts and wins so
rapid a success--leads religion at last to its destruction, as Christ
seems to have warned His own disciples. Science has been the slowly
advancing Nemesis which has overtaken a barbarised and paganised
Christianity. She has come with a winnowing fan in her hand, and she
will not stop till she has thoroughly purged her floor. She has left us
the divine Christ, whatever may be the truth about certain mysterious
events in His human life. But assuredly she has not left us the right to
offer wheedling prayers to a mythical Queen of Heaven; she has not left
us the right to believe in such puerile stories as the Madonna-stamp on
hailstones, in order to induce a comfortably pious state of mind.

The dualism alleged to exist between faith and knowledge will not serve.
Man is one, and reality is one; there can no more be two 'orders of
reality' not affecting each other than there can be two faculties in the
human mind working independently of each other. The universe which is
interpreted to us by our understanding is not unreal, nor are its laws
pliant to our wills, as the pragmatists do vainly talk. It is a divinely
ordered system, which includes man, the roof and crown of things, and
Christ, in whom is revealed to us its inner character and meaning. It is
not the province of faith either to flout scientific knowledge, or to
contaminate the material on which science works by intercalating what M.
Le Roy calls 'transhistorical symbols'--myths in fact--which do not
become true by being recognised as false, as the new apologetic seems to
suggest. Faith is not the born storyteller of Modernist theology. Faith
is, on the practical side, just the resolution to stand or fall by the
noblest hypothesis; and, on the intellectual side, it is a progressive
initiation, by experiment which ends in experience, into the unity of
the good, the true, and the beautiful, founded on the inner assurance
that these three attributes of the divine nature have one source and
conduct to one goal.

The Modernists are right in finding the primary principle of faith in
the depths of our undivided personality. They are right in teaching that
faith develops and comes into its own only through the activity of the
whole man. They are right in denying the name of faith to correct
opinion, which may leave the character untouched. As Hartley Coleridge
says:

'Think not the faith by which the just shall live
Is a dead creed, a map correct of heaven,
Far less a feeling fond and fugitive,
A thoughtless gift, withdrawn as soon as given.
It is an affirmation and an act
That bids eternal truth be present fact.'

For all this we are grateful to them. But we maintain that the future of
Christianity is in the hands of those who insist that faith and
knowledge must be confronted with each other till they have made up
their quarrel. The crisis of faith cannot be dealt with by establishing
a _modus vivendi_ between scepticism and superstition. That is all that
Modernism offers us; and it will not do. Rather we will believe, with
Clement of Alexandria, that piste he gnhosist, gnosthe de he phistist.

If this confidence in the reality of things hoped for and the
hopefulness of things real be well-founded, we must wait in patience for
the coming of the wise master-builders who will construct a more truly
Catholic Church out of the fragments of the old, with the help of the
material now being collected by philosophers, psychologists, historians,
and scientists of all creeds and countries. When the time comes for this
building to rise, the contributions of the Modernists will not be
described as wood, hay, or stubble. They have done valuable service to
biblical criticism, and in other branches, which will be always
recognised. But the building will not (we venture to prophesy) be
erected on their plan, nor by their Church. History shows few examples
of the rejuvenescence of decayed autocracies. Nor is our generation
likely to see much of the reconstruction. The churches, as institutions,
will continue for some time to show apparent weakness; and other
moralising and civilising agencies will do much of their work. But,
since there never has been a time when the character of Christ and the
ethics which he taught have been held in higher honour than the present,
there is every reason to expect that the next 'Age of Faith,' when it
comes, will be of a more genuinely Christian type than the last.

FOOTNOTES:

[50] Bishop Creighton always emphasised this view of Roman
Catholicism. 'The Roman Church,' he wrote, 'is the most
complete expression of Erastianism, for it is not a Church
at all, but a state in its organisation; and the worst form
of state--an autocracy.' (_Life and Letters_, ii. 375.)

[51] In contrast with 'henotheism' or 'monolatry,' such as
the worship of the early Hebrews.

