Newman and Ecumenism

In the weeks before and after St John Henry Newman was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church, there was much talk of Newman’s presumed ecumenism.

“The proclamation is of ecumenical significance,” Archbishop Bernard Longley said, “since it embraces all that Cardinal Newman wrote, preached and taught both as an Anglican priest and after his reception into full communion with the Catholic Church.” Father George Bowen, a priest of the London Oratory and postulator of Newman’s being named a doctor of the Church, echoed these sentiments. “Newman’s journey really began as a… baptized Christian who suddenly found faith in the Church of England through the influence of schoolteachers,” he remarked. “For all of his life, he was very conscious that half his life was spent in the Church of England. And this was something that was immensely important to him.” Why? “He always recognized as a Catholic that he brought with him all that he had learned about Christ as an Anglican. So, Newman is a big ecumenical figure in the sense that he owes his faith to his upbringing in the Church of England. In fact, later in life, St. Newman republished the works he had written as an Anglican with new prefaces and some notes, but basically saying, ‘I’m proud of all this stuff.'”

The National Institute for Newman Studies in Pittsburgh duly repeated this claim: “Perhaps Newman’s greatest contribution to Ecumenism is the extraordinary fact that after his conversion, instead of repudiating his Anglican writings, he republished most of them, with only minor changes, a body of work shaped by Anglican theological method, which has proved a new and fertilising force for the ongoing renewal of Catholic theology.” For one journalist, writing in Crux, the ecumenical character of the proclamation had to be acknowledged because “Newman’s intellectual contributions to the faith are also revered within the Anglican communion as well.”

Newman’s view of the Anglican Church

Is it really the case that Newman owed his faith, as Father Bowen says, “to his upbringing in the Church of England”? Yes, as Archbishop Longley says, the Church’s elevation of Newman to a Doctor of the Church does embrace what he wrote as both an Anglican and a Catholic, but what he wrote as an Anglican is replete with searing criticisms of the fundamental errors of the Anglican Church–its lack of any reliable theology, its lack of any reliable episcopate, its lack of any apostolical authority, indeed, its thoroughgoing Erastianism.

There is no sense in which one can tenably say that Newman’s Catholic faith was attributable to his “upbringing in the Church of England.” For Newman to convert to the Catholic Church–or what he called “the one true fold of the Redeemer”—he clearly realized that he had to repudiate the Anglican Church. And one way he did this was by formally recanting all the anti-Catholic things he had had to say as an Anglican–recantations that appear in an appendix to his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), which nicely proved Hilaire Belloc’s point that the only real belief that has ever held Anglicanism together is its rejection of Catholicism.

Duff Cooper would reconfirm this when he wrote in his autobiography, Old Men Forget (1953), that “In England there are only two religions: Roman Catholicism, which is wrong, and all the others, which don’t matter.” If Newman republished some of his Anglican writings with only modest syntactical changes, he did so because his Anglican writings were consonant with his Catholic writings, not because he somehow believed that there could be any tenability to the Anglican religion. If Fr Bowen wishes to persuade us that Newman saw himself in any ecumenical light, he will have to explain why the convert, five years after leaving the Anglican Church, should have said the following to his Anglican friends in one of the lectures later published in Anglican Difficulties (1850): “Well… I do not know what natural inducement there is to urge me to be harsh” to the Established Church,” he confessed:

I have only pleasant associations of those many years when I was within her pale; I have no theory to put forward, nor position to maintain; and I am come to a time of life, when men desire to be quiet and at peace;—moreover, I am in a communion which satisfies its members, and draws them into itself, and, by the objects which it presents to faith, and the influences which it exerts over the heart, leads them to forget the external world, and look forward more steadily to the future. No, my dear brethren, there is but one thing that forces me to speak,—and it is my intimate sense that the Catholic Church is the one ark of salvation, and my love for your souls; it is my fear lest you ought to submit yourselves to her, and do not; my fear lest I may perchance be able to persuade you, and not use my talent. It will be a miserable thing for you and for me, if I had been instrumental in bringing you but half-way, if I have cooperated in removing your invincible ignorance, but am able to do no more. It is this keen feeling that my life is wearing away, which overcomes the lassitude which possesses me, and scatters the excuses which I might plausibly urge to myself for not meddling with what I have left for ever, which subdues the recollection of past times, and which makes me do my best, with whatever success, to bring you to land from off your wreck, who have thrown yourselves from it upon the waves, or are clinging to its rigging, or are sitting in heaviness and despair upon its side. For this is the truth: the Establishment, whatever it be in the eyes of men, whatever its temporal greatness and its secular prospects, in the eyes of faith is a mere wreck. We must not indulge our imagination, we must not dream: we must look at things as they are; we must not confound the past with the present, or what is substantive with what is the accident of a period. Ridding our minds of these illusions, we shall see that the Established Church has no claims whatever on us, whether in memory or in hope; that they only have claims upon our commiseration and our charity whom she holds in bondage, separated from that faith and that Church in which alone is salvation. If I can do aught towards breaking their chains, and bringing them into the Truth, it will be an act of love towards their souls, and of piety towards God.

