No don has ever captivated Oxford as John Henry Newman did. For ten years or more every pronouncement he made, every direction towards which he seemed to be veering was scrutinised, interpreted and criticised and those luminous eyes scanned to see if they expressed praise or censure. What was it on this day to make him petulant and on that honey-tongued and caressing?
Who could resist the charm [asked Matthew Arnold] of that spiritual apparition gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St Mary’s, rising into the pulpit, and then in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts – subtle, sweet, mournful? I seem to hear him still saying: ‘After the fever of life, after wearinesses and sicknesses, fightings and despondings, languor and fretfulness, struggling and succeeding; after all the changes and chances of this troubled, unhealthy state – at length comes death, at length the white throne of God, at length the beatific vision.’
There were other famous preachers in his time. At Cambridge Charles Simeon in Holy Trinity commanded a congregation as large as that of Newman and for longer. But Simeon was a moderate Evangelical and not in any sense an intellectual. Newman appealed to intellectuals and scholars as well as to devout religious enthusiasts. They were never sure what new interpretation would be put on the Scriptures, what doctrine would be reinterpreted to bring it into line with whatever position Newman in his spiritual pilgrimage had reached. When his readings of the Fathers revealed schisms and heresies in the early Church, Newman asked himself whether these depravities were not being repeated today in the Church of England. He spoke seemingly to every individual in his congregation because he reminded him he was a sinner. At the heart of his sermons, as much when he went over to Rome as before, was the overpowering sense of sin – and of its consequences. For Newman hell was a reality. The fear of the Lord, said the Psalmist, is the beginning of wisdom, and he strove to inculcate holy dread among his listeners. His voice was quiet and musical, with a ‘silver intonation’, as one contemporary put it. The pauses, the charm, the change of tone, all the arts of rhetoric were at his command. Long though it is, the passage below, imagining the horror of a soul that finds itself condemned to eternal punishment – taken from a sermon he preached when a Roman Catholic – illustrates his power.
‘Impossible,’ he cries, ‘I a lost soul. I separated from hope and from peace for ever. It is not I of whom the Judge so spake! There is a mistake somewhere; Christ, Saviour, hold thy hand – one minute to explain it. My name is Demos: I am but Demos, not Judas, or Nicolas, or Alexander, or Philetus, or Diotrephes. What? hopeless pain! for me! Impossible, it shall not be.’ And the poor soul struggles and wrestles in the grasp of the mighty demon which has hold of it, and whose very touch is torment. ‘Oh, atrocious,’ it shrieks in agony, and in anger, too, as if the very keenness of the affliction were a proof of its injustice. ‘A second! and a third! I can bear no more! stop, horrible fiend, give over; I am a man and not such as thou! I am not food for thee, or sport for thee! I never was in hell as thou, I have not on me the smell or taint of the charnel-house. I know what human feelings are; I have been taught religion; I have had a conscience; I have a cultivated mind; I am well versed in science and art; I have been refined by literature; I have had an eye for the beauties of nature; I am a philosopher or a poet, or a shrewd observer of men, or a hero, or a statesman or an orator, or a man of wit and humour. Nay – I am a Catholic; I am not an unregenerate Protestant; I have received the grace of the Redeemer; I have attended the Sacraments for years; I have been a Catholic from a child; I am a son of the Martyrs; I died in communion with the Church; nothing, nothing which I have ever seen, bears any resemblance to thee, and to the fame and stench which exhale from thee; so I defy thee and abjure thee, O enemy of man!’
Alas! poor soul, and whilst it there fights with that destiny which it has brought upon itself, and with those companions whom it has chosen, the man’s name, perhaps, is solemnly chanted forth, and his memory decently cherished among his friends on earth. His readiness in speech, his fertility in thought, his sagacity, or his wisdom are not forgotten. Men talk of him from time to time, they appeal to his authority; they quote his words; perhaps they even raise a monument to his name, or write his history. ‘So comprehensive a mind! Such a power of throwing light on a perplexed subject, and bringing conflicting ideas or facts into harmony!’ ‘Such a speech it was he made on such and such an occasion; I happened to be present, and never shall forget it,’ or ‘It was the saying of a very sensible man’ or ‘A great personage, whom some of us knew’ or ‘It was a rule of mine, now no more’ or ‘Never was his equal in society, so just in his remarks, so versatile, so unobtrusive’, or ‘I was fortunate to see him once when I was a boy’ or ‘So great a benefactor to his country and his kind!’ ‘His discoveries so great’ or, ‘His philosophy so profound’. O vanity! vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What profiteth it? His soul is in hell … Vanity of vanities, misery of miseries! They will not attend to us, they will not believe us. We are but few in number and they are many, and the many will not give credit to the few … Thousands are dying daily; they are waking up into God’s everlasting wrath.
That passage, so profuse in examples, so exquisite in variations of pace, so dramatic in the change of tone from the condemned’s protestations to the pitying dispassionate observer who retails how worldly judgements of a man’s worth are trivial and absurd when set against eternal judgement, plays upon the mind. And then comes the end, so bitter and characteristic of Newman’s self-pity and anger that he and his minority of believers are scorned by the great and the good and by the multitude who, regardless of his warning, are, perhaps, destined themselves to eternal torment.
Newman came by his sense of sin honestly. He was brought up an Evangelical, and the Evangelical party in the Church more than any other explained how that terrible sense of sin can be assuaged and the sinner find comfort provided that he throws himself on Christ’s mercy, repents and finds grace in his new-found faith. The drama of Newman’s spiritual pilgrimage from Evangelicalism to the Church of Rome is all the more ironic since his first break with the culture of the Oriel Noetics came over the issue of Catholic Emancipation. He opposed it.
For centuries Roman Catholics had been subject to disabilities. They were not permitted, for instance, to sit in Parliament. In the seventeenth century they were regarded as a fifth column in the service of England’s enemies, Spain and France. James II, a Catholic king, had been deposed. Nor had opinion changed after the Napoleonic Wars. England remained solidly Protestant. But Ireland was another matter. For years Roman Catholic Ireland had been regarded as England’s Achilles’ heel – a country in which the French might consider they could successfully land and strangle British trade. Yet here was a country whose population was largely Roman Catholic, who were compelled to finance the established Protestant Church of Ireland and whose political leaders were debarred from sitting in Parliament. Agitation to repeal the anti-Catholic laws met obdurate resistance, not least from the King. What changed the minds of the Tory ministers was the state of public opinion in Ireland, which by 1829 seemed likely to burst into open rebellion. The Duke of Wellington and Robert Peel, who had both opposed Catholic Emancipation, now caved in; and they forced George IV, slobbering in tears, to give his assent.
Peel was the member of Parliament for Oxford University and,