[52] 'Nunc defecit certa successio in omnibus ecclesiis
apostolicis, praeterquam in Romana, et ideo ex testimonio
huius solius ecclesiae sumi potest certum argumentum ad
probandas apostolicas traditiones.' Bellarmine, _De Verbo
Dei scripto et non scripto_, IV, ix, 10.

[53] Bellarmine, _De Laicis_, III, xxi, 22.

[54]: Santayana, _Return in Religion_, p. 108.

[55] Tertullian, _De Virg. Vel_., 1.

[56] Encyclical of October 27, 1901.

[57] In _The Programme of Modernism_, and _Quello che
vogliamo_.

[58] _The Programme of Modernism_, p. 16.

[59] _The Programme of Modernism_, pp. 50-54.

[60] Loisy, _Simples Reflexions_, p. 168.

[61] _Ibid. L'Evangile et l'Eglise_, pp. 3-5.

[62] _Ibid. Les Evangiles Synoptiques_, p. 119.

[63] _Ibid_.

[64] _Ibid_. p. 143.

[65] _Ibid_. pp. 138, 139.

[66] _Ibid_. p. 104.

[67] Loisy, _Les Evangiles Synoptiques_, p. 166.

[68] _Ibid_. p. 169.

[69] _Ibid. Le Quatrieme Evangile_, passim.

[70] Loisy, _Les Evangiles Synoptiques_, p. 214.

[71] _Ibid_. p. 218.

[72] Loisy, _Les Evangiles Synoptiques_, p. 223.

[73] _The Programme of Modernism_, pp. 82, 83.

[74] _Ibid_. p. 90.

[75] Loisy, _Simples Reflexions_, p. 211.

[76] Laberthonniere, _Le Realisme Chretien et l'Idealisme
Grec,_ pp. 44, 45.

[77] _Malachi_, ii. 6.

[78] Le Roy, _Dogme et Critique_, p. 26.

[79] _Lex Orandi_, p. 165 (abridged).

[80] This is not carelessness on the part of the writer.
Paulsen also says (_Introduction to Philosophy_, p. 112), 4
It is impossible to separate feeling and willing from each
other.... Only in the highest stage of psychical life, in
man, does a partial separation of feeling from willing
occur.' But it is the highest stage of psychical life, the
human, with which we are alone concerned; and in this stage
it is both possible and necessary to distinguish between
feeling and willing. Some Voluntarists, hard pressed by
facts, try to make 'will' cover the whole of conscious and
subconscious life, with the exception of logical reasoning,
which is excluded as a sort of pariah!

[81] Mgr. Moyes, in _The Nineteenth Century_, December,
1907.

CARDINAL NEWMAN

(1912)