One might say, as the zealous Anglican historian Owen Chadwick said, that these were the sentiments of an overzealous convert and were unrepresentative of Newman’s later views. But Newman put his final edits to his republication of the lectures in 1876, and he struck out nothing from this splendid demolition of the house of cards otherwise known as the Anglican Establishment. If he had qualms about anything he had to say here, he never expressed them. Indeed, in 1870, he wrote to an Anglican gentleman who urged him to return to the Anglican fold in the wake of the Church’s promulgation of the doctrine of papal infallibility: “I have letters and notices come to me every week, and have had ever since I was a Catholic at least every month, to assure me that I have become an Anglican again or to ask me if I have not, or to entreat me to become one,” he wrote with his accustomed charity to his deluded correspondent:

My answers to them would make, if put together, really a respectable volume and, unless there was the trouble of rummaging them out, I have at times thought of making them into one. I declare, it would give me less trouble in the end; for then when there came the inevitable, irrepressible weekly inquiry, ‘My dear Friend, how are you? how do you do by this time?’ I should simply have to send the inquirer back a copy of my Volume.

Of course, it is a pity that many who claim to know Newman’s work have not found time to locate or heed these disavowals, but his response to Thomas Ellacombe, an Anglican friend of his, would have to be accounted one of the most amusing:

Don’t let me hurt you, my dear Ellacombe, by thus smiling over your letter, for I am not hurt at you — ‘make up my mind to return —’ Why, I could as easily ‘make up my mind’ to be a Garibaldian or a Siamese twin. Be sure there is as much chance of my turning an Anglican again as of my being the Irish Giant or the King of Clubs. Don’t let impertinent Pamphleteers delude you. I am as certain that the Church in communion with Rome is the successor and representative of the Primitive Church, as certain that the Anglican Church is not, as certain that the Anglican Church is a mere collection of men, a mere national body, a human society, as I am that Victoria is Queen of Great Britain. Nor have I once had even a passing doubt on the subject, ever since I have been a Catholic. I have all along been in a state of inward certainty and steady assurance on this point, and I should be the most asinine, as well as the most ungrateful of men, if I left that Gracious Lord who manifests Himself in the Catholic Church, for those wearisome Protestant shadows, out of which of His mercy he has delivered me.

These do not sound like the words of a man who would agree with Fr. Bowen that he “owed his faith to his upbringing in the Church of England.”

A “theological bridge”?

Dr. Benjamin King, the Duncalf-Villavoso Professor of Church History at Seminary of the Southwest. who was invited by Fr. George Bowen to contribute to the Positio making Newman a Doctor of the Church, ignores what Newman had to say of Anglicanism in Anglican Difficulties altogether and insists that “Newman was a sort of theological bridge linking the two communions, transferring to Anglicanism the catholic vision of the Church that he read in the early Church Fathers and that he saw on his Mediterranean travels, while also bringing his Anglican scholarship of the Fathers with him when he became a Catholic. Although he crossed the bridge to the Catholic side, most Anglicans who learned from Newman about the catholic roots of their Church remained on the Anglican side of the bridge.”

This is false on a number of counts. Newman can only be regarded as a “bridge” between the Church of Rome and Anglicanism in the sense that he sought to encourage those who were “clinging to the rigging” of the “wreck” of Anglicanism to find safe harbor in the one true fold of the Catholic Church. As for bringing his understanding of the Fathers with him once he converted, he pointedly said that it was only those with “due formation”—that is to say, formation in the Catholic Church—who could read the Fathers accurately. There is no truth in Newman’s understanding of the Fathers being somehow an Anglican understanding.

