JOHN HENRY, CARDINAL NEWMAN (1801-1890) That ferment of aspiration and unrest which produced in the nineteenth century so many forms of religious inquiry, the questioning faith of Tennyson's In Memoriam, Carlyle's turbid discontent with modern civilization and Ruskin's frantic anti-materialism, produced in John Henry Newman its most specialized and inspired searcher after spiritual grace, in short, a religious genius. Newman was born in the City of London not far from the Bank. His father, a banker, was a man of cultivated tastes and is thought to have been of Jewish extraction. His mother came of a Huguenot family and Newman was instructed during his childhood in modified Calvinism.' As a youth he displayed singular intellectual restlessness combined with literary instinct and precocity. He was said to know the Bible by heart. His early passion for Scott provided his imagination with a background of medieval sympathies, and his memory with a piquant reference at a crucial point in the most close-knit controversy of his later life. In 1817 he entered Trinity College, Oxford, and won a scholarship at the end of his first year. The stirrings of the medieval movement were already beginning at Oxford when Newman became a fellow of Oriel College, its special home. After some terms at the law in London, Newman took orders in the Anglican church and by 1829 had become a tutor in Oriel and Vicar of St. Mary's. From contact with Hurrell Froude he soon grew deeply interested in the historic phases of Christianity; the new-old ideas of the Fathers came like music' to his inward ear,' and he conveyed them with burning effect into his clarion University Sermons at St. Mary's. In 1832, with Froude he saw Rome; he came near to death from cholera, paid devout visits to many ancient churches, wrote at Palermo, O, that thy creed were sound, thou Church of Rome,' and on shipboard composed in the twilight of Romanism, Lead Kindly Light, which one of his critics has termed the "March" of the tractarian movement.' The Sunday after Newman reached England, John Keble preached in his pulpit at St. Mary's the sermon on National Apostasy, which is held to have precipitated the Tractarian movement. To meet the rationalistic liberalism and irreligion which were threatening the church from without, two movements, broadly speaking, were advocated within it;-one, in sympathy with the temper of the age, toward more latitude of doctrine and more practical activity; the other, reactionary, toward a more zealous adherence to the forms, traditions and earlier sanctities of the church. It was this latter course that Newman and his friends espoused in the Tracts for the Times. Of this movement Newman was the most powerful writer. In seeking to establish the historical continuity of the English church, he gradually convinced himself of the authenticity of Romanism. He was not yet aware of the approaching position of his own mind, when he examined the subject of Apostolic Succession in his famous Tract Ninety (1841). The dangerousness of his position did not remain undetected by others and aroused the utmost violence of passion. Newman was compelled to leave Oxford and, soon after, it became known that he had entered the Roman fold. What followed is indescribable. Families were broken up. The entire religious world was in a state of almost tragic excitement. Newman alone preserved his calm and what was considered an ominous silence. For twenty years he addressed himself chiefly to his own parish and the men of his adopted faith. Finally, in 1864, a supreme opportunity came for him to address from a point of advantage the public which had reviled him. Charles Kingsley in a review of Froude's History of England, went out of his way to accuse Father Newman' of having justified the principle of dishonesty in the Roman priesthood. In the complicated correspondence, which was afterwards published in full, Newman had all the honors. With resistless logic and dexterity and the perfect poise and sincerity of a christian gentleman he left his assailant in an obvious position of reckless bigotry, wrong-headedness and untruth. Newman could now present to the English world the logic of his religious development, and this he did in his Apologia pro Vita Sua [Defense of his Life]. This is a telling presentation, full of acute personal interest, of the claims which an ancient and established religion can urge upon modern culture, and a justification of faith against the assaults of a fictitious enlightenment.' Upon the elevation of Pope Leo XIII, Newman was made, in 1879, a Cardinal of the Roman church. Newman's prose style was a remarkable weapon in the hands of a controversialist. Pliant and strong, colloquial but never familiar, subtle and suave without the least insinuation of vulgar slyness, in command of all the nuances of delicate culture which it sparingly uses, it bends and thrusts like a beautifully tempered steel. Even should its matter cease to be of great interest, Newman's prose will always remain poignant for its classic purity and strength. THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY DISCOURSE VI KNOWLEDGE VIEWED IN RELATION TO LEARNING 5 It were well if the English, like the Greek language, possessed some definite word to express, simply and generally, intellectual