Chapter XIII: Part 13

Another of these assumptions is not a little remarkable. It suits his argument to deduce all our known varieties of pigeons from the rock-pigeon (the Columba livia), and this parentage is traced out, though not, we think, to demonstration, yet with great ingenuity and patience. But another branch of the argument would be greatly strengthened by establishing the descent of our various breeds of dogs with their perfect power of fertile inter-breeding from different natural species. And accordingly, though every fact as to the canine race is parallel to the facts which have been used before to establish the common parentage of the pigeons in Columba livia, all these are thrown over in a moment, and Mr. Darwin, first assuming, without the shadow of proof, that our domestic breeds are descended from different species, proceeds calmly to argue from this, as though it were a demonstrated certainty.

It _seems to me unlikely_ in the case of the dog-genus, which is
distributed in a wild state throughout the world, that since man first
appeared one species alone should have been domesticated.--p. 18.

In some cases _I do not doubt_ that the intercrossing of species
aboriginally distinct has played an important part in the origin of
our domestic productions.--p. 43.

What new words are these for a loyal disciple of the true Baconian philosophy?--"I can conceive"--"It is not incredible"--"I do not doubt" --"It is conceivable."

For myself, _I venture confidently_ to look back thousands on
thousands of generations, and I see an animal striped like a zebra,
but perhaps otherwise very differently constructed, the common parent
of our domestic horse, whether or not it be descended from one or more
wild stocks of the ass, hemionous, quagga, or zebra.--p. 167.

In the name of all true philosophy we protest against such a mode of dealing with nature, as utterly dishonourable to all natural science, as reducing it from its present lofty level of being one of the noblest trainers of man's intellect and instructors of his mind, to being a mere idle play of the fancy, without the basis of fact or the discipline of observation. In the "Arabian Nights" we are not offended as at an impossibility when Amina sprinkles her husband with water and transforms him into a dog, but we cannot open the august doors of the venerable temple of scientific truth to the genii and magicians of romance. We plead guilty to Mr. Darwin's imputation that

the chief cause of our natural unwillingness to admit that one species
has given birth to other and distinct species is that we are always
slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the
intermediate steps.--p. 481.

In this tardiness to admit great changes suggested by the imagination, but the steps of which we cannot see, is the true spirit of philosophy.

Analysis, says Professor Sedgwick, consists in making experiments and
observations, and in drawing general conclusions from them by
induction, and admitting of no objections against the conclusions but
such as are taken from experiments or other certain truths; for
_hypotheses are not to be regarded in experimental philosophy._[1]

[1] "A Discourse on the Studies of the University," by A. Sedgwick, p.
102.

The other solvent which Mr. Darwin most freely and, we think, unphilosophically employs to get rid of difficulties, is his use of time. This he shortens or prolongs at will by the mere wave of his magician's rod. Thus the duration of whole epochs, during which certain forms of animal life prevailed, is gathered up into a point, whilst an unlimited expanse of years, "impressing his mind with a sense of eternity," is suddenly interposed between that and the next series, though geology proclaims the transition to have been one of gentle and, it may be, swift accomplishment. All this too is made the more startling because it is used to meet the objections drawn from facts. "We see none of your works," says the observer of nature; "we see no beginnings of the portentous change; we see plainly beings of another order in creation, but we find amongst them no tendencies to these altered organisms." "True," says the great magician, with a calmness no difficulty derived from the obstinacy of facts can disturb; "true, but remember the effect of time. Throw in a few hundreds of millions of years more or less, and why should not all these changes be possible, and, if possible, why may I not assume them to be real?"

Together with this large licence of assumption we notice in this book several instances of receiving as facts whatever seems to bear out the theory upon the slightest evidence, and rejecting summarily others, merely because they are fatal to it. We grieve to charge upon Mr. Darwin this freedom in handling facts, but truth extorts it from us. That the loose statements and unfounded speculations of this book should come from the author of the monograms on Cirripedes, and the writer, in the natural history of the Voyage of the "Beagle," of the paper on the Coral Reefs, is indeed a sad warning how far the love of a theory may seduce even a first-rate naturalist from the very articles of his creed.

This treatment of facts is followed up by another favourite line of argument, namely, that by this hypothesis difficulties otherwise inextricable are solved. Such passages abound. Take a few, selected almost at random, to illustrate what we mean:--

How inexplicable are these facts on the ordinary view of creation!--p.
436.

Such facts as the presence of peculiar species of bats and the absence
of other mammals on oceanic islands are utterly inexplicable on the
theory of independent acts of creation.--pp. 477-8.

It must be admitted that these facts receive no explanation on the
theory of creation.--p. 478.

The inhabitants of the Cape de Verde Islands are related to those of
Africa, like those of the Galapagos to America. I believe this grand
fact can receive no sort of explanation on the ordinary view of
independent creation.--pp. 398-9.

Now what can be more simply reconcilable with that theory than Mr. Darwin's own account of the mode in which the migration of animal life from one distant region to another is continually accomplished?

Take another of these suggestions:--

It is inexplicable, on the theory of creation, why a part developed in
a very unusual manner in any one species of a genus, and therefore, as
we may naturally infer, of great importance to the species, should be
eminently liable to variation.--p. 474.