The life of Newman was divided into two nearly equal portions by his
change of religion in October 1845. For the earlier half of his career
we have long had his own narrative; and Newman is a prince of
autobiographers. It was his wish that the 'Apologia' should be the final
and authoritative account of his life in the Church of England, and of
the steps by which he was led to transfer his allegiance to another
communion. The voluminous literature of the Tractarian movement, which
includes large collections of Newman's own letters, has confirmed the
accuracy of his narrative, and has made any further description of that
strange episode in English University life superfluous. With the
'Apologia' and Dean Church's 'Oxford Movement' before him, the reader
needs no more. Mr. Wilfrid Ward has therefore been well advised to
adhere loyally to the Cardinal's wishes, by confining himself to the
last half of Newman's life, after a brief summary of his childhood,
youth, and middle age till 1845. Nevertheless, it is misleading to give
the title 'The Life of Cardinal Newman' to a work which is only, as it
were, the second volume of a biography. There are very few men, however
long-lived, who have not done much of their best work before the age of
forty-five, and Newman was certainly not one of the exceptions. From
every point of view, except that of the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical
historian, Newman's Anglican career was far more interesting and
important than his residence at Birmingham. He will live in history, not
as the recluse of Edgbaston, nor as the wearer of the Cardinal's hat
which fell to his lot, almost too late to save the credit of the
Vatican, when he had passed the normal limit of human life, but as the
real founder and leader of nineteenth century Anglo-Catholicism, the
movement which he created and then tried in vain to destroy. The
projects and failures and successes of his later life seem very pale and
almost petty when compared with the activities of the years while he was
making a chapter of English history. His greatest book, though it was
written many years after his secession, is the record of a drama which
ended in the interview with Father Dominic the Passionist. It is 'The
History of my Religious Opinions'; and after 1845 his religious opinions
had, as he says himself, no further history. The incomparable style
which will give him a permanent place among the masters of English prose
was the product of his life at Oxford, where he lived in a society of
highly cultivated men, whose writings show many of the same excellences
as his own. Newman's English is only the Oriel manner at its best. Such
an instrument could hardly have been forged at the Birmingham Oratory,
where his associates, who had followed him from Littlemore, were of such
an inferior type that Mark Pattison, who knew them, was surprised that
he could be satisfied with their company. His best sermons and his best
poetry belong to his Anglican period. 'The Dream of Gerontius,' with all
its tender grace, is far less virile than 'Lead, kindly Light,' and
other short poems of his youth. Moreover, his record as a Roman
ecclesiastic is one of almost unrelieved failure. If he had died
eighteen years after his secession, when he already looked upon himself
as an old man whose course was nearly run, he would have been regarded
as one who had sacrificed a great career in the Church of England for
neglect and obscurity. From the first he was distrusted by the 'Old
Catholics' (the old Roman Catholic families in England), and suspected
at the Vatican, where Talbot assiduously represented him as 'the most
dangerous man in England.' When Manning, Archdeacon of Chichester,
followed his example and joined the Roman Church, Newman was confronted
with a still more subtle and relentless opponent, whose hostility was
never relaxed till the accession of a Liberal Pope made it no longer
possible to resist the bestowal of tardy honours upon a feeble
octogenarian. The recognition came in time to soothe his decline, but
too late to enable him to leave his mark upon the administration of the
Roman Church.

The main events in a very uneventful career are narrated at length in
Mr. Ward's volumes. After his 'conversion' Newman first resided in a
small community at Maryvale (Oscott) but soon left it on a journey to
Rome, where he spent some time at the Collegio di Propaganda, and had a
foretaste of the distrust with which Pius IX and his advisers always
regarded him. His plan at this time was to found a theological seminary
at Maryvale; and in this scheme he had the support of Wiseman, the
ablest Roman ecclesiastic in the United Kingdom. But the 'Essay on
Development,' with its unscholastic language and unfamiliar line of
apologetic, seriously alarmed the theologians at Rome; and Newman,
accepting the first of many rebuffs, abandoned this project in favour of
another. He resolved to join the Oratorians, an order founded by St.
Philip Neri, and obtained permission to modify, in his projected
establishment, the rules of the Order, which, among other things,
prescribed frequent floggings in public. He visited Naples, and came
back a believer in the liquefaction of the saint's blood. The amazing
letter to Henry Wilberforce, writter from Santa Croce, shows that he was
the most docile and credulous of converts. Even the Holy House at Loreto
caused him no difficulty. 'He who floated the ark on the surges of a
world-wide sea, and inclosed in it all living things, who has hidden the
terrestrial paradise, who said that faith might remove mountains ...
could do this wonder also.' It 'may have been'; 'everybody believes it
in Rome'; therefore Newman 'has no doubt'!

