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PHIL OMTTHUS
An Antidote against Credulity
A Discussion of Cardinal JVewman s Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles
KY
EDWIN A. ABBOTT ^O^
"^ How long will ye love vanity and seek after falsehood r . . . Stand in awe and sin not "
Psalm iv. 2
11 0 n ti 0 n
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK 189I
The Right of Tratislation and Reproduction is Reserved
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PREFACE
The great need of the coming age appears to be a faith that shall be at once deep, honest, morally helpful, not tremulous, and not foolish. Faith in an indisputable God must be detached from faith about disputable incidents. We must learn to distinguish between knowledge of material facts, and confidence in spiritual realities ; and to combine a resolute trust in Righteousness with a resolute distrust in all history (whether of things animate or inanimate) that is not commended to us by appropriate evidence.
No timorous soul can draw this distinction or effect this combination. He who is always quoting to us, " Stand in awe and sin not," against the " sin " of rejecting what " may possibly " be true, and never quotes it against the " sin " of accepting what is in all probability untrue, is not a safe guide for himself; still less, for others. Caesar's craven lieutenant, who mistook some bushes for the Hel- vetian enemy and spoilt the great general's well-laid plans by " reporting, for seen, what he had not seen ", is but a type of many a superstitious " Philomythus " who, in
VI
PREFACE
his pusillanimous eagerness to believe what is " safe," has " reported for seen, what he has not seen ", and has led astray whole battalions in the army of God.
Abstract denunciation of this theological timidity appeared to the author likely to be less effective than a concrete ex- hibition of the results to w-hich a keen-witted, pure-hearted, and sincerely pious man may commit himself, by giving way to this safety-seeking spirit in what ought to be dispassionate historical investigation. The better the man, the more conspicuous the warning to be derived from his errors. For this reason, Cardinal Newman's Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles has been selected as the subject for a discussion, intended to suggest an antidote against that kind of un- consciously dishonest and conveniently credulous Assent which springs from a misplaced application of Faith to historical facts.
Braeside, Willow Road
Hampstead, N.W.
March 25, 1891
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PAGE
§ I. The Nature of the Proposed Discussion i
§ 2. Newtnaii!s Treatment of Facts 3
§ 3. The Argument from the Three Classes of Ecclesiastical
Miracles .8
§4. The Argument from Potentiality 14
§5. The Device of Indefinite Adjourntnent 21
§ 6. Distinction between the Theory and the Theorist .... 35
CHAPTER I
IS PROBABILITY "THE GUIDE OF LIFE"?
§ 7. Probability 48
§8. Is Faith based on Probability ? 52
CHAPTER II
Newman's doctrine of probability and f^ith
9. Keble^ s Doctrine of Faith 57
§ 10. What is Faith 1 60
viii CONTENTS
I'Af.K
§11. What is Christian Faith? 63
5; 1 2. NcwmaiUs Inclined Plane of Probabilities 74
§ 1 3. Ho-M to attain Religious Certitude 80
CHAPTER III
LEGAL PROOFS
§14. What is '' Legal Proof " ? 86
§15. Is Evidence '' the Test of Truth" ? 89
§ 16. Belief '' on Authority" , 94
CHAPTER IV
THE DOCTRINE OF PROBABILITY APPLIED TO MIRACLES
§17. Newinatis Doctrine of the " First Principle" loi
§18. Detailed Incongruities of the Doctrine 106
§19. The Statistical Probability of an alleged Miracle .... 108
§20. Rhetorical charge against Protestants II3
§21. Did Impostures '' abound" in the Apostolic Church ? . . II 5
CHAPTER V
"WHAT IS THE HARM OF THIS?"
§ 22. "A Church without Miracles is a Reign without the
Alonarch " 123
§ 23. Newman's Stahdard of Credulity 1 29
§24. The Six '■'■ Harms" 132
§25 § 26 §27
§28,
§29
§30 §31 §32 §33
§34 §35
CONTENTS IK
CHAPTER VI
PAOE THE on. OF ST. WALBURGA I4O
CHAPTER VU
Newman's inquiry into particular miraci.es
Why are they not all of '■^ an historical cJiaracter" 1 . . . 150
The Thundering Legion 152
Change of Water into Oil by St. Narcissus 157
Change of the Course of the Lycits by St. Gregory .... 160
Appearance of the Cross to Constantine 165
St. Helena! s Discovejy of the Holy Cross 1 70
Further Details of the alleged Discog)ery 175
The Death of Arius 182
The fiery Eruption on Juliati's attempt to rebuild the
Temple 185
Recovery of the Blind Man at Alilati 190
The Power of Speech continued to the African Confessojs
deprived of their Tongues 196
CHAPTER VHI
A GRAMMAR OK ECCLESIASTICAL ASSENT I98
CHAPTER IX
AN ART OF ECCLESIASTICAL RHETORIC
§36. The Art of Lubrication 211
§37. A Specimen of self-deceptive Lubrication 215
§ 38. The Art of Oscillation • 220
§39. The Art of Assimilation ; or, Dj-awing Parallels . . 227
X CONTENTS
CHAPTER X
TWO spp:cimens of ecclesiastical composition
PAGE
§ 40. An Exhortation to Pious Belief 242
§ 41. The Proof of the Assumption of the Mother of our Lord , 249
APPENDIX the two editions of Newman's essay 253
PHILOMTTHUS
INTRODUCTION § I. The Nature of the Proposed Discussion
It is an invidious thing, in ordinary circumstances, to attack the opinions of an eminent man recently dead, and justly and widely admired. But as the late Cardinal New- man was himself no ordinary man, so the circumstances now tending to the diffusion of his opinions are of no ordinary kind. The Master of Balliol tells us that on the last occasion when he saw Mr. Ward (one of Newman's foremost allies in the Tractarian movement, who joined the Church of Rome in 1845), he asked him "whether he thought there was any hope of a great Catholic revival, and in what way it was to be effected. The answer was curious. He said ' Yes ! ' and he thought that the change would be brought about (i) by a great outpouring of miraculous power in many parts of the world ; (2) by the rise of a new Catholic philosophy, for which portions of Cardinal Newman's Grajnt/iar of Assent would form a fitting basis." ^
This prophecy, made apparently about thirteen years ago might remain on record as merely " curious ; " and an isolated
1 Life of Ward, by Mr, Wilfrid Ward, p. 439.
B
2 INTRODUCTION
incident of this kind would not have much weight against what, I beheve, has been the prevaiHng opinion in Eng- land— that the principal value of the Grammar of Assent consists in its psychological interest and its bearing upon the complex character of its author. But a Romanist prelate, not many months ago, held up to admiration the Gra7Jimar of Assefit as a work whose logical character would henceforth prevent any one from even entertaining the supposition that conversion from Anglicanism to Romanism implied weakness of understanding in the con- verted ; and Mr. Wilfrid Ward has recently expressed his opinion that " the theory of faith which slowly shaped itself in the Tracts and Parochial Sermons, which was more exclusively (? extensively) developed in the Oxford University Sermons, and which was yet further amplified and elaborated in the Grammar of Assent (published* in 1870) lives and will ever live as a permanent contribution to the philosophy of religious belief" Lastly, all English- speaking people have been invited to contribute to a testi- monial to Cardinal Newman ; and, among the objects of this effort, one, recently announced (though, I believe, more recently dropped) was to be the encouragement of the study of his works, and, these, it is to be presumed, principally, if not entirely, his religious works, or those bearing on religious questions.
Since, then, certain people are speaking their minds in this very plain way, and saying "Cardinal Newman's religious works ought to be generally read," it seems only fair, and nothing more than a kind of self-defence, that those who think some, at all events, of his works to be hurtful in their bearing upon religion, should say with equal plainness, " Some, at least, of Cardinal Newman's works ought tiot to be generally read," and should give their reasons for thinking
INTRODUCTION 3
so. One can say this, and give one's reasons for it, with- out in any way impugning the sincerity, or denying the fascinating gracefulness, of the Cardinal's character.
§ 2. Newma7t^s Treatment of Facts
I do not intend, in the following pages, to deal much with abstract questions ; but rather to show that Newman's methods of reasoning, whatever they may be in theory, do not work in practice. Taking the Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles as a practical exemplification of the results which follow from the adoption of some of Newman's most characteristic dicta, such as(i77)\ "A fact is not disproved because it is not proved," and (171) "A fact is not disproved because the testimony is confused and insufficient," and (179) "How does insufficiency in the evidence create a positive pre- judice against an alleged fact ? How can things depend on our knowledge of them? " and (231) "As if evidence were the test of truth ! " — statements which appear to Mr. R. H. Hutton 2 so very true as to be truisms, and to Professor Huxley so very false as to be almost insolent — I shall try to show that they are indeed true, so very true that they would be scarcely deserving of deliberate examination, if they were not almost always used by Newman in such a context as to suggest, a little later on, some other and quite differe^it statemefit which, besides being not a truism, is also not true.
In dealing with practical applications of Newman's theory, we are, comparatively at all events, on safe and solid ground. And one need be on very solid ground in criticizing New-
^ Bracketed numbers refer to the pages in the Essay on Miracles, ed. 1890.
- Cardinal Newman, by Mr. R. H, Hutton, p. 60.
B 2
4 INTRODUCTION
man's statements. Transparently clear in appearance, his general propositions abound in reservations, qualifications, peculiar usages of words — pitfalls, masked batteries, line after line of concealed entrenchments on which he can fall back in case of a retreat ; and, if you attack a general statement of his, you can never feel sure, at the last, that he will not explode both his assailant and himself, by blowing his own proposition to pieces and proving that it never had any meaning at all. What ordinary Englishman, for instance, could say (259) that "we have no doiibt about" a narrative — the narrative being a story that a Bishop changed water into oil by his prayers — and yet that " we cannot bring our- selves to say positively that we believe it " ? There is a meaning in this. It is not nonsense. But what cafe and toil are needed to extract from this and similar apparently lucid nonsense the obscure and latent sense ! ^
It is only, therefore, in dealing with facts that we can catch our Proteus in a net from which he cannot extricate himself. If, for example, you can show that, while he bitterly accuses Kingsley^ of ignoring the words "it is said" " it is reported" (in one of the lives of the Saints) as indicating the legendary character of the story containing these expressions, Newman himself repeatedly ignores the same words in quoting Eusebius"^ — this is an undeniable
1 '< We have no doubt about it, yet we cannot bring ourselves to say positively that we believe it, because belief implies an habitual presence and abidance of the matter believed in our thoughts, and a familiar acquaintance with the ideas it involves." I cannot understand this, as applied to "belief" in the truth oi facts.
- Apologia, 1st ed. p. 38, "Now will it be believed that this writer suppresses the fact that the miracles of St. Walbiirga are treated by the author of her life as mythical ? " and see ib. p. 40 as to the omission of the words " was told and believed," '■^ says her history," &c.
^ For example (242), "another sight still more strange happened,"
INTRODUCTION 5
instance of culpable neglect ; and it is rather less excusable in Newman, not writing in controversial haste. Again, in one of the passages above quoted from Eusebius, that historian himself quotes tivo other authons, but adds, at the end of the narrative of some disputed legend, this distinct warning, " But on this, matter let each of juy readers form his otvn conclusion.'" Now Newman first (242) oinits these words of warning, and then goes on to make Eusebius (251) " attest" where he has distinctly decliiied to ^'■attest " any- thing at all. Surely, in the face of such derelictions as these, you are safe in saying at once, "This is too bad, even in a man with a strong bias, and would be inexcusable in a thorough scholar, however biassed." If further, you find him devoting a score of pages (348-368) to a particular " Inquiry " into an alleged miraculous cure of blindness, and not giving a single reference to any of the authorities for the miracle — what scholar can blame you for saying, " This betokens a gross contempt for facts, and an absence of all expectation that his readers will seriously inquire for themselves with his 'inquiry' to help them"? If, again, you find him trying to prove the miraculous
ought to have been, " it is reported that, or, the story goes that (\6-yos «Xf ') another sight . . . happened " ; and on the very same page, translating, in inverted commas, TertulHan's testimony to the existence of a letter of Marcus Aurelius, he omits words (see below, p. 153) which show that Tertullian really knrdu of tio such letter, and that it was a mere guess, or, as Bishop Lightfoot calls it, a " /irtsan/ of Tertullian." Again (255-6) Newman relates two stories from a single section of Eusebius, the former essentially miraculous, the latter not. Tht former, Eusebius introduces with " they say that" {(piffi), which is maintained throughout ; the latter he relates, in the indicative, on his own re- sponsibility, as difact. But Newman, though he adds afterwards (258) that " Eusebius notices rather pointedly that it was the tradition of the Church," ignores the marked distinction made by the historian between the miraculous and the tion- miraculous parts of the tradition.
6 INTRODUCTION
efficacy of a certain oil that flows from the bones of St. Walburga by "a chain of evidence," and neglecting to obtain evidence (which he might have procured in a week by a letter to the bishop of the diocese in which St Walburga's monastery is situated) as to the efficacy of the oil during the last two hundred and fifty years, who again can blame you for declaring that this would be most culpable laziness, if it did not proceed from a contempt for that very evidence which he professes to be fabricating into a "chain"? Lastly, if he introduces you to a grand miracle entitled " The Change of the Course of the Lycus " ; then introduces you to a new description of it as the " Restraint of the Course of the Lycus," that is to say, in plain English, " The Keeping of the Lycus in its Original Course " — an act that might have been effected by natural means ; — then lays stress upon this miracle as being (267) "verified" by a "monument set up at the time," and by an "observance"; and then informs you that the " monument set up at the time " was a " tree," and that this tree had once been the Saint's staff, but had mira- culously been changed to a tree, and that the " observance " was the conversion of the people in consequence ; then — what are you not justified in saying ? Indeed, you hardly know what to say, consistent with the desire to say nothing unkind against one who in the supposed interests of religion can honestly make so great a sacrifice of the faculties with which God has endowed him for the attain- ment of truth.
As I proceed, I feel more and more the great difficulty of my task. My object is to prove that Newman's logical principles tend to make ordinary people superstitious, credulous, and lazy ; superstitious, because, instead of looking God's facts in the face, and seeking to know
INTRODUCTION 7
them through the faculties which He has given them, men under these fettering principles are constantly tempted to crouch before Him and say, " VVe will believe anything to have happened or not to have happened. Only do Thou tell us by some special sign, some conspicuous authority, what Thou wouldst have us believe ; " credulous, because in such a frame of mind as this, to believe any lying legend that " may possibly be telling of Him " seems safer than to reject it ; lazy, because this miracle-mongering mood dis- poses men to expect that the truth about facts should be itself conveyed to them by means little short of miraculous, without any painful effort on their part to use their minds and understanding. But in proving this I am beset with difficulties. An ordinary Englishman enjoys Newman's easy-flowing style ; has not time to penetrate its fallacies, still less to verify his references or examine the context of his quotations ; and cannot bring himself easily to believe that a theologian of such established reputation is not only radically inaccurate about facts, but also supremely and contemptuously indifferent to facts, as a basis for belief in an alleged miracle. This therefore I must endeavour to show.
But, before going further, a short extract may be of use in preparing the reader for the kmd of miracles which Newman once (1826) rejected, but, under the influence of his later theory, is prepared to defend. In his earlier Essay on Miracles (1826), he enumerated, as being " unworthy of an All-wise Author " the following portents (29) : " that of the consecrated bread changing into a live coal in the hands of a woman who came to the Lord's Supper after offering in- cense to an idol ; of the dove issuing from the body of Polycarp at his martyrdom ; of the petrifaction of a fowl dressed by a person under a vow of abstinence ; of the
8 INTRODUCTION
exorcism of a demoniac camel ; of the stones shedding tears at the barbarity of the persecutions ; of inundations rising up to the roofs of churches without entering the open doors ; and of pieces of gold, as fresh from the mint, dropt from heaven into the laps of the Italian monks."
But in the present edition of that Essay, the following foot- note is added at the end of the extract, ^'[Fide, however Essay ii., infra, n. 48 — 50, 54, 58, &€.]" Turning to these passages in the second Essay, we find it argued that there is in Nature a principle of (150) deformity and of the ludicrous ; that (151) "there is far greater difference between the appearance of a horse or an eagle and a monkey, or a lion and a mouse, as they meet our eye, than between even the most august of the Divine manifestations in Scripture and the meanest and most fanciful of those legends which we are accustomed without further examination to cast aside ; " and thus, we are invited to infer that (152) " it may be as shallow a philosophy to reject them," e.g. the petrifaction of a fowl by a special suspension of the Laws of Nature by the Almighty, " as to judge of universal nature by the standard of our own home." To such results is Newman led by his assumption that Miracles are (97) the " characteristic of sacred History " and that to treat the history of the post-apostolic Church without taking Miracles into account would be (981) "to profess to write the annals of a reign, yet to be silent about the monarch."
3. The Argtiment from the Three Classes of Ecclesiastical
Miracles
Now let us consider Newman's method of inquiring, and of preparing us for the inquiry, into Ecclesiastical Miracles. Early in his Essay he draws a very marked distinction be-
INTRODUCTION 9
tween Scriptural and (99) " Ecclesiastical Miracles, that is, Miracles posterior to the Apostolic age," which are " on the whole, different^ in object, character, and evidence, from those of Scripture on the whole, so that the one series, or family, ought never to be confounded with the other J'' The Scriptural Miracles (11 5-6) are generally public; they are evidences of a Divine revelation, and (220) not tentative ; they are (116) wrought for a definite object by persons con- scious of a Divine guidance ; they are grave, simple, and majestic, (117) compactly and authentically narrated. Ec- clesiastical Miracles, on the other hand, are often (116) of a romantic character, wild and unequal, (220) frequently tentative and private, spiritual accomplishments, so to speak, (221) of individuals 5 often (116) scarcely more than ex- traordinary accidents or coincidences; supported by (116) exaggerated evidence (117) or by mere floating rumours, popular traditions, vague, various, inconsistent in detail ; (116) "they have sometimes no discoverable or direct object, or but a slight object ; they happen for the sake of individ- uals, and of those who are already Christians, or {or purposes already effected, as far as we can judge, by the miracles of Scripture."
Startled by these candid admissions, we ask what ground there is for thinking that these inadequately proved and often purposeless portents actually occurred ; and we find an argument alleged as a "first principle." It is this {Apol. ist ed. Append. 49): "What God did once. He is likely to do again." In other words, " Because God is supposed to have suspended the Laws of Nature once for a definite purpose, and in certain ways, (' grave,' ' simple,'
1 The edition of 1843 has " 57f;7 different." Here, and elsewhere (unless specially excepted), italicized words in quotations are italicized by the present writer, not by Newman.
ro INTRODUCTION
' majestic '), therefore it is a likely supposition that He has repeatedly suspended, is suspending, and will suspend, the Laws of Nature, in quite differe7it ways {not " grave," not ' simple,' and not ' majestic ') for quite different purposes, and often, so far as we can judge, /<?;' no purpose at ally
Wildly absurd though this may appear, it is really Newman's ;««'/« argument. In comparison with this "first principle " of the Antecedent Probability of Ecclesiastical Miracles, he tells us plainly that mere facts and evidence are of very little account (190) : "in drawing out the argu- ment on behalf of ecclesiastical miracles, the main point to which attefition must be paid is the proof of their atitecedent probability. If that is established, the task is 7iearly accom- plished:'
With Antecedent Probability, however, we shall deal more fully hereafter. What claims our present attention, is another, though subordinate, argument, viz., that we ought to look favourably on a great number of these doubtful or moderately probable Ecclesiastical Miracles, because some at least can be proved to be certainly true. Accordingly he tells us (134) that in his review of the miracles belonging to the early Church, " It will be right to include certain isolated ones which have aji historical character, and are accordingly more celebrated than the rest " ; and he proceeds to enumer- ate seven, beginning with the well-known story of the Thunder- ing Legion, and ending with that of the African Confessors who spoke after their tongues had been cut out. He then adds (135) : " These, and other such, shall be considered separately before I conclude ; " and he concludes his Essay by an inquiry (241-387) into the evidence and character of these seven miracles (adding two others that can hardly be described as having " a historical character," viz., the Change of the Course of the Lycus, by Gregory
INTRODUCTION ii
Thaumaturgus, and the Change of Water to Oil, by Narcissus). The Inquiry is preceded by a brief Introduc- tion (228-240) on the "Evidence for Particular Miracles." In this, he admits (229) that some ecclesiastical miracles are certainly false ; but then he urges that some are certainly true ; and he says that, as regards a great number of ecclesiastical miracles that are neither certainly true nor certainly false, the reader, while prejudiced against them by the false miracles, ought to be prejudiced for them by the true ones.
