Note C. on Page 153 {in Chapter 4)
Sermon on Wisdom and Innocence
The professed basis of the charge of lying and equivocation made against me,
and, in my person, against the Catholic clergy, was, as I have already noticed
in the Preface, a certain Sermon of mine on "Wisdom and Innocence," being the
20th in a series of "Sermons on Subjects of the Day," written, preached, and
published while I was an Anglican. Of this Sermon my accuser spoke thus in his
Pamphlet:—
"It is occupied entirely with the attitude of 'the world' to 'Christians' and
'the Church.' By the world appears to be signified, especially, the Protestant
public of these realms; what Dr. Newman means by Christians, and the Church, he
has not left in doubt; for in the preceding Sermon he says: 'But if the truth
must be spoken, what are the humble monk and the holy nun, and other regulars,
as they are called, but Christians after the very pattern given us in Scripture,
&c.'.... This is his definition of Christians. And in the Sermon itself, he
sufficiently defines what he means by 'the Church,' in two notes of her
character, which he shall give in his own words: 'What, for instance, though we
grant that sacramental confession and the celibacy of the clergy do tend to
consolidate the body politic in the relation of rulers and subjects, or, in
other words, to aggrandize the priesthood? for how can the Church be one body
without such relation?'"—Pp. 8, 9.
He then proceeded to analyze and comment on it at great length, and to
criticize severely the method and tone of my Sermons generally. Among other
things, he said:—
"What, then, did the Sermon mean? Why was it preached? To insinuate
that a Church which had sacramental confession and a celibate clergy was the
only true Church? Or to insinuate that the admiring young gentlemen who listened
to him stood to their fellow-countrymen in the relation of the early Christians
to the heathen Romans? Or that Queen Victoria's Government was to the Church of
England what Nero's or Dioclesian's was to the Church of Rome? It may have been
so. I know that men used to suspect Dr. Newman,—I have been inclined to do so
myself,—of writing a whole Sermon, not for the sake of the text or of the
matter, but for the sake of one single passing hint—one phrase, one epithet, one
little barbed arrow, which, as he swept magnificently past on the stream of his
calm eloquence, seemingly unconscious of all presences, save those unseen, he
delivered unheeded, as with his finger-tip, to the very heart of an initiated
hearer, never to be withdrawn again. I do not blame him for that. It is one of
the highest triumphs of oratoric power, and may be employed honestly and fairly
by any person who has the skill to do it honestly and fairly; but then, Why did
he entitle his Sermon 'Wisdom and Innocence?'
"What, then, could I think that Dr. Newman meant? I found a preacher
bidding Christians imitate, to some undefined point, the 'arts' of the basest of
animals, and of men, and of the devil himself. I found him, by a strange
perversion of Scripture, insinuating that St. Paul's conduct and manner were
such as naturally to bring down on him the reputation of being a crafty
deceiver. I found him—horrible to say it—even hinting the same of one greater
than St. Paul. I found him denying or explaining away the existence of that
Priestcraft, which is a notorious fact to every honest student of history, and
justifying (as far as I can understand him) that double dealing by which
prelates, in the middle age, too often played off alternately the sovereign
against the people, and the people against the sovereign, careless which was in
the right, so long as their own power gained by the move. I found him actually
using of such (and, as I thought, of himself and his party likewise) the words
'They yield outwardly; to assent inwardly were to betray the faith. Yet they are
called deceitful and double-dealing, because they do as much as they can, and
not more than they may.' I found him telling Christians that they will always
seem 'artificial,' and 'wanting in openness and manliness;' that they will
always be 'a mystery' to the world, and that the world will always think them
rogues; and bidding them glory in what the world (i.e. the rest of their
countrymen) disown, and say with Mawworm, 'I like to be despised.'
{from The Hypocrite (act V, scene. 1), by Isaac Bickerstaff (1733-1812)}
"Now, how was I to know that the preacher, who had the reputation of being
the most acute man of his generation, and of having a specially intimate
acquaintance with the weaknesses of the human heart, was utterly blind to the
broad meaning and the plain practical result of a Sermon like this, delivered
before fanatic and hot-headed young men, who hung upon his every word? that he
did not foresee that they would think that they obeyed him by becoming affected,
artificial, sly, shifty, ready for concealments and equivocations?" &c.
&c.—Pp. 14-16.
