[34] Guardian, 13th August 1890.

The long life is closed. And men, according to their knowledge and intelligence, turn to seek for some governing idea or aspect of things, by which to interpret the movements and changes of a course which, in spite of its great changes, is felt at bottom to have been a uniform and consistent one. For it seems that, at starting, he is at once intolerant, even to harshness, to the Roman Church, and tolerant, though not sympathetic, to the English; then the parts are reversed, and he is intolerant to the English and tolerant to the Roman; and then at last, when he finally anchored in the Roman Church, he is seen as—not tolerant, for that would involve dogmatic points on which he was most jealous, but—sympathetic in all that was of interest to England, and ready to recognise what was good and high in the English Church.

Is not the ultimate key to Newman's history his keen and profound sense of the life, society, and principles of action presented in the New Testament? To this New Testament life he saw, opposed and in contrast, the ways and assumptions of English life, religious as well as secular. He saw that the organisation of society had been carried, and was still being carried, to great and wonderful perfection; only it was the perfection of a society and way of life adapted to the present world, and having its ends here; only it was as different as anything can be from the picture which the writers of the New Testament, consciously and unconsciously, give of themselves and their friends. Here was a Church, a religion, a "Christian nation," professing to be identical in spirit and rules of faith and conduct with the Church and religion of the Gospels and Epistles; and what was the identity, beyond certain phrases and conventional suppositions? He could not see a trace in English society of that simple and severe hold of the unseen and the future which is the colour and breath, as well as the outward form, of the New Testament life. Nothing could be more perfect, nothing grander and nobler, than all the current arrangements for this life; its justice and order and increasing gentleness, its widening sympathies between men; but it was all for the perfection and improvement of this life; it would all go on, if what we experience now was our only scene and destiny. This perpetual antithesis haunted him, when he knew it, or when he did not. Against it the Church ought to be the perpetual protest, and the fearless challenge, as it was in the days of the New Testament. But the English Church had drunk in, he held, too deeply the temper, ideas, and laws of an ambitious and advancing civilisation; so much so as to be unfaithful to its special charge and mission. The prophet had ceased to rebuke, warn, and suffer; he had thrown in his lot with those who had ceased to be cruel and inhuman, but who thought only of making their dwelling-place as secure and happy as they could. The Church had become respectable, comfortable, sensible, temperate, liberal; jealous about the forms of its creeds, equally jealous of its secular rights, interested in the discussion of subordinate questions, and becoming more and more tolerant of differences; ready for works of benevolence and large charity, in sympathy with the agricultural poor, open-handed in its gifts; a willing fellow-worker with society in kindly deeds, and its accomplice in secularity. All this was admirable, but it was not the life of the New Testament, and it was that which filled his thoughts. The English Church had exchanged religion for civilisation, the first century for the nineteenth, the New Testament as it is written, for a counterfeit of it interpreted by Paley or Mr. Simeon; and it seemed to have betrayed its trust.

Form after form was tried by him, the Christianity of Evangelicalism, the Christianity of Whately, the Christianity of Hawkins, the Christianity of Keble and Pusey; it was all very well, but it was not the Christianity of the New Testament and of the first ages. He wrote the Church of the Fathers to show they were not merely evidences of religion, but really living men; that they could and did live as they taught, and what was there like the New Testament or even the first ages now? Alas! there was nothing completely like them; but of all unlike things, the Church of England with its "smug parsons," and pony-carriages for their wives and daughters, seemed to him the most unlike: more unlike than the great unreformed Roman Church, with its strange, unscriptural doctrines and its undeniable crimes, and its alliance, wherever it could, with the world. But at least the Roman Church had not only preserved, but maintained at full strength through the centuries to our day two things of which the New Testament was full, and which are characteristic of it—devotion and self-sacrifice. The crowds at a pilgrimage, a shrine, or a "pardon" were much more like the multitudes who followed our Lord about the hills of Galilee—like them probably in that imperfect faith which we call superstition—than anything that could be seen in the English Church, even if the Salvation Army were one of its instruments. And the spirit which governed the Roman Church had prevailed on men to make the sacrifice of celibacy a matter of course, as a condition of ministering in a regular and systematic way not only to the souls, but to the bodies of men, not only for the Priesthood, but for educational Brotherhoods, and Sisters of the poor and of hospitals. Devotion and sacrifice, prayer and self-denying charity, in one word sanctity, are at once on the surface of the New Testament and interwoven with all its substance. He recoiled from a representation of the religion of the New Testament which to his eye was without them. He turned to where, in spite of every other disadvantage, he thought he found them. In S. Filippo Neri he could find a link between the New Testament and progressive civilisation. He could find no S. Filippo—so modern and yet so Scriptural—when he sought at home.