This is fair enough, so far — if true. But the reader must carefully observe that there is no question here of Scrip- tural Miracles. The whole argument turns upon this, that the miracles under discussion are (229) "of the same family,'" i.e., Ecclesiastical. His thesis is, that the multitude of " neither certainly true nor certainly false " Ecclesiastical miracles ought to be regarded favourably because (besides other reasons) some " of the sa7?te faftiily " are certainly true ; and that they ought not to be at once rejected because others " of the sarne family " are certainly false. Here is the whole passage.
After stating in the previous section that he intends to examine particular miracles, Newman begins the next section thus (229) : —
"An inquirer, then, should not enter upon the subject of the miracles reported or alleged in ecclesiastical history, without being prepared for fiction and exaggeration in the narrative to an indefinite extent. This cannot be insisted on too often ; nothing but the gift of inspiration could have hindered it. Nay, he must not expect that more than a few {^Ecclesiastical miracIeslcdinhQ exhibited with evidence of so cogent and complete a character as to demand his ac- ceptance ; while a great number of them [i.e. Ecclesiastical
12 INTRODUCTION
viirades\ as far as the evidence goes \i.e. apart from Antecedent Probability, which, to Newmafi, seems (190, quoted above, p. 10) '■^ the main poi?it"'\ are neither certainly true nor certainly false, but have very various degrees of probability viewed one with another ; all of them [i.e. the middle class of Ecclesiastical miracles'\ recommended to his devout attention by the circumstance that others of the same fatnily [/.<?. (99) miracles not of t/ie Scriptural '■^family " but of the Ecclesiastical '■'■faftiily"'] have been proved to be true, and all [i.e. the middle class of Ecclesiastical miracles^ prejudiced by his knowledge that so many others [i.e. '■'■so many other Ecclesiastical ?niracles " ] on the contrary are certainly not true."
Does not this passage clearly show that, in the selection of his few " particular " miracles, Newman was bound — if he had the slightest respect for evidence — to take the greatest care to select those for which he can produce the fullest and strongest evidence ? Upon the proof of this select " few " depends his power to " recommend " a great number of others to his reader's "devout attention" — so he has him- self told us. He has also warned his readers that "not more than a few can be exhibited with evidence of so cogent and complete a character as to demand his accept- ance." Then surely we are justified in inferring that, of these precious "few," none will be omitted. Or, if the "few" are too many for his pages and for the special inquiry which he proposes to devote to them, then at least we may expect that the evidence for those very few which he is forced by his excess of material to select from the "few," shall be not only "cogent" but "most cogent," not only "complete" but " absolutely complete."
Again, suppose for a moment that one of his very few " historical " miracles should fail him, or at least so far fail
INTRODUCTION 13
him as not to be available for controversial purposes, and that he himself should be obliged to admit this ; suppose the discovery of some natural phenomena coming to light, say in i860, should show that the very miracle for which the most "cogent and complete " evidence had apparently been produced in his essay of 1843, must henceforth be regarded as disabled from " recommending " the vast multi- tude of doubtful ecclesiastical miracles to the "devout attention " of his readers ; and suppose that Newman himself should candidly make this admission and publish it, say, in 1865 — should we not infer that, before pubHshing a new edition of the Essay ofi Miracles in 1870, he would substitute for the disabled miracle — upon which so very much depended for his "devout" readers — one of the other few or very few miracles for which he had space to produce his " cogent and complete " evidence ? If he should not do so, there would be the less excuse for such neglect, because we happen to know that he had at hand in 1864 another "historical" miracle, not included in the Nine — a miracle that is notorious among Protestants and Romanists alike, for which Newman tells us the evidence appeared to him irresistible. "I think it," he says {Apologia, ist ed., p. 57), " impossible to withstatid the evidefice which is brought for the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius at Naples." ^ I shall presently show that the above-mentioned suppositions are verified, but that our inference as to what would be the consequence is not verified. One of the Nine great Miracles — and by far the most important in the estimation of any
1 "Putting out of the question the hypothesis of unknown laws of nature (which is an evasion from the force of any proof), I think it im- possible to withstand the evidence which is brought for the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius at Naples, and for the motion of the eyes of the pictures of the Madonna in the Roman States."
14 INTRODUCTION
good judge ; one, at least, on which Newman himself justly lays the greatest stress, because of (381) its " complete- ness," (382) "the opportunity of testimony," (384) "its entireness," (385) its "permanence," (380) the "variety, consistency, and unity " of the testimony," and that too " from eye-witnesses of the miracle " — will be found to be given up ; but neither in the edition of 1870 nor in that of 1890 is any substitute provided.
Were we dealing ^ith ordinary men, we should be almost compelled to attribute such conduct as this to tergiversation. But against Newman it is impossible not only to substantiate such a charge, but even to imagine that it could be brought by any rational being acquainted with his character. It is simply a contempt for facts — a contempt so great that he might, without much exaggeration, be said almost to prefer to believe in a miracle that is unsupported, rather than in one that is supported, by a basis of facts ; and he hardly conceals his contempt for the Protestant reader who cannot help asking for evidence.
§ 4. The Argument from Potetitiality
Hence arises the great danger of Newman's position. It is this, that, though he is dealing with facts, and is tempted to alter and suppress inconvenient facts, he can yet place himself beyond the appeal to facts — so far as concerns their miraculousness. As to some of the faults mentioned above, grave though they are, there might be nevertheless some hope. A man who has been guilty merely of omissions, neglects, or misconceptions, you might possibly hope to convince of his errors. But the fatal characteristic of Newman's position is that, even when he has made all these admissions, he can still fall back upon a
INTRODUCTION 15
reserve which is absolutely impregnable to the attacks of common sense. Newman was in no sense a student ; but still he had the literary faculty, and you could certainly have induced him to confess that he was wrong in mis- quoting Eusebius, in misdescribing the so-called Change of the Course of the Lycus, and in not giving his authorities for the miraculous cure of blindness at Milan ; possibly you might even have shown him that from a constant repetition of his theoretical assertion (180), "The direct effect of evidence is to create a presumption in favour of the alleged fact," he has been led in practice to neglect the word " direct," and occasionally to attach worth to what is worthless, through neglecting the context and circum- stances and " indirect effect " of evidence ; but all these triumphs, supposing you could attain them, would be but a scratching of the surface ; they would not penetrate below, or touch the rooted and superstitious credulity which is the real cause of the evil.
Not that, of course, the superstition which is at the bottom of this credulity, is often openly avowed. It generally disguises itself and has various masks to be assumed accord- ing to various circumstances, such as, " It may be so," " It is at least a pious belief," " We do not say it is so, but, if it is so, then is it wise to reject what possibly may be from the Lord?" and the like. Against these what argument can avail ? You may perhaps hope to move this advocate of "pious belief" in probable facts, by urging that it is not right to accept what is probably an error, and possibly a lie, about any subject, least of all about God. He smiles and tells you that Queen Victoria has many romances told about her, and {Apol. ist ed. p. 54) : " Do you think she is displeased at them?" Note, just in passing, the clever " parallel " — we will devote a section hereafter (p. 227)
i6 INTRODUCTION
to Newman's " parallels " — between Almighty God, re- ported as a Pctrifier of unlawfully dressed fowls, and an Exorcizer of demoniac camels, and Queen Victoria reported as {ib.) " mistaken for the housekeeper by some blind old woman," or " meeting beggars in her rides at Windsor," or " running up the hill as if she were a child " ! !
But to return to our " pious believer." You may de- monstrate to him that natural causes are fully sufficient to explain a certain result hitherto supposed to be miraculous. He will listen with equanimity, he will admit with candour. But do you seriously suppose that he will on that account give up to profane history what had once been consecrated to God by the name of a miracle ? In theory, he may. In theory, he will {Apol. 303) " frankly confess that the present advance of science tends to make it probable that various facts take place and have taken place, in the order of nature, which hitherto have been considered by Catholics as simply super- natural." But, in practice, he would resort to almost any device sooner than abandon a miracle to Liberalism ; and one of these devices is Potentiality.
Just as a jury — so, at least, Newman says — would not (303) "think it safe to find a man guilty of arson if a dangerous thunderstorm was raging at the very time when the fire broke out," so we ought, he says, to be cautious in rejecting any miracle ; for any possibly natural act may be also a possibly supernatural act. You may point out that in the former instance there are two possible causes, arson or lightning, distinctly before the jury ; but in the case, say, of a man who speaks when his tongue is cut out by the roots, and whose retention of speech has hitherto been called a miracle, you may ask him, " If it should be proved to your satisfaction not only that some men do thus speak
INTRODUCTION 17
without their tongues, but also that, within a considerable range of experience, 710 one has been known to be unable thus to speak, will you give up the miracle then ? What are your two possible causes there ? Is not Nature the obvious cause ? " But do you think you have driven him into a corner ? " Two possible causes ! " we can imagine him replying; "Is it possible that you are not aware that there are always two possible causes of anything ? Do you not know that God may be expected to be continually inter- vening in His Church by means of miracles ? that miracles are as much the characteristic, and (98) 'the most import- ant of the characteristics, of sacred history,' as deeds of valour and enterprise are of profane history ? and that to write the history of the Church without miracles, would be (98) ' to profess to write the annals of a reign, yet to be silent about the monarch ' ? " And then he might quote the last sentence of the Essay on Miracles (390), " This is ever the language men use concerning the arguments of others, when they dissent from their first principles — which take them by surprise, and which they have not mastered " ; and finally he might tell you once for all that {Apol. 303) "no Catholic " — although of course recognizing that God does sometimes w^ork through natural causes — " can bind the Almighty to act only in one and the same way, or to the observance alw^ays of His own laws." And so it comes to this — thanks to Potentiality — that Church property in portents is always safe ; and that truth and evidence, in ecclesiastical suits about miracles, are never inconvenient to the advocates of the Church ; for, '■'■Nullum argutne7itujn occurrit Ecclesice."
But I have not yet done justice to the versatility of Newman's mind or the amplitude of his resources in emer- gency. Sometimes, for example, where the evidence for
c
i8 INTRODUCTION
supernatural agency is not very strong, Newman, with great tact, will lay stress, not upon the necessarily miraculous nature of the act, but upon the antecedent probability of the miracle ; as in the change of water into oil by Narcissus, Bishop of Jerusalem, where he very briefly indeed just touches upon the existence of oil wells known to the ancients, and, instead of showing that there were no oil wells in Palestine, he insists that (255) "it is favourable to the truth of this account that the instrutnent was an aged, and, as was also the case, very holy man. It may be added that he was born in the first century^ But how differently does he deal with the miracle of the Tongueless Martyrs, mentioned above ! In this case he feels that the necessarily miraculous nature of the act, and the evidence of the fact, constitute his strongest ground. " How can men speak with- out a tongue ? " seemed a question that could be answered only in the words, " In no way, and by no possibility." He therefore spares no pains to prove that no tongue was left — no part of a tongue. It is not often that he is so fond of evidence ; but he can be, on occasion, and he is so here (381) : " ' He cut out the tongues by the roots,' says Victor Bishop oi Vite ; ' I perceived the tongue entirely go?ie by the roots,' says yEneas ; ' As low down as the throat,' says Procopius; ^ AX. the roots,' says Justinian and St. Gregory. ' He spoke like an educated man, without impediment,' says Victor of Vite," and so on — calling up the same wit- nesses again to give evidence as to articulate utterance, and clearly showing how he can appreciate really cogent and complete evidence, 7uhe?i it is on the right side. Besides this, he appeals to the variety of the witnesses, their con- sistency and unity and means of observation (380) : "out of the seven writers adduced, six are contemporaries ; three, if not four, are eyewitnesses of the miracle ; all seven were
INTRODUCTION 19
living, or had been staying, at one or other of the two places which are mentioned," i.e. the abode of the Confessors on whom the alleged miracle was wrought. Again, we are asked to consider the different circumstances of the wit- nesses (380) : " One is a Pope ; a second a Catholic Bishop ; a third a Bishop of a schismatical party ; a fourth an Emperor ; a fifth a soldier, a politician and a suspected infidel ; a sixth a statesman and courtier ; a seventh a rhetorician and philosopher." O si sic omtiia ! Could anything be fairer than this ?
All this is very strong indeed. It is by far stronger than the combined evidence for all the rest of Newman's miracles put together ; and he is quite right to lay great stress upon it. But then what is to be done if — as was hinted above — it should really be demonstrated that all this irresistible evidence as to the complete absence of atiy portion of the tongue, so far from proving the retention of speech to be miraculous, proved, on the contrary, that the retention ivas explicable by natural causes ?
Yet this was what was doomed to happen ; and Newman himself has to make the confession that it is so. In an Appendix to the second edition of his Apology published in 1865, and repeated in the latest edition (391, 392), he gives evidence which appeared in Notes and Queries (May 22, 1858) and which absolutely destroys the miraculousness of the story of the African Confessors. Colonel Churchill, in his " Lebanon," speaks of a certain Pasha as " extracting to the root the tongues of some Emirs," and adds, " It is a curious fact, however, that the tongues grow again sufficiently for the purposes of speech.'' Sir John Malcolm, in his "Sketches of Persia," teUing us of a certain Khan who was condemned to lose his tongue, says, " The mandate was imperfectly executed,
c 2
20 INTRODUCTION
and the loss of half this member deprived him of speech. Being afterwards persuaded that its beiftg cut close to the root would enable him to speak so as to be understood, he sub- mitted to the operation ; and the effect has been that his voice, though indistinct and thick, is yet intelligible to persons accustomed to converse with him." Strongest of all is the evidence of Sir John McNeill, who states, from personal observation, that several persons whom he knew in Persia, who had been subjected to that punishment, "spoke so in- telligibly as to be able to transact ii7iportant business" and — after describing it as the universal conviction in Persia," that the power of speech, when lost by cutting off the tip of the tongue, can be partially restored by farther amputation — adds these emphatic words : "I 7iever had to meet with a person who had suffered this punishment who could not speak so far as to be quite i?itelligible to his familiar associates."
" Never had to meet with a person who could not speak ! " What is to be done now ? An ordinary man — a man who was not bound by some special rules of a Grammar of Ecclesiastical Assent not known to English laymen — would frankly give up this miracle. That, of course, for Newman, is out of the question. And yet Newman does not like here to fall back, in this instance, upon the reserve of Potentiality. So much stress has been laid upon the "cogent and complete " evidence in this case ; and the testimony from the Eastern experience of the three English witnesses is so strange and, as it were, so contrary to our common sense, that Newman feels that an immediate retreat to Potentiality is not perhaps necessary, and would certainly be humiliating. Potentiality he would prefer to reserve for cases like that of the Thun- dering Legion, cases of natural phenomena that 7tiay be supernatural interventions. So he resorts, in this instance,
INTRODUCTION 21
to another device — so ingenious that it deserves a separate section.
§ 5. The Device of Indefinite Adjournment
Hampden is praised by Lord Clarendon for resorting to this device with great tact in the House of Commons ; but Newman does it much more effectually in proportion as his adjournments are for a longer period. And there is besides —in the passage which I am going to quote and in which he, as it were, makes his formal motion for indefinite ad- journment— a certain naive frankness in the plain way in which he lets us know that he does not really care for the bald, literal truth of fact in which laymen take an unaccount- able interest. His care is for the " system " of supernatural intervention into which he is "generously throwing himself," in comparison with which, facts are poor things ; he is not seeking truth of fact ; it is a war, not a search, in which he is engaged — a war against what he called " Liberalism " and against private judgment \ and the laws of war will " fairly " allow him to resist evidence which non-theological laymen would find irresistible. Here is the passage (392) :
" I should not, however, be honest if I professed to be simply converted by their testimony " \i.e. the testimony of the three English gentlemen above-mentioned] "to the belief that there was nothing miraculous in the case of the African confessor. It is quite as fair to be sceptical on one side of the question as on the other ; and if Gibbon is considered worthy of praise for his ' stubborn incredulity ' in receiving the evidence for the miracle, I do not see why I am to be blamed if I wish to be quite sure of the full appositeiiess of the recent evidence zvhich is brought to its disadvantage. Questions of fact cannot be disproved by analogies or pre-
22 INTRODUCTION
sumptions ; the inquiry must be made into the particular case in all its parts as it comes before us.
'■'■Meanwhile, I fully allow that the points of evidence brought in disparagement of the miracle are prima facie of such cogency, that, //// they are proved to be irrelevatit. Catholics are prevented from appealing to it for controversial purposes."
Now let the reader carefully examine this passage three or four times, and word by word — many sentences of Newman require at least this, and some of them require a great deal more — and let him ask himself the following questions : —
(i.) To what purpose is the word " fair " introduced here, when the object is, or should be, to get at the truth, and there is no question of taking an " unfair " advantage in controversy ?
(2.) What is the meaning of " the full appositeness " ? And how does Newman hope to attain his " wish " of making himself "quite sure " of '•'• the full appositeness of the recent evidence " ?
(3.) " Questions of fact cannot be disproved by analogies or presumptions." What is the meaning of "disproving a question of fact " ?
This is answered by referring to a j^revious page {Apol. 300), where we find that Newman " proposed three questions about a professed miraculous occurrence : i. Is it ante- cedently probable? 2. Is it in its nature miraculous? 3. Has it sufificient evidence! ... i. The verisimilitude ; 2. The miraculousness ; 3. 'WiQ.fact."
Obviously, therefore, " questions " of fact are to be dis- tinguished from " questions of " antecedent probability and miraculousness." The latter may depend upon " analogies or presumptions " ; e.g. the antecedent probability (or verisi-
INTRODUCTION 23
inilitude) and miraciilousness of a cure by relics may depend upon the " analogy " of the miracle wrought (2 Kings xiii, 20, 21) by {Apol. 300) the "bones of Elisha," or upon the " presumption " that God would specially intervene in this or that important crisis, for this or that Saint. But the former, i.e. " questions oifact" imply the question asked in the last paragraph, "has it sufficient evidence V and must depend upon ^'■evidence" alone.
This being the case, the phrase "questions of fact'' appears to mean really no more than " questions whether this or that happened " ; and the sentence amounts to this : "Alleged facts cannot be disproved by analogies or pre- sumptions." But who attempts, or has attempted, to dis- prove the facts about the African martyrs ? Does any one even dispute the " facts " ? Does not every one admit the facts, the only question being whether they can, or cannot, be explained by natural causes ?
The meaning is so obscure that we must consider the last part of the sentence separately.
(4.) " By analogies or presumptions."
What is the meaning of this phrase ? I believe it has been correctly explained in (3) above, as being the method of proof connected with antecedent probability. But lest it should be urged that the words are capable of another interpretation, I will give an alternative.
When we hear that a tower, e.g. the Tower of Siloam, fell in old days, we are in the habit of " presuming " that it fell in accordance with the Laws of Nature ; and some would say that this " presumption " was based upon an " analogy " with other cases of the fall of buildings. Is this the meaning here ? Does Newman mean that we are not to " presume " that the sixty African martyrs retained their speech naturally, upon the " analogy " of the numerous
24 INTRODUCTION
tongueless Persians who have retained it in modern times ?
If this were the meaning, it would be equivalent to saying that we are not to " presume " that any act happened naturally once because it happens naturally now ; e.g. we are not to " presume," upon the " analogy " of a stone falling to the ground notv, that it fell to the ground naturally 1,400 years ago. If that were the meaning, cadit quaestio ; we have no means of proving the naturalness of anything to an antagonist who raises this objection. We have done with him ; and we think he has done with common sense.