The new Oratory was placed by Papal brief at Birmingham. The first
members of it were his friends who had left the English Church with him.
Recruits soon came in, and branch houses were talked of. But for many
years Newman had reason to complain of neglect and want of sympathy. He
even found empty churches when he preached in London. In conjunction
with Faber, he next started a series of 'Lives of the Saints,' in which
the most absurd 'miracles' were accepted without question as true. The
'Old Catholics,' who had no stomach for such food, protested; and
Newman, this time thoroughly irritated, had to admit another failure.
The Oratory, however, and its London offshoot under Faber were
prosperous, and the churches where Newman preached were not long empty.
In 1850 we find him in better spirits. He employed his energies in a
series of clever lectures on 'Anglican Difficulties,' in which he
ridiculed the Church of his earlier vows with all the refined cruelty of
which he was a master. But he was soon in trouble again. One Dr.
Giacinto Achilli, formerly a Dominican friar, gave lectures in London
upon the scandals of the Roman Inquisition, which had imprisoned him for
attacking the Catholic faith and fomenting sedition. The temper of the
British public at this time made it ready to believe anything to the
discredit of the Roman Church, and Achilli became a popular hero.
Wiseman published a libellous article upon him in the _Dublin Review_,
which passed unnoticed. But when Newman repeated the charges of
profligacy in a public lecture, Achilli brought an action for libel,
which in costs and expenses cost Newman L12,000. The money however was
paid, and much more than paid, by his co-religionists. This trial was
quickly followed by the inauguration of a scheme for founding a Catholic
University in Ireland, the avowed object of which was to withdraw young
Catholics from the liberalising influences of mixed education. This
scheme was sure to appeal strongly to Newman. Liberalism had come in
with a rush at Oxford, after the dissipation of the 'long nightmare' (as
Mark Pattison calls it) while the University was dominated by religious
medievalism. The Oxford of Newman had become the Oxford of Jowett. The
ablest of Newman's young friends and disciples, such as Mark Pattison
and J.A. Froude, were now in the opposite camp, full of anger and
disgust at the seductive influences from which they had just escaped.
Newman, as might be expected, was anxious to protect Catholic students
from similar dangers, and accepted the post of Rector of the proposed
Catholic University. He intended it to provide 'philosophical defences
of Catholicity and Revelation, and create a Catholic literature.' The
lectures in which he expounded his ideals at Dublin were a great
success, and he returned to England full of hope. With a curious
inability to read the character of one who was to be his worst enemy, he
offered Manning the post of Vice-Rector. Manning's refusal was followed
by his failure to obtain the support of Ward, Henry Wilberforce, and
others; and Catholic opinion in Ireland was much divided. For three or
four years Newman was engaged in ineffectual efforts to push his scheme
forward. At last, in 1855, he was installed as Rector, and began his
work at Dublin. A fine church was built at St. Stephen's Green with the
surplus of the Achilli subscriptions, and Newman produced some excellent
literary work in the form of University lectures and sermons. But the
whole movement was viewed with distrust by the Irish ecclesiastics, who,
as he said in a moment of impatience, 'regard any intellectual man as
being on the road to perdition.' There was a cloud over his work from
first to last. He had been promised a bishopric, without which he was
made to feel himself in an inferior position by the Irish prelates; but
the promise was not fulfilled. The Irish objected to one or two English
professors on his staff, because they were English. Dr. Cullen, the
ruling spirit in the Irish hierarchy, was a narrow conservative, who
wished to use Newman merely as an instrument against progressive
tendencies in Church and State. In 1857 he resigned an impossible task,
and returned to Birmingham.

New undertakings followed, no more successful than the abortive
university scheme. There was to be a new translation of the Bible, and a
new Catholic magazine called the _Rambler_. The former enterprise was
already well advanced when the general indifference of the Catholic
public caused it to be abandoned. The _Rambler_, the contributors to
which used a freedom of discussion unpalatable to Roman ecclesiastics,
struggled on amid a storm of criticism till 1859, when Newman, who was
then himself editor, resigned, and one more humiliating failure was
registered. The management of the magazine passed into other hands. The
Oratory School at Birmingham, a much less contentious undertaking, was
successfully launched in the same year.

In 1860 came the emancipation of the States of the Church by Cavour and
Victor Emmanuel. Newman referred to the Piedmontese as 'sacrilegious
robbers,' but his advocacy of the temporal power was not strong enough
to please the Vatican, while the strength of Manning's language left
nothing to be desired. Newman became more unpopular than ever. His
reputation suffered by his former connection with the _Rambler_ and his
supposed connection with the _Home and Foreign Review_, which Acton
intended to represent the views of progressive Catholics, till it also
was snuffed out by the hierarchy. The five years from 1859 to 1864 are
considered by Mr. Ward to have been the saddest in Newman's life. He
felt, truly enough, that the dominant party had no sympathy with his
aims, and that he was treated as 'some wild incomprehensible beast, a
spectacle for Dr. Wiseman to exhibit to strangers, as himself being the
hunter who captured it.' 'All through my life I have been plucked,' he
writes to an old Oxford friend. There was even in his mind at this time
a wistful yearning after the friends and the Church that he had left--a
feeling, doubtless transient, but significant, which his biographer has
allowed to show itself in a few pages of his book. After reminding
himself, in his diary, of the warning against those who, after putting
their hand to the plough, 'look back,' he proceeds to look back, because
he cannot help it.