Why "inexplicable"? Such a liability to variation might most naturally be expected in the part "unusually developed," because such unusual development is of the nature of a monstrosity, and monsters are always tending to relapse into likeness to the normal type. Yet this argument is one on which he mainly relies to establish his theory, for he sums all up in this triumphant inference:--

I cannot believe that a false theory would explain, as it seems to me
that the theory of natural selection does explain, the several large
classes of facts above specified.--p. 480.

Now, as to all this, we deny, first, that many of these difficulties are "inexplicable on any other supposition." Of the greatest of them (128, 194) we shall have to speak before we conclude. We will here touch only on one of those which are continually reappearing in Mr. Darwin's pages, in order to illustrate his mode of dealing with them. He finds, then, one of these "inexplicable difficulties" in the fact, that the young of the blackbird, instead of resembling the adult in the colour of its plumage, is like the young of many other birds spotted, and triumphantly declaring that--

No one will suppose that the stripes on the whelp of a lion, or the
spots on the young blackbird, are of any use to these animals, or are
related to the conditions to which they are exposed.--pp. 439-40--

he draws from them one of his strongest arguments for this alleged community of descent. Yet what is more certain to every observant field-naturalist than that this alleged uselessness of colouring is one of the greatest protections to the young bird, imperfect in its flight, perching on every spray, sitting unwarily on every bush through which the rays of sunshine dapple every bough to the colour of its own plumage, and so give it a facility of escape which it would utterly want if it bore the marked and prominent colours, the beauty of which the adult bird needs to recommend him to his mate, and can safely bear with his increased habits of vigilance and power of wing?

But, secondly, as to many of these difficulties, the alleged solving of which is one great proof of the truth of Mr. Darwin's theory, we are compelled to join issue with him on another ground, and deny that he gives us any solution at all. Thus, for instance, Mr. Darwin builds a most ingenious argument on the tendency of the young of the horse, ass, zebra, and quagga, to bear on their shoulders and on their legs certain barred stripes. Up these bars (bars sinister, as we think, as to any true descent of existing animals from their fancied prototype) he mounts through his "thousands and thousands of generations," to the existence of his "common parent, otherwise perhaps very differently constructed, but striped like a zebra."--(p. 67.) "How inexplicable," he exclaims, "on the theory of creation, is the occasional appearance of stripes on the shoulder and legs of several species of the horse genus and in their hybrids!"--(p. 473.) He tells us that to suppose that each species was created with a tendency "like this, is to make the works of God a mere mockery and deception"; and he satisfies himself that all difficulty is gone when he refers the stripes to his hypothetical thousands on thousands of years removed progenitor. But how is his difficulty really affected? for why is the striping of one species a less real difficulty than the striping of many?

Another instance of this mode of dealing with his subject, to which we must call the attention of our readers, because it too often recurs, is contained in the following question:--

Were all the infinitely numerous kinds of animals and plants created
as eggs, or seed, or as full grown? and, in the case of mammals, were
they created bearing the false marks of nourishment from the mother's
womb?--p. 483.

The difficulty here glanced at is extreme, but it is one for the solution of which the transmutation-theory gives no clue. It is inherent in the idea of the creation of beings, which are to reproduce their like by natural succession; for, in such a world, place the first beginning where you will, that beginning _must_ contain the apparent history of a _past_, which existed only in the mind of the Creator. If, with Mr. Darwin, to escape the difficulty of supposing the first man at his creation to possess in that framework of his body "false marks of nourishment from his mother's womb," with Mr. Darwin you consider him to have been an improved ape, you only carry the difficulty up from the first man to the first ape; if, with Mr. Darwin, in violation of all observation, you break the barrier between the classes of vegetable and animal life, and suppose every animal to be an "improved" vegetable, you do but carry your difficulty with you into the vegetable world; for, how could there be seeds if there had been no plants to seed them? and if you carry up your thoughts through the vista of the Darwinian eternity up to the primaeval fungus, still the primaeval fungus must have had a humus, from which to draw into its venerable vessels the nourishment of its archetypal existence, and that humus must itself be a "false mark" of a pre-existing vegetation.

We have dwelt a little upon this, because it is by such seeming solutions of difficulties as that which this passage supplies that the transmutationist endeavours to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation.

There are no parts of Mr. Darwin's ingenious book in which he gives the reins more completely to his fancy than where he deals with the improvement of instinct by his principle of natural selection. We need but instance his assumption, without a fact on which to build it, that the marvellous skill of the honey-bee in constructing its cells is thus obtained, and the slave-making habits of the Formica Polyerges thus formed. There seems to be no limit here to the exuberance of his fancy, and we cannot but think that we detect one of those hints by which Mr. Darwin indicates the application of his system from the lower animals to man himself, when he dwells so pointedly upon the fact that it is always the _black_ ant which is enslaved by his other coloured and more fortunate brethren. "The slaves are black!" We believe that, if we had Mr. Darwin in the witness-box, and could subject him to a moderate cross-examination, we should find that he believed that the tendency of the lighter-coloured races of mankind to prosecute the negro slave-trade was really a remains, in their more favoured condition, of the "extraordinary and odious instinct" which had possessed them before they had been "improved by natural selection" from Formica Polyerges into Homo. This at least is very much the way in which (p. 479) he slips in quite incidentally the true identity of man with the horse, the bat, and the porpoise:--

The framework of bones being the same in the hand of a man, wing of a
bat, fin of a porpoise, and leg of the horse, the same number of
vertebrae forming the neck of the giraffe and of the elephant, and
innumerable other such facts, at once explain themselves on the theory
of descent with slow and slight successive modifications.--p. 479.

