A married clergy seemed always to annoy Newman. Readers of _Loss and
Gain_ are not likely to forget the famous 'pork chop' passage, which
describes a young parson and his bride bustling into a stationer's shop
to buy hymnals and tracts. What was once only annoyance at some of the
ways of John Bull on his knees, soon ripened into something not very
unlike hatred. Never was any invention less _ben trovato_ than that
which used to describe Newman as pining after the 'incomparable liturgy'
or the 'cultured society' of the Church of England. He hated _ex animo_
all those aspects of Anglicanism which best recommend it to Erastian
minds. A church of which sanctity is _not_ a note is sure to have many
friends.
The _Saturday Review_ struck up a fine national tune:
'An intense but narrow conception of personal holiness, and personal
satisfaction with dogma, ate him (Newman) up--the natural legacy of the
Evangelical school in which he had been nursed, the great tradition of
Tory churchmanship, _of pride in the Church of England, as such_, of
determination to stand shoulder to shoulder in resisting the foreigner,
whether he came from Rome or from Geneva, from Tübingen, or from Saint
Sulpice, of the union of all social and intellectual culture with
theological learning--the idea which, alone of all such ideas, has made
education patriotic, and orthodoxy generous, made insufficient appeal to
him, and for want of it he himself made shipwreck.'
Here is John Bullism, bold and erect. If the Ark of Peter won't hoist
the Union Jack, John Bull must have an Ark of his own, with patriotic
clergy of his own manufacture tugging at the oar, and with nothing
foreign in the hold save some sound old port. 'It will always be
remembered to Newman's credit,' says this same reviewer, 'that he knew
good wine if he did not drink much.' Mark the 'If'; there is much virtue
in it.
We are now provided with two causes of Newman's discomfort in the Church
of England--its too comfortable clergy, and its too frequent
introduction of the lion and the unicorn amongst the symbols of
religion--both effective causes, as may be proved by many passages; but
to say that either or both availed to drive him out, and compelled him
to seek shelter at the hands of one whom he had long regarded as a foe,
is to go very far indeed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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