My accuser asked in this passage what did the Sermon mean, and why was
it preached. I will here answer this question; and with this view will speak,
first of the matter of the Sermon, then of its subject, then of its
circumstances.
1. It was one of the last six Sermons which I wrote when I was an Anglican.
It was one of the five Sermons I preached in St. Mary's between Christmas and
Easter, 1843, the year when I gave up my Living. The MS. of the Sermon is
destroyed; but I believe, and my memory too bears me out, as far as it goes,
that the sentence in question about Celibacy and Confession, of which this
writer would make so much, was not preached at all. The Volume, in which
this Sermon is found, was published after that I had given up St. Mary's,
when I had no call on me to restrain the expression of any thing which I might
hold: and I stated an important fact about it in the Advertisement, in these
words:—
"In preparing [these Sermons] for publication, a few words and
sentences have in several places been added, which will be found to
express more of private or personal opinion, than it was expedient to
introduce into the instruction delivered in Church to a parochial
Congregation. Such introduction, however, seems unobjectionable in the case of
compositions, which are detached from the sacred place and service to
which they once belonged, and submitted to the reason and judgment of the
general reader."
This Volume of Sermons then cannot be criticized at all as
preachments; they are essays; essays of a man who, at the time of
publishing them, was not a preacher. Such passages, as that in question,
are just the very ones which I added upon my publishing them; and, as I
always was on my guard in the pulpit against saying any thing which looked
towards Rome, I shall believe that I did not preach the obnoxious sentence till
some one is found to testify that he heard it.
At the same time I cannot conceive why the mention of Sacramental Confession,
or of Clerical Celibacy, had I made it, was inconsistent with the position of an
Anglican Clergyman. For Sacramental Confession and Absolution actually form a
portion of the Anglican Visitation of the Sick; and though the 32nd Article says that
"Bishops, priests, and deacons, are not commanded by God's law either to
vow the state of single life or to abstain from marriage," and "therefore it is
lawful for them to marry," this proposition I did not dream of denying,
nor is it inconsistent with St. Paul's doctrine, which I held, that it is
"good to abide even as he," i.e. in celibacy.
But I have more to say on this point. This writer says, "I know that men used
to suspect Dr. Newman,—I have been inclined to do so myself,—of writing a
whole Sermon, not for the sake of the text or of the matter, but for the
sake of one simple passing hint,—one phrase, one epithet." Now observe; can
there be a plainer testimony borne to the practical character of my Sermons at
St. Mary's than this gratuitous insinuation? Many a preacher of Tractarian
doctrine has been accused of not letting his parishioners alone, and of teasing
them with his private theological notions. The same report was spread about me
twenty years ago as this writer spreads now, and the world believed that my
Sermons at St. Mary's were full of red-hot Tractarianism. Then strangers came to
hear me preach, and were astonished at their own disappointment. I recollect the
wife of a great prelate from a distance coming to hear me, and then expressing
her surprise to find that I preached nothing but a plain humdrum Sermon. I
recollect how, when on the Sunday before Commemoration one year, a number of
strangers came to hear me, and I preached in my usual way, residents in Oxford,
of high position, were loud in their satisfaction that on a great occasion, I
had made a simple failure, for after all there was nothing in the Sermon to
hear. Well, but they were not going to let me off, for all my common-sense view
of duty. Accordingly they got up the charitable theory which this Writer
revives. They said that there was a double purpose in those plain addresses of
mine, and that my Sermons were never so artful as when they seemed common-place; that
there were sentences which redeemed their apparent simplicity and quietness. So
they watched during the delivery of a Sermon, which to them was too practical to
be useful, for the concealed point of it, which they could at least imagine, if
they could not discover. "Men used to suspect Dr. Newman," he says, "of writing
a whole Sermon, not for the sake of the text or of the
matter, but for the sake of one single passing hint, ... one phrase,
one epithet, one little barbed arrow, which, as he swept
magnificently past on the stream of his calm eloquence, seemingly
unconscious of all presences, save those unseen, he delivered unheeded," &c.
To all appearance, he says, I was "unconscious of all presences." He is not able
to deny that the "whole Sermon" had the appearance of being
"for the sake of the text and matter;" therefore he suggests that perhaps
it wasn't.