In Anglican Difficulties, Newman shared with his auditors his own personal testimony to show that, far from the Fathers’ dissuading him from entering into the appeal of the Catholic Church, they were instrumental in his conversion:

I say, then, that the writings of the Fathers, so far from prejudicing at least one man against the modern Catholic Church, have been simply and solely the one intellectual cause of his having renounced the religion in which he was born and submitted himself to her. What other causes there may be, not intellectual, unknown, unsuspected by himself, though freely imputed on mere conjecture by those who would invalidate his testimony, it would be unbecoming and impertinent to discuss; for himself, if he is asked why he became a Catholic, he can only give that answer which experience and consciousness bring home to him as the true one, viz., that he joined the Catholic Church simply because he believed it, and it only, to be the Church of the Fathers.

If it took Newman some time to realize this, it was only because when he first read the Fathers, he was reading them with Protestant eyes, which blinded him to their Catholic purposes. He makes the same criticism of Gibbon. The Enlightenment historian’s account of the rise of Christianity is unreliable precisely because he, too, looked on his subject with Protestant eyes; he had no “due formation” in the Faith, as Newman points out in the Grammar of Assent, nor did he ever consider acquiring one necessary, for all of his undeniable learning.

In converting and leaving not only his own people but an entire English way of life, Newman found a new life, the companions of which could not be taken away from him. “You speak of feeling drawn to the religion of Ireland by your love of Ireland,” Newman wrote a Protestant Irishman drawn to Irish Catholicism, “I felt something like this as regards the Fathers. After my conversion I had a sensible pleasure in taking down the Volumes of St Athanasius, St Ambrose etc in my Library—The words rose in my mind ‘I am at one with you now.’ I had a feeling of family-intimacy with them then, the want of which I suffered from before, without recognising it.”

If Newman had somehow not felt this affinity with the Fathers as Catholic Fathers, he would have remained with Pusey and Keble in a false understanding of the Fathers, especially with regard to the papacy and the Holy Eucharist. If Dr. King or any of his readers are inclined to doubt this, and believe somehow that Newman retained any respect for the Via Media, the “paper religion” he cobbled together between Protestantism and Catholicism, they should reacquaint themselves with Newman’s own famous words:

For a mere sentence, the words of St Augustine struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before… ‘Securus judicat orbis terranum!’ [“The universal Church is in its judgments secure of truth.] By those great words of the ancient Father, interpreting and summing up the long and varied course of ecclesiastical history, the theory of the Via Media was absolutely pulverized.

As for “most Anglicans who learned from Newman” not converting, this is also false. If we compare the number of those Anglicans who stayed “clinging to the rigging” after reading Newman with those who chose to extricate themselves from the “wreck” of Anglicanism after reading him, the number of those who stayed is far fewer than those who left. It is true that prominent Anglicans like Pusey and Keble were content to remain with the wreck, but many less prominent Anglicans had the good sense to follow Newman to Rome after learning from him of the genuine blessings of the one true fold.

One of these was James Stewart, who had received his B.A. and M.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge, and would later teach Classics at Newman’s Oxford on the Liffey. In 1870, Stewart wrote Newman:

I cannot help thinking of you always on the Epiphany, for it was on that day I and my family were received into the Church, 20 years ago, and we never can forget how entirely it was owing to you that humanly speaking we ever became Catholics. …[Y]our sermons to mixed congregations was the last book I read before I became a Catholic; and my doubts and difficulties about the Blessed Virgin were dispelled by your two sermons in that volume, especially the one on ‘The Glories of Mary for the sake of her Son.’ You will never know how many people owe their conversion to you, mediately or immediately, till the day when all hearts are open.

Of course, this is not to say that Newman was dismissive of his Anglican faith, for all its inadequacies. In one rather nuanced passage from his Essay on Development, he concedes that false religion might actually be conducive to conversion. “A gradual conversion from a false to a true religion, plainly, has much of the character of a continuous process, or a development, in the mind itself, even when the two religions, which are the limits of its course, are antagonists,” he wrote. And then he quotes a passage from something he wrote in Tract 85 (1838):

True religion is the summit and perfection of false religions; it combines in one whatever there is of good and true separately remaining in each. And in like manner the Catholic Creed is for the most part the combination of separate truths, which heretics have divided among themselves, and err in dividing. So that, in matter of fact, if a religious mind were educated in and sincerely attached to some form of heathenism or heresy, and then were brought under the light of truth, it would be drawn off from error into the truth, not by losing what it had, but by gaining what it had not, not by being unclothed, but by being ‘clothed upon,’ ‘that mortality may be swallowed up of life.’ That same principle of faith which attaches it at first to the wrong doctrine would attach it to the truth; and that portion of its original doctrine, which was to be cast off as absolutely false, would not be directly rejected, but indirectly, in the reception of the truth which is its opposite. True conversion is ever of a positive, not a negative character.