But, as I have suggested above in (3), I do not think this is the meaning. If it is contrary to common sense, we have no right to impute it to our adversary, unless we are forced to do so by lack of other meaning. Besides, it is also inconsistent with the phrase "questions oifact" not "of miraculousness" but '■'■oifact." Lastly, it is not as though we were driven to a nonsensical meaning, for lack of any other. For there is the other meaning, pointed out above, viz. : "Questions oi fact cannot, like questions of veri- similitude and mu-aadoustiess., be disproved, or proved, by analogies or presu?npiio7is, but must be proved, or disproved, by evidence."
The worst of this interpretation is that it is so very true as not to be worth saying. It is a truism, and not at all to the point. But as I shall show elsewhere (221), it is quite in Newman's manner to disarm his readers by con- ceding to them, with a great appearance of moderation, at a critical stage in an argument, something that is really no concession at all ; and so the meaning here appears to be this : " I wish to be convinced about the evidence ; surely I am not to be blamed for this. On the contrary, I am taking your view. You like facts and evidence ; so do I.
INTRODUCTION 25
Let us have no speculative analogies here ! Away with presumptions ! Give me solid fac^s, and let us mquire hito the evidence all over agai?i."
(5.) " The itiquiry must be made into the particular case in all its parts, as it covies before us."
When and how does Newman intend to make this im- portant " inquiry," which, as he tells us, "must be made"? It appears to be an "inquiry" into the "facts." But what " facts " ? Has not " the particular case " — viz. the case of the Tongueless Martyrs, already " come before him? Has not his " Inquiry" into "the particular case included "all its parts"? If not, why has he omitted any of the " parts " ? And if he omitted any of the "parts" in 1842-3 (when he wrote the Essay), why did he not insert them in the edition of 1870, in which, with the exception of a few bracketed foot-notes, the only alterations are (viii) " of a literary character," and which was reprinted, without mention of any change at all, in 1890?
Lastly, what is the meaning of the words "as it comes before us " ? They appear to suggest a reference to alleged miracles in general. But we do not want just now to think about miracles in general, but about this " particular case," and about the means by which Newman proposes to make that further inquiry into it " in all its parts," which, as appears from the next sentence, he is contemplating. Therefore, whatever may be the iniefition of the words — they serve no purpose except that of diverting the attention from this special miracle, which is the point in question, to a general and indisputable proposition which is not to the point. ^
1 It has been suggested to me that the words "as it comes before us " refer to the circumstances of the case. The present alleged miracle •'comes before us," it is said, "not as a hospital case, but as a case of
26 INTRODUCTION
All this is very bewildering and creates in us the uneasy suspicion that we may not be doing justice to our opponent. Let us make one last effort to enter into Newman's position and to imagine the strongest defence he might make for himself He seems to have rebelled — and certainly it was natural for him to rebel — against the terribly hard conditions to which his tenure of miracles was subject :
" I have just frankly confessed — " we can imagine him saying to himself — " in the 303rd page of my Apologia, that ' the present advance of science tends to make it probable that various facts take place, and have taken place, in the order of nature, which hitherto have been considered by Catholics as simply supernatural.' Now if this ' advance ' goes on, science will be always gaining, and religion will be always losing. Many years ago, for example, I ' bound ' myself ' to the belief ' {Apol. 300) in the miraculously medicinal effect of St. Wal- burga's oil ; but since I entered the Catholic Church I {ib. 302) found there is a difference of opinion. Some persons consider that the oil is the natural produce of the rock and ever flowed from it ; others thought it was miracu- lous now, or had been miraculous once. Consequently I have felt myself obliged to say above (/^.), ' this point must be settled, of course, before the virtue of the oil can be ascribed to the sanctity of St. Walburga.'
" Thus I am deprived, for the time at all events, of one of my best miracles ; and it really does not seem fair that science should be thus constantly capturing miracle
confession of Martyrs." Grant that this may be the meaning : then surely, so far as a knowledge of the "circumstances" is essential to a knowledge of the case, the "circumstances " are "parts" of the case, and included in the phrase "all its parts," so that the words "as it comes before us " would be superfluous — which I cannot believe.
INTRODUCTION 27
after miracle from religion, while religion never cap- tures a fact, nor even recaptures a miracle, from science. Once give up a miracle and you never get it back again. Surely it is time to stop this losing game. Surely God 7nay be working in a special way even through a natural fact. I value miracles simply as the signs of God's presence in the Church. Why then may I not give the name of a miracle, and ascribe some special Divine presence, to a fact so striking and so impressive as the articulate speech retained by sixty tongueless orthodox martyrs ?
" People want to persuade me that the case of these sixty orthodox martyrs is analogous to that of the poor wretches who now-a-days lose their tongues in Persia. But surely there may be a miraculous explanatio7i in the for?ner, and a non-miraculous in the latter. If those who believe in the non-miraculous explanation of the latter are justified in being sceptical about the miraculous explanation of the former, it is quite as fair for me to be sceptical about this new ex- planation as applied to the old fact. Consider the immense antecedent probability of a miracle in the former case, a pro- bability which does not exist in the latter. I do not dis- believe in causes ; I simply believe that more than one cause may produce the same result. Because x is caused by y in one case, does it follow that it jnay not be caused by z in another ? So far therefore from resorting to the Device of Indefinite Adjournment, I am really only pleading quite justly and scientifically for the recognition of a scientific principle, the Plurality of Causes. Possibly some fresh light may hereafter be thrown upon these questions ; and I would have people meantime suspend their judgment."
To all which, we shall reply, " If you meant this, you should have said this ; and we should have done with evidence and argument. But you speak about an ' inquiry '
28 INTRODUCTION
that ' must be made,' and about what you will do ' mean- while.' Tell us, then, plainly ivhat yoii are going to inquire into. Into the ancient facts of the African martyrs? But you know perfectly well you have exhausted them. Into the modern facts, attested by the three English witnesses, and the ' universal conviction in Persia,' attested by one of them ? But you do not even suggest where the evidence is faulty. Into its ' appositeness '? What do you mean by that? Do you mean that what is ' apposite ' to ' poor wretches in Persia' in the nineteenth century, is not ' apposite ' to Athanasian martyrs in the fifth ? But in using that language, you would be entering the region of 'presumption,' 'analogy,' 'veri- similitude,' ' antecedent probability ' — which you appear to have disclaimed, as having no bearing on ' questions of facf; and even if you mean that, how do you propose to ascertain it ?
" Then, as to your Plurality of Causes ; you say that ' because x is caused by y in one case, it does not follow that it may not be caused by z in another ' — where, by z you jnea?i ' miraculous pozver.'' But, in the first place, the words ' in one case ' are misleading. You should have said ' in all cases, so far as they have been examined ' ; it is the ' universal convictioji ' in Persia that x is iti all cases caused by y, i.e. articulate speech is restored in all cases by the total (when lost by partial) extraction of the tongue. In the next place, what proof will you accept that ' x is not caused by z ', knowing, as you do, that by z you mean ' miraculous power ' ? You know that you will be satisfied with no proof short of this : we must use z, and show that x does not follow ' ! I'hat is to say, we must use ' miraculous power,' and sho7c> that restoration of speech does not follotv ! This will satisfy you, this, and nothing else ! Ordinary people will say that, if we want to prove tongueless articulation to be always
INTRODUCTION 29
natural, the best possible proof is to bring a number of men into a lecture room, and experiment upon them, cutting out the whole tongue in some cases and calling the audience to witness that these men cati speak ; cutting out half the tongue in others, and showing that these canfwt speak ; and then, in these last cases, cutting out the remaining half of the tongue, and showing that no7v they cafi speak. Well this proof has been practically given you. But this will not suffice. Nothing will suffice to prove /(?r _>'(?// that the tongue- less speech is non-miraculous, unless we enter the lecture- room, armed with fniraculous power, and disprove a miracle by mea?is of a tniracle !
" Again, think for a moment, from the point of view of religious reverence, what is implied by your hypothesis that although a non-miraculous explanation covers the modern cases, yet a miraculous explanation may cover the ancient one? It implies this, that these tongueless martyrs, if ojily God would have, so to speak, let thetn alone, i.e. left them to the ordinary operation of His natural laws, would have re- tained their speech ; but that He intervened by a special act to make them umiaturally dumb, in order that afterwards He might make them supernaturally articulate. In other words, you ask us to believe that God broke His Laws of nature (or, as I should call them, His Promises of nature) and took away from these poor wretches what may be called their natural right, in order that He might afterwards pose to the world as their supernatural Benefactor — much as a clever conjurer might pick the pocket of one of his hearers in order to give him back his purse again before all the audience, so as to extort their applause and make them clap him and cry, ' What a clever rascal ! '
" What we would urge is, that the truth in these matters should not be regarded as the prize of a game or of a war ;
30 INTRODUCTION
and that you should not speak of what is ' fair ' but of what is 'true.' If science, as you say, teaches us, century by century, that many things supposed to be miraculous, can happen by natural means, may not that be a warning that we are to detach our faith in God from faith in miracles ? That kind of faith in a thaumaturgic God which you and some of your former followers describe as the ' mediseval ', or as the ' aboriginal genuine ' ^ faith — are you so very certain that, instead of being the ' genuine ' faith, it was not a rudimentary faith, intended to prepare the way for a higher and more spiritual faith that does not contemplate material but spiritual ' signs ' ? But even if you are not prepared at present to adopt, or so much as to consider, that view, you ought at least to deal fairly with yourself and us, and say distinctly, as to this alleged African miracle, either what proof you will accept as to its non-miraculousness, or else that you will accept no proof at all, except a proof that would be itself a miracle."
It only remains to add that there is no reason to suppose that Newman made the slightest attempt to gratify his above-mentioned " wish to be quite sure of the full appositeness of the recent evidence " which was " brought to the disadvantage" of the African Miracle, or to conduct " the inquiry " which needed "to be made into the parti- cular case in all its parts." The evidence appeared in Notes a?id Queries in 1858, and was inserted by Newman in the second edition of \i\% Apologia, in 1865. And yet neither in 1870 nor between 1870 and 1890, is the slightest attempt made to " prove " that the evidence is — or even to indicate how the evidence could be proved to be — " irre- levant"!
Are we not justified in calling this by the name of the 1 Letters of the Rev. J. B. Modey, p. 175.
INTRODUCTION 31
Device of Indefinite Adjournment ? It is not — what it would be in any one else — deception, that is to say, direct deception of his readers ; it is only self-decep- tion ; but indirectly it may deceive a good many who are willing, and some few perhaps who are unwilling, to be deceived. If Newman had openly said, " I never can believe that an event, edifying if miraculous, and long recognized to be miraculous, is not miraculous ; and indeed any event, however explicable by natural causes, may be miraculous ; so that further argument between us is really useless " — no one would have been deceived by that. We should then have understood that, as reasonable Christians refer many questions that are not questions of fact and do not come within the province of evidence and understanding, to a solution that cannot be reached on this side of the grave, so Newman indefinitely postpones questions that are questions of fact and matters of evidence, because the decision, upon evidence, is likely to be unfavourable to religion. Then there would have been no deception. But people may easily be deceived, when an honest man says, in effect, " This matter must be argued again after fuller investigation." They may actually suppose he intends to investigate it more fully. And there- fore, in order that my readers may be upon their guard, let me give one more instance of the incredible, the almost superhuman consistency with which Newman, when con- vinced against his will, can remain still of the same opinion. The instance given is of almost historic interest in the study of human nature. It deserves to go down to posterity with Galileo's famous instance of stubborn persistence in mental opinion, in spite of the coercion that forced him to make a lingual recantation. It is nothing less than a proposal to defer the settlemejit of the question whether the earth is fixed or moves, till zee have ascertained what is the nature of motiofi ;
32 INTRODUCTION
and the reader will find it in what Mr. Wilfrid Ward ^ calls Newman's memorable Sermon on Development : — " Scrip- ture says that the sun moves and the earth is stationary ; and science that the earth moves and the sun comparatively at rest. How can we determine which of these opposite statements is the very truth //'// we know what 7notion is ? " Is it not clear that, upon this system of Indefinite Ad- journment, you are justified in declaring yourself unable to determine which of any opposite statements is true ? All propositions, in their strictly logical form, may be reduced to statements with the verb is in them. Now if you cannot determine the truth of any proposition with the word " moves " in it till you know (in some new celestial objective shape) what motion is, why should you be able to determine the truth of any proposition with the word " is " in it, till you know what l^eing is ? And when will you know that ? Never, this side of the grave. Thus, by the Device of Indefinite Adjournment, you can resist any logical assault, shelve any dispute, and remain convinced of anything you like, by putting off all inconvenient knowledge till the world to come !
I recommend honest and truthful young men who desire to remain honest and true to themselves, not to study such of Newman's works as bear upon Faith, on penalty of being tempted to dishonesty and untruth. Special pleaders ought to read them, and re-read them night and day. In the pages of the great Greek and Roman orators I have never met with such perfect and fascinating instances as are to be found in Newman's writings, of that subtle and delicately-lubricated illative rhetoric by which you are led downwards on an exquisitely elaborated inclined plane, from a truism to a probability, and from a strong probability to a fair pro- 1 Life of Ward, p. 386.
INTRODUCTION 33
bability, and from a fair probability to a pious but most improbable belief. Nowhere perhaps is Newman's know- ledge of the weaknesses and imbecilities of the human mind, and especially of its liability to confused vision and its re- sponsiveness to gentle guidance, more clearly manifested than in his graduated scale of demands upon our intelligence : while he asks us, first, perhaps, only to consider something as fairly probable ; then, not to reject it — since it may be possibly from the Lord, and we ought to " stand in awe and sin not " ; then, to ponder it as being what the Lord may have done ; then, to cherish it as what the Lord " does in secret " for our comfort and edification (though we are not to use it openly for controversy) ; and thus, ultimately and prac- tically, to accept it into our mind and heart as true — though all the while it is almost certainly untrue, and to be rejected by any one who so far fears God as to believe that he must hereafter give account of the faculties received from Him for the attainment of the truth. ^
Another great man, besides Newman, has given us a specimen of the Device of Indefinite Adjournment. When Francis Bacon, while Lord Chancellor, was ordered by Buckingham to cancel, in effect, one of his legal decisions, he adopted a similar plan to the method above described. He obtained a practically indefinite adjournment by giving orders for the appointment of a sham commission to in- vestigate the case. Baron Heath, who, at Mr. Spedding's request, went carefully into the question,- after telling us how this sham commission was to be appointed, adds " I do
^ See p. 243 below for this and other specimens of Newman's illative rhetoric.
- Spedding's Lord Bacon's Letters and Lije, vol, vii. p. 587. The Investigation, being contained in an Appendix, has escaped the atten- tion of all Bacon's biographers except Professor S. R. Gardiner.
D
34 INTRODUCTION
not suppose anything was ever seriously meant by it except to ease the Lord Chancellor of h-is burden."
There is a similarity, but'there is an important difference too, between Bacon's and Newman's " easing himself of his burden." The former knew what he was about ; the latter did not. The former knew perfectly well that he was not acting as a just judge should ; the latter, on the contrary, believed he was doing God service by upholding, at any cost, the inspiration of Scripture as to all matters of fact, and by maintaining against materialists the doctrine of frequent miraculous intervention. Bacon believed in the Laws of England and in the spirit of equity in which he was bound to administer them ; and he felt that his Indefinite Adjourn- ment was a sham and a sin. Newman had no belief — no practicalhe\\Qi, no belief except where it was cojivenientVo have it — in the Laws of Nature, nor in the rules of evidence, nor in the possibility of man's approximating to Divine truth by the use of his mental as well as spiritual faculties. Conse- quently to him the Device seemed — or at least may well have seemed — not only justifiable but pious and holy, a way out of temptation, a path appointed by God Himself Newman does not believe that God intends us to attain to truth by using our mind and understanding as well as our heart and our soul, and that, about historical facts, we are not to use our heart, and are to use our intellect and observa- tion. In effect, he is constantly asking, not, " How shall I find out, with God's. help, the truth about this or that fact?" but, " What does God wish me to believe, in some miracu- lous or quasi-miraculous way, about this or that fact ? "
Such conduct is not for us. Newman might think thus, and might act up (or down) to such thoughts, and might be, and remain to the end of his days, one who was always aiming at sincerity, and always, to the best of his ability.
INTRODUCTION 35
anxiously sincere ; but it is not given to ordinary men to do this. What he would call a battle against " Liberalism," common men would call a search after truth ; and where he would ask, " What is the harm ? " common men are forced to ask " What is honest ? " Hence his. ways are not our ways. Such a Grammar of Assent as he practically acts on will be found to lead many ordinary men through credulity to atheism, through believing everything to be- lieving in nothing whatever — neither in truth, nor in themselves, nor in God.
§ 6. Distinction between the Theory a7id the Theorist.
Nothing will be said in these pages against Newman as an individual ; and wherever he is described as deceiving and misleading others, it must be always understood that he is represented as doing this in perfect sincerity because he has first deceived and misled himself. But the very absence of charges against the man will constitute the severest of charges against the system which made him what he became.
It will also be understood that this treatise deals with Newman's theology only so far as it bears upon his theory of miracles. His sermons deserve all the admiration they have received for their grave and chastened beauty of expression ; but their literary merits ought not to overshadow their spiritual deficiencies. Many a teacher of youth may find in them, especially if he be optimistically inclined, the searching medicine of a bitter humiliation, profitable though depressing, and good for occasional use. But a young man loving Christ and striving honestly to serve Christ will find in them, so far as I can judge, little strength, little stimulus, little spiritual sustenance. They appear to ex- hibit a theologian who feared Christ far more than he loved
D 2
36 INTRODUCTION
Him ; who regarded God as a centre of dogma rather than as a loving Father ; and to whom the Gospel brought news not so much of hope as of terror. They contain exquisite passages, s]Deaking the language of the world yet most un- worldly ; never stilted or inflated, yet never dull or prosaic or falling below the level of a calm and natural dignity ; displaying a subtle knowledge of the weaknesses, the tor- tuosities, the self-deceptions of human nature ; recognizing with an awe that approximates to dread the impenetrable mysteries of the stupendous darkness amid which man emerges for a moment to play his little part and vanish ; capable, one may well believe, of leaving some impress upon the callous worldliness of any but the most convinced unbeliever ; and painfully penetrative to the very heart of the anxious and inconsistent Christian. But they do not seem to breathe Christian strength. They seem to speak — except so far as ecclesiastical means of holiness, or "channels of grace," are concerned — rather in the spirit of John the Baptist than in the spirit of St. Paul. Take but one instance. The virtue of thankfulness is inculcated on almost every page of the Pauline Epistles ; in Newman's Sermons, it seems conspicuous by its absence. " Are you not a little hard on David ? " writes Keble, criticizing Newman's summary of David's mission which is described in the Lyra Apostolica as being : —
" on us to impress The poitenl of a blood-stained holiness."
And then Keble goes on to suggest that Isaac Walton may have been right in explaining the saying that David was " a man after God's own heart," by reference to that spirit of '■' thankfubiess'" which is so clearly manifested in the Psalms (Newman's Letters^ ii. S5).
INTRODUCTION 37
But how could Newman sympathize with this spirit if he had none of it himself? And how could he have it himself, if he felt nothing to be thankful for in himself, if his con- science was a horror, and his life a desolation from which he wished to be released as soon as might be ? " Not that I am sorry so great a part of life is gone " — he writes to his mother shortly after liis coming of age {Letters i. 58) — " would that all were over ! — but I seem now more left to myself, and when I reflect upon my own weakness I have cause to shudder " : and afterwards, when his mother imputes this feeling to a morbid melancholy, he insists upon it that it represents his genuine and deliberate conviction : he can be " always cheerful," he says, in company ; he is " ready and eager to join in any merriment "; but all this is mere surface-feeling, merely put on ; " take me when I am most foolish at home and extend mirth into childishness ; stop me short and ask me then what I think of myself, whether my opinions are less gloomy ; no, I think I should seriously return the same answer, that I 'shuddered at myself" Does not all this explain why he was " a little hard upon David " ? It was because he was very hard upon him- self. If he "shuddered at himself," and had shuddered systematically for "five years," ever since his "conver- sion " at the age of sixteen, ought we to be surprised that he should " shudder at " the members of his con- gregation, and that a spirit of shuddering should pervade his teaching ?