2. And now as to the subject of the Sermon. The Sermons of which the Volume
consists are such as are, more or less, exceptions to the rule which I
ordinarily observed, as to the subjects which I introduced into the pulpit of
St. Mary's. They are not purely ethical or doctrinal. They were for the most
part caused by circumstances of the day or of the moment, and they belong to
various years. One was written in 1832, two in 1836, two in 1838, five in 1840,
five in 1841, four in 1842, seven in 1843. Many of them are engaged on one
subject, viz. in viewing the Church in its relation to the world. By the world
was meant, not simply those multitudes which were not in the Church, but the
existing body of human society, whether in the Church or not, whether Catholics,
Protestants, Greeks, or Mahometans, theists or idolaters, as being ruled by
principles, maxims, and instincts of their own, that is, of an unregenerate
nature, whatever their supernatural privileges might be, greater or less, according to
their form of religion. This view of the relation of the Church to the world as
taken apart from questions of ecclesiastical politics, as they may be called, is
often brought out in my Sermons. Two occur to me at once; No. 3 of my Plain
Sermons, which was written in 1829, and No. 15 of my Third Volume of Parochial,
written in 1835. On the other hand, by Church I meant,—in common with all
writers connected with the Tract Movement, whatever their shades of opinion, and
with the whole body of English divines, except those of the Puritan or
Evangelical School,—the whole of Christendom, from the Apostles' time till now,
whatever their later divisions into Latin, Greek, and Anglican. I have explained
this view of the subject above at pp. 69-71 of this Volume. When then I speak,
in the particular Sermon before us, of the members, or the rulers, or the action
of "the Church," I mean neither the Latin, nor the Greek, nor the English, taken
by itself, but of the whole Church as one body: of Italy as one with England, of
the Saxon or Norman as one with the Caroline Church. This was specially
the one Church, and the points in which one branch or one period differed from
another were not and could not be Notes of the Church, because Notes necessarily
belong to the whole of the Church every where and always.
This being my doctrine as to the relation of the Church to the world, I laid
down in the Sermon three principles concerning it, and there left the matter.
The first is, that Divine Wisdom had framed for its action laws, which man, if
left to himself, would have antecedently pronounced to be the worst possible for
its success, and which in all ages have been called by the world, as they were
in the Apostles' days, "foolishness;" that man ever relies on physical and
material force, and on carnal inducements as Mahomet with his sword and his houris, or
indeed almost as that theory of religion, called, since the Sermon was written,
"muscular Christianity;" but that our Lord, on the contrary, has substituted
meekness for haughtiness, passiveness for violence, and innocence for craft: and
that the event has shown the high wisdom of such an economy, for it has brought
to light a set of natural laws, unknown before, by which the seeming paradox
that weakness should be stronger than might, and simplicity than worldly policy,
is readily explained.
Secondly, I said that men of the world, judging by the event, and not
recognizing the secret causes of the success, viz. a higher order of natural
laws,—natural, though their source and action were supernatural, (for "the meek
inherit the earth," by means of a meekness which comes from above,)—these men, I
say, concluded, that the success which they witnessed must arise from some evil
secret which the world had not mastered,—by means of magic, as they said in the
first ages, by cunning as they say now. And accordingly they thought that the
humility and inoffensiveness of Christians, or of Churchmen, was a mere pretence
and blind to cover the real causes of that success, which Christians could
explain and would not; and that they were simply hypocrites.
Thirdly, I suggested that shrewd ecclesiastics, who knew very well that there
was neither magic nor craft in the matter, and, from their intimate acquaintance
with what actually went on within the Church, discerned what were the real
causes of its success, were of course under the temptation of substituting
reason for conscience, and, instead of simply obeying the command, were led to
do good that good might come, that is, to act in order to secure success,
and not from a motive of faith. Some, I said, did yield to the temptation more
or less, and their motives became mixed; and in this way the world in a more subtle shape
had got into the Church; and hence it had come to pass, that, looking at its
history from first to last, we could not possibly draw the line between good and
evil there, and say either that every thing was to be defended, or certain
things to be condemned. I expressed the difficulty, which I supposed to be
inherent in the Church, in the following words. I said, "Priestcraft has ever
been considered the badge, and its imputation is a kind of Note of the
Church: and in part indeed truly, because the presence of powerful
enemies, and the sense of their own weakness, has sometimes tempted
Christians to the abuse, instead of the use of Christian wisdom, to be wise
without being harmless; but partly, nay, for the most part, not truly, but
slanderously, and merely because the world called their wisdom craft, when it
was found to be a match for its own numbers and power."
