Famous Reviews, Selected and Edited with Introductory Notes by R. Brimley Johnson
History
Famous Reviews, Selected and Edited with Introductory Notes by R. Brimley Johnson
Books -- Reviews; Criticism; English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism; English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism
All this is the more remarkable because he conceives himself to have
been, even from early youth, peculiarly devoted to dogma in the
abstract; he returns continually to this idea, confounding, as we
venture to conceive, his estimate of the effect of truth when he
received it, on himself, with truth as it exists in the abstract. And as
this affected him in regard to dogma, so it reached to his relations to
every part of the Church around him. It led him to gather up in a
dangerous degree, into the person of his "own Bishop," the deference due
to the whole order. "I did not care much for the Bench of Bishops, nor
should I have cared much for a Provincial Council.... All these matters
seemed to me to be jure ecclesiastico; but what to me was jure divino
was the voice of my Bishop in his own person. My own Bishop was my
Pope."--(p. 123.) His intense individuality had substituted the personal
bond to the individual for the general bond to the collective holders of
the office: and so when the strain became violent it snapped at once.
This doubtless natural disposition seems to have been developed, and
perhaps permanently fixed, as the law of his intellectual and spiritual
being, by the peculiarities of his early religious training. Educated in
what is called the "Evangelical" school, early and consciously
converted, and deriving his first religious tone, in great measure, from
the vehement but misled Calvinism, of which Thomas Scott, of Aston
Sandford, was one of the ablest and most robust specimens, he was early
taught to appreciate, and even to judge of, all external truth mainly in
its ascertainable bearings on his own religious experience. In many a
man the effect of this teaching is to fix him for life in a hard,
narrow, and exclusive school of religious thought and feeling, in which
he lives and dies profoundly satisfied with himself and his
co-religionists, and quite hopeless of salvation for any beyond the
immediate pale in which his own Shibboleth is pronounced with the
exactest nicety of articulation. But Dr. Newman's mind was framed upon a
wholly different idea, and the results were proportionally dissimilar.
With the introvertive tendency which we have ascribed to him, was joined
a most subtle and speculative intellect, and an ambitious temper. The
"Apologia" is the history of the practical working out of those various
conditions. His hold upon any truth external to and separate from
himself, was so feeble when placed in comparison with his perception of
what was passing within himself, that the external truth was always
liable to corrections which would make its essential elements harmonize
with what was occurring within his own intellectual or spiritual being.
We think that we can distinctly trace in these pages a twofold
consequence from all this: first, an inexhaustible mutability in his
views on all subjects; and secondly, a continually recurring temptation
to entire scepticism as to everything external to himself. Every page
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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