It is a most vague and unsatisfactory explanation of these results to say that " the religious element was too strong for him." Such an explanation can satisfy none but those (though indeed they are not few) who are ready to accept any proposition that is sufficiently abstract and misty. " The religious element " may mean anything — intense love, hope,
38 INTRODUCTION
awe, trust, admiration, fear approximating to abject dread. In Newman's writings there are ample indications that Fear unduly predominated and that, in his estimation. Fear was not only, as he said it ought to be, " the prominent grace in the beginning of Christian life," but " prominent " — whether *' grace, or not " — to the very end of his Anglican career.^ Hence we can explain that " forlorn undertone now and then," in his sermons, which seemed to one of his hearers "at the time, inexplicable." "^ It was not a mere thrill of intellectual misgiving in him as to the Anglican logical position ; it was a deeper pang of agonizing soul-piercing doubt as to whether he, the speaker, and they, the con- gregation, had a7iy position at all, in the presence of the Supreme.
It is not now our business to discuss how he could reconcile this theory with such sayings as, "There is no Fear in Love," or " Perfect Love casteth out Fear," and the like. No doubt he did contrive to reconcile them somehow. But the important fact for us is that " Fear " — not in the high and pure sense of "awe" or "reverence," but " Fear " of a kind almost approaching to abjectness — assumed in his doctrine that prominent position which in St. Paul's and St. John's Epistles is generally occupied by Love.
The Love of God, as it is described in the New Testa- ment, appears to have been either absent or quite latent in him : and he himself spoke of Love (see below, p. 223) as a " Preservative Addition " to Fear — a kind of after-thought in the scheme of the Christian religion. Nor was the
^ See p. 223 below ; also Poems, pp. 175, 123, 341, quoted with other passages, in the Contemporary, January, 1891, pp. 34-38.
- Professor J. C. Shairp, in Dean Church's Oxford Movement, p. 124.
INTRODUCTION 39
absence of Love compensated by any profound trust in God's infinite justice and righteousness. There was not in Newman, as has been shown elsewhere,^ any adequate sense of even human justice ; and, as for the justice of God, it was known to him only as a group of inferences from Scripture texts ; it was not bound to be hke, nay, it was ahiiost bound to be unhke, all human notions of what is ideally and per- fectly just. Hence, he not only failed to attain that cheer- ful trustful faith which has characterized many Christians far less pious than himself, but he could not even rest in the lower and more rudimentary conviction that "the Judge of all the earth will do right." Thus the Image of God became for him the image, not of a Father, not even of a just Judge, but of a dread-inspiring Holiness ; a dazzling Splendour, dark with excess of light ; practically, a Darkness ; before Which he could but prostrate himself in abject awe, prepared for whatever lightnings and thunderbolts might come forth, and prepared to ca// them "just."
" You might be perplexed," writes Professor Shairp, from whom I last quoted, " at the drift of what he said, but you felt all the more drawn to the speaker." That might well be. Might he not have diffused around him an atmosphere of anxiety which made all men feel themselves neighbours with him in a community of trouble and desolation ? May he not have been a magnet of spiritual self-conviction drawing towards himself all that was responsive in the self- searching, self-condemning faculties of his hearers ? He was a Seer of a kind : and men perceived that he had seen something ; but what had he seen ? Was it not a Terror ? Might not men have thought they were listening to Isaiah,
•^ Contemporary Reviciv, January, 1891, quoting Fletcher's Short Life of Cardinal Nnvman, ]i. 186, and Expositor, October, 1890, P- 305-
40 INTRODUCTION
transferred from the Temple in Jerusalem to St. Mary's, Oxford, fresh from his vision of the Invisible King, before the seraph had touched his lips with the fire from the altar and had imparted to him the due prophetic peace and strength : " Woe is me, for I am undone ; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips ; for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts"? The most callous soul could not but feel touched by such a cry as this.
" After hearing these sermons," continues our witness, " you might come away, still not believing the tenets peculiar to the High Church system ; but you would be harder than most men if you did not feel more than ever ashamed of coarseness, selfishness, worldliness ; if you did not feel the things of faith brought closer to the soul." Here are two things, quite distinct, confused together. " Ashamed of coarseness, selfishness, worldliness " — yes ; or rather not "ashamed," but more than "ashamed"; say "revolted," " horrified." But, as for " the things of faith brought closer to the soul " — that is quite a different thing. This indeed is another instance of a misleading abstraction, like "the religious element." For we must needs ask, " WJiat faith ? " Faith, chameleon-like, takes the colour of its sur- roundings. There are all hues of faith, from faith in a stock or a stone, to faith in Moloch ; and thence to faith in a just Judge ; and thence to Faith in God the Father as revealed in Christ the Eternal Son. If the last is meant, it seems scarcely possible that the things of that Faith — Faith in the perfect and ultimate triumph of the Fatherhood of God — could be brought closer to any soul by a Prophet of Fear, a magnet of spiritual anxieties.
Arnold once said that Newman was always thinking of himself when he was preaching ; and Newman, believing
INTRODUCTION 41
that the accusation implied a sense of superiority to his hearers, justly and firmly repelled it. But if Arnold meant that when Newman was analysing and convicting the thoughts of his hearers he was also analysing his own thoughts and condemning himself, he was not far wrong. Newman " never saw his congregation " ■} when he preached at them, he was preaching at, or rather accusing and con- demning, himself, in the sight of the Lord ; and it was this in part (besides his extraordinary versatility) that gave such a wonderful force and vividness to his utterances and caused him to appear to have so profound and sympathetic an in- sight into what were thought the depths, but were not really the depths, of human nature. Nothing could escape him that was conventional, or shifty, or inconsistent, or insincere, or half-hearted, or hollow, because he suspected his own single-heartedness and feared that he himself might be found hollow, if searched to the bottom.
"A sermon of Mr, Newman's," says Professor James Mozley,- " enters into all our feelings, ideas, modes of view- ing things. He wonderfully realizes a state of mind, enters into a difficulty, a temptation, a disappointment, a grief. . . Every part of the easy, natural, passive process by which a man becomes a man of the world is entered into, as if the preacher were going to justify or excuse him, rather than condemn him. ... He sets before persons their own feelings with such truth of detail, such natural expressive touches that . . . he and the reader seem to be the 07ily two persons m the world that have them iii common^
How finely does this critic express the precise fact, and how innocently unconscious he is that he is expressing it I
1 Expositor, September, p. 236, quoted in Contemporary, Jan. 1890, p. 48.
" Quoted in Dean Church's Oxford Movement, p. 121.
42 INTRODUCTION
St. Paul's precept was, ''■Rejoice with them that do rejoice, weep with them that weep." But Newman seems to have confined himself to " weeping." He entered into only one half of the human being ; he realized only one half of the human "states of mind," the "difficulties, temptations, dis- appointments, griefs," and the " easy processes by which a man becomes a man of the world." Search through the long and detailed criticism from which I have given a short extract, and you will find no recognition whatever that Newman " entered into " that other half of the human " states of mind," that element of purified " rejoicing," which is so prominent in the Epistles of St. Paul. He " entered into " the worldly self, the lower self, of each of his hearers, helping some of them to hate and loath and shudder at it, but, alas, tempting others to half- suspect that this after all was their true self, that they had nothing whatever of the image of God within them, nothing sound, nothing true, nothing honest ; and forcing some towards the brink of that unutterably lonely, that God- forsaken precipice, to which Newman himself had come dangerously close when he sat down in the year 1834 and deliberately passed this sentence on himself, " I believe my- self at heart to be nearly holloiv." ^
If this is even j^artially a correct estimate and explanation of some of the defects in Newman's teaching, it may explain much of the misdirection of the Tractarian movement. What is next best, often acts as a narcotic on the conscience, ])reventing it from compelling us to remain unsatisfied till we have achieved the best ; and thus obedience is made to compensate for love, and anxious piety takes the place of faith, and authority supplants the spirit of life. So it seems to have been with Newman. The Church of his country
^ Newman's Letters, i. 416.
INTRODUCTION 43
lay half impotent at the Beautiful Gate, waiting for some quickening Voice to say, as Wesley had said, but with tones of a deeper and wider import than Wesley's message, " Demonstrations and authorities have I none, but of such as I have give I thee '" — and then to bid her arise and walk in the name of that Eternal Word Who rules, and will yet hereafter more manifestly rule, in Nature, in Man, and in the Church, and who is uniquely revealed to us in the Lord Jesus Christ. But Newman's message was widely different. It may not have meant this, but it sounded like this : " Trust in Christ I have none, or not enough to inspire me with fervent and hopeful conviction ; but you have the sacraments ; and what the sacraments will do for you, may be learned from the inspired Scriptures, and from the authority of the Church, and from the traditions of the Fathers, and from the w-ritings of the great Anglican Divines : try to walk with these."
Thus, what might have been a vital reform — and even, as it was, had a spark of energizing vitality — degenerated too often into a preaching of precedent, a religion of etiquette. There were in the ancient and continuous history of developed Christianity, realities of spiritual life, which the Anglican Church had half or wholly forgotten. These might have been spiritually revived. The doctrine of the identity of the Universal Church with Christ ; the Remis- sion of Sins by human agency ; the need of spiritual Regeneration ; the transmission of the Spirit from Disciple to Disciple ; the spiritual use of Prayer for the Dead ; a spiritual doctrine of Purgatory very different from the formal doctrine practically current in the Roman Church, and, above all, the true and moral doctrine of Sacrifice (not Bribing) as set forth in the Sacrament of the Holy Com- munion— all these, and the other highest truths of the
44 INTRODUCTION
Christian religion, if they had been treated and taught as spiritual realities, might have found access to the heart of the nation without "movements" and "systems" and controver- sies and factions of any kind. But as it was, these life-giving truths were too often devitalized and degraded by the Tractarians to the level of Ecclesiastical demonstrabilities : instead of being preached from the heart, they were "got up " out of books and repeated by rote ; thus they became party cries, not truths to be felt and quietly and gradually spread, but dogmas to be made into a "system " and fought for, and wrangled about ; and Newman himself, and Hurrell Froude, thought it no profanity, to write to one another in their intimate correspondence about " cramming their men " with the stock formularies needful for the glib repetition of some of these momentous and sacred mysteries.^ Hence, a great work that might have been greatly and fully done, was done but in part, with much of pettiness and more of imperfection ; in some respects so misdone that even now, much of it needs to be done all over again.
From this digression — not needless, since it will show the point of view from which Newman is regarded throughout this treatise — I must not pass on without admitting that his religious writings are too voluminous to justify one who has only partially examined them in speaking with perfect con- fidence about their characteristic features, or at all events in asserting a universal negative about them. Here, therefore, I have preferred to rely largely upon the testimony of his best admirers ; and even in commenting, with their aid, upon this phase of Newman's teaching, I would speak under correction, and should indeed be glad to be taught better, and to be told of some of Newman's sermons that inculcate
^ See p. 98 below.
INTRODUCTION 45
thankfulness, strengthen faith, and stimulate and encourage us in a course of manly self-respecting ^ rectitude. But as to his theory of Assent, or Faith, I do not speak under correction, but desire without reserve to express my detesta- tion of its practical working. For what indeed can be more detestable than a method of thought which converted an anxious and pious seeker after truth, into a misconceiver, ignorer, perverter and distorter of it ; which induced him conscientiously and habitually to say more than he meant in order to convince people that he meant what he really did mean-: which blunted the sense of historical fact,
^ In using the word " self-respecting," I had in my mind a dialogue between Mr. Ward and a friend, related in the Life of Ward, p. 217. Ward had said, "When we realize this" \i.e. the difference between Creation and the all-powerful Creator] "we feel that our attitude in the presence of God should be abject." To which the friend replied, " No, not abject, my dear Ward, not abject. Certainly it should be a deferential ^\.'i\\.yxA&, but not abject."
Mr. Wilfrid Ward has placed it on record that Ward found this reply "intensely ludicrous," and that "his delight and sense of its absurdity was unbounded." But is this subject one in which a mistake can be called " ludicrous," or can produce "delight " ? "Deference " is certainly not the right word to express "devotion"; but is "ab- jectness " better ? And ought not our conclusion about the whole matter to be that, whereas Jesus of Nazareth is generally supposed to have taught us to regard God with the feelings of a child looking in love and reverence towards an infinitely just and loving Father, Mr. Ward preferred to regard Him with the feelings of a slave ?
I can hardly believe that Mr. Ward was serious in maintaining this. Yet I must admit that something approaching to "abjectness" — in the conception of the relations between man and God — appears to predominate in Newman's Anglican poems, and in his Anglican sermons so far as I have read them.
- See the letter to Sir W. H. Cope (Fletcher's Life of Cardinal Ne'Mtnan, p. 131) in which he says, "A casual reader would think my language denoted anger, but it did not. ... It would not do to
46 INTRODUCTION
paralysed the faculties which should have helped him to attain truth, and so transmuted his utterances that, although
be tame and not to sJio-v indignation." I am perfectly aware that subtle distinctions might be drawn between "anger" and "indig- nation"; but I consider my statement is more than justified by Newman's avowal that he deliberately " j7/(?7iV(/ indignation " although he did not really fed "anger."
No doubt, there were other causes — besides any " system of thought " — for Newman's extraordinary use of words ; and, among these causes, personal characteristics claim a prominent position. In a most interesting but too severe delineation of his own character {Letters, i. p. 416), Newman speaks of his own "rhetorical or histrionic power." Elsewhere {ib. ii. 441), in a very subtle and life-like descrip- tion of his manner in rather awkward circumstances, "I seem," he writes to his sister, "if you will let me say it, to put on a very simple, innocent, and modest manner. I sometimes laugh at myself and at the absurdities which result from it ; but really I cannot help it, and I really do believe it to be genuine " : and a former pupil of his {Expositor, 1890, p. 231), has described the "extraordinary versatility" which he displayed at the rehearsals of Terence in the Birmingham Oratory, when he personated, for the imitation of his pupils, " a love- sick Roman or a drunken slave."
Other personal characteristics besides mere versatility of nature tended in the same direction. He had an exact knowledge of the superficial qualities of human nature — its inconsistencies, its vacillations, con- fusions, and insincerities, its self-deceptiveness and willingness to be deceived ; a profound sense of the great gulf between truth as it is and truth as the wisest of us conceive it — a sense not fitly tempered by the hope that through honest errors God is leading mankind toward the truth ; and a rooted distrust and contempt for the deceptive medium of words. Add to all these a most practical turn of mind, and a keen sense of effect ; and we can see at once why and how he was pushed towards " histrionism." He was constantly saying to himself, " What will be the effect of my words ? It is of little use to ask, ' What am I saying ? ' ; men are such fools ; and words are such mere counters. I must always ask, ' What will be the effect of my words ? ' " Conse- quently, he felt a more than usual tendency to speak with a view, to effect. His anxious self-introspection led him, at times, to suspect this
INTRODUCTION 47
we acknowledge that they proceed from one who was always striving with all his might to be honest, we are forced to recognize in them many of the phenomena that would characterize the most insincere of sophists ?
tendency and to call it "histrionic." He was often on his guard against it ; but the danger was ahvays there. He was saved, how- ever, from being seriously "histrionic" by being portentously self- deceptive.
CHAPTER I
IS PROBABILITY "THE GUIDE OF LIFE"?
§ 7. Probability
" Butler's doctrine that Probability is the guide of Ufe, led me, at least under the teaching to which a few years later I was introduced, to the logical cogency of Faith " : — so writes Newman in his Apologia (p. 11), and by these words he leads us to consider what is meant by Probability ; how far it is the guide of life ; and in what way it is connected with Faith.
No one, of course, denies that we sometimes decide and act upon probability. Whenever we have to stop and think, the weighing of probabilities comes in. " What profession shall I choose ? " " What school shall I send my son to ? " " Will it rain to-day ? " — as regards these, and a great many other matters, we have to act upon probabilities. But this admission is a very different thing from admitting that "Probability is the Guide of Life." In using the phrase " the guide " (not " a guide "), Newman apparently did not contemplate a spasmodic or occasional impulse, but such a continual and regular pressure as is implied when we say that God '•'• \sS}\ guide us with His counsel," or ^^ guides the
IS PROBABILITY "THE GUIDE OF LIFE"? 49
meek in judgment," or that the Holy Spirit '■'■guides us into all truth " : and this seems to be confirmed by the supple- mentary phrase, " of life " as though he said, " Probability is to be our guide through life, not merely in rare occasions or important crises, but, the guide of life." This therefore is the question that first comes before us, " Are we to be always, or almost always, living, acting, and believing, upon probabilities ? "
All probability is, at bottom, of a statistical nature ; that is to say, it is based upon records of some kind. Sometimes the statistics are prominent and committed to paper, as in the business of an Insurance Office; sometimes less prominent, and rarely committed to paper, as when a farmer roughly conjectures the future weather from his mental records about past weather ; sometimes latent, as when a savage conjectures the weather much better than the farmer, but in scrnon-deliberate and unscientific a way that we feel inclined to call it instinct.
By Statistical Probability we can discover (from an experi- ence, say, of one hundred or one thousand tosses) that a penny will turn up " heads " as often as "tails " ; or, from a knowledge of the number of letters posted in London in 1890 without an address, we can discover roughly the number likely to be similarly posted in 1891.; and, if we also know the whole number of letters posted with addresses in London in 1890, we can roughly infer the probability (which of course would be very small indeed and would be popularly called " improbability ") that a particular letter now being posted before our eyes this year (1891) by some stranger, would be without an address.
A moment's consideration shows that probability of this kind may be often difficult to calculate except on a large scale and with a vast amount of statistics. The business of
E
50 IS PROBABILITY "THE GUIDE OF LIFE"?
Life Insurance would be practically gambling if the interests of an Office were staked upon the life of one person, even though the probabilities of the duration of that one person's life had been calculated with mathematical accuracy ; but, when the risk is scattered over several hundreds of lives, the business is safe if the lives are correctly calculated : one insurer lives, so to speak, less long than he ought to have lived ; but another lives longer ; excess and defect balance each other ; and thus, over the whole mass of Insurers, the calculations of Probability made by the Office are verified by the results.
So much for Statistical Probability, which, as every one will admit, we are very far from consciously accepting as " the guide of life." But what as to our ordinary actions ? We get up in the morning, we breakfast, go out, catch our train, go to our business, keep our appointments, with scarcely any thought of probability, but in fai't/i — faith that the sun will rise, faith (less, but sufficient) that breakfast will be ready and eatable, roads passable, trains (to some extent) punctual, our office not burned down, and so on. No thought of probability enters our minds about all these things.
Of course, if, as we are going down stairs, some one stops us and says, " Is it certain that you will have your breakfast to-day?" we should perhaps — to be precise— reply, " Well, it's highly probable." But, whatever our words might be, we act in a practical certitude, derived (i) partly from our experience, knowing that the sun has risen, breakfast has been ready, roads have been passable, &c., and that no circumstances have arisen (within our knowledge) to break this course of things ; partly (2) from our desire that what has been shall be, or, we may almost say, from our feeling that a fixed order of things is so necessary
IS PROBABILITY "THE GUIDE OF LIFE"? 51
to our existence that we must take it for granted, and that it is useless to speculate as to what would happen if that order were broken. Really, and in truth, the routine of our life might be broken ; our place of business .might be burned down, our trains all smashed in accidents, our roads rendered impassable by earthquake or by six feet of snow, bread might cease to be eatable, the sun might not rise, the laws of gravitation and friction might cease to act — all sorts of disturbances of our comfortable circle of cir- cumstances might occur, some of them not very improbable, some very improbable, some so highly improbable that we are accustomed to call them impossible. But even as regards these not very improbable interferences with our common course of life, our attitude is — and ought to be if we want to do our work well — one oi faith ; we do not spend our time in thinking of probabilities of interference, we assume that there will be no interference.