Such assumptions as these, we once more repeat, are most dishonourable and injurious to science; and though, out of respect to Mr. Darwin's high character and to the tone of his work, we have felt it right to weigh the "argument" again set by him before us in the simple scales of logical examination, yet we must remind him that the view is not a new one, and that it has already been treated with admirable humour when propounded by another of his name and of his lineage. We do not think that, with all his matchless ingenuity, Mr. Darwin has found any instance which so well illustrates his own theory of the improved descendant under the elevating influences of natural selection exterminating the progenitor whose specialities he has exaggerated as he himself affords us in this work. For if we go back two generations we find the ingenious grandsire of the author of the _Origin of Species_ speculating on the same subject, and almost in the same manner with his more daring descendant.

* * * * *

Our readers will not have failed to notice that we have objected to the views with which we have been dealing solely on scientific grounds. We have done so from our fixed conviction that it is thus that the truth or falsehood of such arguments should be tried. We have no sympathy with those who object to any facts or alleged facts in nature, or to any inference logically deduced from them, because they believe them to contradict what it appears to them is taught by Revelation. We think that all such objections savour of a timidity which is really inconsistent with a firm and well-instructed faith:--

"Let us for a moment," profoundly remarks Professor Sedgwick, "suppose
that there are some religious difficulties in the conclusions of
geology. How, then, are we to solve them? Not by making a world after
a pattern of our own--not by shifting and shuffling the solid strata
of the earth, and then dealing them out in such a way as to play the
game of an ignorant or dishonest hypothesis--not by shutting our eyes
to facts, or denying the evidence of our senses--but by patient
investigation, carried on in the sincere love of truth, and by
learning to reject every consequence not warranted by physical
evidence."[1]

He who is as sure as he is of his own existence that the God of Truth is at once the God of Nature and the God of Revelation, cannot believe it to be possible that His voice in either, rightly understood, can differ, or deceive His creatures. To oppose facts in the natural world because they seem to oppose Revelation, or to humour them so as to compel them to speak its voice, is, he knows, but another form of the ever-ready feebleminded dishonesty of lying for God, and trying by fraud or falsehood to do the work of the God of truth. It is with another and a nobler spirit that the true believer walks amongst the works of nature. The words graven on the everlasting rocks are the words of God, and they are graven by His hand. No more can they contradict His Word written in His book, than could the words of the old covenant graven by His hand on the stony tables contradict the writings of His hand in the volume of the new dispensation. There may be to man difficulty in reconciling all the utterances of the two voices. But what of that? He has learned already that here he knows only in part, and that the day of reconciling all apparent contradictions between what must agree is nigh at hand. He rests his mind in perfect quietness on this assurance, and rejoices in the gift of light without a misgiving as to what it may discover:--

"A man of deep thought and great practical wisdom," says Sedgwick,[2]
"one whose piety and benevolence have for many years been shining
before the world, and of whose sincerity no scoffer (of whatever
school) will dare to start a doubt, recorded his opinion in the great
assembly of the men of science who during the past year were gathered
from every corner of the Empire within the walls of this University,
'that Christianity had everything to hope and nothing to fear from the
advancement of philosophy.'"[3]

[1] "A Discourse on the Studies of the University," p. 149. [2] Ibid., p. 153. [3] Speech of Dr. Chalmers at the Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, June, 1833.

This is as truly the spirit of Christianity as it is that of philosophy. Few things have more deeply injured the cause of religion than the busy fussy energy with which men, narrow and feeble alike in faith and in science, have bustled forth to reconcile all new discoveries in physics with the word of inspiration. For it continually happens that some larger collection of facts, or some wider view of the phenomena of nature, alter the whole philosophic scheme; whilst Revelation has been committed to declare an absolute agreement with what turns out after all to have been a misconception or an error. We cannot, therefore, consent to test the truth of natural science by the Word of Revelation. But this does not make it the less important to point out on scientific grounds scientific errors, when those errors tend to limit God's glory in creation, or to gainsay the revealed relations of that creation to Himself. To both these classes of error, though, we doubt not, quite unintentionally on his part, we think that Mr. Darwin's speculations directly tend.

