The following letters of my uncle, the late Cardinal Newman, written in the year 1875 (three years before he was made Cardinal), form one—that is, the defensive—side of a correspondence which I had with him in the course of that year. I had ventured to put to him certain questions, to which he (as I felt sure would be the case) was willing to reply. I had asked whether the real conduct of the visible Church—i.e., in his view, of the Church of Rome—had been in accordance with that spirit of morality and goodness which should mark a divine example and a divine teacher. I pointed to facts in the history of the Church which appeared to me to be symptoms of a faulty nature. I referred to the condition of the countries most obedient to Rome—Spain under Philip II., France up to the first Revolution, Italy up to the middle of the nineteenth century—as exhibiting a tremendous total of misdoing, partly traceable directly to the influence of the highest authorities of Rome, partly permitted by them without protest or repudiation. How came it that the visible happiness and harmony of the several countries of Europe should be almost in the reverse proportion to the degree of their belief in the authority of Rome? How came it that the members of an organization, to which the divine promises were believed to have been entrusted, should not only have committed such grave offenses in the past, but should be so unwilling to confess them in the present, except as bare facts, and without any sense of the disrepute thereby attaching to themselves, and to the society they looked upon as divine?
The Cardinal’s answers to the questions of which the above is a summary will certainly be found extremely interesting.
With respect to my own share in the correspondence I have but one regret; that, however, is a serious one: it is that in relying to the Cardinal’s last letter (that dated December 3, 1875) I was overpowered by the magnitude of the subject, and perhaps also by the personality of my opponent in argument, and missed the true point. Hence, this was the end of continuous and sustained argument between us; though, of the letters which I had from him in later years, two certainly are of very high interest.
Let me, as far as is possible, repair my error by indicating the central point in the Cardinal’s letter of December 3, 1875, from which, were the opportunity ever to offer, the argument might be resumed. It lies in the following sentence: “The ethos of the Catholic Church is what it was of old time, and whatever or whoever quarrels with Catholicism now, quarrels virtually, and would have quarrelled if alive 1800 years ago, with the Christianity of Apostles and Evangelists.”
The question, it will be seen, is this—and truly it is an important one—whether the spirit of St. Peter and St. Paul can be shown to differ, in any material respect, from the spirit of the Church of Rome at the present day.
J. R. Mozley.
———————
The Oratory,
April 1, 1875.
My DEAR John,
You open a subject too large to be dealt with in one letter; but I shall be able to get a certain way in it today.
I consider your letter to be addressed to me personally, as if you said, “I am perplexed and even curious to understand how a man like you, who have had time and opportunities for observation and thought, should be able to put up with a one-sided view of the Church of Rome—nay, with an abstract view and a paper representation of it, a mere conclusion, congruous or compulsory, from premises dependent on certain first principles, such as ‘there must be a visible Church,’ instead of going into the world of facts, and seeing and judging of the Roman Church by what it is seen to have been in history.”
My reply to your objections, then, shall take the shape of accounting for my own insensibility to them as objections. But anyhow, as I can only answer you in my own way and from my own standpoint, the substance of what I shall say would be the same, whether I argued with you directly or explained to you the arguments which convince me.
First, then, I grant that I do assume certain first principles as the starting points from which my convictions proceed, and I don’t see who can arrive at any conviction without making assumptions. I assume that there is a truth in religion, and that it is attainable by us: that there is a God, to whom we can approve ourselves and to whom we are responsible. On the other hand, I find, in matter of fact and by experience, that there are great difficulties in admitting this first principle; but still, they are not such as to succeed in thrusting it out from its supremacy in my mind. The most prominent difficulty of Theism is the existence of evil: I can’t overcome it; I am obliged to leave it alone, with the confession that it is too much for me, and with an appeal to the argumentum ab ignorantiâ, or, in other words, with the evasion or excuse, not very satisfactory, that we have not the means here of answering an objection, which nevertheless, if we knew more, we should doubtless have the means of answering: that we can at least make hypotheses to help the difficulty, and, though all those which we can make be wrong, still they open a possibility and prospect of other hypotheses as yet unknown, one of which may be the true explanation.