'I live more and more in the past, and in hopes that the
past may revive in the future.... I think, as death comes
on, his cold breath is felt on soul as on body, and that,
viewed naturally, my soul is half dead now, whereas then [in
his Protestant days] it was in the freshness and fervour of
youth.... I say the same of my state of mind from 1834 to
1845, when I became a Catholic. It is a time past and
gone--it relates to a work done and over. "Quis mihi
tribuat, ut sim iuxta menses pristinos, secundum dies,
quibus Deus custodiebat me? Quando splendebat lucerna eius
super caput meum, et ad lumen eius ambulabam in tenebris?"
... I have no friend at Rome; I have laboured in England, to
be misrepresented, backbitten and scorned. I have laboured
in Ireland, with a door ever shut in my face....
Contemporaneously with this neglect on the part of those for
whom I laboured, there has been a drawing towards me on the
part of Protestants. Those very books and labours which
Catholics did not understand, Protestants did. I am under
the temptation of looking out for, if not courting,
Protestant praise.... What I wrote as a Protestant has had
far greater power, force, meaning, success, than my Catholic
works.'

Such reflections might seem to indicate a disposition to return to the
Anglican fold. But a man must have vanquished pride in its most
insidious form before he can leave the Church of Rome for any other. The
aristocratic _hauteur_ of the _civis Romanus_ among barbarians lives on
in the sentiment of the Roman Catholic towards Protestants. When Newman
was publicly charged with intending to return to Anglicanism, this
spirit broke out in a disagreeable and insulting manner.

The bitterness of these five years of neglect, in which he had been
eating his heart in silence, must be remembered in connexion with the
famous Kingsley controversy, which in 1864 roused him to put on his
armour and fight for his reputation. There had always been an element of
combativeness in Newman's disposition. '_Nescio quo pacto_, my spirits
most happily rise at the prospect of danger,' he wrote early in life.
And when he could persuade himself that not only his honour but that of
the Church was at stake, he could feel and show the true Catholic
ferocity, the cruellest spirit on earth. 'A heresiarch,' he had written
even in his Anglican days, 'should meet with no mercy. He must be dealt
with by the competent authority as if he were embodied evil. To spare
him is a false and dangerous pity. It is to endanger the souls of
thousands, and it is uncharitable towards himself'! This was the temper,
soured by defeat and not mellowed by age, which Charles Kingsley in an
evil moment for himself chose wantonly to provoke. At Christmas 1863
there appeared in _Macmillan's Magazine_ a review of Froude's 'History
of England,' in which Kingsley wrote 'Truth for its own sake has never
been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it
need not be, and on the whole ought not to be--that cunning is the
weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the
brute male force of the wicked world.' This charge was in fact based on
a careless reading, or an imperfect recollection, of the twentieth
discourse in 'Sermons on Subjects of the Day.' The discourse in question
is a somewhat nauseous glorification of the servile temper, but it only
says that the meekness of the saints is (by Divine providence) so
successful that it is always mistaken for craft. The _imputation_ of
cunning is therefore a note of sanctity in its victim. Kingsley ought to
have read the sermon again, and withdrawn unreservedly from an untenable
position. But he thought that something less than a complete apology
would serve; and so gave Newman the opportunity of his life. When the
withdrawal which he offered was rejected, Kingsley made matters ten
times worse for himself by an ill-considered pamphlet called 'What then
does Dr. Newman mean?' In this effusion he vents all his scorn and
hatred for Catholicism--for its tortuous tactics, its monstrous
credulity and appetite for miracles, which must proceed, according to
him, either from infantile folly or from deliberate imposture.
Forgetting altogether that he has to defend himself against a specific
charge of slander, he offers his great opponent the choice between
writing himself down a knave or a fool--a knave if he pretends to
believe in the Holy Coat and the blood of St. Januarius, a fool if he
does believe in them.

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