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CHAPTER I

OF THEOLOGICAL WRITERS

THE state of Ecclesiastical affairs at the beginning of the half-century was full of agitation and confusion. Oxford was the centre of a conflict which extended over the whole kingdom, and which had perhaps a greater effect than any religious movement except the Reformation, throughout England. Both period and movement are dominated by one commanding figure, of whom it can scarcely be said so much that he was a theologian, a controversialist and a religious thinker, as that he was himself—a man of such singular mind, character and personality, that while we think and speak of the works of other men, our minds are occupied, wherever he appears, chiefly with him-John Henry Newman: once a submissive member of the Evangelical school of religious thought, then a believer in the Fathers and the English Church: then a disturbed and

VOL. II

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anxious inquirer, wading in deep waters of confusion and uncertainty: afterwards making a casuistical though always sincere attempt to find footing within his own communion upon the rock of the Church which appeared to him the only thing solid on earth: then landing with a sudden impulse, though after long preparation and detachment from all previous ties, upon that rock indeed, but the Rock of Peter, the-as he had slowly come to regard it-unaltered and unalterable foundation of Rome. The excitement with

which the world, of which he was the central figure, watched all these evolutions, was like that with which a great drama might be watched, or the performance of an athlete in the classic games. The slowness of the process extending over so many years, the self-concentrated attention of the actor working out step by step in his own mind each lingering detail of the way—himself, as it were, the first and most interested spectator of those processes going on within himself, never flagging in his interest, never drawn aside to any lesser occupation of thought-afforded one of the most wonderful spectacles that has ever been laid open before men. Newman had no sense of humour, no apprehension of that natural perspective which daunts many men, and prevents them from thus concentrating upon themselves their own profoundest interest and observation.

His Apologia is perhaps in this sense the most wonderful book that ever was written. There it is apparent that he took himself as much in earnest at the beginning of his career as at the end was as gravely respectful of his own conclusions as a boy, as of those he reached in maturity of manhood, and that the career of his own mind was to himself the chief epic, drama, history and poem in existence.

It is not necessary here to relate a tale which has already been told so often. The man, who will not die, is to this generation more interesting than those Tracts for the Times about which we have already heard so much. That he began, after his first phase of evangelicalism was over, with the conviction that the Church of England was even more truly than Rome Apostolic, purer and better and more trustworthy in divine institution that he was gradually led to entertain the doubts that arose during a severe course of study and reading on that point, and found no certainty in his former faith, no answer that could satisfy him and the manner in which that problem was slowly and finally worked out in his mind, is now known more or less to every reader. How completely in his thoughts the question turned upon this not upon the fundamental truths of religion but upon the Apostolic Succession, the unbroken tradition, the divine commission of the ecclesiastical

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