Page:Matthew Arnold, Coates, Century, April 1894.djvu/6

Rh apology of a doubter despairingly seeking shelter from "the devouring flame of thought."

That there is no via media in the service of truth, Newman perfectly realized. "My battle," he wrote, "is with liberalism—scarcely now a party; it is the educated lay world." Naturally for him the appeals of truth sounded fainter, and because of his doubts, and the intolerable burden of them, he fled to Rome, finding rest beneath the ægis of authority.

To most of us there come moments of like spiritual lassitude when, wearied in the conflict, we long for like relief; when, the whole head sick, and the whole heart faint, we would gladly fling ourselves upon the bosom of an infallible Church which should bid us think no more. But such moments we account not our noblest moments, nor do we esteem them periods of faith. In the words of Newman—the Newman of an earlier day—we, too, may say: "Considering the high gifts and strong claims of the Church of Rome, and its dependencies on our admiration, reverence, love, and gratitude, how could we withstand it as we do, how could we refrain from being melted into tenderness and rushing into communion with it, but for the words of truth itself, which bid us prefer it to the whole world? 'He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me!'"

The name of Cardinal Newman has been a great name,— many things besides his own rare gifts conspired to make it so,—but it may safely be assumed that it will be a name less potent in the future. For his faith—a faith in darkness and in ignorance we are obliged to consider it—he battled against the enlightenment of the age, against the spirit of "the educated lay world." He distrusted man's highest endowment, and, in dishonoring reason, dishonored, to quote Bishop Butler, "the only faculty given unto man whereby he can judge of anything." His doctrines are already a kind of anachronism, and many of his pages read like protests from the middle ages. He rejected the ideals of the future, and his ideals will the future reject, remembering him tenderly, yet with compassion, as one whose voice still pleaded in the dawn for the return of a night wholly past. Newman may stand for much that is valuable, for much that is appealing, lofty, spiritual, beautiful, but unless by "faith" we mean the abdication of the throne of intelligence, in a voluntary subordination to visible authority, for faith he may not stand.

"No man can be great," says Emerson, "who is not a nonconformist," and certain it is that in their generation the greatest have been accounted heretics, and as heretics condemned. The doubt of to-day becomes the faith of to-morrow, and "incredulity," as Aristotle tells us, "is the beginning of wisdom."

It is not my purpose to attempt a vindication of the religious opinions and teachings of Matthew Arnold. It is necessary only to state what those teachings and opinions actually were, and to free them from some misconceptions. Upon this subject I speak with less timidity because, moved by what seemed to me the erroneous interpretations placed upon them, some years ago I wrote in full my understanding of what the author of "Literature and Dogma" had in that work intended to convey, and, after reading the statement, Mr. Arnold indorsed it fully.

Says the Persian proverb: To know that we know that which we know, and to know that we do not know that which we do not know—that is true knowledge. Matthew Arnold had a fondness for knowing that which he knew, and he disliked what he termed "men's insane license of affirmation about God"—their way of talking of him as of "a magnified and non-natural man in the next street." Holding with Bishop Butler that "religion after all is nothing if it is not true," he believed that our faith should at least rest upon foundations which are verifiable; and for these foundations he looked within, finding in the sense of right and wrong in man—in the Ought, the mysterious Thou shalt, which we name the voice of duty—what seemed to him irrefutable evidence of an enduring power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness! In other words, he believed that we may verify God, may assure ourselves as to the Eternal who cares for, and who demands of us, righteousness.

The Bible was dear to him as it is dear to few, and his knowledge of the Bible was so exceptional as to be, among laymen, well nigh unique. He recommended men to read it, not as a miraculous and talismanic book, but as the best account of the spiritual life of that people who, of all the peoples of the earth, had the greatest genius for conduct—the clearest intuitions concerning the Eternal who loveth righteousness. Conduct he estimated as three fourths of life, and he held with the prophet Micah, that "To do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly" is to fulfil the requirement of the Eternal. ''O ye that love the Eternal, see that ye hate the thing which is evil! To him that ordereth his conversation right shall be shown the salvation of God!''

Religion he defined, not as the acceptance or rejection of dogmas, but as "a temper and a behavior," and he urged men to the Bible that they might win from its teachings something of the secret and the method of Christ, something of the mildness and sweet reasonableness of Jesus; that, through its influence, they might come to believe that "the path of the just is as a shining light," that "the gentle shall inherit the earth," that "the pure in heart shall see God."

I once repeated to him some lines of Clough's