Mr. Darwin writes as a Christian, and we doubt not that he is one. We do not for a moment believe him to be one of those who retain in some corner of their hearts a secret unbelief which they dare not vent; and we therefore pray him to consider well the grounds on which we brand his speculations with the charge of such a tendency. First, then, he not obscurely declares that he applies his scheme of the action of the principle of natural selection to MAN himself, as well as to the animals around him. Now, we must say at once, and openly, that such a notion is absolutely incompatible not only with single expressions in the word of God on that subject of natural science with which it is not immediately concerned, but, which in our judgment is of far more importance, with the whole representation of that moral and spiritual condition of man which is its proper subject-matter. Man's derived supremacy over the earth; man's power of articulate speech; man's gift of reason; man's free-will and responsibility; man's fall and man's redemption; the incarnation of the Eternal Son; the indwelling of the Eternal Spirit,-- all are equally and utterly irreconcilable with the degrading notion of the brute origin of him who was created in the image of God, and redeemed by the Eternal Son assuming to himself his nature. Equally inconsistent, too, not with any passing expressions, but with the whole scheme of God's dealings with man as recorded in His word, is Mr. Darwin's daring notion of man's further development into some unknown extent of powers, and shape, and size, through natural selection acting through that long vista of ages which he casts mistily over the earth upon the most favoured individuals of his species. We care not in these pages to push the argument further. We have done enough for our purpose in thus succinctly intimating its course. If any of our readers doubt what must be the result of such speculations carried to their logical and legitimate conclusion, let them turn to the pages of _Oken_, and see for themselves the end of that path the opening of which is decked out in these pages with the bright hues and seemingly innocent deductions of the transmutation-theory.

Nor can we doubt, secondly, that this view, which thus contradicts the revealed relation of creation to its Creator, is equally inconsistent with the fullness of His glory. It is, in truth, an ingenious theory for diffusing throughout creation the working and so the personality of the Creator. And thus, however unconsciously to him who holds them, such views really tend inevitably to banish from the mind most of the peculiar attributes of the Almighty.

How, asks Mr. Darwin, can we possibly account for the manifest plan, order, and arrangement which pervade creation, except we allow to it this self-developing power through modified descent?

As Milne-Edwards has well expressed it, Nature is prodigal in variety,
but niggard in innovation. Why, on the theory of creation, should this
be so? Why should all the parts and organs of many independent beings,
each supposed to have been separately created for its proper place in
nature, be so commonly linked together by graduated steps? Why should
not Nature have taken a leap from structure to structure?--p. 194.

And again:--

It is a truly wonderful fact--the wonder of which we are apt to
overlook from familiarity--that all animals and plants throughout all
time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to
group, in the manner which we everywhere behold, namely, varieties of
the same species most closely related together, species of the same
genus less closely and unequally related together, forming sections
and sub-genera, species of distinct genera much less closely related,
and genera related in different degrees, forming sub-families,
families, orders, sub-classes, and classes.--pp. 128-9.

How can we account for all this? By the simplest and yet the most comprehensive answer. By declaring the stupendous fact that all creation is the transcript in matter of ideas eternally existing in the mind of the Most High--that order in the utmost perfectness of its relation pervades His works, because it exists as in its centre and highest fountain-head in Him the Lord of all. Here is the true account of the fact which has so utterly misled shallow observers, that Man himself, the Prince and Head of this creation, passes in the earlier stages of his being through phases of existence closely analogous, so far as his earthly tabernacle is concerned, to those in which the lower animals ever remain. At that point of being the development of the protozoa is arrested. Through it the embryo of their chief passes to the perfection of his earthly frame. But the types of those lower forms of being must be found in the animals which never advance beyond them--not in man for whom they are but the foundation for an after-development; whilst he too, Creation's crown and perfection, thus bears witness in his own frame to the law of order which pervades the universe.

In like manner could we answer every other question as to which Mr. Darwin thinks all oracles are dumb unless they speak his speculation. He is, for instance, more than once troubled by what he considers imperfections in Nature's work. "If," he says, "our reason leads us to admire with enthusiasm a multitude of inimitable contrivances in Nature, this same reason tells us that some other contrivances are less perfect."

Nor ought we to marvel if all the contrivances in nature be not, as
far as we can judge, absolutely perfect; and if some of them be
abhorrent to our idea of fitness. We need not marvel at the sting of
the bee causing the bee's own death; at drones being produced in such
vast numbers for one single act, and with the great majority
slaughtered by their sterile sisters; at the astonishing waste of
pollen by our fir-trees; at the instinctive hatred of the queen-bee
for her own fertile daughters; at ichneumonidae feeding within the
live bodies of caterpillars; and at other such cases. The wonder
indeed is, on the theory of natural selection, that more cases of the
want of absolute perfection have not been observed.--p. 472.

We think that the real temper of this whole speculation as to nature itself may be read in these few lines. It is a dishonouring view of nature.

That reverence for the work of God's hands with which a true belief in the All-wise Worker fills the believer's heart is at the root of all great physical discovery; it is the basis of philosophy. He who would see the venerable features of Nature must not seek with the rudeness of a licensed roysterer violently to unmask her countenance; but must wait as a learner for her willing unveiling. There was more of the true temper of philosophy in the poetic fiction of the Pan-ic shriek, than in the atheistic speculations of Lucretius. But this temper must beset those who do in effect banish God from nature. And so Mr. Darwin not only finds in it these bungling contrivances which his own greater skill could amend, but he stands aghast before its mightier phenomena. The presence of death and famine seems to him inconceivable on the ordinary idea of creation; and he looks almost aghast at them until reconciled to their presence by his own theory that "a ratio of increase so high as to lead to a struggle for life, and as a consequence to natural selection entailing divergence of character and the extinction of less improved forms, is decidedly followed by the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals" (p. 490). But we can give him a simpler solution still for the presence of these strange forms of imperfection and suffering amongst the works of God.

