Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman

Excerpt

MY DEAR READER,

Rightly understood, the two points of view, as regards Religion, of the brothers, Cardinal Newman and Francis Newman, which most separated them, would, together, have approached the realization of a great conception.

For the Cardinal, Authority was the sine quâ non without which there could be no real faith. Authority was the pilot, without whose steering he could not feel secure in his personal ship. But with Authority at the helm, his fears dispersed, his doubts removed.

     "I was not ever thus…..
  I loved to choose and see my path, but now
  Lead Thou me on!"

Over Francis Newman, dogma and the authority of the Church had no sway. He dimly discerned a religion which should move forward with men's advance in knowledge. He imagined an unformalized inward revelation which should reveal new truths to those who passionately desired Truth above all things. And when all is said, the union of Authority given in the past, with the very real mental development which makes for spiritual progress in the present, is not antagonistic to a wise, strong breadth of view in the conception of a perfect Church.

But in both points of view, carried to extremes, there are grave perils to the man who thinks. And I find it impossible to avoid saying here that Francis Newman did not realize this risk when he refused to "ask for the old paths," and determined to "see and choose his path" alone and unaided. We know what the endeavour to found a new church in Syria ended in. We know how, later, he wrote, held back by no reverence for revealed religion, no reverence for other men's belief in it. Many of his writings therefore are painful reading. Though from very early boyhood he had been really a keen seeker after true religion, an earnest student of the Holy Scriptures, and a deep thinker, yet, very soon after he had reached young manhood, it began to be realized by all who knew him that he was very evidently breaking away from all definite dogmatic faith. He was bent, so to speak, on inventing a new religion for himself.

Gradually every year made the spiritual breach wider between him and those who held the Christian Faith. Soon he did not hesitate to say out, in very unguarded language, what he really thought of doctrines which he knew were precious to them. Sometimes to-day, indeed, in reading his books, one comes across some statement in letter, article, or lecture flung out almost venomously; and one steps back mentally as if a spiritual hiss had whipped the air from some inimical sentence which had suddenly lifted its heretical head from amongst an otherwise quiet group of words.

At the end of life it is said that he showed signs of some return to the early faith of his boyhood. That he said, just before his death, to Rev. Temperley Grey, who was visiting him in his last illness, "I feel Paul is less and less to me; and Christ is more and more."

And those who knew that side of him which was splendid in its untiring effort for the betterment of mankind—for the righting of wrongs to women, and others unable to achieve it for themselves—cannot but hope that the faith of earlier days was his once more, before he passed into the silence that lies—as far as we are concerned in this world—at the back of Death....