Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 40.djvu/354

 then, in the words of his last Anglican sermon, ‘The Parting of Friends,’ ‘he passed over that Jordan and set out upon his dreary way. He parted with all that his heart loved, and turned his face to a strange land.’ Newman's main contribution to religious controversy has been to present with all the power of his great dialectical skill, with all the winningness of his noble personality, with all the majesty of his regal English, the thesis illustrated by his life—that the communion of Rome alone satisfies the conception of the church as a divine kingdom in the world. He was far too clear-sighted not to discern, and far too candid not to allow, the difficulties which the claims of the papacy present. Still his conclusion was: ‘There is no help for it; we must either give up the belief in the church as a divine institution altogether, or we must recognise it in that communion of which the pope is the head; we must take things as they are; to believe in a church is to believe in the pope.’ And a church seemed to him in the system of revelation what conscience is in the system of nature. It is sometimes said that Newman's defence of his own creed was confined to the proposition that it is the only possible alternative to atheism. So to state his teaching is to caricature it. Starting from the being of God, a truth impressed upon him irresistibly by the voice of conscience, he holds it urgently probable that a revelation has been given. And if a revelation has been given, he considers that it must be sought in Christianity, of which he regards catholicism as the only form historically or philosophically tenable. His conclusion is: ‘Either the catholic religion is verily and indeed the coming of the unseen world into this, or there is nothing positive, nothing dogmatic, nothing real in any of our notions as to whence we come or whither we go.’

This is, in substance, the argument which Newman opposed to ‘liberalism in religion.’ So far as the fundamental ideas of his theological and philosophical creed are concerned, he changed very little during his long life. No doubt the key to his mind is to be found in the school of Alexandria, by which he was so strongly influenced at the beginning of his career. Origen and Clement never lost their hold upon him. Even with regard to a distinctively anti-catholic doctrine, which he imbibed very early in life, he varied much less than is commonly supposed. For many years antichrist was for him the pope. When he gave up this interpretation it was to substitute for it the spirit of the world working in the church for temporal ends. As he expressed it in writing to a friend in 1876, ‘The church is in the world and the world in the church and the world “totus in maligno positus est.” This is true in all ages and places.’ He never, from first to last, varied from the conviction, maintained in one of his ‘Sermons on Subjects of the Day,’ that ‘the strength of the church lies not in earthly law, or human countenance, or civil station, but in her proper gifts—in those great gifts which our Lord pronounced to be beatitudes.’ His attitude to modern thought was by no means hostile. It may be truly said of him, as of another, that he sincerely loved light, and preferred it to any private darkness of his own. Thus, early in his Anglican days, he was led to hold freer views of inspiration than were common among his friends. Although the higher Teutonic criticism was never specially studied by him—he was no German scholar—he became increasingly conscious, as years went on, of the untenableness of much of the biblical exegesis commonly taught. His last publication was an essay in the ‘Nineteenth Century’ of February 1884, in which he treats of this theme with the extreme caution demanded by its delicacy, but distinctly lays down the pregnant principle: ‘The titles of the canonical books, and their ascription to definite authors, either do not come under their inspiration, or need not be accepted literally;’ ‘nor does it matter whether one or two Isaiahs wrote the book which bears that prophet's name. The church, without settling this point, pronounces it inspired in respect of faith and morals, both Isaiahs being inspired, and if this be assured to us, all other questions are irrelevant and unnecessary.’ Again, in one of his earliest publications—his ‘History of the Arians’—he enunciated the broad proposition: ‘There is something true and divinely revealed in every religion. Revelation, properly speaking, is an universal, not a local gift;’ and in a private letter of 1882 he states that he holds this in substance as strongly as he did when it was written, fifty years before. Once more, his adoption of the theory of evolution in his essay on ‘Development’ is extremely significant. The abandonment of the old notion that Christianity issued as a complete dogmatic system from its first preachers, the admission that its creed grew by a gradual process, assimilating elements from all sides, is an immense concession to the method of scientific history. Lastly, the doctrine of the indefeasible supremacy of conscience found in him the most eloquent and most unwearied preacher. He is at one with Kant, whom up to 1884 he had never read, in regarding the categorical imperative of duty as the surest foundation