proficiency or perfection, such 10 as health,' as used with reference to the animal frame, and virtue,' with reference to our moral nature: I am not able to tellect by the name of philosophy, philosophical knowledge, enlargement of mind, or illumination; terms which are not uncommonly given to it by writers of this day: but, whatever name we bestow on it, it is, I believe, as a matter of history, the business of a university to make this intellectual culture its direct scope, or to employ itself in the education of the intellect, just as the work of a hospital lies in healing the sick or wounded, of a riding or fencing school, or of a gymnasium, in exercising the find such a term; - talent, ability, genius, limbs, of an almshouse, in aiding and belong distinctly to the raw material, 15 solacing the old, of an orphanage, in which is the subject-matter, not to that protecting innocence, of a penitentiary, excellence which is the result of exercise in restoring the guilty. I say, a univerand training. When we turn, indeed, to sity, taken in its bare idea, and before the particular kinds of intellectual perfec- we view it as an instrument of the church, tion, words are forthcoming for our pur- 20 has this object and this mission; it conpose, as, for instance, judgment, taste, templates neither moral impression nor and skill; yet even these belong, for the mechanical production; it professes to most part, to powers or habits bearing exercise the mind neither in art nor in upon practice or upon art, and not to any duty; its function is intellectual culture; perfect condition of the intellect, con- 25 here it may leave its scholars, and it has sidered in itself. Wisdom, again, is cerdone its work when it has done as much tainly a more comprehensive word than as this. It educates the intellect to reaany other, but it has a direct relation to son well in all matters, to reach out toconduct, and to human life. Knowledge, wards truth, and to grasp it. indeed, and science express purely intel- 30 lectual ideas, but still not a state or quality of the intellect; for knowledge, in its ordinary sense, is but one of its circumstances, denoting a possession or a habit; and science has been appropriated 35 to the subject-matter of the intellect, instead of belonging in English, as it ought to do, to the intellect itself. The consequence is that, on an occasion like this, many words are necessary, in order, first, 40 to bring out and convey what surely is no difficult idea in itself,- that of the cultivation of the intellect as an end; next, in order to recommend what surely is no unreasonable object; and lastly, to 45 describe and make the mind realize the particular perfection in which that object. consists. Every one knows practically what are the constituents of health or This, I said in my foregoing discourse, was the object of a university, viewed in itself, and apart from the Catholic Church, or from the state, or from any other power which may use it; and I illustrated this in various ways. I said that the intellect must have an excellence of its own, for there was nothing which had not its specific good; that the word 'educate' would not be used of intellectual culture, as it is used, had not the intellect had an end of its own; that, had it not such an end, there would be no meaning in calling certain intellectual exercises liberal,' in contrast with useful,' as is commonly done; that the very notion of a philosophical temper implied it, for it threw us back upon research and system as ends in themselves, distinct from effects and works of any kind; of virtue; and every one recognizes 50 that a philosophical scheme of knowlhealth and virtue as ends to be pursued; it is otherwise with intellectual excellence, and this must be my excuse, if I seem to anyone to be bestowing a good deal of labor on a preliminary matter. In default of a recognized term, I have called the perfection or virtue of the in edge, or system of sciences, could not, from the nature of the case, issue in any one definite art or pursuit, as its end; and that, on the other hand, the 55 discovery and contemplation of truth, to which research and systematizing led, were surely sufficient ends, though noth ing beyond them were added, and that they had ever been accounted sufficient by mankind. Here then I take up the subject; and, having determined that the cultivation 5 of the intellect is an end distinct and sufficient in itself, and that, so far as words go, it is an enlargement or illumination, I proceed to inquire what this mental breath, or power, or light, or phi- 10 losophy consists in. A hospital heals a broken limb or cures a fever: what does an institution effect, which professes the health, not of the body, not of the soul, but of the intellect? What is this good, 15 which in former times, as well as our own, has been found worth the notice, the appropriation of the Catholic Church? ceptacle for storing them; he welcomes them as fast as they come to him; he lives on what is without; he has his eyes ever about him; he has a lively susceptibility of impressions; he imbibes information of every kind; and little does he make his own in a true sense of the word, living rather upon his neighbors all around him. He has opinions, religious, political and literary, and, for a boy, is very