We can tell him of the strong shudder which ran through all this world when its head and ruler fell. When he asks concerning the infinite variety of these multiplied works which are set in such an orderly unity, and run up into man as their reasonable head, we can tell him of the exuberance of God's goodness and remind him of the deep philosophy which lies in those simple words--"All thy works praise Thee, O God, and thy saints give thanks unto Thee." For it is one office of redeemed man to collect the inarticulate praises of the material creation, and pay them with conscious homage into the treasury of the supreme Lord.

* * * * *

It is by putting restraint upon fancy that science is made the true trainer of our intellect:--

"A study of the Newtonian philosophy," says Sedgwick, "as affecting
our moral powers and capacities, does not terminate in mere negations.
It teaches us to see the finger of God in all things animate and
inaminate [Transcriber's note: sic], and gives us an exalted
conception of His attributes, placing before us the clearest proof of
their reality; and so prepares, or ought to prepare, the mind for the
reception of that higher illumination which brings the rebellious
faculties into obedience to the Divine will."--_Studies of the
University_, p. 14.

It is by our deep conviction of the truth and importance of this view for the scientific mind of England that we have been led to treat at so much length Mr. Darwin's speculation. The contrast between the sober, patient, philosophical courage of our home philosophy, and the writings of Lamarck and his followers and predecessors, of MM. Demaillet, Bory de Saint Vincent, Virey, and Oken,[1] is indeed most wonderful; and it is greatly owing to the noble tone which has been given by those great men whose words we have quoted to the school of British science. That Mr. Darwin should have wandered from this broad highway of nature's works into the jungle of fanciful assumption is no small evil. We trust that he is mistaken in believing that he may count Sir C. Lyell as one of his converts. We know indeed the strength of the temptations which he can bring to bear upon his geological brother. The Lyellian hypothesis, itself not free from some of Mr. Darwin's faults, stands eminently in need for its own support of some such new scheme of physical life as that propounded here. Yet no man has been more distinct and more logical in the denial of the transmutation of species than Sir C. Lyell, and that not in the infancy of his scientific life, but in its full vigour and maturity.

[1] It may be worth while to exhibit to our readers a few of Dr. Oken's
postulates or arguments as specimens of his views:--
I wrote the first edition of 1810 in a kind of inspiration.
4. Spirit is the motion of mathematical ideas.
10. Physio-philosphy [Transcriber's note: sic] has to ... pourtray
the first period of the world's development from nothing; how the
elements and heavenly bodies originated; in what method by
self-evolution into higher and manifold forms they separated into
minerals, became finally organic, and in man attained
self-consciousness.
42. The mathematical monad is eternal.
43. The eternal is one and the same with the zero of mathematics.

Sir C. Lyell devotes the 33rd to the 36th chapter of his "Principles of Geology" to an examination of this question. He gives a clear account of the mode in which Lamarck supported his belief of the transmutation of species; he interrupts the author's argument to observe that "no positive fact is cited to exemplify the substitution of some _entirely new_ sense, faculty, or organ--because no examples were to be found"; and remarks that when Lamarck talks of "the effects of internal sentiment," etc., as causes whereby animals and plants may acquire _new organs_, he substitutes names for things, and with a disregard to the strict rules of induction, resorts to fictions.

He shows the fallacy of Lamarck's reasoning, and by anticipation confutes the whole theory of Mr. Darwin, when gathering clearly up into a few heads the recapitulation of the whole argument in favour of the reality of species in nature. He urges:--[Transcriber's note: numbering in original]

1. That there is a capacity in all species to accommodate themselves to a certain extent to a change of external circumstances.

4. The entire variation from the original type ... may usually be effected in a brief period of time, after which no further deviation can be obtained.

5. The intermixing distinct species is guarded against by the sterility of the mule offspring.

6. It appears that species have a real existence in nature, and that each was endowed at the time of its creation with the attributes and organization by which it is now distinguished.[1]

[1] "Principles of Geology," edit. 1853.

We trust that Sir C. Lyell abides still by these truly philosophical principles; and that with his help and with that of his brethren this flimsy speculation may be as completely put down as was what in spite of all denials we must venture to call its twin though less-instructed brother, the "Vestiges of Creation." In so doing they will assuredly provide for the strength and continually growing progress of British science.

