CHAP. II.] THE FOUNDER OF TRACTARIANISM. 49 the greater part of them, to give his own account, growing out of that religious movement which he followed so faithfully from first to last. And, further, we have his present criticism upon his former self, his ultimate judgments upon his early views, in the prefaces and notes with which he has enriched the new editions of his old works. Thus we possess in his volumes not only the story of his life, but, in some degree, his comment thereon. Ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim Credebat libris, neque si male cesserat unquam Vita senis. Cardinal Newman's life runs with the century. It is to the age of Pitt and Fox, of Napoleon and Pius VII., of Scott and Byron, of Coleridge and Kant, that we must go back to survey the moral, political, and religious surroundings of his early years-surroundings which largely influence every man, and the more largely in proportion to the receptivity and retentiveness of his intellectual constitution. To form some apprehension of the spiritual element in which Cardinal Newman lived and moved during the time when his character was matured and his first principles were formed, is a 1 Dedication to Mr. Badeley of Verses upon Various Occasions, P. vii. E necessary condition precedent to any true understanding of what he is and of what he has wrought. Let us therefore glance at the condition of English religious thought at that period. Perhaps it is not too much to say that never, during its course of well-nigh two thousand years in the world, has Christianity presented less of the character of a spiritual religion than during the last half of the eighteenth century. Not in England only, but throughout Europe, the general aim of its accredited teachers seems to have been to explain away its mysteries, to extenuate its supernatural character, to reduce it to a system of ethics little differing from the doctrines of Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius. Religious dogmas were almost openly admitted to be nonsense. Religious emotion was openly stigmatized as enthusiasm. Theology, from being "the science of things divine," had sunk into apologies, opposing, too often, weak answers to strong objections, and into evidences, endeavouring, for the most part with the smallest result, to establish the existence of a vague possible Deity. Even the sanctions of morality were sought in the lowest instincts of human nature, the reason for doing good assigned in the received text-books of philosophy being, in effect, "that God is stronger than we are, and able to damn us if we do not." The prevailing religion of the day may be accurately judged of from the most widely popular of its homiletic works, those thrice-famous sermons of CHAP. II.] CARDINAL NEWMAN'S EARLY DAYS. 51 Blair's, which were at one time to be found in wellnigh every family of the upper and middle classes of this country, and which may still be discovered in the remoter shelves of the libraries in most country-houses. No one can look into these discourses without admitting the truth of Mr. Leslie Stephen's trenchant criticism that "they represent the last stage of theological decay." For unction there is mere mouthing; for the solid common sense of earlier writers, an infinite capacity for repeating the feeblest platitudes; the morality can scarcely be dignified by the name of prudential, unless all prudence be summed up in the command, "Be respectable"; the pages are full of solemn trifling-prosings about adversity and prosperity, eulogies upon the most excellent of virtues, Moderation, and proofs that religion is, upon the whole, productive of pleasure. As Mr. Mill accurately sums the matter up-"The age seemed smitten with an incapacity of producing deep or strong feeling, such at least as could ally itself with meditative habits. There were few poets, and none of a high order; and philosophy had fallen into the hands of men of a dry prosaic nature, who had not enough of the materials of human feeling in them to imagine any of its more complex and mysterious manifestations; all of which they either left out of 1 English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. ii. p. 346. The remarks in my following sentence are an abridgment of au admirable page-the next-of Mr. Stephen's book. their theories, or introduced them with such explanations as no one who had experienced the feelings could receive as adequate." 1 Such was the dominant school of English thought about the time when Cardinal Newman was born. But beside it there was another which exercised a strong influence over a not inconsiderable number of adherents, and which potently affected the growth of his character and the formation of his opinions. Among the figures conspicuous in the history of England in the last century, there is perhaps none more worthy of careful study than John Wesley. Make all deductions you please for his narrowness, his self-conceit, his extravagance, and still it remains that no one so nearly approaches the fulness of stature of the great heroes of Christian spiritualism in the early and middle ages. He had more in common with St. Boniface and St. Bernardine of Sienna, with St. Vincent Ferrer, and Savonarola, than any teacher whom Protestantism has ever produced. Nor is the rise of the religious body commonly known by his name-the "people called Methodists" was his way of designating his followers-by any means the most important of the results of his life and labours. It is not too much to say that he, and those whom he formed and influenced, chiefly kept alive in England the idea of a supernatural order during the dull materialism and selfish coldness of the eighteenth century. To 1 Discussions and Dissertations, vol. i. p. 430. CHAP. II.] THE EVANGELICAL SCHOOL. 53 him the rise of the Evangelical party in the National Church is undoubtedly due. Romaine and Newton, Venn and Jowett, Milner and Simeon, differing as they did from him on particular doctrines, derived from him that fundamental tenet of religious conversion which they termed "the new birth." It is easy now, as it ever was, to ridicule the grotesque phraseology of these teachers, to make merry over their sour superstitions, their ignorant fanaticism, to detect and pillory their intellectual littleness. It is not easy to estimate adequately the work which they did by reviving the idea of Grace in the Established Church. They were not theologians, they were not philosophers, they were not scholars. Possibly only two of them, Cecil and Scott, can be said to rise above a very low level of mental mediocrity. But they were men who felt the powers of the world to come in an age when that world had become to most little more than an unmeaning phrase; who spoke of a God to pray to, in a generation which knew chiefly of one to swear by; who made full proof of their ministry by signs and wonders parallel to those of the prophetic vision. It was in truth a valley of dry bones in which the Evangelical clergyman of the opening nineteenth century was set; and as he prophesied there was a noise, and behold, a shaking, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army. |