Some might be tempted to see this as somehow an endorsement on Newman’s part of the false religion of Anglicanism. But his subsequent remarks show this not to have been the case. “Such too is the theory of the Fathers as regards the doctrines fixed by Councils, as is instanced in the language of St. Leo,” he wrote. “‘To be seeking for what has been disclosed, to reconsider what has been finished, to tear up what has been laid down, what is this but to be unthankful for what is gained?’”

If Newman is to be regarded as somehow indulgent of the errors of such seeking, then St Leo should have to be as well, and of course that would be a grotesque nonsense. Moreover, such a categorical passage refutes Fr. Bowen’s claim, shared with an EWTN interviewer, that Newman’s whole life could be seen as a “journey of discovering the truth.” No, Newman was not a religious seeker: he was a religious finder. As he told a correspondent in 1874: “Means always cease when the end is obtained. You cease walking when you have got home — if you went on walking, you would get all wrong. Inquiry ends, when you at length know what you were inquiring about. When the water boils, you take the kettle off the fire; else, it would boil away.”

In his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), he is still more explicit on the matter: “From the time that I became a Catholic, of course I have no further history of my religious opinions to narrate,” Newman wrote:

In saying this, I do not mean to say that my mind has been idle, or that I have given up thinking on theological subjects; but that I have had no variations to record, and have had no anxiety of heart whatever. I have been in perfect peace and contentment; I never have had one doubt. I was not conscious to myself, on my conversion, of any change, intellectual or moral, wrought in my mind. I was not conscious of firmer faith in the fundamental truths of Revelation, or of more self-command; I had not more fervour; but it was like coming into port after a rough sea; and my happiness on that score remains to this day without interruption.

That the National Institute of Newman Studies should claim that the Anglican religion that Newman repudiated possesses a “new and fertilizing force for the ongoing renewal of Catholic theology” is characteristically fatuous, especially in light of the Anglican Church’s recently making the Rt. Rev. and Rt. Hon. Dame Sarah Mullally DBE, the Archbishop of Canterbury, though Pittsburgh’s fondness for Cardinal Kasper’s wildly false notions of Newman is well known. If any of us thought Newman’s elevation would put him beyond the misappropriations of Modernists, the National Institute of Newman Studies is always there to remind us that such misappropriations are here to stay.

Newman’s ecumenism

The most unaccountable of the claims for Newman’s presumed ecumenism can be seen in the Crux article, in which the author valiantly defends her case by saying that “Newman’s intellectual contributions to the faith are also revered within the Anglican communion as well.” Putting aside whether “intellectual contributions” to anything can be revered, one has to wonder who exactly these Anglicans are who are so enamored of Newman and his uncompromisingly Catholic faith.

Certainly, there is no more respected Anglican today than Diarmaid MacCulloch, the highly acclaimed church historian. A fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, MacCulloch belongs to the same Erastian establishment that has always held sway over the National Church. One can hear the historian’s affinity with this Erastian ethos in his saying, in all sincerity: “Newman made a genuine career sacrifice by moving to Rome,” as though the convert somehow partook of the same careerism that defines all the pattern men of the Anglican Establishment. Of course, this establishment has changed in many ways since Newman’s day, but, at its core, it is still defined by anti-Catholicism, if by Catholicism we understand the magisterial teachings of the Church, which are necessarily anathema to most professing Anglicans.

In the wake of Newman’s elevation, MacCulloch’s comments were much more illustrative of genuine Anglican sentiment than either Fr. Bowen or the Crux writer realizes. “Newman was a remarkably accomplished writer, with a beautiful literary style, who cleverly developed an idea of development which justified Roman Catholic doctrines not immediately obvious from early church history,” MacCulloch told his viewers. “While his conversion to Rome was a sensation at the time, however, I’ve never felt he said anything of particular interest or originality.”