positive in them and sure about them; but he gets them from his schoolfellows, or his masters, or his parents, as the case may be. Such as he is in his other relations, such also is he in his school exercises; his mind is observant, sharp, ready, retentive; he is almost passive in the acquisition of knowledge. I say this in no disparagement of the idea of a clever I have then to investigate, in the discourses which follow, those qualities and 20 boy. Geography, chronology, history, language, natural history, he heaps up the matter of these studies as treasures for a future day. It is the seven years of plenty with him: he gathers in by characteristics of the intellect in which its cultivation issues or rather consists; and, with a view of assisting myself in this undertaking, I shall recur to certain questions which have already been 25 handfuls, like the Egyptians, without touched upon. These questions are three: viz. the relation of intellectual counting; and though, as time goes on, there is exercise for his argumentative powers in the elements of mathematics, and for his taste in the poets and orators, 30 still, while at school, or at least, till quite the last years of his time, he acquires, and little more; and when he is leaving for the university, he is mainly the creature of foreign influences and circumstances, and made up of accidents, homogeneous or not, as the case may be. Moreover, the moral habits, which are a boy's praise, encourage and assist this result; that is, diligence, assiduity, regularity, despatch, persevering application; for these are the direct conditions of acquisition, and naturally lead to it. Acquirements, again, are emphatically producible, and at a moment; they are a 45 something to show, both for master and scholar; an audience, even though ignorant themselves of the subjects of an examination, can comprehend when questions are answered and when they are I suppose the prima-facie view which the public at large would take of a university, considering it as a place of education, is nothing more or less than a place for acquiring a great deal of knowl- 50 not. Here again is a reason why mental edge on a great many subjects. Memory is one of the first developed of the mental faculties; a boy's business when he goes to school is to learn, that is, to store up things in his memory. For some years his intellect is little more than an instrument for taking in facts, or a re 55 culture is in the minds of men identified with the acquisition of knowledge. The same notion possesses the public mind, when it passes on from the thought of a school to that of a university: and with the best of reasons so far as this, that there is no true culture without ac quirements, and that philosophy presup- ness and enjoyment of large intellectual possessions? And yet this notion is, I conceive, a mistake, and my present business is to 5 show that it is one, and that the end of a liberal education is not mere knowledge, or knowledge considered in its matter; and I shall best attain my object, by actually setting down some cases, which will be generally granted to be instances of the process of enlightenment or enlargement of mind, and others which are not, and thus, by the comparison, you will be able to judge for yourselves, gentlemen, whether knowledge, that is, acquirement, is after all the real principle of the enlargement or whether that principle is not rather something beyond it. For instance, let a person, whose experience has hitherto been confined to the more calm and unpretending scenery of these islands, whether here or in England, go for the first time into parts where physical nature puts on her wilder and more awful forms, whether at home or abroad, as into mountainous districts; or let one, who has ever lived in a quiet village, go for the first time to a great metropolis, then I suppose he will have Knowledge then is the indispensable condition of expansion of mind, and the instrument of attaining to it; this cannot be denied, it is ever to be insisted 30 a sensation which perhaps he never had en before. He has a feeling not in addition or increase of former feelings, but of something different in its nature. He will perhaps be borne forward, and find for a time that he has lost his bearings. He has made a certain progress, and he has a consciousness of mental enlargement; he does not stand where he did, he has a new center, and a range of thoughts to which he was before a stranger. on; I begin with it as a first principle; however, the very truth of it carries men too far, and confirms to them the notion that it is the whole of the matter. A narrow mind is thought to be that which 35 contains little knowledge; and an larged mind, that which holds a great deal; and what seems to put the matter beyond dispute is, the fact of the great number of studies which are pursued in 4° a university, by its very profession. Lectures are given on every kind of subject; examinations are held; prizes. awarded. There are moral, metaphysical, physical professors; professors of lan- 45 guages, of history, of mathematics, of experimental science. Lists of questions are published, wonderful for their range and depth, variety and difficulty; treatises are written, which carry upon their 50 strangeness, the originality (if I may use Again, the