Of course when some of these interferences are reported to have actually occurred, we readily believe them, provided that the interferences are fairly common in our experience, and that there is no suspicion of deception, or of credulity, or of exaggeration in the reporter. To such statements as, "Your office is burned down," "The train is smashed in an accident," we should give much more ready credence than to the statement that " every one of the sixteen persons with whom you have made different appointments is said to have died yesterday from heart-disease," or "the Bank is destroyed by an earthquake." We do not therefore reject narratives of events, in themselves antecedently improbable, when they are reported on good evidence to have actually occurred. But the point is, that although all these interferences are possible, and some not in the highest degree improbable, we are so constituted by nature that, until they are alleged to
E 2
52 IS PROBABILITY "THE GUIDE OF LIFE"?
have occurred, we practically ignore all but those which are of frequent occurrence. To do this, is necessary for success — which requires that our habitual basis for the immense majority of the actions of life, should be, not probability, hwi faith based upon experience.
Probability steps in, as we have admitted, when we " stop to think how to act " ; but it is not the whole of life, it is not the principal part of life, to '■'■ stoJ> to thini hovf to act." It would not be to our purpose to consider whether, in borrow- ing his doctrine from Butler, Newman has, or has not, altered it. Enough for us the common-sense conclusion that — if the words "probability," "the," "guide," "life," have their ordinary meaning — Probability is not entitled to be called the Guide of life.
§ 8. Is Faith based Ofi Probability ?
"But," it may be urged, "even though faith, and not probability, be accepted as the ' Guide of Life,' yet this faith itself — that is to say faith in the fixed order of things — is based upon probabilities."
Is it so, as regards the most common actions of our life, which depend upon our constant recognition of the laws of gravitation, friction, and the like ? Can any one re- collect a time when he thought that a stone would probably fall, and that a wall would probably not yield to the pressure of a finger, and that the sun would probably set ? If so, he can perhaps tell us how the accumulation of many experiences of probability, blossomed, so to speak, into that kind of certain faith which he now possesses. But no one can tell us the hota, for no one can recollect the whe7i — if such a wheji ever was. We are perfectly safe therefore in asserting that as regards our most common actions and the
IS PROBABILITY "THE GUIDE OF LIFE"? 53
larger part of our lives, though we have passed from ex- perience to what we call certitude, we have not passed to it — so far as we knoiu — over the bridge of probability. If therefore Probability was really the guide of our lives in leading us to ■ these most important certitudes, Nature (or God) has at all events covered up the fact, and may be almost said to have hidden it from us lest Probability should paralyse Faith.
Here however a speculative mind may raise an ingenious objection. "You speak," it may be urged, "of the indi- vidual ; but what of the race ? Race experience shows that there must have been once this Bridge of Probability, of which you deny the existence. The tabula rasa theory has been abolished by that of hereditary and cumulative experiences. There never was a time, we grant, in the life of any now existing individual when it seemed probable that the stone would fall, or that the earth would prove hard : there was, and must have been, in the life of the race ; and experiences of probability in the race have become a faculty of faith in the individual — faith being thus a priori to the individual and a posteriori to the race."
It may be so. I cannot myself feel confident that there was ever a time when a race, human or destined to become human, threw a stone up at acorns " upon a probability " that the stone would go up but prepared to find it go down ; or dropped a cocoa-nut from a branch upon the head of an enemy below, on the chance that the nut would go down, but prepared to find it go up. But still, for my purpose, I welcome this objection. Grant that, as .-Eschylus says, there was, first, a time, before the Promethean Advent, when quasi-human creatures lived absolutely at random, " blending all things at hazard " ; and then a second stage, when a more highly developed race believed in the Law of Gravitation
54 IS PROBABILITY "THE GUIDE OF LIFE"?
upon a probability, and moved their legs and balanced their bodies on a life-long hypothesis : what follows ? Why this : that Nature brought us through this lower stage and led us to a higher, where we have as completely forgotten the lower, as we have forgotten our first year's nursery annals. This being the case, why go back from the higher to the lower? Let speculators assign probability, as a basis for belief in the fundamental laws of life, to the troglodytes, or if they will have none of it, to their primseval ancestors. But our business is with men.
And is it not manifest that man, as we know him, could not co7istantly live and act (consciously) by Prob- abilities ? We could no more act upon probable laws of gravitation and probable laws of friction than we could worship a probable God. As God must, so too must Nature's Promises (which are God's Promises, some- times called Nature's Laws) be obeyed and trusted with all our heart as well as with all our mind. To act co7i- sciously and consta7itly upon a calculation of probabilities would exclude the simultaneous co-operation of faith. Worry has been defined as unbelieving work. Now the habit of consciously acting upon probabilities in all the relations of life, would tend to make all work faithless, and all life a succession of worries, beneath which the finest and strongest nature would speedily deteriorate and succumb.
" But," it may be urged, " we often act consciously, as well as unconsciously, upon the doctrine of Probability ; more often, a good deal, than you have admitted above ; as for example, in taking, or not taking, an umbrella with us, upon the chance of its raining, or not raining. Does not this one simple instance show how common the habit is ? "
Perhaps it is too common ; but it is not ^•ery common.
IS PROBABILITY "THE GUIDE OF LIFE"? 55
One proof of its rarity is the invention of games. In games we almost always act, and act consciously, "upon prob- abilities " ; and the reason why this is so charming is, that our ordinary lives are full of dull routine ; in which we are so tired of acting, not upon probabilities but upon l)ractical certainties, that we like, for a change, to act now and then " upon a probability," or, as we sometimes call it " upon the chance." There is " no fun," we say, " no sport," in a game where there is not some element of chance. Hence too the love of war and enterprise, because they afford the rare and delightful stimulus of consciously acting upon probabilities.
It may be admitted however that even in ordinary life many of us act upon these grounds fairly often (though the frequency cannot be compared for a moment with the frequency with which we act on Faith). But it is, or should be, either where the stakes- are small, or where there is more or less compulsio7i so to act. Except in these cases, to act consciously upon nice probabilities is more or less demoralizing. Even if Insurance Offices doubled the usual premium, a young husband, with a fair in- come but no fortune, would be right in saying, "My mathematical neighbour tells me I am a fool for insuring at such a cost : but when the question is whether my wife should go to the workhouse, I will have nothing to do with probabilities : give me certainties there.'' They are, of course, }iot real " certainties " ; they are only comparative " cer- tainties," but '"'■certain'''' efiough to release him from the strain of co7isciously actiiig upon probability.
" Give me certainties " — yes, that is the right demand where the stake is constant as well as great. Generals and doctors and judges and juries — and all of us on rare occa- sions— are forced to act consciously on probabilities, and
56 IS PROBABILITY "THE GUIDE OF LIFE"?
sometimes for high stakes ; and the compulsmi frees the action from the sense of gambling, and converts it from an excitement into a duty. But the strain is severe and could not be long endured ; and, while we are under the strain, we are often obliged to reduce ouselves as far as possible to machines, suspending the play of the emotions ; and these facts, viz. the brief duration, the severe and, so to speak, unnatural tension, and the partial one-sided nature of this conscious " acting upon Probability," stamp it as being so exceptional as rather to confirm than weaken our assertion that Probability is 7iot the guide of life.
Our contention is, then, that in the greater part of life, Faith and not Probability, is, and is to be, our guide. We also assert that this Faith — that is. Faith in the fixed and, in the main, beneficent order of things — though it is based upon ex]:)erience, never, so far as we k?ww, sprang from Prob- ability ; or, if it did so spring, that Nature has so dealt with us as to forbid us to exhume, for the purposes of practical life, those base, distant, and forgotten antecedents which are, as it were, buried out of our sight. But we seem to have been led on to a point where we perceive that this con- clusion may also hold good for the nobler, as well as the "greater," part of our life. For what can be a nobler task, and yet what task can involve a higher stake, than that of shaping an immortal soul ? And we have seen above, that the greater the risk, the greater ought to be our aversion to acting upon Probability. But this question has not yet been considered ; and it now demands our attention. We have rejected Probability as the " guide " in the ordinary affairs of our material life ; are we to accept it as our guide for spiritual progress ?
CHAPTER II Newman's doctrine of probability and faith
§ 9. KebWs Doctrine of Faith ^
In attempting to apply his doctrine of " Probability as the Guide of Life " to belief in God and in Divine truths Newman confesses that he met a difficulty. How could a man pray to a probable God, or pray to God upon grounds of probability ?
But, he says (Apol. 19), "I considered that Mr. Keble met this difficulty by ascribing the firmness of assent which we give to religious doctrine, not to the probabilities which introduced it, but to the living power of love and faith which accepted it. . . . In illustration, Mr. Keble used to quote the words of the Psalm : ' I will guide thee with mine eye. .' This is the very difference, he used to say, between slaves, and friends or children. Friends do not ask for literal commands ; but from their knowledge of the speaker, they anticipate his half-words, and from love of him they anticipate his wishes."
This profound truth, thus simply expressed, demands our
1 The following remarks refer to Keble's " Doctrine " simply as stated by Ne'ivntan in the present passage.
S8 NEWMAN'S DOCTRINE
close attention ; for it may explain the gradual divergence and ultimate parting between Keble and the man who thought himself at that time his follower. Newman fancied that he agreed with Keble ; but he did not and could not, because he had not the same conception of God. Keble — or Keble as here represented — loved God as a Father, and was content to remain as a child, trusting and believing ; Newman feared God as a Judge, and was consequently always " asking for literal commands," either direct from God, or indirect, through authorities appointed by Him. Between two theo- logians, thus differing, however unconsciously, in the funda- mental principle of Christianity there could be no ultimate harmony.^
Again, for a man of Newman's disposition — not only timo- rous of error, distrustful of his own feelings, and anxiously prone to lean upon authority, but also endowed with a strong dialectic faculty and a keen sense (keen when not dulled by prejudice) of logical difficulties — it would soon seem unsatisfactory to have to defend his belief in a great mass of " religious doctrine " by a mere metaphor about the guidance of the Divine eye. Our personal trust in God our Father may enable us to understand sympathetically and to grasp firmly such doctrines as tell us that Christ authorita- tively, and in some real, objective, and possibly natural way, forgave sins ; that He, in some real, objective, and possibly natural way, rose from the dead ; and that He in His last will and testament bequeathed Himself, His real and personal presence, for ever, to His disciples. But it is only a few very simple and fundamental doctrines that flash, as
1 It may be urged that " the fundamental principle " is the recognition of the existence of God. But though that may be the fundamental principle of some religions, it is not the fundamental principle of Christianity, which is to love God as a Father, in Christ, as the Son.
OF PROBABILITY AND FAITH 59
it were, conviction upon our hearts, as though our Father Himself were, with a glance, expressing in them His will, and helping us at the same time to do it. How could the eye of God, or " living trust and faith," help a believer to accept — what Newman felt not only bound to accept, but bound to justify himself in accepting — the truth and divine origin of the " doctrines " that set forth the stopping of the sun by Joshua, the human utterance of the ass of Balaam, and the destruction of the swine by our Lord Himself? Probably Keble believed all these things, and, somehow, connected them with "faith." But how was the connection "logical"? How was Newman to defend the whole mass of Biblical " doctrine " against those who would assail it with the doctrine of private judgment ? For this purpose Keble's metaphor gave him no assistance ; and therefore we ought not to be surprised at his half-complaint, that this view of the matter was {Apol. 20) " beautiful and religious, but // did not eve7i p?vfess to be logical."
Yet this objection ought to prepare us not to be altogether surprised if Newman misconceives the nature of Christian Faith. A " logical view " of Christian Faith is, no doubt, a justifiable expression — just as, I suppose, we might speak of a " logical view " of parental, filial, or conjugal love, mean- ing a view that is not inconsistent with facts and that can connect a certain number of facts as effects and causes ; but it sounds as though it might be misleading, However, we can say no more about this till we have determined what Christian Faith is. And, to begin with, let us clear our minds by asking what is Faith ?
6o NEWMAN'S DOCTRINE
§ 10. What is Faith "i
Faith, like love, takes its colour from its object, and is as often bad as good : we may have faith in ourselves, in our luck, in tact, in audacity, in money, in advertising ; or we may have faith in good men, in our friends, in honesty, in the influence of good character, in justice. Faith always implies desire : we never say " I have faith that my audacity will fail," " I have faith that honesty will not prove the best policy"; in such cases we should use the word "belief." Faith differs from hope, in that the latter, generally, having to do with particular cases, is more readily verifiable than the former : " I have a hope (not ' a faith ') that I shall make ^ I CO by advertising," but, " I have faith (not so often ' hope,') in advertising generally," that is, " I believe that advertising generally succeeds, and I have a sort of liking that it should succeed."
It is a great pity — for it is the source of great confusion — that faith should be used in so many different senses. Faith in money or advertising is — we feel — quite a different thing from faith in our father, wife, children, or friends. The former implies little more than a belief in sequence, viz., that the use of money or advertising will be followed by certain results, and a desire, selfishly strong in particular cases, but weak and little more than acquiescent in general, that this sequence should be preserved. But in the latter, the belief in sequence is quite subordinate. The mere intellectual anticipation that the exercise of will on the part of one's father, wife, or children, will be followed by certain moral actions and not be followed by immoral actions, is wholly swallowed up in an affectionate desire that this sequence shall be observed combined with an affectionate certitude that it tvill be observed.
OF PROBABILITY AND FAITH 6i
Perhaps some people will tell us that it is nonsense to speak of an " affectionate certitude," certitude being an intellectual condition : "How," they will ask, "can you be affectionately certain that your son will tell the truth, any more than you can be affectionately certain that you will catch your train ? In both cases you are simply (what you call) ' certain ' ; and the certitude is, in both cases, a high probability based upon evidence. So far as it is thus based, it is likely to be right ; so far as it is not, it is likely to be wrong. ' Affection,' if it interfered at all, would disturb the judgment. Affection for your dining-room clock will not more certainly make you lose your train than affection for your children (unless held in abeyance) will make you miscalculate and miscredit their actions."
This is clever ; and I have heard a still more clever objection, to the effect that, if you want to know a man really well and to anticipate his actions, you cannot do better than hate him ; for then, not a weakness of his will escape you, and you will probe every corner of his nature. Judging men, and hating men, crinanthropy ^ and misanthropy — in theory these are admirable means for knowing men ; but we are speaking of practical life. And in practice we find that affectionate certitude answers better — at least as regards that very large and important part of our human course in which the influence of the family is shaping and moulding the character.
Think for an instant how that critical attitude which I have called crinanthropy would answer in family life. I
^ Dr. Murray's Dictionary has not reached the stage at which it could be ascertained whether this word as yet exists. In any case, I hope the reader will pardon the word because of the commonness of the thing. For one misanthropist there are a thousand or ten thousand
crinantJiopists.
62 NEWMAN'S DOCTRINE
have admitted above that our faith in the ordinary course of material things is so far modifiable that if we were suddenly asked, " Is it certain that this, or that, will happen ? '' we might have to reply, " Well, no, not certain ; but at all events highly j^robable."' But suppos- ing such a question were put to us about persojis ; suppose the questioner were to begin from the end of the Deca- logue and work upwards, asking us " Is it certain that your parents, your wife, your children, will not do this, or that ? " — who would endure, in some of these contexts, to answer with the word " probable "? We simply decline to look at the matter in that light. Regarding it physiologically, we should say that to entertain questions of this kind tends to insanity ; Biblically, we should say it leads to Hell.
Thus far we seem justified in asserting that affectionate certitude works better than crinanthropy for ourselves, that is, for our moral welfare and sanity, in family life. It might also be maintained, we think, that, in the end, it works better for our own intelligence ; because it enables us to understand phenomena, quickening our sympathetic imagination, and helping us to throw ourselves into the position of others, to feel as they feel, and to know what they need. Lastly, even a man of the world will admit that this way of looking at, or feeling about, persons, works well for the persons themselves. For it is a common-place that such affectionate certitude, such trtist as this, often makes a man trustworthy — a spiritual result that no one would attribute to crinanthropy or mis- anthropy. So, seeing that our illogical practice of affectionate certitude works on the whole well, and certainly better than the theories of our critics, we cannot surrender it to them.
The only concession we can make to our critics is, perhaps the word " certitude," which makes them uneasy because it has an intellectual sound. If the word does indeed suggest
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any prominent intellectual element, it certainly is deceptive ; for the highest kind of faith, though suggested by knowledge, and therefore indebted originally to the understanding, does not appear to be, in itself, intellectual but emotional. The intellectual factor in it, if it exists, is quite subordinate ; and perhaps " factor" is not the right word. The Faith of which we are speaking does not, perhaps, coiitaiji an element of reason, but is only accompmiied by a sense of cojisotiafice with reason. Let us therefore substitute for " affectionate certitude," either " faith " or "trust." Where this "trust" is spread over a long period, and is not likely to be confirmed or confuted at any definite time, the intellectual factor in faith (if there is such a factor) is more than ever subordinated and forgotten (say, like a scaffolding, stowed away when the house is built) ; and most of all where the final verification is not expected on this side of the grave.
§ 1 1. What is Christian Faith ?
So far, we have seen that this very deceptive word faith — though it always implies more or less of desire, and a belief in some kind of sequence— varies from what is little more than an intellectual belief with a spice of desire, good or bad, up to an intense, affectionate, desire, producing all the certainty of conviction although any intellectual factor that may have once existed is either latent or absent.
In what sense, then, do we propose to use the word. It is not enough to say, " religious faith," nor even " Christian faith," unless the phrase is defined. For there are several kinds of so-called "Christian faith"; (i) "faith" that the Bible is verbally, historically, and morally inspired ; (2) "faith" that there is a true, visible, and authoritative Church of Christ upon earth ; (3) " faith " that oneself and a
64 NEWMAN'S DOCTRINE
"few" are to be eternally saved and the "many" to be eternally damned ; (4) " faith " that God will judge the world in Christ, without regard to the justice of that judgmoit ; (5) " faith " that there are three Persons in one God, without regard to the nature of those Persons and the moral goodness of that God : — all these five faiths are quite different from (6) faith in God as the Father, revealed in Christ, as the Son. Hence, whenever we hear a proposition about "faith" — even in the phrase " Christian faith " — we must treat it as we should treat a statement about "property" bequeathed to us, where we have good reason for doubting which will be the larger, the debts or the assets. In that case we should have to say, " ' Property ' ; yes, but for what amount, positive or negative ? " And so, " ' Faith ' ; yes, but in what object, good or bad ? "
The following then shall be our definition. The object of Christian Faith is that invisible order of things which is described in the Gospels as the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven. Our belief is that God, as revealed through Christ in the character of a Father, is already, in some sense, and will be seen to be hereafter in a sense beyond our present apprehension, the ruling Power of the Ufiiverse ; and our desire is that this should be so. But, by its very nature, this belief in the existence of a God thus revealed, is absorbed by a trust in the God thus revealed. This will be best seen from an instance.
I am drowning, we will suppose ; and I suddenly catch sight of a man who has plunged into the water and is by my side to save me. Reasonably or unreasonably I trust him ; I am (we will suppose) at once possessed with the conviction that he will save me. Now is it necessary that I should see him first, as a man, and trust him afterwards as a deliverer? Or may I not see him and trust him simultaneously, seeing
OF PROBABILITY AND FAITH 65
h\m, from the first — as soon as I see him at all — as a ti-usted saviour ?
In the same way, mankind is — from the Christian point of view — strugghng in an ocean of sin ; and God, when revealed to us m Christ, is revealed as a Helper from the first. Until He is thus revealed, lie — the Christian God — is not revealed to us at all ; and any other conception that we may have formed of God is not the Christian conception. As regards our visible rescuer in the water, it might be true to say that we saw him as a man first and trusted him as a rescuer afterwards ; but as regards our invisible Saviour, this cannot be true ; for imtil we see and trust Him as a Saviour, we do not see Him (as He is in Christ) at all.