Such is the substance of the Sermon: and as to the main drift of it, it was
this; that I was, there and elsewhere, scrutinizing the course of the Church as
a whole, as if philosophically, as an historical phenomenon, and observing the
laws on which it was conducted. Hence the Sermon, or Essay as it more truly is,
is written in a dry and unimpassioned way: it shows as little of human warmth of
feeling as a Sermon of Bishop Butler's. Yet, under that calm exterior there was
a deep and keen sensitiveness, as I shall now proceed to show.
3. If I mistake not, it was written with a secret thought about myself. Every
one preaches according to his frame of mind, at the time of preaching. One
heaviness especially oppressed me at that season, which this Writer, twenty
years afterwards, has set himself with a good will to renew: it arose from the
sense of the base calumnies which were heaped upon me on all sides. It is worth
observing that this Sermon is exactly contemporaneous with the report spread by a
Bishop (vid. supr. p. 181 {in Chapter 4}), that I had advised a clergyman converted to
Catholicism to retain his Living. This report was in circulation in February
1843, and my Sermon was preached on the 19th. In the trouble of mind into which
I was thrown by such calumnies as this, I gained, while I reviewed the history
of the Church, at once an argument and a consolation. My argument was this: if
I, who knew my own innocence, was so blackened by party prejudice, perhaps those
high rulers and those servants of the Church, in the many ages which intervened
between the early Nicene times and the present, who were laden with such
grievous accusations, were innocent also; and this reflection served to make me
tender towards those great names of the past, to whom weaknesses or crimes were
imputed, and reconciled me to difficulties in ecclesiastical proceedings, which
there were no means now of properly explaining. And the sympathy thus excited
for them, re-acted on myself, and I found comfort in being able to put myself
under the shadow of those who had suffered as I was suffering, and who seemed to
promise me their recompense, since I had a fellowship in their trial. In a
letter to my Bishop at the time of Tract 90, part of which I have quoted, I said
that I had ever tried to "keep innocency;" and now two years had passed since
then, and men were louder and louder in heaping on me the very charges, which
this Writer repeats out of my Sermon, of "fraud and cunning," "craftiness and
deceitfulness," "double-dealing," "priestcraft," of being "mysterious, dark,
subtle, designing," when I was all the time conscious to myself, in my degree,
and after my measure, of "sobriety, self-restraint, and control of word and
feeling." I had had experience how my past success had been imputed to "secret
management;" and how, when I had shown surprise at that success, that surprise
again was imputed to "deceit;" and how my honest heartfelt submission to authority had
been called, as it was called in a Bishop's charge abroad, "mystic humility;"
and how my silence was called an "hypocrisy;" and my faithfulness to my clerical
engagements a secret correspondence with the enemy. And I found a way of
destroying my sensitiveness about these things which jarred upon my sense of
justice, and otherwise would have been too much for me, by the contemplation of
a large law of the Divine Dispensation, and felt myself more and more able to
bear in my own person a present trial, of which in my past writings I had
expressed an anticipation.
For this feeling and thus speaking this Writer compares me to "Mawworm." "I
found him telling Christians," he says, "that they will always seem
'artificial,' and 'wanting in openness and manliness;' that they will always be
'a mystery' to the world; and that the world will always think them rogues; and
bidding them glory in what the world (that is, the rest of their
fellow-countrymen) disown, and say with Mawworm, 'I like to be despised.' Now
how was I to know that the preacher ... was utterly blind to the broad meaning
and the plain practical result of a Sermon like this delivered before fanatic
and hot-headed young men, who hung upon his every word?"—Fanatic and hot-headed
young men, who hung on my every word! If he had undertaken to write a history,
and not a romance, he would have easily found out, as I have said above, that
from 1841 I had severed myself from the younger generation of Oxford, that Dr.
Pusey and I had then closed our theological meetings at his house, that I had
brought my own weekly evening parties to an end, that I preached only by fits
and starts at St. Mary's, so that the attendance of young men was broken up,
that in those very weeks from Christmas till over Easter, during which this
Sermon was preached, I was but five times in the pulpit there. He would have
found, that it was written at a time when I was shunned rather than sought, when I had great
sacrifices in anticipation, when I was thinking much of myself; that I was
ruthlessly tearing myself away from my own followers, and that, in the musings
of that Sermon, I was at the very utmost only delivering a testimony in my
behalf for time to come, not sowing my rhetoric broadcast for the chance of
present sympathy.
