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case; for He has, with respect to His creatures, one main feeling and source of action, namely, jealousy of them, lest they should perchance attribute to themselves something of what is His alone, and thus encroach on his all-engrossing kingdom. Hence He is ever more prone to punish than to reward, to inflict pain than to bestow pleasure, to ruin than to build. It is His singular satisfaction to let created beings continually feel that they are nothing else than His slaves, His tools, and contemptible tools also, that thus they may the better acknowledge His superiority, and know His power to be above their power, His cunning above their cunning, His will above their will, His pride above their pride; or, rather, that there is no power, cunning, will, or pride, save His own. But He Himself, sterile in His inaccessible height, neither loving nor enjoying aught save His own and self-measured decree, without son, companion, or counsellor, is no less barren for Himself than for His creatures, and His own barrenness and lone egoism in Himself is the cause and rule of His indifferent and unregarding despotism around. The first note is the key of the whole tune, and the primal idea of God runs through and modifies the whole system and creed that centres in Him.

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"Islam is, in its essence, stationary, and was framed thus to remain. Sterile like its God, lifeless like its first Principle and supreme Original in all that constitutes true life, for life is love, participation, and progress, and of these the Coranic Deity has none, it justly repudiates all change, all advance, all development. To borrow the forcible words of Lord Houghton, the 'written book' is there the dead man's hand,' stiff and motionless: whatever savors of vitality is by that alone convicted of heresy and defection. . . . Islam is lifeless, and because lifeless cannot grow, cannot advance, cannot change, and was never intended so to do; stand-still is its motto and its most essential condition; and therefore the son of 'Abd-el-Wahhāb, in doing his best to bring it back to its primal simplicity, and making its goal of its starting-point, was so far in the right, and showed himself well acquainted with the nature and first principles of his religion."

For the story of the religious revolution which followed, and for many details illustrating Arabian history and life, which we had marked for extraction, we must refer the reader to the volumes from which we have already so freely quoted, and which we regard as among the most curious and important of recent contributions to our knowledge of the outlying regions of religious belief and practice.

ART. III.

7.41. Chadwick.

-DR. NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA.

Apologia pro Vitâ suâ. Being a Reply to a Pamphlet entitled, "What, then, does Dr. Newman mean?" By JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, D.D. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

1865.

IF, in re-publishing this book, the Messrs. Appleton had ventured to leave out that part of it which is filled with the details of Dr. Newman's controversy with Mr. Kingsley, perhaps the author would have been displeased, but his book would have been vastly bettered by the deed. Not that we blame the Doctor for his evident intention not to leave one stone of Mr. Kingsley's argument upon another; not that we can help admiring him for doing what he does in such a thorough-going and remorseless way; not but that the details of this controversy give us two very interesting chapters and a very sharp appendix, although the interest is of such a sort as generally attaches to a foot-race or regatta, and the sharpness smacks too strongly of contempt for us to greatly relish it; but because we think it quite too bad that any thing so reverent and tender and so beautiful as is this Apology should be introduced and ended with matter, in the main but little relevant, and surely not harmonious. We say, but little relevant, because, if this book is to be read and re-read, to live and be admired, it will not be for any controversial matter it contains, but for the singularly bold and graphic picture which it gives us of a life in almost every way remarkable; and those parts of it which deal with Mr. Kingsley, and his charges against Dr. Newman and his Church, contribute nothing toward the fuller understanding of that life which is not revealed in the Apology itself in a far better way. Certainly, we shall not reverence Dr. Newman any more because they have been written, although we may admire him for his legal skill; because, if they prove any thing but this, it is that Dr. Newman can be very angry when sufficiently provoked. But of this too we have an inkling in the body of the work. It

may be that the Doctor's vigorous onslaught upon Kingsley will delight a larger audience than the almost rhythmic march of his own story; but it will be an audience of a very different sort, and, when it is all asleep or dead, as it will be very soon, the generation of men who would like to read this history of a great man's theological experience should not be obliged to enter it through such an endless propylæum, or leave it through such heaps of lumber and débris.