But it follows from the nature of this revelation that the intellectual and logical process which might lead us to form propositions, such as God is, God helps, are altogether subordinated to the emotion of triist. Nor need it be supposed that the Author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, in defining Faith as "the assurance of things ?iot seen,'' con- tradicts our statement that Faith is not belief about things, but trust in a Fe)-so?i ; for what " things " has the writer in his mind ? Clearly, the same that St. Paul has when he speaks of "Jerusalem that is above"; he means that invisible order of things by which humanity is to be conformed to the Divine image ; and this may be described as the invisible history of humanity as represented and predicted and summed up in the Life, the Death, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the Reign of Christ. Thus Faith as defined in the Epistle to the Hebrews is practically identical with Faith defined in the Epistle to the Romans ; it is trust in an Eternal Order, summed up and represented in an eternal Person.
What part does Reason play in the formation of this faith ? Reason classifies phenomena and infers their prob-
F
66 NEWMAN'S DOCTRINE
able causes ; does Reason lead us to God in Christ through the phenomena of the world, the family, the Bible, and the Church ? We shall have a difficulty in answering this question as long as we retain the ambiguous " us." What does " us " mean ? Does it mean (i) those who, in the full maturity of manhood, are converted to Christianity ; or (2) those who are born and bred amid the influences of the Spirit of Christ ?
To take the former case, first. It would seem that here there must needs be a weighing of probabilities. In the play of Euripides, we see Ion, ignorant of his parentage, scrutinizing his old cradle, and minutely examining the swaddling-clothes, and the tokens of his babyhood, and pondering over his mother's answers before recognizing that he is indeed her son, and flying into her arms. The suspense is terrible, the strain is unique. Much more might it seem at first sight to be so in the case of the recognition of a heavenly Father by a long-estranged and fatherless soul.
But the parallel is not perhaps quite a fair one. For it omits the influence of family likeness, which, even in some human " recognitions " on the stage, plays no unimportant part, and which, in the spiritual recognition of souls — the wandering soul of man turning towards the great fixed and loving World-soul — ought to be (one may well think) almost powerful enough, of itself, to convert suggestions of kinship into demonstrative proof And this anticipation is in some degree confirmed by the records of the earliest conversions handed down to us, in which we seem to see that Reason from the first plays a subordinate part, and soon retires quite into the background. Evidence was brought forward : " Christ rose from the dead ; / saw Him " ; or, " He was seen by so-and-so " ; with some brief account, perhaps, of what Christ was and did. This seems slight
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testimony ; but at this point there entered in the influence of the "family Hkeness," and this, in two ways. The mes- sage was brought, not only about a Father, but also by a brother. If it was not, it failed. The " I " in the "/ saw Him," was a most potent element, the element of an inspired and inspiring personality, giving forth part of that life and power which it had received from the Giver.
The heart of the believer recognized the invisible Father, in part through the recognition of the visible brother who breathed as it were a spirit of sonship which made the message seem, first, credible, then, natural, then, so sublimely glorious that it was felt that it must be true. And thus these two Spirits of the " family likeness " — or shall we not rather say, the Three Spirits of Father, Son and Brother ? — combined in an irresistible alliance which converted what else would have been a mere verbal message, into a Spirit of Power. That Christ, being what He was, could not be holden by death ; that He was, as it were, bound to triumph over sin and death, these words of fire— even without the marvels of faith-healing which often accompanied the Good News — carried the Spirit of Power into the very heart of the hearer and compelled him to feel that he was in a region not to be fathomed or verified by verbal logic, and that, apart from the exact accuracy of this or that fact, God must be such a one as Christ, and Christ must represent the Ruling Principle of the world.
At this juncture, therefore, when Reason would fain weigh the pros and cons^ and decide the question in her own systematic way, faith puts her gently aside. " If this were a question of simple fact, I should have to bow to you ; but it is now mainly a question of the unverifiable causes of fact. You did your work when you laid the evidence before me and helped me to judge of the honesty of the witness and general
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consistency of the testimony. That is now over. It is right for me to beheve that God is our Father ; I need to beheve, and it is right to beheve, that Christ in some sense rose from the dead and triumphed over sin. We are here in a region where what is right is true ; and to test the right is my faculty, not yours."
There is nothing unreal, then, or dishonest, or contrary to facts, or of the nature of a make-believe, in all this. Dr. Martineau, describing Newman^s theory of faith, says, "an uneasy wonder comes upon us when we are told that in early times men became Christians, not because they believed but in order to believe (Arians, p. 78 ; Loss and Gain, p. 343) ; and that the characteristic doctrines of the Gospel were not offered to them till they had bound themselves to the Church by baptism."^ Certainly it would be an entire misrepresen- tation of the facts to say that the early Christians " believed in order that they might believe " ; they believed because they could not help it ; because conviction came rushing upon them, and conscience threw open the gates and surrendered at discretion. They did not beHeve, "upon a probability." The probability, the harmony, of the evidence, arrested t/ieir attention ; but it was the sense of affection that did the deed ; it was the " family-likeness " between man and God self- asserting itself in the heart of the converted ; it was the spirit leaping up to welcome the Father towards whom it had long been blindly groping.
We pass to the consideration of those brought up from infancy under Christian influences. What part does reason play in shaping their faith, and where does probability step in?
To such a child, unable to conceive of anyone better, wiser, and more powerful than his parents, faith in God ^ Essays, vol. i. p. 240.
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means, at first, simply trust in his parents, and then, trust in One above to whom even his parents look up with reverence. "Is this, then, 'belief on authority'? And does a child believe that there is a God, simply on the authority of his parents ; just as he believes that there are red men, and would believe that there are green men, upon their authority ? " No ; it is not so. If he believes that there is a God m the same way in which he believes that there are red men, he has a wrong conception of the term God ; he must trust in God through his parents, if he is to be said, with any truth, to "believe in God." They must be, as it were, mediators between him and God ; otherwise God is a mere Name to him, or something worse than a name, something not good but bad. The evidence, or authority, of his parents, places the truth before the child's mind and heart ; and so far as the spirit of the household has prepared him to welcome that truth by imbuing him with the love of goodness and justice, so far, and no further, he takes in the truth.
But, in either case, whether he believes in God or not, he does not believe, or disbelieve, upon a probability. He accepts the proposition in either case as a certainty ; but it ■ either remains upon the surface of the soul as a theory that does not practically affect him — perhaps because he sees that it does not practically affect his parents — or else it penetrates the soul for good or ill. If for good, then there is the germ of the faith in a heavenly Father. If for ill, then there is the germ of the dread of a hard Judge or capricious Tyrant, or a vague sense of a mysterious Restrainer of pleasures and Meddler with innocent amusements. In no case, does a child believe in God " upon a probability."
But perhaps it may be argued that the conscious "belief upon probabilities," enters later on ; at the point where, for example, the child, or youth, or man, passes from his false
70 NEWMAN'S DOCTRINE
belief about God as a Tyrant to a true belief in God as a Father. Do the records of religious experiences justify such a supposition ? Does a man pass from dreading God as a domineering Interferer, to loving and trusting Him as a Father, by some nice weighing and pondering of prob- abilities which leads him perhaps to discover that, whereas he had believed that there were three chances for a Tyrant and two for a Father, he now discovers there are three for a Father, and only two for a Tyrant ? Surely such a hypothesis needs only to be fairly and fully stated in order to be unhesitatingly and irrevocably dismissed with the words of the Ajjostle : " Ye have not so learned Christ.''''
It is the beauty and the glory of the Righteousness of God in Christ that turn us from thoughts of darkness and from self-brooding fears, and captivate us and constrain us to trust in Him. Some glimpse or other of the truth obscured in childhood — and often obscured by well-meant religious teaching — brings home to us the reality of Christ ; that, after all, He was a man, though Divine ; that He did indeed bear the sins and carry the iniquities of all man- kind, as, on a small scale, men are now bearing one another's sins and carrying one another's iniquities ; that He did indeed introduce a new power of forgiveness into the world ; that He did indeed bequeath His very being to be our food and the sustenance of our souls for ever ; and then, gradually or suddenly, we find that our dread of Christ as a Judge, or our dim and far-off reverence for Him as a mysterious amalgam of the human and divine, has become a passionate certitude that He, and no other thing or person, expresses the ruling principle of the Universe. Then almost all things become clear ; and Sin itself, though it can never become quite clear in this life, looms through the half- dispelled mist no longer as a "stone of stumbling," but as a
OF PROBABILITY AND FAITH 71
Step, an altar-step leading to a higher Righteousness than could ever have been achieved by an innocent world. This is Faith ; and Faith, we willingly admit, derived help from Reason, which did its good work in discerning and classifying the operations of the Divine Word, working in many shapes and with various results ; but still there is no room in this Faith for Probability.
Nor does Probability step in at any later stage. ' Proba- bility' means 'proveableness.' But no man now-a-days, that is to say, no educated man, believes that he can prove the truth of Christianity. Once people thought it could be proved by miracles alone ; no one thinks that now. If a man worked a miracle in heaven to prove that Christ was an impostor, we -should not believe him : then how can we ask sceptics to believe that Christ was God because, it is said, He worked miracles on earth ? We did not approach Christ, we do not remain in Christ, on the strength of such proofs as these.
There are certain facts — facts of the nursery, of social life, of history, of science, of the Church, of the Bible — which suggest that God is the Father of mankind ; there are others that point in a contrary or different direction, suggesting that Evil, or Nothing, rules the Universe. The honest Christian does not tamper with either class of facts ; but he allows his mind to rest more on the former, because he loves them and finds them helpful. Some of the facts that prepared him in his childhood to accept God as a Father— ^.^. his trust in parental goodness and perfection, and perhaps his trust in the historical accuracy of some parts of the Bible — he finds, as he grows older, to be not so fully true as he supposed ; but meantime, his increased spiritual experience and his enlarged knowledge of human nature have combined to build up the structure of Faith within his heart. Then,
72 NEWMAN'S DOCTRINE
the structure being complete, some of what he thought facts — which were but as a kind of scaffolding and not a part of the building itself — can be dispensed with, not only without injury, but even with benefit to the building ; and the Faith remains, cleared from much that was once a help but is now an encumbrance.
In a painfully curious passage written by a man of ability, but much given to "views," and perhaps more versed in books and views than in the higher possibilities of human nature, a kind of patronage is extended to the rational . " view " of Faith, as put forward by the late Dean Church : " Also that view of Faith has so much in it that you ought to make more of it, some time or other. / could fancy its workifig up to something. The same of the view of ' the powers which God's wisdom has in these last days placed in the hands of men.' They are views which seem to explain our present state of things — the former, as show- ing that medicBval faith was not so much better than ours as, in some aspects, it seems ; the latter, as showing that our tvant of that aboriginal genuifie faith has something to say in its defence, and can point to a new dispensation of things which ill some measure justifies or explaifis it." ^
It is lamentable that from a professed theologian there should have come forth such an avowal of ignorance of the first principles of the Christian religion. As though anything whatever could " justify " our want of "genuine " faith ! But no "justification " at all is needed. The tnodern faith is the more '■'• ge?iuine" of the two. It is faith in Christ for His own sake and not for the sake of His supposed thauma- turgic powers. Dean Church's " view" (or, as I should call it, statement of facts that should be patent to all Christians) is this, that Christian faith should be faith in God's Eternal ^ Letters of the Rev. J. B. Mozley, p. 175.
OF PROBABILITY AND FAITH 73
order as revealed in His Eternal Son : " Search as we will, we can find nothing to rest upon, nothing that will endure the real trial, but the faith of the Psalmists in the eternal kingdom of God — the faith of the Psalmists lit up by the 'grace and truth that came by Jesus Christ.' "^ It is only theological viewists who would dream that such faith as this required justification or apology because it found its nourishment less in wonders such as the articulate speech of Balaam's ass, or the liquefaction of the blood of St. Janu- arius, than in the spiritual, the naturally-spiritual experience of Christian souls and Christian societies.
The weakness of such a Faith — if it is a weakness — is, that it does not embrace a large number of dogmatic propositions. The strength of it — besides that it has no quarrel with Reason and incurs no danger of fanaticism — is, that it is under no temptation to deal dishonestly with facts. Recognizing that there is an opposing Evil in the world, it confesses that our trust in the ultimate triumph of Goodness is sometimes, and is intended to be, of the nature of an effort. Christian Faith is a victory ; but it is not a victory over facts, in the setise of dishonestly denying facts. It is a victory over selfish ignoble desires, brooding melancholies, bestial passions that tempt men to think themselves meant to be beasts ; it is not a victory over the mind, the understanding, the observation and the judgment, with which faculties, as we conceive, man has been endowed by God in order that he may seek and approximate to truth. If the Devil were to paint the sky to-morrow with the luminous letters THERE IS NO GOD, Christian Faith would still believe in a God ; but it would not try to blink the NO or say it was meant for an A.
' Church's Advent Sermons, p. 28. Macmillan. 1885.
74 NEWMAN'S DOCTRINE
§ 12. Newman' s Inclined Plane of Probabilities
Such a Faith however seemed too weak and too illogical for Newman. He tells us that, though he made a partial use of Keble's theory, yet he was (20) " dissatisfied, because he did not go to the root of the difficulty." What " difficulty " ? He means the " difficulty " of assenting firmly to a vast mass of Biblical statements as to facts, concerning some of which there is not very strong evidence ; and the evidence — such as it is — we sometimes have little means of investigating. In other words, Newman quarrels with Keble's theory of Faith because it does not logically enable him to take up some " system " of fact and thought, and to adopt it whole, and to say, " All these facts and statements I have not investigated and shall not investigate ; but I am certain they are all accurate." This is the "difficulty" which Keble's theory of Faith does not meet and which Newman's theory is intended to meet.
He therefore attempts, as he expresses it {Apol. 19), " to complete " Keble's theory by " considerations " of his own, to be found in his University Sermons, Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles, and Essay on Development of Doctrine. The advantage of his theory is that it attaches to all statements in the Bible, to all the miraculous narratives therein contained, and even to all the alleged miracles of Ecclesiastical History, something of the sentiment that we attach to faith in God Himself The disadvantage is, that it attaches to our fundamental faith in God that taint of the simultaneous feeling of Probability from which Faith and Love shrink as from a leper's touch. Belief in God and belief in the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius are both made beliefs of the same kind, though
OF PROBABILITY AND FAITH 75
differing in degree ; one is at the top of the incUned plane and represents a " transcendent " ProbabiHty ; the other, perhaps half-way down, is believed in upon a medial Prob- ability ; then perhaps the belief in the Miracle of the tongueless Martyrs, mentioned aoove (p. 18) might come at the bottom representing the lowest degree of Probability. The Probability at the top we may call " certitude " ; that in the middle, "a belief," or "a pious belief" ; that at the bottom " a pious opinion " or " a religious conjecture." From Newman's point of view, this is a very useful theory which he might call the " Inclined Plane of Probabilities." If you have certitude about God, upon grounds of Probability, why not, upon similar grounds, have a "pious belief" in the Liquefaction of the Blood of St. JanuariuS/ and a " religious conjecture " about the African Martyrs ? In his Apologia (p. 21) he stated his theory thus : — " That, as there were probabilities which sufficed for ^ certi- tude, so there were other probabilities which were legiti- mately adapted to create opinion : that it might be quite as much a matter of duty in given cases and to given persons to have about a fact an opinion of a definite strength and con- sistency, as in the case oi greater or of more nmneroiis prob- abilities it was a duty to have a certitude ; that, accordingly, we were bound to be more or less sure, on a sort of (as it were) graduated scale of ascent, viz., according as the prob- abilities attaching to a professed fact were brought home to us, and, as the case might be, to entertain about it a pious
1 Both here, and on p. 20, the original edition has "to create," instead of " for." The reason for the change is this : Newman believes that " probabiUties " do tiot ^^ create" certitude ; but, when they have accumulated so far as to "suffice," God steps in and creates certitude. On p. 22 oi Apologia, "to create certitude," is still left — no doubt, by a slip. Notice, in the next line that "probabilities" may "create" opinion.
76 NEWMAN'S DOCTRINE
belief, or a pious opinion, or a religious conjecture, or at least, a tolerance of such belief, or opinion or conjecture, in others." He adds that, " in other cases " (but he does not define whether they are " cases " of intellectual improba- bility or moral repugnance) we are not to believe, opine, or conjecture.
Here it is implied that, just as we believe in a fairly pro- bable miracle upon a fair amount of probabilities, so we beliet^e in God upon those '■'■greater or 7nore nu?nerous probabilities " in the case of which it is our " duty to have a certitude." But still, as Newman does not expressly say that we believe in a God on a ground of probability., it will be best to quote at full length the passage in which he at last commits himself to these very words. Al- though nineteen years had elapsed between the Essay on Development (1845) and the Apologia — giving him ample time to formulate his theory — he nevertheless considerably altered, in subsequent editions, the exposition contained in the first edition of the latter. Where they diverge, I give both versions : —
(1864 atid 1890).
(199) " I am not speaking theologically, nor have I any intention of going into controversy, or of defending myself; ^ but, speaking histori-
^ I have inserted the words, " I . . . myself" as the omission of them might seem unfair to some who may see their bearing on what follows. But I fail to see it. I do not understand the difference (here) between " speaking theologically " and speaking secularly. At the conclusion of the passage he says (200) : " But, let it be observed, that I am stating a matter of fact, not defending it ; and if any Catholic says in conse- quence that I have been converted in a 7in-ons^ way, I cannot help that now." Possibly, therefore, Newman means, by this introductory caveat, no more than this, that some of his expressions may not seem technically accurate in the light of authoritative Roman theological principles.
OF PROBABILITY AND FAITH 77
cally of what I held in 1843-4, I say, that / believed in a God on a ground of probability, and that I believed in Christianity on a proba- bility, and that I believed in Catholicism on a probability, and that
1864. 1890.
(p. 324). (p. 199).
"all three were about the same "these three grounds of proba-
izw^iT/" probability, bility, distinct from each other, of
course, in subject-matter, were still, all of them one and the same in nature of proof, as being prob- abilities— probabilities of a special kind,
(1864 and 1890).
"a cumulative, a transcendent probability, but still probability ; in- asmuch as He who made us has so willed, that in mathematics indeed we [should, om. in 1864] arrive at certitude by rigid demonstration, but in religious inquiry we [should, om. in 1864] arrive at certitude by accumulated probabilities : —
1864. 1890
(p. 324). (P- 199).
" — inasmuch as He who has " He has willed, I say, that we
willed that we should so act co- should so act, and, as willing it, operates with us in our acting, and He co-operates with us in our act- thereby bestows on us ing and thereby enables us to do
that which He wills us to do, and carries us on, if our will does but co-operate with His, to
(1864 and 1890.)
" a certitude which rises higher than the logical force of our conclusions."
Reserving for the next section the question how we are to co-operate with God so as to gairi this " certitude," let us for the present briefly consider whether there is not a terrible possibility of losiiig it. Imagine a pious believer brought up
78 NEWMAN'S DOCTRINE
upon the principle of this Inclined Plane of Probabilities ; entertaining a "pious behef" about this miracle, a "pious opinion " about another, a " religious conjecture " about a third, and a " certitude " about God ; and recognizing that all these mental conditions, viz. certitude, pious belief, pious opinion, and so on, are similar in kind, but different in degree — the certitude being our "duty" in the case of "greater or more numerous probabilities " but the pious belief being equally our " duty " where the probabilities are less great and numerous — and that all alike are based upon probability. And imagine — a thing by no means impossible — that the evidence against first one, then another, of these miracles, compels him at last to give them all up.
What follows ? He has been taught and trained to believe in these and other miracles as special revelations of God's Personal attributes, the " most important characteristics " of the records of His reign ; he has been habituated to regard these royal manifestations with something of the solemnity and awe with which he regards the invisible King Himself; they are, so to speak, a holy region, the precincts and outer courts through which we pass to His immediate presence ; precincts that bear the impress of His immediate touch, His handiwork ; so personal to Him as almost to be — if God had parts — veritable parts of God. And now, step by step, he is forced back by evidence and common sense and honesty, surrendering a first, a second, a third, of the sacred enclosures ; never gaining ground, always losing it ; losing as it were Divine ground, losing the tokens of the Divine presence. Why ask what will be the end ? When a soldier begins to look behind him, do we not generally know, without asking, what the end will be ? Giving up this, and that, and the other, of beliefs once held " upon probabilities," will he not presently be tempted to ask himself whether he may not be compelled
OF PROBABILITY AND FAITH 79
at last to give up that highest belief of all, which he was taught to regard as resting ofi the same basis of proofs co\\ it, as in 1864, "about the same kind of probability," or call it, as in 1890, "one and the same in nature of proof," call it "cumulative," call it "transcendent," call it "certitude"; still, at bottom, and in fact, nothing more than '■'•probability " after all ?