Indeed, not only do all laws for the study of nature vanish when the great principle of order pervading and regulating all her processes is given up, but all that imparts the deepest interest in the investigation of her wonders will have departed too. Under such influences a man soon goes back to the marvelling stare of childhood at the centaurs and hippogriffs of fancy, or if he is of a philosophic turn, he comes like Oken to write a scheme of creation under "a sort of inspiration"; but it is the frenzied inspiration of the inhaler of mephitic gas. The whole world of nature is laid for such a man under a fantastic law of glamour, and he becomes capable of believing anything: to him it is just as probable that Dr. Livingstone will find the next tribe of negroes with their heads growing under their arms as fixed on the summit of the cervical vertebrae; and he is able, with a continually growing neglect of all the facts around him, with equal confidence and equal delusion, to look back to any past and to look on to any future.

ON CARDINAL NEWMAN

[From _The Quarterly Review_, October, 1864]

_Apologia pro Vita suâ_. By JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, D.D.

Few books have been published of late years which combine more distinct elements of interest than the "Apologia" of Dr. Newman. As an autobiography, in the highest sense of that word, as the portraiture, that is, and record of what the man was, irrespective of those common accidents of humanity which too often load the biographer's pages, it is eminently dramatic. To produce such a portrait was the end which the writer proposed to himself, and which he has achieved with a rare fidelity and completeness. Hardly do the "Confessions of St. Augustine" more vividly reproduce the old African Bishop before successive generations in all the greatness and struggles of his life than do these pages the very inner being of this remarkable man--"the living intelligence," as he describes it, "by which I write, and argue, and act" (p. 47). No wonder that when he first fully recognised what he had to do, he

shrank from both the task and the exposure which it would entail. I
must, I said, give the true key to my whole life; I must show what I
am, that it may be seen what I am not, and that the phantom may be
extinguished which gibbers instead of me. I wish to be known as a
living man, and not as a scarecrow which is dressed up in my
clothes.... I will draw out, as far as may be, the history of my mind;
I will state the point at which I began, in what external suggestion
or accident each opinion had its rise, how far and how they were
developed from within, how they grew, were modified, were combined,
were in collision with each other, and were changed. Again, how I
conducted myself towards them; and how, and how far, and for how long
a time, I thought I could hold them consistently with the
ecclesiastical engagements which I had made, and with the position
which I filled.... It is not at all pleasant for me to be egotistical
nor to be criticised for being so. It is not pleasant to reveal to
high and low, young and old, what has gone on within me from my early
years. It is not pleasant to be giving to every shallow or flippant
disputant the advantage over me of knowing my most private thoughts, I
might even say the intercourse between myself and my Maker.
--pp. 47-51.

Here is the task he set himself, and the task which he has performed. There is in these pages an absolute revealing of the hidden life in its acting, and its processes, which at times is almost startling, which is everywhere of the deepest interest. For the life thus revealed is well worthy of the pen by which it is portrayed. Of all those who, in these later years, have quitted the Church of England for the Roman communion --esteemed, honoured, and beloved, as were many of them--no one, save Dr. Newman, appears to us to possess the rare gift of undoubted genius.

That life, moreover, which anywhere and at any time must have marked its own character on his fellows, was cast precisely at the time and place most favourable for stamping upon others the impress of itself. The plate was ready to receive and to retain every line of the image which was thrown so vividly upon it. The history, therefore, of this life in its shifting scenes of thought, feeling, and purpose, becomes in fact the history of a school, a party, and a sect. From its effect on us, who, from without, judge of it with critical calmness, we can form some idea of what must be its power on those who were within the charmed ring; who were actually under the wand of the enchanter, for whom there was music in that voice, fascination in that eye, and habitual command in that spare but lustrous countenance; and who can trace again in this retrospect the colours and shadows which in those years which fixed their destiny, passed, though in less distinct hues, into their own lives, and made them what they are.

Again, in another aspect, the "Apologia" will have a special interest for most of our readers. Almost every page of it will throw some light upon the great controversy which has been maintained for these three hundred years, and which now spreads itself throughout the world, between the Anglican Church and her oldest and greatest antagonist, the Papal See....

The first names to which it introduces us indicate the widely-differing influences under which was formed that party within our Church which has acted so powerfully and in such various directions upon its life and teaching. They are those of Mr.--afterwards Archbishop--Whately and Dr. Hawkins, afterwards and still the Provost of Oriel College. To intercourse with both of whom Dr. Newman attributes great results in the formation of his own character: the first emphatically opening his mind and teaching him to use his reason, whilst in religious opinion he taught him the existence of a church, and fixed in him Anti-Erastian views of Church polity; the second being a man of most exact mind, who through a course of severe snubbing taught him to weigh his words and be cautious in his statements.

To an almost unknown degree, Oriel had at that time monopolised the active speculative intellect of Oxford. Her fellowships being open, whilst those of other Colleges were closed, drew to her the ablest men of the University: whilst the nature of the examination for her fellowships, which took no note of ordinary University honours, and stretched boldly out beyond inquiries as to classical and mathematical attainments in everything which could test the dormant powers of the candidates, had already impressed upon the Society a distinctive character of intellectual excellence. The late Lord Grenville used at this time to term an Oriel Fellowship the Blue Ribbon of the University; and, undoubtedly, the results of those examinations have been marvellously confirmed by the event, if we think to what an extent the mind, and opinions, and thoughts of England have been moulded by them who form the list of those "Orielenses," of whom it was said in an academic squib of the time, with some truth, flavoured perhaps with a spice of envy, that they were wont to enter the academic circle "under a flourish of trumpets." Such a "flourish" certainly has often preceded the entry of far lesser men than E. Coplestone, E. Hawkins, J. Davison, J. Keble, R. Whately, T. Arnold, E.B. Pusey, J. H. Newman, H. Froude, R. J. Wilberforce, S. Wilberforce, G. A. Denison, &c., &c.