view of the heavens which the telescope opens upon us, if allowed to fill and possess the mind, may almost whirl it round and make it dizzy. It brings in a flood of ideas, and is rightly called an intellectual enlargement, what ever is meant by the term. And so again, the sight of beasts of prey and other foreign animals, their the term) of their forms and gestures and habits, and their variety and independence of each other, throw us out of ourselves into another creation, and as very face the evidence of extensive reading or multifarious information; what then is wanting for mental culture to a person of large reading and scientific attainments? what is grasp of mind but 55 if under another Creator, if I may so acquirement? where shall philosophical repose be found, but in the conscious express the temptation which may come on the mind. We seem to have new faculties, or a new exercise for our faculties, by this addition to our knowledge; like a prisoner, who, having been accustomed to wear manacles or fetters, suddenly finds his arms and legs free. Hence physical science generally, in all its departments, as bringing before us the exuberant riches and resources, yet the orderly course, of the universe, who will deny that the fruit of the tree of knowledge, or what the mind takes for knowledge, has made it one of the gods, with a sense of expansion and 5 elevation, an intoxication in reality, still, so far as the subjective state of the mind goes, an illumination? Hence the . fanaticism of individuals or nations, who suddenly cast off their Maker. Their elevates and excites the student, and at 10 eyes are opened; and, like the judgment first, I may say, almost takes away his breath, while in time it exercises a tranquilizing influence upon him. Again the study of history is said to enlarge and enlighten the mind, and why? 15 because, as I conceive, it gives it a power of judging of passing events and of all events, and a conscious superiority over them, which before it did not possess. And in like manner, what is called 20 seeing the world, entering into active life, going into society, traveling, gaining acquaintance with the various classes of the community, coming into contact with the principles and modes of thought of vari- 25 ous parties, interests, and races, their views, aims, habits and manners, their religious creeds and forms of worship,gaining experience how various yet how alike men are, how low-minded, how bad, how opposed, yet how confident in their opinions; all this exerts a perceptible influence upon the mind, which it is impossible to mistake, be it good or be it bad, and is popularly called its enlarge ment. stricken king in the tragedy, they see two suns, and a magic universe, out of which they look back upon their former state of faith and innocence with a sort of contempt and indignation, as if they were then but fools, and the dupes of imposture. On the other hand, religion has its own enlargement, and an enlargement, not of tumult, but of peace. It is often remarked of uneducated persons, who have hitherto thought little of the unseen world, that, on their turning to God, looking into themselves, regulating their hearts, reforming their conduct, and meditating on death and judgment, heaven and hell, they seem to become, in point of intellect, different beings from what they were. Before, they took things as 30 they came, and thought no more of one thing than another. But now every event has a meaning; they have their own estimate of whatever happens to them; they are mindful of times and seasons, and compare the present with the past; and the world, no longer dull, monotonous, unprofitable, and hopeless, is a various and complicated drama, with parts and an object, and an awful moral. 35 And then again, the first time the mind comes across the arguments and speculations of unbelievers, and feels what a novel light they cast upon what he has 40 hitherto accounted sacred; and still more, if it gives in to them and embraces them, and throws off as so much prejudice what it has hitherto held, and, as if waking from a dream, begins to realize to its 45 imagination that there is now no such thing as law and the transgression of law, that sin is a phantom, and punishment a bugbear, that it is free to sin, free to enjoy the world and the flesh; and still 50 further, when it does enjoy them, and reflects that it may think and hold just what it will, that 'the world is all before it where to choose,' and what system to build up as its own private per-55 suasion; when this torrent of wilful thoughts rushes over and inundates it, Now from these instances, to which many more might be added, it is plain, first, that the communication of knowledge certainly is either a condition or the means of that sense of enlargement, or enlightenment of which at this day we hear so much in certain quarters: this cannot be denied; but next, it is equally plain, that such communication is not the whole of the process. The enlargement consists, not merely in the passive reception into the mind of a number of ideas hitherto unknown to it, but in the mind's energetic and simultaneous action upon and towards and among those new ideas, which are rushing in upon it. It is the action of a formative power, reducing to order and meaning the matter of our |