And further, besides the danger of losing a "certitude " tainted with this conscious thought of probabilities, there is also the danger of never gaining it at all by these means. Bishop Butler, from whom Newman says he borrowed (whether in Butler's sense, or not, I will not stop to enquire) this Doctrine of Probability, when lying on his death-bed, is said to have confessed to his chaplain that he was afraid to die. " ' My lord,' said the chaplain, ' you have forgotten that Jesus Christ is a Saviour.' 'True,' was the answer, 'but how shall I know that He is a Saviour for me ? ' ' My lord, it is written. Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.' 'True,' said the Bishop, 'and I am surprised that, though I have read that Scripture a thousand times over, I never felt its virtue till this moment ; and now I die happy.' " 1
Stories of this kind are often false and almost always ex- aggerated ; but, true or false, this story exemplifies what might be expected from one who has always believed in Christ "upon a probability." Somehow or other the simul- taneous thought of " probability " paralyses affection and trust. Faith implies an action of the soul, a stretching out of the hand, or an opening of the eyes, to receive God's proffered love ; but the sense of probability implies, not action, but
^ This story is related " on the authority of Mr. Venn," in the Intro- duction to The Analogy of Religion, edited by the Rev. Dr. Angus, p. xii.
So NEWMAN'S DOCTRINE
" stopping to thhik." Hence it comes that a belief in God held upon probabilities — even though we call them by the finest titles, "cumulative," "transcendent," and the like — rests upon the mere surface of the heart ; and the longer we become familiarized with it as a probability, the harder it is to recognize it as a certitude. We read or repeat our Creed, " a thousand times over," but we " never feel its virtue."
§ 13. How to attain Religious Certitude
We now have to consider the question. How are we to " act," according to Newman's scheme, so as to attain certi- tude in religious inquiry ? The earlier and shorter version of the scheme (which I prefer to quote because the later seems only to make the process a little less clear and a little more mysterious) tells us that we are to " act " ; and then God " co-operates with us in our acting, and there- by bestows on us a certitude which rises higher than the logical force of our conclusions." But how has God " willed us to act " ? Going back for our answer to the previous words, in the passage quoted above (p. 77) "willed that we should so act" we find ourselves once more carried back (after Newman's fashion) to what again precedes, " God has willed that in religious inquiry tve should arrive at certitude by accumulated probabilities.^'' Our " acting," then, is to be "arriving at certitude by accumulated probabili- ties." We obtain therefore — upon an exact and grammatical interpretation of the passage — this inane and futile result, that we, on our side, are to " arrive at certitude " by accumulated probabilities, and, if we do this, God, on His side, will ^'•bestow on us certitude." Obviously Newman does not mean this. He means that we are to attempt to arrive at certitude. But how ? By " accumulated
OF PROBABILITY AND FAITH 8i
probabilities" ; and if we go on patiently " accumulating probabilities," God will at last step in, as it were, and, with a magic touch, convert our heap of probabilities into a "certitude."
This is Newman's theory and this appears to have been — at least occasionally — Newman's practice. It exactly de- scribes what he himself did in 1845 while he was waiting for some intimation of the Divine will, some " sign " that might make it clear to him that it was his " duty " to join the Church of Rome. His heap of " accumulated prob- abilities " may be found in his Da^elopmeiit of Christian Doctrine in which he supplied himself with a logical basis for his proposed action. We are therefore justified in believing that this passage really does represent his deliberate theo- retical estimate of the right means of obtaining religious certitude. The emotions Hope, Love, Faith, seem to be altogether out of court, and to have noplace, no right to say a word, in the formation of religious certitude ; nor is the " acting " to be moral action, beneficent action, that kind of action which appears to be contemplated in the words (John vii. 17) " If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God." It is to be a piling up of probabilities ; a supplying oneself with a logical basis. We are to believe in God and in Christ on the same grounds as we are to believe in the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius ; only in the former case the probabilities are by some mysterious process (not illustrated by anything in nature) to be converted into a " certitude," whereas in the latter case they remain untransmuted, merely " beliefs," or "pious opinion." The former is transcendent probability, the latter is medial probability ; still, both are probabilities.
Practical atheism being that state of mind in which a man believes in God without a basis of Love, Newman — if
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82 NEWMAN'S DOCTRINE
he had really in his heart of hearts adopted this theory — would have been a practical atheist : and indeed we should be driven to that conclusion if we felt obliged to receive as true the following pitilessly cold and cruel self-judgment passed by himself upon himself in 1834 {Letters, i. 416) : —
"Indeed, this is how I look on myself; very much (as the illustra- tions goes) as a pane of glass, which transmits heat, being cold itself. I have a vivid perception of the consequences of certain admitted principles, have a considerable intellectual capacity of drawing them out, have the refinement to admire them, and a rhetorical or histrionic power to represent them ; and, having no great {i.e. no vivid) love of this world, whether riches, or honour, or anything else, and some firmness and natural dignity of character, take the profession of them upon me, as I might sing a tune which I liked — loving the Truth, but not possessing it, for I believe myself at heart to be ttearly hollow, i.e. 'vith little love, little self-denial."
Such a sentence as this a lost soul might pass upon itself on the Day of Judgment. It makes us shudder to the very depth of our being. It contains so much that is subtly true, so much well-balanced praise, so much half-justified self-suspicion, that we are disposed to exclaim, "Can it be really true ? Was he indeed ' nearly hollow ' ? "
That it was not true, is proved by these same letters that supply the accusation. It was Newman's way, in his self- introspective mood — ignorant as he was of human nature at its best and of its glorious possibilities, and versed, like any diplomatist, in its intricate weaknesses — to distrust and shudder at himself, as he shuddered at " the world " around hnn. In his Apologia he tells us that when he renounced his brother in 1833, he " put his conduct upon a syllogism." ^ He was not so cold-blooded. He renounced his brother,
^ Apol. p. 47, " I would have no dealings with my brother, and I put my conduct upon a syllogism. I said, ' St. Paul bids us avoid those who cause divisions ; you cause divisions ; therefore I must avoid you.' "
OF PROBABILITY AND FAITH 83
with one-half of himself, as a propliet, or, if you will, as a fanatic ; and afterwards, with the other half of himself, he justified his action as a logician.
Now, just as we refuse to believe Newman himself when he accuses himself of being " nearly hollow," and of re- nouncing his brother "upon a syllogism," so we are justified in refusing to believe that he trusted in God upon a prob- ability— even upon a transcendent probability. It was, perhaps, through fear of himself and distrust of a basis so subjective as the emotions, that he was induced to impute to logic and probability a feeling of certitude that really sprang from nobler sources. There must have been, some- where or other in the formation of his religious certitude, the elements — though inadequately present — of Hope and Love. But if we refuse to call a man so blind as he makes himself out to be, it does not follow that we should at once go into the other extreme, and say that he is fit to be the guide of others. Even to himself his theory must have been most injurious ; but on some of his followers — who had less reverence and less knowledge than he had — this theory of "going by the greater probability" must have acted like poison, destroying such germs of honest faith as they once had, and forcing them back upon the sole duty of believing whatever was safe.
The following letter, written by one of Newman's followers to Mark Pattison, will give an instance of the danger here indicated. Every line of it is infected with the Newmannian spirit, which occasionally breaks out in what may be described as the Tractarian cant of " going upon grounds " (only that the writer calls it ^^/aa'ng grounds ") and "going by prob- abilities." It is an invitation to join the Church of Rome, and though it sounds dispassionately and almost mathemati- cally reasonable, it is really and radically immoral. For it
G 2
84 NEWMAN'S DOCTRINE
practically urges the reader, for the sake of saving his soul, to say that he believes what, in his hearty he does not believe. This letter does indeed justify Dr. Martineau's accusation quoted above (p. 68) that the tendency of Newman's teaching was to lead people to " believe in order to believe " ; that is, in this particular case, to take the plunge into the Roman Church in the hope that, when you have once said that you believe what you don't believe, you will feel delightfully certain about it for the rest of your life : —
" My dear Pattison,
I hope you will excuse my earnestly pressing upon you the duty oi facing your grounds for remaining a Protestant, and of going by the greater probability SiS to which is the Church. You seemed to me to be getting quite towards scepticism last time I had a talk with you, and that is one reason why I urge you not to delay. Depend upon it thzX yoti cannot expect more than probability out of the Catholic Church., and that you really ought to act on that, whether you feel inclined to do so or not.
"People say that converts are 'cocky' ; but that impression arises in part from the fact that they who have it have no more than doubtful evidence for what Catholics have certain proof [of]. This is not a conviction arising from my own case, but from all I see around me. It would be ' cocky ' in me to say so : but I don't care what it is, so as I may urge you not to be slow about the ' uttum necessarium ' of caring for your own soul." ^
This letter was written in 1846, a year after Newman had joined the Church of Rome. The writer (if we may accept the testimony of Mark Pattison's Memoirs) appears to have thought it consistent with his honour, while still remaining a member of the Church of England, to lose no opportunity of reviling her as a " stepmother," and to avow — in such Vir- gilian quotations as " Tendimus in Latium " — the determin- ation of his party to approach the Roman Church. We have therefore no right to attribute his unquestionable "cocki- ^ Mark Pattison's Memoirs, p. 222.
OF PROBABILITY AND FAITH 85
ness " to the Church of Rome. But Newman cannot be so easily acquitted. If this "cocky" creature had learned from his leader some sense of the nobility of those natural emotions whereby alone we can approximate to God, he could hardly have written, on so solemn a subject, a letter so frivolously shallow and so contemptibly mean : but what else can be expected from a man, naturally light-minded, who has been taught by his spiritual guide that we are to arrive at Faith in the living God "by accumulated probabilities " ? ^
Is it surprising that more manly characters were so re- pelled by this artificial notion of a special and ecclesiastical Faith that in their reaction from it they were driven to say, " If this is what Faith means, we will have nothing to do with it nor with anything that calls itself by such a name " ? Such was the attitude of J. A. Froude : " What was faith ? " is the question suggested to his mind by Newman's doc- trine. "And on what did it rest? Was it as if mankind had been born with but four senses by which to form their notions of things external to them, and that a fifth, sight, was conferred on favoured individuals, which converted con- jectures into certainty ? I could not tell. For myself, this way of putting the matter gave me no new sense at all, and only taught me to distrust my old ones." ^
^ At the same time it ought to be said, in fairness, that Newman himself had been scandalized, even in 1839, by the absurd audacity of his follower ^Letters, ii. 291): "What does he do on St. Michael's day but preach a sermon " [occupying Newman's pulpit in St. Mary's] " not simply on angels, but on his one subject, for which he has a monomania, of fasting ; nay, and say that it was a good thing, whereas angels feasted on festivals, to make the brute creation last on fast days . . . The next Sunday . . . he preached to them " [i>. the Heads of Houses] " the Roman doctrine of the Mass. ... To this he added other speculations of his own still more objectionable."
'^ Life of Ward p. 396.
CHAPTER III
" LEGAL PROOFS "
§ 1 4. What is ' ' Legal Proof ' ' ?
"Some infidel authors," says Newman (231), "advise us to accept no miracles which would not have a verdict in their favour in a court of justice ; that is, they employ against Scripture a weapon which Protestants would confine to attacks upon the Church ; as if moral and religious ques- tions required legal proofs, and evidence were the test of truth.' ^
What is "legal proof"? It is simply proof of the ordinary kind, by evidence direct and indirect, but stronger and stricter. Legal proof, being seldom required except where facts are affirmed and denied by interested parties, requires (in a greater degree than ordinary proof) that the evidence shall be deliberate — hence, the use of the oath ; free from exaggeration or misunderstanding — hence, the rejection of hear-say evidence ; consistent and truthful — hence, the demand that every witness shall undergo cross- examination ; free from suspicion — hence, the preference of evidence as to character (and even of evidence as to facts) coming from witnesses who have no interest, one way or the other, in the ultimate decision. Occasionally, in the ex-
"LEGAL PROOFS" 87
cessive desire to serve order, law has unfairly favoured des- potism ; and, in the excessive desire to be fair to the accused, it has foolishly excluded evidence that might have fairly helped the accused. But on the whole, it may be said that legal proof is of the same kind as ordinary proof, only superior in degree.
What then do people mean when they say, " Our know- ledge of our friend so-and-so gives us a proof far stronger than any legal proof , that he never committed such and such a crime " ? Whatever they may mean, they talk sophisti- cally ; for there is no such thing as a legal proof thixt " so-and- so never committed such and such a crime ; " law never attempts to prove a negative of this general kind. But if these people mean that their knowledge of their friend gives them a proof, far stronger than any legal proof, that he did not comviit a defi?iite criine at a defifiite ti/ne and in a defifiite place, then they talk sentimental nonsense, — pardonable, but still nonsense. For "legal proof" could show on the testimony of a score of competent witnesses that their friend was a thousand miles away from that definite place, at that definite time, engaged in some occupation which made it physically impossible that he could commit that definite crime. But their knowledge of their friend could not show that he might not have suddenly developed kleptomaniacal or suicidal, or homicidal, tendencies ; or that he might not have been drugged, or hypnotized, or otherwise coerced, into doing something wholly alien to his nature ; or that he might not of himself, have experienced some sudden lapse into an isolated act of evil.
"Then here" — it may be said — "you are arguing /^r probability (since probability is all you can get out of legal proof), and against the feelings — just the opposite to your former line." Of course I am. For I am speaking now of
88 " LEGAL PROOFS "
historic facts, where one's feelings, so to speak, are to be put in one's pocket, being useless and indeed worse than useless, in weighing evidence for fact — except so far as they may constitute testimony to character, which, of course, may be sometimes of great weight as evidence. I said, above, that, as regards the future, if the suggestion were made to us that those whom we loved best might not very improbably commit certain abominable crimes, we should do well to refuse to " look at the matter in that light " : that this way of looking at things did not work ; that it was not good for physical or moral health to contemplate such con- tingencies in such a cold-blooded way ; that it was against nature, and therefore unnatural. And to that I adhere. But I have never contended that probability was not to be our guide, on those comparatively exceptional occasions when we have to inquire into the truth or falsehood of what actually happened.
Is there, then, no such thing as "moral proof" as to facts ; and may not a father say — without laying himself open to the charge of folly — " I am morally convinced that my son did not do, and could not have done, this or that defin- ite act at a definite time and place " ? There is not the least harm in the phrase, provided that, in the first place, it be confined to negatives, and, in the second place, it be remem- bered that "moral proof" is a mere non-legal phrase for witness to character." If the father says, " I am morally convinced that my son must have done this or that," he is wrong ; for all sorts of accidents, having nothing to do with morality, may have prevented the action. The moral con- viction of a father, that his son could not have done this or that, arises from a great mass of evidence, facts small and great, which, if they could be put before a jury in court by a number of disinterested and independent witnesses.
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would have great legal weight. Because (i) this evidence coming from a father, who is interested in the decision, has — and ought to have — comparatively little weight in a Court of Justice ; and because (2) it is, by its nature, very lengthy ; and (3) because it is often so subtle that it cannot be easily reproduced in Court, we have come to think of it, and to talk of it, as though it were quite distinct, in kind as well as in degree, from " testimony to character : " but it is identical in kind, though not in degree.
The phrase "moral proof " or "morally convinced," is sometimes used of the future, e.g., "I am morally convinced that so-and-so will pay his debts, or, will not neglect his parents, will not ill treat his wife," and so on. Here, of course, " legal proof" is out of the question, because the law seldom, if ever, recognizes proof as to what will be, but what has beefi, or is (e.g., as to my /r^j'i?^/ reasonable fear that my neighbour will assault me — a fear that must be shown to be reasonable by evidence as to the past). There is no great objection to the phrase " moral conviction " with reference to the future, except that it has two words, and " faith " — which is one word — means the same thing. However there is a shade of difference between them ; and there is room for both in the language. But in any case we are not to ground upon this application of "moral proof" to the future, any vague inference that " moral proof" can dispute with " legal proof" in the peculiar province of the latter, that is to say, l/ie region of historical fact.
§ 15. Is Evidence " the test of Truth " .?
Now we return to Newman's dictum : " as if moral and religious questions required legal proofs." To this we must reply, " If, by ' moral and religious questions,' you mean, such
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questions as, whether there is a God or not ; whether He is just ; whether He will ultimately conform man to His image ; whether Good will ultimately triumph over Evil — then we agree with you. For these questions are in the region of hope, aspiration, and faith ; and, as we should allow no facts to dis- prove these beliefs, so we must admit that no facts could prove them, though facts ca7i help us, and have helped us, to shape, and to develop, and to identify with our inmost being, those hopes, those aspirations, and those beliefs. But if you mean, by 'moral and religious questions,' the question whether God stopped the sun (relatively to the earth) at the prayer of Joshua, and the question whether our Lord killed two thousand swine, who at the worst had done no greater harm than belong to a Jewish owner, and more probably belonged to a Gentile — then we must reply that you enter the region of historical fact ; and here faith has no place, and, 'legal proof is the best possible proof; and if you cannot get it, you ought to try at least to get some- thing as much like it as possible ; and if you cannot get something very like it, you must be content to say, ' This fact is not proved.' "
Against this, Newman would have two rejoinders. In the first place he would reply that although the truth or false- hood of the stopping of the sun at the command of Joshua, or the slaying of the Gadarene swine, is not of itself, a " moral and religious question," yet it becomes so, through its inclusion in the canonical Scriptures. The Scriptures he accepts as inspired — -at least so far as questions of fact — and so heartily accepts that he will even wait to find out the meaning of motion (see above, p. 32), and, for the present, suspend his belief that the earth moves, rather than say that the Scriptures err in asserting that the earth is still. On this point we need not dwell. We should have to
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agree to differ. He, on his side, would tell us that it was at our peril that we rejected a single scriptural statement of fact on our private judgment ; we should reply, on our side, that it was at his peril that he swallowed the Scriptures whole, doing violence to his mind and understanding. He would say we must not " pick and choose " ; we should rejoin that we must " test and discriminate " the true from the false, and hold fast that which is true. He would warn us that we might not find ourselves "safe" on the Day of Judgment if we rejected God's word in the Bible ; we should warn him that he was " unsafe " already, and probably would be still less safe hereafter, since he deliberately rejected God's word in Science. And so we should part, with mutual warn- ings, but still with hopes, perhaps on both sides, certainly on ours, that in the end, if we were both honest, there might be found " safety " of some sort for both of us.
But Newman's second rejoinder would be, " You say, ' This fact is not proved ' : granted, but (177) 'a fact is not disproved because it is not proved,' and I must repeat what I said just now, that 'evidence is not the test of truth,' Thousands of people in Central Africa have no ' evidence ' of the existence of ice, and would deny its existence ; yet ice exists."
The answer to this, is, that people prach'ca//y detiy, and are quite right in practically denyi?ig, the existence of everything of which they have no evidence, direct or indirect. There may be regions of four, five, or fifty dimensions ; there ;//«_>' (^^ bipeds in the sun, each as big as the moon ; there may be in the earth at this moment a diamond a hundred times as big as the Koh-i-noor ; there may be an instance in which the law of gravitation has been suspended. But we are so constituted as not to act on any " may be " that is not at least suggested by some evidence. Until thus suggested.
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the "may be " is non-existent relatively to us; it is " nothing " ; and of course every one knows how many neat and sophistical truisms can be elaborated about " nothing." But, if we are to be serious, we must say that, in practice, although millions of facts are daily occurring of which we have heard nothing, and for which conse- quently we have no evidence— yet still 7io truth is a truth for us ufiless an alleged fact has borne the test of evidence — evidence direct, or indirect, but always evidence of some kind.