Again, he says: "I found him actually using of such [prelates], (and, as I
thought, of himself and his party likewise,) the words 'They yield outwardly; to
assent inwardly were to betray the faith. Yet they are called deceitful and
double-dealing, because they do as much as they can, not more than they may.'"
This too is a proof of my duplicity! Let this writer, in his dealings with some
one else, go just a little further than he has gone with me; and let him get
into a court of law for libel; and let him be convicted; and let him still fancy
that his libel, though a libel, was true, and let us then see whether he will
not in such a case "yield outwardly," without assenting internally; and then
again whether we should please him, if we called him "deceitful and
double-dealing," because "he did as much as he could, not more than he ought to
do." But Tract 90 will supply a real illustration of what I meant. I yielded to
the Bishops in outward act, viz. in not defending the Tract, and in closing the
Series; but, not only did I not assent inwardly to any condemnation of it, but I
opposed myself to the proposition of a condemnation on the part of authority.
Yet I was then by the public called "deceitful and double-dealing," as this
Writer calls me now, "because I did as much as I felt I could do, and not more
than I felt I could honestly do." Many were the publications of the day and the
private letters, which accused me of shuffling, because I closed the Series of
Tracts, yet kept the Tracts on sale, as if I ought to comply not only with what my Bishop
asked, but with what he did not ask, and perhaps did not wish. However, such
teaching, according to this Writer, was likely to make young men "suspect, that
truth was not a virtue for its own sake, but only for the sake of the spread of
'Catholic opinions,' and the 'salvation of their own souls;' and that cunning
was the weapon which heaven had allowed to them to defend themselves against the
persecuting Protestant public."—p. 16.
And now I draw attention to a further point. He says, "How was I to know that
the preacher ... did not foresee, that [fanatic and hot-headed young men] would
think that they obeyed him, by becoming affected, artificial, sly, shifty, ready
for concealments and equivocations?" "How should he know!" What! I
suppose that we are to think every man a knave till he is proved not to be such.
Know! had he no friend to tell him whether I was "affected" or "artificial"
myself? Could he not have done better than impute equivocations to me, at
a time when I was in no sense answerable for the amphibologia of the
Roman casuists? Had he a single fact which belongs to me personally or by
profession to couple my name with equivocation in 1843? "How should he know"
that I was not sly, smooth, artificial, non-natural! he should know by that
common manly frankness, by which we put confidence in others, till they are
proved to have forfeited it; he should know it by my own words in that very
Sermon, in which I say it is best to be natural, and that reserve is at best but
an unpleasant necessity. For I say there expressly:—
"I do not deny that there is something very engaging in a frank and
unpretending manner; some persons have it more than others; in some persons
it is a great grace. But it must be recollected that I am speaking of
times of persecution and oppression to Christians, such as the text
foretells; and then surely frankness will become nothing else than indignation
at the oppressor, and vehement speech, if it is permitted. Accordingly, as
persons have deep feelings, so they will find the necessity of self-control,
lest they should say what they ought not."
He sums up thus:
"If [Dr. Newman] would ... persist (as in this Sermon) in dealing with
matters dark, offensive, doubtful, sometimes actually forbidden, at least
according to the notions of the great majority of English Churchmen; if he would
always do so in a tentative, paltering way, seldom or never letting the world
know how much he believed, how far he intended to go; if, in a word, his method
of teaching was a suspicious one, what wonder if the minds of men were filled
with suspicions of him?"—p. 17.
Now, in the course of my Narrative, I have frankly admitted that I was
tentative in such of my works as fairly allowed of the introduction into them of
religious inquiry; but he is speaking of my Sermons; where, then, is his proof
that in my Sermons I dealt in matters dark, offensive, doubtful, actually
forbidden? He must show that I was tentative in my Sermons; and he has the range
of eight volumes to gather evidence in. As to the ninth, my University Sermons,
of course I was tentative in them; but not because "I would seldom or never let
the world know how much I believed, or how far I intended to go;" but because
University Sermons are commonly, and allowably, of the nature of disquisitions,
as preached before a learned body; and because in deep subjects, which had not
been fully investigated, I said as much as I believed, and about as far as I saw
I could go; and a man cannot do more; and I account no man to be a philosopher
who attempts to do more.