Into a Society leavened with such intellectual influences as these, Dr. Newman, soon after taking his degree, was ushered. It could at this time have borne no distinctively devout character in its religious aspect. Rather must it have been marked by the opposite of this. Whately, whose powerful and somewhat rude intellect must almost have overawed the common room when the might of Davison had been taken from it, was, with all his varied excellences, never by any means an eminently devout, scarcely perhaps an orthodox man. All his earlier writings bristle with paradoxes, which affronted the instincts of simpler and more believing minds. Whately, accordingly, appears in these pages as "generous and warmhearted--particularly loyal to his friends" (p. 68); as teaching his pupil "to see with my own eyes and to walk with my own feet"; yet as exercising an influence over him (p. 69) which, "in a higher respect than intellectual advance, had not been satisfactory," under which he "was beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral, was drifting in the direction of liberalism"; a "dream" out of which he was "rudely awakened at the end of 1827, by two great blows--illness and bereavement" (p. 72).

Though this change in his views is traced by Dr. Newman to the action of these strictly personal causes of illness and bereavement, yet other influences, we suspect, were working strongly in the same direction. It is plain that, so far as regards early permanent impression on the character of his religious opinions, the influence of Whately was calculated rather to stir up reaction than to win a convert. "Whately's mind," he says himself (p. 68), "was too different from mine for us to remain long on one line." The course of events round him impelled him in the same direction, and furnished him with new comrades, on whom henceforth he was to act, and who were to react most powerfully on him. The torrent of reform was beginning its full rush through the land; and its turbulent waters threatened not only to drown the old political landmarks of the Constitution, but also to sweep away the Church of the nation. Abhorrence of these so-called liberal opinions was the electric current which bound together the several minds which speedily appeared as instituting and directing the great Oxford Church movement. Not that it was in any sense the offspring of the old cry of "the Church in danger." The meaning of that alarm was the apprehension of danger to the emoluments or position of the Church as the established religion in the land. From the very first the Oxford movement pointed more to the maintenance of the Church as a spiritual society, divinely incorporated to teach certain doctrines, and do certain acts which none other could do, than to the preservation of those temporal advantages which had been conferred by the State. From the first there was a tendency to undervalue these external aids, which made the movement an object of suspicion to thorough Church-and-State men. This suspicion was repaid by the members of the new school with a return of contempt. They believed that in struggling for the temporal advantages of the Establishment, men had forgotten the essential characteristics of the Church, and had been led to barter their divine birthright for the mess of pottage which Acts of Parliament secured them. Thus we find Dr. Newman remembering his early Oxford dislike of "the bigoted two-bottle orthodox." He records (p. 73) the characteristic mode in which on the appearance of the first symptoms of his "leaving the clientela" of Dr. Whately he was punished by that rough humorist. "Whately was considerably annoyed at me; and he took a humorous revenge, of which he had given me due notice beforehand.... He asked a set of the least intellectual men in Oxford to dinner, and men most fond of port; he made me one of the party; placed me between Provost this and Principal that, and then asked me if I was proud of my friends" (p. 73). It is easy to conceive how he liked them. He had, indeed, though formerly a supporter of Catholic Emancipation, "acted with them in opposing Mr. Peel's re-election in 1829, on 'simple academical grounds,' because he thought that a great University ought not to be bullied even by a great Duke of Wellington" (p. 172); but he soon parted with his friends of "two-bottle orthodoxy," and joined the gathering knot of men of an utterly different temper, who "disliked the Duke's change of policy as dictated by liberalism" (p. 72).

This whole company shared the feelings which even yet, after so many years and in such altered circumstances, break forth from Dr. Newman like the rumblings and smoke of a long extinct volcano, in such utterances as this: "The new Bill for the suppression of the Irish Sees was in prospect, and had filled my mind. I had fierce thoughts against the Liberals. It was the success of the Liberal cause which fretted me inwardly. I became fierce against its instruments and its manifestations. A French vessel was at Algiers; I would not even look at the tricolor" (97). This was the temper of the whole band. Most of these men appear in Dr. Newman's pages; and from their common earnestness and various endowments a mighty band they were.

* * * * *

Here then was the band which have accomplished so much; which have failed in so much; which have added a new party-name to our vocabulary; which have furnished materials for every scribbling or declaiming political Protestant, from the writer of the Durham Letter down to Mr. Whalley and Mr. Harper; which aided so greatly in reawakening the dormant energies of the English Church; which carried over to the ranks of her most deadly opponent some of the ablest and most devoted of her sons. The language of these pages has never varied concerning this movement. We have always admitted its many excellences--we have always lamented its evils. As long ago as in 1839, whilst we protested openly and fully against what we termed at the time the "strange and lamentable" publication of Mr. Froude's "Remains,"[1] we declared our hope that "the publication of the Oxford Tracts was a very seasonable and valuable contribution to the cause both of the Church and the State." And in 1846, even after so many of our hopes had faded away, we yet spoke in the same tone of "this religious movement in our Church," as one "from which, however clouded be the present aspect, we doubt not that great blessings have resulted and will result, unless we forfeit them by neglect or wilful abuse."[2]

[1] "Quarterly Review," vol. lxiii, p. 551. [2] Ibid., vol. lxxviii, p. 24.