Of course a man may make a mistake now and then in rejecting some truth for which, though there exists ample evidence, none but inadequate evidence has been submitted to him. But, still, rejection, under these circumstances, is the right course. A Central African ought to be praised, not blamed, for rejecting the existence of ice, if casually mentioned — or even deliberately attested^by some Euro- pean whom he has repeatedly detected in exaggeration., and embellishmefit, and sometimes in deliberate falsehood.^ The right rule is, to regard as non-existent all alleged facts for which there is no evidence direct or indirect ; and to regard as antecedeiitly false, or highly improb- able, all statei7ients that contradict our hioivledge of the fixed and orderly course of things. Observe we do not
^ Comp. (171) : " it is doubtless the tendency of religious minds to imagine mysteries and wonders where there are none, and, much more, where causes of awe really exist, will they unintentionally misstate, exaggerate, zndi embellish" ; also, {ib.) "certain others, i.e. miracles," are said to be "rejected on all hands as fictitious and pretended" ; and (239), ^' false miracles at once exceed and conceal and prejudice those which are genuine "; and (ib.), it is implied that the true are as much fewer than the false, "as the elect are fewer than the reprobate, and hard to find amid the chaff." These passages justify our illustration of the " European " who exaggerates, embellishes ^ and sometimes lies.
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say they are false ; but, being practical people, with a limited amount of time at our disposal, and having been taught by repeated experience that innumerable similar stories have originated from nothing but misunderstandings, or exaggerations, or deliberate impostures, and that very few of such stories have been based on truth, we shall say to an alleged fact of this kind, "Statistical Probability is 100 to i, or 1000 to I, against you; pass on ; we have no time to think of you. Other propositions have higher claims."
This practical, reasonable, and justifiable quasi-prejudice against the extraordinary — though it ought not to prevent us from examining a case here and there where the evidence is particularly strong — is absolutely necessary for a truth- seeker, because it prevents him from wasting his time upon the myriads of marvellous lies which have abounded in all ages, and leaves him leisure for serious investigation. It is not really prejudice ; it is only a kind of selective Suspen- sion of Judgment, whereby we select some, and dismiss other propositions, that claim to be considered, because some are more worthy than others, and we have not time to hear all. The practical conclusion, then is this : since, for all the purposes of life, no "truth" of fact can, so to speak, exist for a man of sense, until it has presented some proof that it has passed a preliminary test of evidence, we may say, roughly and popularly speaking, that evidence is "the test" of truth as regards fact, and that truth of fact does "depend upon evidence."
But if any one chooses — not without a touch of pedantry, as we think — to insist upon it that " Evidence is not the test of truth ; for truth may exist without our knowing anything about it," we submit and acquiesce at once ; for we deny, as firmly as he does, that " Man is the measure of all things." Only we venture humbly to remind our
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adept in this nice use of words to be on his guard lest, if he should apply this maxim to the investigation of historical facts, where he has an interest hi this or that conclusion, he may find that from freely and familiarly using it against antagonists, he has sometimes come to act as though he believed that " Evidence is of no use for testing truth.'' That Newman has acted thus, has been, in part, and will be, more fully, demonstrated.
§ 1 6. Belief '^ on Authority''
" But does not the experience of childhood show that belief based on parental authority must be with all human beings one of the stepping-stones to the knowledge of facts ; and does it not hence follow that the demand for ' legal proofs ' as to facts is against nature ? "
Nothing of the kind follows. " Legal proof," as every one knows, includes the opinions of experts. To the child, the father is an expert as to the big world outside the nursery. Suppose a father tells his child that there are red men and black men : that is, to him, " the evidence of an expert," and he accepts it as a judge and jury would accept the evidence of four physicians declaring that such and such a condition of a dead body was produced by strychnine.
Indeed the experience of childhood, so far from showing that it is against nature for men to demand "legal proof" as to facts, shows just the opposite. It is natural for children not only to receive, but to digest information, com- paring it with their pre-existing knowledge, and, in a rude way, classifying it. Now they cannot classify or digest a piece of information that gives the lie to their experience. For an intelligent child, to be told that the sun does not move, and to be told no more, is a morsel of indigestible news,
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which disorganizes his mind, dulls the mental palate, and enfeebles the appetite : " What is the use of one's eyes " — he unconsciously, or consciously, says to himself — " if there is no trusting them ? I give it up." No father, of any sense and sympathy, would ever tell a child that the sun does not move, without at least attempting to show him how the deception of the senses can arise ; nor would he feel angry, but rather pleased, with the child, for feeling dissatisfied with the contradiction between the evidence of the expert and the evidence of his own senses, and for desiring to find some reconciliation between the two. And if we admit, as I think we should, that the wisest and best father will be most desirous that his children should be led steadily onward to use their senses and faculties, and to examine facts, for themselves — not lazily taking on trust what they themselves have the means of ascertaining for themselves by a little patient labour — then it would seem to follow that it is not against nature to expect that the Supreme Father should take the same course and even more apparently.
Thus, it seems in accordance with Nature, (i), that, from the very beginning, the infant should take in its largest store of fundamental truths as to facts, from his own ex- perience, amplified and helped by a faith in the fixedness of the order of Nature ; and that this should constitute in the human being a definite habit of trusting to what is called "the evidence of his senses," so far as concerns things that come within this province : (2), that he should, afterwards — but not at first — take upon trust tJie evidence of experts, whose experience extends to things beyond his ken : yet (3), that he should not rest quiet where the evi- dence of experts contradicts his own experience, but should seek to reconcile the discrepancy : (4), that, as his own experience is enlarged, he should gradually believes less and
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less upon authority, so far as concerns the covunon things of life, such as the simplest laws of the material and of the moral world. These are Nature's Laws for healthy human growth ; and any one who should con- tinue, past childhood, to rest upon authority for those simple and fundamental truths which are necessary to material and moral welfare, would be in a condition so dwarfed and undeveloped as to deserve the name of an idiot.
On the other hand we concede to the advocates of " belief on Authority " that as civilization developes, we — and by "we " I mean not children now, but men — shall find ourselves forced to believe more and more, upon the authority of specialists — such specialists, that is, as tell us the metals of which the sun is composed, and instruct us how to construct phonographs and telephones, and to lay electric wires so that they shall do their work effectually and safely. But, then, civilized mankind will accord this belief to experts, only because — as the very word " expert " shows — that belief is in accordance with experience and can be justified by experiment. And let it be repeated that this " belief on Authority " seems to be gradually retiring, as humanity moves upward, and to be destined still further to retire, from the simpler and more fundamental truths, which once were inexplicable, but are now recognized as the pro- perty of the common intelligence. Our astronomers may specialize and claim belief as specialists ; but every educated person now knows the marvellous Law that keeps the Uni- verse together ; our physicians still claim, as of old, obedience to their authority, but we obey more intelligently because we ourselves have some knowledge of the Laws of health, which will, we trust, soon become familiar to every child in our elementary schools.
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Thus, instead of trying to repair and perpetuate the worn-out yoke of Authority in matters of belief, we ought rather to assist those tendencies which are preparing us for the time when it will drop away, and when men "shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, ' Know the Lord ' ; for they shall all know me, from the least to the greatest." Experience, if it teaches us that authority may be sometimes cast aside too soon, teaches us with equal emphasis that it may be some- times retained too long, and that it must be at some time cast aside by all who are to attain to the stature of full- grown humanity. Better to learn through mistakes than to remain ignorant by never placing ourselves within the possibility of error.
Our Lord, indeed, is said to have " taught with authority," but it was with the " authority " of the Living Truth, the great World-Conscience, so to speak, appealing to the "authority" of the kindred consciences of His several hearers. He did not wish to be believed or accepted as an external authority. No belief pleased Him, except that of a reverent affection which took Him into the heart of the believer, and assimilated the Voice of the individual con- science to His own.
The Scribes and Pharisees taught also, after their fashion, "with authority," that is to say, with constant reference to external " authorities." The religion of the Authority of conscience will become, as the centuries roll on, more powerful and less voluminous ; the religion of "authorities," more voluminous and less powerful. The one grows more spiritual and less embodied, more vital and vitalizing, but more independent of any special and external integuments or surroundings ; the other grows less spiritual and more corporeal and material, scattering and diffusing in
u
98 "LEGAL PROOFS"
outward manifestations the force that should have been spent on inward growth.
The teaching of the Scribes and Pharisees, of every age and in every religion, will always constitute a solid, substantial, and imposing " Body of Divinity," a "system" into which a Pupil of Authority can " throw himself ge- nerously," teaching nothing that is not "consistent," and leading the souls of men steadily onward from mist to fog, and from fog to utter darkness, a darkness that may be felt — a darkness that may be, so to speak, cut into squares and measured out in rations of quasi-spiritual pabulum.
All Scribes are essentially crammers. Newman himself tended by degrees to become a Scribe, and unblushingly avowed his readiness to condescend to cramming of the most pernicious kind. " It would be much," he writes to his most intimate friend Hurrell Froude {Letters, ii. 124) "if we could cram our men " [meaning "our faction," "the Tractarian party"] "in one and the same way of talking upon various points, e.g. what the Church holds about heretical baptism, about ordination before baptism, about the power of bishops, &c. This is a strong point of Romanism ; they have their system so well tip.^^ " Cram- ming'' and "being up to" or "well up in" are terms that the Tractarians ai)parently think it no profanity to apply even to so awful a subject as the nature of God Himself: "As to Sabellianism and facts," writes Froude {ib. 141), " I fear you have been unable to cram me with your views." Children were to be "crammed" in the same style ; and enthusiastic Tractarians, destined in due course to become theologians of repute, went out to Littlemore, to hear the great Tractarian crammer who could contrive to make the children of his church-school " have their
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system so well upT "I heard him last Sunday," writes Dr. James Mozley, "and thought it very striking; done with such spirit, and the children so up to it., answering with the greatest alacrity. It would have provoked some people's bile immoderately to have heard them all unanimous on the point of tlic 7iine orders of afigels ; the definitetiess of the mimber being, in itself, a great charm to the minds of the children.''''
" Provoked some people's bile immoderately " ! Might it not have provoked some thoughtful parents reasonably, that their children should be "crammed" with such '■'■definite" doctrine about things doubtful or baseless ? If, in after years, one of these children, led by knowledge and thought to reject — " upon probability " — his old belief, so authorita- tively inculcated by a respected and honoured teacher, in " the nine orders of angels," were consequently led on still further to reject — again "upon probability" — the belief in God Himself, would not our minds instinctively turn to that tremendous warning which speaks about " little children " in connection with " a mill-stone " ? Would it hereafter avail for the teacher to say in the Great Day of Summing Up, " I had no deep convictions of my own, and therefore I thought It best and safest to teach upon authority " ? Surely the reply would come, " If you could not teach upon conviction, you should not have taught at all " ; and there would be a terrible danger that such " cramming " might " provoke " — not " immoderately," but most justly — the great Friend and Advocate of " the little ones," in spite of the " definiteness " of the doctrine.
The teaching of Jesus was not, and never will be, of this definite character : it will be only half-satisfying ; it will ever lead us to desire more ; it will be continually resisting our efforts to systematize it and to throw ourselves into systems ;
H 2
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it will resolutely refuse to satisfy our jjctition, " Tell us what to believe, that we may believe it"; it will sometimes take us into the wilderness apart, and there, with a searching Eye fixed on our heart of hearts, it will bring Jesus before us, saying, " Whom say ye that I am ? " and, when we glibly reply, ''Some say that thou art 'Man,' and some say 'God,' and J<7w^ say, 'a Fable,' and some say, 'We know not what ' — it will waive aside these idle delayings, and say again, in words that admit no evasion, " But whom say ye that I am ? " Sooner or later — in death, or after death, if not in life — this question must be answered : and then how hollow will seem the answer of " Some say," how vain our tremulous reference to " the best autJwrities " !
CHAPTER IV
THE DOCTRINE OF PROBABILITY APPLIED TO MIRACLES
§ 17. Newman s '■' First Principle ''
The manner in which Newman was led to apply his Doctrine of Probabilities to Ecclesiastical Miracles, is thus stated in the Apologia (p. 21) :
" Considerations such as these " \i.e., of graduated probability above described] " throw a new light on Miracles, and they seem to have led me to reconsider the view which I had taken of them in my Essay 1825-6. . . That there had been already great miracles, as those of Scripture, as the Resurrection, was a fact establishing the principle that the laws of nature had some- times been suspended by their Divine Author, and, since lohat happejied once might happen again, a certain probability, at least ?io kind of improbability, was attached to the idea taken in itself, of miraculous iutervention in later times ; and miraculous accounts were to be regarded in connection with the verisimilitude, scope, instrument, character, testimony, and circumstances, with which they presented themselves to us : and, according to the final result of those various con- siderations, it was our duty to be sure, or to believe, or t o
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opine, or to surmise, or to tolerate, or to reject, or to de- nounce."
This important passage contains what Newman elsewhere calls " the first principle " upon which Romanists accept, and Protestants reject, Ecclesiastical miracles {Apol. ist cd. Appendix, p. 49) : " Both they and we start with the mir- acles of the Apostles ; and then \.\\e\r first priticiple or pre- sumption against our miracles, is this, ' What God did once, He is ?7ot likely to do again ; ' while our firsi pri7tciple or presumption for our miracles is this ; ' What God did once, He is likely to do again.' "
Educated Protestants, so far as I know, recognize no such " first principle " as is here imputed to them. They deny Ecclesiastical miracles because they are proved, so far as they have been investigated, to be either natural, and no miracles, or else false. But that may be passed over. Let the reader however observe that the latter of the two quota- tions is less guarded and cautious than the former. The latter states that the recurrence of miracles '■'■is likely" ; the former, more cautiously, says that it " inigJii happen again," or that there is a " certai/i probability" or " at least, fio kind of improbability.'" In reality there are a great many com- binations of things that are continually happening 07ice, but will almost certainly never happen again. The mere routine of yesterday, which happened once to the reader, will never befall him, nor any one else, again, as long as the world lasts — not in all its precise details, occurring at precisely the same times, and in precisely the same circumstances. In- numerable things that we accept as having occurred once, we think extremely unlikely ever to occur again.
But it may be replied that Newman is speaking not of a combination of things, but a thiiig, viz.. Divine intervention by suspension of the laws of nature. I should conceive
AriMJKI) TO MIRACLES 103
that (upon the miraculous hypothesis) if God for a special puri)ose, at a special time, really gave to special agents the power of suspending the Laws of Nature, not capriciously but by Divine impulse, so as to act, for example, upon the bodies of other men in healing diseases — all this did involve a combination of things which (like the very rarely occurring " break " in Babbage's calculating machine) may occur hardly ever, and perhaps never again ; and therefore even if it be assumed that God did " intervene " miracu- lously when He created the world anew in Christ, it is illogical to infer that He consequently was " likely " to thus " intervene " in later times, or even that such an intervention was " not improbable."
Another logical objection — from Newman's own point of view — is this, that he himself admits the Scriptural miracles to be so very dijfcrent from the Ecclesiastical Miracles, that to argue from the fact that He performed the former to the probability that He will perform the latter, is, in effect, to argue thus : " Because God once did something/^rr? special purpose., therefore it is likely that He will hereafter do some- thing quite differe7it, and for no purpose, or at all events for no discernible purpose I " Lest the reader should suppose that I have exaggerated the difference recognized by Newman himself between the two classes of miracles, I must repeat what I have already (]uoted, in his own words (99) : " Ecclesiastical Miracles, that is, Miracles posterior to the Apostolic age, are, on the whole, different ^ /';/ object, character and evidence, from those of Scripture on the whole, so that the one series or family ought never to be confounded with the other;" and similarly (115), the "Scripture Miracles are for the most part evidence of a Divine Revelation, and that, for the sake of those who have not yet been instructed
' In 1S43, " very (liffcienl."
104 THE DOCTRINE OF PROBAIULITV
in it .... ; but the Miracles which follow have sometimes no discmterable or direct object, or but a slight object ; " and, still more emphatically, they were sometimes (141), "J<? unlike the Scripture Miracles, so strange and startling in their nature and circumstances as to 7ieed support and sanction thefuselves, rather than to supply it to Christianity."
It is on the ground of the radical differetice between the Ecclesiastical Miracles and the Scriptural Miracles, as a whole, that Newman explains the repeated statements made by Chrysostom, Augustine, Isidore, and Pope Gregory, who declare that in their days Miracles no longer existed because they were no longer needed (135 — 146). In answer to the Protestants who point to these disclaimers of Miracles, committed to writing by the highest authorities, /« centuries to which tradition subseque?itly attributed Afiracles without ejid, of the most startling, wild, grotesque and purposeless character, Newman replies in effect, " These Fathers really meant, not that there were no miracles in their days, but that they were quite different from the old Scriptural miracles ; ihcy were often 7iot (116) ' grave, simple and majestic,' as the Scriptural miracles were ; they often had a (116) ' wild- ness and inequality ' and partook of (116) 'what may not unfitly be called a romantic character ' ; they have ' some- times no discoverable or direct object, or but a slight object.' Hence, on the whole, they were so different from the Scrip- tural Miracles that the Fathers, having the Scriptural Miracles in their minds, were quite justified in saying that miracles no lo7iger existed in their days, as, for example, Chrysostom says (136) ' Argue not that, because miracles do not happen now, they did not happen then .... In those days they were profitable, and now they arc not.'' "
What then will become of Newman's " first principle," in behalf of a miraculous intervention in Ecclesiastical History,
ArrLIEI) TO MIRACLES 105
the great anti-Protestant aphorism, that " What God has done once, He is likely to do again " ? He disguises its fallacy from himself, with his usual skill in self-deception, in the following homely metaphor {Apol. ist Ed., Append., p. 51), " If the Divine Being does a thing once, He is, judging by human reason, likely to do it again. This surely is common sense. If a beggar gets food at a gentleman's house once, does he not send others after him ? "
This is a Metaphor. May not an absolute contradiction of this proposition be expressed in almost the same words, with a little change of Metaphor, and with far more truth ? " If the Divine Being does a thing once, it is very unsafe, judging by human reason, to say that He is likely to do it again. This surely is common sense. If a landscape-gardener and a florist get employment at a gentleman's house when he is laying out a garden, will they expect to get it again next year when the garden is laid out and the gentleman is waiting to see the plants grow ? " Our analogy between the planting of the Garden and the planting of the Church, is surely far more to the point than the daily relief of beggars. If our adversary denies it, we shall quote against him his own quotation from Pope Gregory (138) : Miracles, we may say, were " necessary in the beginning of the Churcli . . . just as 1^11671 we pla?it shrubs, we zvater them till they seem to thrive in the ground, and as soon as they are well rooted we cease our irrigation.''' To which we shall add, " Is not this common se?ise ? "
There is also the additional retort that, under that am- biguous pronoun " what " — " What God has done once. He is likely to do again "' — there are really latent two nouns mean- ifig quite different things. Scriptural Miracles, we have been told, were so different from Ecclesiastical Miracles, that although, says Newman, the latter existed from the fourth
io6 TIIK DOCTRINE OF PRO]!A |;i |.I•I•^•
to the sixth centuries, yet the P'athers in those centuries were justified in saying ih^it practically there were no miracles at all. Then, in the face of this admitted and essential difference, is it not a manifest absurdity to argue that " What God has done once, He is hkely to do again,"' when you really mean, " Because God did a certain thing once for a special object, therefore it is likely that He should do something quite different a great many times for no discoverable object " ; and, if there can be a still higher height of absurdity, is not the climax reached in dignifying this fallacy with the title of a "first principle"?
§ 1 8. Detailed Incojigruities of the Doctrine
Similar absurdities pervade the rules at which Newman tries to arrive as to the probable times, seasons, and agents, of Ecclesiastical Miracles. He considers it {Apol. 23) "a natural and on the whole, a true anticipation" that miracles attend " transcendent sanctity," and, since (23) there have been centuries of disorder and of revival, and " one region might be in the mid-day of religious fervour and another in twilight or gloom," it did not follow that {Apol. 23) " because we did not see miracles with our