Surely, the Anglicans who welcome the National Church’s embrace of every conceivable liberal hobbyhorse can have no interest in Newman’s insistence on the dogmatic principle or his recognition of the Church’s antagonism to the manifold errors of the World. Here is but one example of many passages from Newman’s writings that most Erastian Anglicans would naturally have a hard time stomaching. “The Church is built upon the doctrine that impurity is hateful to God, and that concupiscence is its root,” the convert wrote,

with the Prince of the Apostles, her visible Head, she denounces “the corruption of concupiscence which is in the world,” or, that corruption in the world which comes of concupiscence; whereas the corrupt world defends, nay, I may even say, sanctifies that very concupiscence which is the world’s corruption. Just as its bolder teachers, as you know, my brethren, hold that the laws of this physical creation are so supreme, as to allow of their utterly disbelieving in the existence of miracles, so, in like manner, it deifies and worships human nature and its impulses, and denies the power and the grant of grace. This is the source of the hatred which the world bears to the Church; it finds a whole catalogue of sins brought into light and denounced, which it would fain believe to be no sins at all; it finds itself to its indignation and impatience, surrounded with sin, morning, noon, and night; it finds that a stern law lies against it in matters where it believed it was its own master and need not think of God; it finds guilt accumulating upon it hourly, which nothing can prevent, nothing remove, but a higher power, the grace of God. It finds itself in danger of being humbled to the earth as a rebel, instead of being allowed to indulge its self-dependence and self-complacency. Hence it takes its stand on nature, and denies or rejects divine grace.

Naturally, MacCulloch would be the last person to find writing of this sort of any interest.

If Newman cannot be said to have shared the preoccupation with ecumenism that exercises our own contemporaries, he did exhibit profound solicitude for his Anglican friends, whom, as a Catholic, he necessarily viewed as estranged from the one true fold. One can see this in a moving letter he wrote at the very end of his life to Charles Gore, the first Principal of Pusey House and editor of Lux Mundi (1889):

The Oratory, Birmingham Novr [14] 1888

Dear Mr Gore,

In the prospect of the Feast of St Edmund King and Martyr. Amen

I am bold to ask you to accept from me a picture of Keble made sacred by a relic of a Saint and Martyr.

As the likeness of a very dear Friend, I welcomed it when received from dear Mr Richmond, and have gladly guarded it since that time. But in spite of my personal affection for the original I have not thought I could consistently leave it to my brothers of St Philip Neri.

It has struck me from your own relation to my other and equally dear friend Pusey, that I may gain in your House in St Giles’s place for the picture, and thus in our Lord’s words you will be receiving ‘the just in the name of the just, and a disciple in the name of a disciple.’

Excuse me if I have said anything rude or unacceptable in this request.

Believe me dear Mr Gore Most truly Yours

John H. Card. Newman

The portrait Newman refers to here is the one the artist George Richmond made of Keble. When Pusey’s biographer, Henry Parry Liddon saw the portrait and the letter, he wrote to Gore: “Indeed I do congratulate you and the Pusey House on such an acquisition and such a letter. It brings you within the lines of what I always think of as the heroic age. How the perfect and inimitable grace of courtesy which characterizes the Cardinal’s writings survives — even the test of dictation!” Dean Church, the author of the only history of the Oxford Movement worth reading, besides Newman’s own, once said, rightly enough, that “Nations may make peace; Churches are irreconcilable.” Although a dear friend of Newman, Church was never reconciled to what he regarded as his friend’s “catastrophic” conversion. Still, he would doubtless have seen in Newman’s act of generosity a prayer for old friends infinitely more efficacious than any ecumenical wishful thinking.

Newman began his letter with a prayer to St. Edmund, curiously enough, not only because of the saint’s feast day but because Richmond’s portrait of Keble was framed in oak from a tree in Oakley Park, traditionally linked to the martyrdom of St Edmund, the King of the East Angles killed by Vikings in 915 when he refused to renounce his Christian faith. Unfortunately, in our own time, another St Edmund—St Edmund of Abingdon (1175-1240)—has also acquired a connection with Newman, though it is one that true Newman scholars, as opposed to the careerists who fill the Newman institutes, will find tragically ironic.

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Recently, St Edmund’s College, Cambridge announced the establishment of a new academic position called The John Henry Newman Research Fellowship in Catholic Studies, “made possible,” as the college’s website notes, by “the generous bequest of the late Rev Dr Ian Ker (1942–2022), the preeminent scholar on the life and thought of St John Henry Newman,” only adding that the new scholarship is “a testament to Newman’s enduring legacy and commitment to fostering Catholic intellectual tradition within higher education.” The generous bequest was indeed generous: Fr Ian Ker gave the college £1m to set up the scholarship.