His mind, naturally alive to all greatness, had early been impressed with the greatness of the Church of Rome. But in his early days it was the greatness of Anti-Christ. Then came the change, and his sense of greatness was satisfied by the commanding and undoubting attitude of the Roman system, by the completeness of its theory, by the sweep of its claims and its rule, by the even march of its vast administration. It could not and it did not escape him, that the Roman Church, with all the good things which it had, was, as a whole, as unlike the Church of the New Testament and of the first ages as the English. He recognised it frankly, and built up a great theory to account for the fact, incorporating and modernising great portions of the received Roman explanations of the fact. But what won his heart and his enthusiasm was one thing; what justified itself to his intellect was another. And it was the reproduction, partial, as it might be, yet real and characteristic, in the Roman Church of the life and ways of the New Testament, which was the irresistible attraction that tore him from the associations and the affections of half a lifetime.

The final break with the English Church was with much heat and bitterness; and both sides knew too much each of the other to warrant the language used on each side. The English Church had received too much loyal and invaluable service from him in teaching and example to have insulted him, as many of its chief authorities did, with the charges of dishonesty and bad faith; his persecutors forgot that a little effort on his part might, if he had been what they called him, and had really been a traitor, have formed a large and compact party, whose secession might have caused fatal damage. And he, too, knew too much of the better side of English religious life to justify the fierce invective and sarcasm with which he assailed for a time the English Church as a mere system of comfortable and self-deceiving worldliness.

But as time went over him in his new position two things made themselves felt. One was, that though there was a New Testament life, lived in the Roman Church with conspicuous truth and reality, yet the Roman Church, like the English, was administered and governed by men—men with passions and faults, men of mixed characters—who had, like their English contemporaries and rivals, ends and rules of action not exactly like those of the New Testament. The Roman Church had to accept, as much as the English, the modern conditions of social and political life, however different in outward look from those of the Sermon on the Mount. The other was the increasing sense that the civilisation of the West was as a whole, and notwithstanding grievous drawbacks, part of God's providential government, a noble and beneficent thing, ministering graciously to man's peace and order, which Christians ought to recognise as a blessing of their times such as their fathers had not, for which they ought to be thankful, and which, if they were wise, they would put to what, in his phrase, was an "Apostolical" use. In one of the angelical hymns in the Dream of Gerontius, he dwells on the Divine goodness which led men to found "a household and a fatherland, a city and a state" with an earnestness of sympathy, recalling the enumeration of the achievements of human thought and hand, and the arts of civil and social life—[Greek: kai phthegma kai aenemoen phronaema kai astynomous orgas]—dwelt on so fondly by Aeschylus and Sophocles.

The force with which these two things made themselves felt as age came on—the disappointments attending his service to the Church, and the grandeur of the physical and social order of the world and its Divine sanction in spite of all that is evil and all that is so shortlived in it—produced a softening in his ways of thought and speech. Never for a moment did his loyalty and obedience to his Church, even when most tried, waver and falter. The thing is inconceivable to any one who ever knew him, and the mere suggestion would be enough to make him blaze forth in all his old fierceness and power. But perfectly satisfied of his position, and with his duties clearly defined, he could allow large and increasing play, in the leisure of advancing age, to his natural sympathies, and to the effect of the wonderful spectacle of the world around him. He was, after all, an Englishman; and with all his quickness to detect and denounce what was selfish and poor in English ideas and action, and with all the strength of his deep antipathies, his chief interests were for things English—English literature, English social life, English politics, English religion. He liked to identify himself, as far as it was possible, with things English, even with things that belonged to his own first days. He republished his Oxford sermons and treatises. He prized his honorary fellowship at Trinity; he enjoyed his visit to Oxford, and the welcome which he met there. He discerned how much the English Church counted for in the fight going on in England for the faith in Christ. There was in all that he said and did a gentleness, a forbearance, a kindly friendliness, a warm recognition of the honour paid him by his countrymen, ever since the Apologia had broken down the prejudices which had prevented Englishmen from doing him justice. As with his chief antagonist at Oxford, Dr. Hawkins, advancing years brought with them increasing gentleness, and generosity, and courtesy. But through all this there was perceptible to those who watched a pathetic yearning for something which was not to be had: a sense, resigned—for so it was ordered—but deep and piercing, how far, not some of us, but all of us, are from the life of the New Testament: how much there is for religion to do, and how little there seems to be to do it.