The history of the progress of the movement lies scattered through these pages. All that we can collect concerning its first intention confirms absolutely Mr. Perceval's Statements, 1843, that it was begun for two leading objects: "first, the firm and practical maintenance of the doctrine of the apostolical succession.... secondly, the preservation in its integrity of the Christian doctrine in our Prayerbooks."[1] Its unity of action was shaken by the first entrance of doubts into its leader's mind. His retirement from it tended directly to break it up as an actual party. But it would be a monstrous error to suppose that the influence of this movement was extinguished when its conductors were dispersed as a party. So far from it, the system of the Church of England took in all the more freely the elements of truth which it had all along been diffusing, because they were no longer scattered abroad by the direct action of an organised party under ostensible chiefs. Where, we may ask, is not at this moment the effect of that movement perfectly appreciable within our body? Look at the new-built and restored churches of the land; look at the multiplication of schools; the greater exactness of ritual observance; the higher standard of clerical life, service, and devotion; the more frequent celebrations; the cathedrals open; the loving sisterhoods labouring, under episcopal sanction, with the meek, active saintliness of the Church's purest time; look--above all, perhaps--at the raised tone of devotion and doctrine amongst us, and see in all these that the movement did not die, but rather flourished with a new vigour when the party of the movement was so greatly broken up. It is surely one of the strangest objections which can be urged against a living spiritual body, that the loss of many of its foremost sons still left its vital strength unimpaired. Yet this was Dr. Newman's objection, and his witness, fourteen years ago, when he complained of the Church of England, that though it had given "a hundred educated men to the Catholic Church, yet the huge creature from which they went forth showed no consciousness of its loss, but shook itself, and went about its work as of old time."[2]

[1] "Collection of Papers connected with the Theological Movement of 1833." By the Hon. and Rev. A.P. Perceval. 1843. Second Edition. [2] "Lectures on Anglican Difficulties," p. 9.

As the unity of the party was broken up, the fire which had burned hitherto in but a single beacon was scattered upon a thousand hills. Nevertheless, the first breaking up of the party was eminently disheartening to its living members. But it was not by external violence that it was broken, but by the development within itself of a distinctive Romeward bias. Dr. Newman lays his hand upon a particular epoch in its progress, at which, he says, it was crossed by a new set of men, who imparted to it that leaning to Romanism which ever after perceptibly beset it. "A new school of thought was rising, as is usual in such movements, and was sweeping the original party of the movement aside, and was taking its place" (p. 277). This is a curious instance of self-delusion. He was, as we maintain, throughout, the Romanising element in the whole movement. But for him it might have continued, as its other great chiefs still continue, the ornament and strength of the English Church. These younger men, to whom he attributes the change, were, in fact, the minds whom he had consciously or unconsciously fashioned and biassed. Some of them, as is ever the case, had outrun their leader. Some of them were now, in their sensitive spiritual organism, catching the varying outline of the great leader whom they almost worshipped, and beginning at once to give back his own altering image. Instead of seeing in their changing minds this reflection of himself, he dwelt upon it as an original element, and read in its presence an indication of its being the will of God that the stream should turn its flow towards the gulf to which he himself had unawares, it may be, directed its waters. Those who remember how at this time he was followed will know how easily such a result might follow his own incipient change. Those who can still remember how many often involuntarily caught his peculiar intonation--so distinctively singular, and therefore so attractive in himself and so repulsive in his copyists --will understand how the altering fashion of the leader's thoughts was appropriated with the same unconscious fidelity.

One other cause acted powerfully on him and on them to give this bias to the movement, and that was the bitterness and invectives of the Liberal party. Dr. Newman repeatedly reminds us that it was the Liberals who drove him from Oxford. The four tutors--the after course of one of whom, at least, was destined to display so remarkable a Nemesis--and the pack who followed them turned by their ceaseless baying the noble hart who led the rest towards this evil covert. He and they heard incessantly that they were Papists in disguise: men dishonoured by professing one thing and holding another; until they began to doubt their own fidelity, and in that doubt was death. Nor was this all. The Liberals ever (as is their wont), most illiberal to those who differ from them, began to use direct academic persecution; until, in self-distrust and very weariness, the great soul began to abandon the warfare it had waged inwardly against its own inclinations and the fascinations of its enemy, and to yield the first defences to the foe. It will remain written, as Dr. Newman's deliberate judgment, that it was the Liberals who forced him from Oxford. How far, if he had not taken that step, he might have again shaken off the errors which were growing on him--how far therefore in driving him from Oxford they drove him finally to Rome--man can never know.