However, at the event purporting to celebrate the scholarship and Newman’s being declared a Doctor of the Church, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, the former Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, a distinguished immunologist, roundly attacked, indeed mocked Newman and his work on education, even going so far as to say—to the uproarious laughter of his audience—that Newman’s prose was unreadably “turgid” and that if any portion of the Idea of University—which he called “a purist utopian construct”—had been submitted to him as an undergraduate essay he would have given it a failing grade. Why? It was without any value to any university in Newman’s time and even less value to any contemporary university—with the exception, perhaps, of some “abstruse liberal arts college in America.”

That Ian Ker, of all people, should have indirectly initiated such a travesty of Newman’s understanding of education was shocking enough. After all, Ker’s work on Newman’s lifelong commitment to education, which includes a critical edition of the Idea of a University, is full of precise, luminous, scholarly insight. Yet what made the address of the former Vice-Chancellor more lamentable still was that it was precisely the sort of ill-informed, vulgar attack on Newman that Ker himself would have delighted in denouncing. Now that he is gone, who will hold such impudent men to account? What induced Ker to extend so munificent a gift to Cambridge is anyone’s guess, but Sir Leszek’s address certainly shows that it will not prosper the cause of ecumenism in a university whose contempt for Newman and the Catholic Church is patent.

As for Newman and ecumenism, generally, we cannot falsify Newman’s true assessment of Anglicanism to curry favor with those who imagine that ecumenism can be found in his work where none actually exists. Or, worse, suggest to Catholics that Catholicism has something to learn from a Protestant Church that rejects Catholic Truth in so many blatant ways. Yes, Newman dutifully answered Pusey, on the one hand, and Phillipps de Lisle, on the other, when ecumenical issues arose between the two Churches in his own time, but the realist in Newman never glossed over their inherent irreconcilability.

One can see this in a letter to de Lisle in the midst of Newman’s controversy with Gladstone over papal infallibility. When de Lisle urged Newman to follow up his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875) with another pamphlet, the convert sensibly demurred. “I should not think of writing a new pamphlet,” he told the indefatigable ecumenist. “Protestants are tired of the controversy and we ought to let well alone.” Why? For Newman, “to go into the Council of Constance etc. would be to enter into the general controversy between Catholics and Protestants, in which each party has its own texts and its own facts, and has had them, and flourished them, for the last 300 years. Gladstone says nothing new — our writers have our answers to all he says. And the general public would be soon sick of such an interminable conflict.”

How to conclude? In so fraught and delicate a matter as ecumenism, as in so many others, we should never follow those who merely paraphrase Newman but let him speak for himself. Many years after leaving Oxford, and all the false theorizing of the Via Media, it was fitting that Newman should have left as his epitaph: “Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem,” which Ker in his definitive biography nicely translated: “Out of unreality into Reality.”

If Newman gained from looking at himself from without, he also gained from looking at the Church of England from without—a fact which may not redound to his ecumenical credit but shows his readiness to see things objectively. In the Apologia, Newman spoke candidly of how his conversion had opened his eyes to aspects of the Established Church that he had only partially perceived before converting. “[U]nwilling as I am to give offence to religious Anglicans, I am bound to confess that I felt a great change in my view of the Church of England,” he wrote,

I cannot tell how Church and the Sacraments and in especial the Sacrament of the Altar and the Mass soon there came on me,—but very soon,—an extreme astonishment that I had ever imagined it to be a portion of the Catholic Church. For the first time, I looked at it from without, and (as I should myself say) saw it as it was. Forthwith I could not get myself to see in it any thing else, than what I had so long fearfully suspected, from as far back as 1836,—a mere national institution. As if my eyes were suddenly opened, so I saw it—spontaneously, apart from any definite act of reason or any argument; and so I have seen it ever since. I suppose, the main cause of this lay in the contrast which was presented to me by the Catholic Church. Then I recognized at once a reality which was quite a new thing with me. Then I was sensible that I was not making for myself a Church by an effort of thought; I needed not to make an act of faith in her; I had not painfully to force myself into a position, but my mind fell back upon itself in relaxation and in peace, and I gazed at her almost passively as a great objective fact. I looked at her;—at her rites, her ceremonial, and her precepts; and I said, “This is a religion;” and then, when I looked back upon the poor Anglican Church, for which I had laboured so hard, and upon all that appertained to it, and thought of our various attempts to dress it up doctrinally and esthetically, it seemed to me to be the veriest of nonentities.

If faithful Catholics, in charity and love, wish to encourage Anglicans to join the one true fold, they should do so by sharing with them Newman’s real recognition of the fundamental unreality of the National Church, not endeavor to conceal that recognition, which, after all, was no easier for him to accept than it would be for anyone born into a false religion.