We must confess that we are glad, that Mr. Kingsley's charges, at least so much of them as was entirely personal, have been successfully rebutted. We hope that we have listened candidly to the evidence upon both sides. At first thought, it would seem a great deal harder to do so now than it would have been five or six years ago; for then we loved Charles Kingsley, and thanked God every day for his "Hypatia" and "Saints' Tragedy." How generously he clasped hands with the Reformers of the time in "Alton Locke"! and, in "Two Years ago," how good it was for those of us who fought with our pet demon on this side of the world to hear his "Sursum Corda"! "Yea, to the Lord we have lifted them up," and he has filled them full of wonder and thanksgiving. But Kingsley is not with us any more; and it would be only natural if we heard of his discomfiture more calmly now than if it had been then. But, at second thought, is it not plain that we can judge between him and his antagonist more fairly now than ever, because our wholesome dislike of him will scarcely more than balance our natural distrust of any thing that comes from Dr. Newman's side of the house? Between a Roman Catholic and an English rebel-sympathizer an American Protestant ought to judge impartially; and, when we say that we are glad that Mr. Kingsley's charges did not take effect, it is not because Mr. Kingsley made them, but because we should hate to believe that Dr. Newman is so radically dishonest as in his dealings with America his opponent has proved himself to be.

But, when Dr. Newman agrees to be responsible for the whole method of that church into which he has at length drifted, he assumes a burden much too heavy even for him to

bear; and, though we cannot follow Mr. Kingsley in the form, and perhaps not in the spirit, of his first attack on Catholic veracity, it must be granted that his innuendoes pointed to a fact which Dr. Newman's logic cannot dissipate. But for the Society of Jesus, Roman-Catholicism would have been dead and buried more than a century ago. Now, it "may still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's." So Lord Macaulay prophesied. And, should it happen so, it will be through the agency of that society which grew out of the fiery heart of Loyola. Jesuitism has been the soul of the Church, and the soul of Jesuitism has been "the Economy."* Dr. Newman may prove that it is possible for his Saint Alphonzo Liguori to write a book of casuistry which even he cannot accept (although, for saying so, he hopes he shall not lose his intercession), and still be very saintly in his private life, always acting from his conscience, and never from his rules; but "corporations have no souls," and so it does not follow that the theory of Jesuitism did not affect its practice. Individuals may put to shame the moral formulas which they accept; but a church is never better than its creed, a corporation never better than the formula which it accepts. Jesuitism accepted "the Economy" as its guide, substituting it for the active conscience of the individual man. And though it would be mad and foolish not to grant that there have been and are disciples of this school than whose fragrant piety the world knows nothing sweeter, yet to say "Jesuitism" has always been to say chicanery, equivocation, sophistry. This was the substance of Mr. Kingsley's charge; for the sins of Jesuitism are the sins of the Roman Church. This Dr. Newman has not answered.

* Dr. Newman uses this word to express the casuistic principle in operation. It does not consist in "doing evil that good may come." Oh, no! but in doing just the next thing to it, in stretching the truth until the difference between it and a lie is not appreciable. See the Doctor's instances. No wonder that he thinks the method dangerous.

He has demolished the form of Mr. Kingsley's accusation; but its essence still remains.

Beginning at part third, we have a history of Dr. Newman's religious opinions from his earliest years up to the time when he found completest rest and satisfaction in the Roman Church. And there are several points of view from which it is intensely interesting. Regarded merely as a work of art, it is as beautiful as the immortal Meditations and Confessions, as Antonine's and Augustine's. We do not know of any book written with more grace and fluency, any that contains touches more rarely delicate or passages of more incisive wit and power. One does not care to rise from pages such as this, where, speaking of the dangers of the Church in 1831, he says:

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"With the Establishment thus divided and threatened, thus ignorant of its true strength, I compared that fresh vigorous power of which I was reading in the first centuries. In her triumphant zeal on behalf of that Primeval Mystery to which I had had so great a devotion from my youth, I recognized the movement of my Spiritual Mother. Incessu patuit Dea.' The self-conquest of her ascetics, the patience of her martyrs, the irresistible determination of her bishops, the joyous swing of her advance, both exalted and abashed me. I said to myself, Look on this picture, and on that;' I felt affection for my own Church, but not tenderness; I felt dismay at her prospects, anger and scorn at her do-nothing perplexity. I thought that, if Liberalism once got a footing within her, it was sure of the victory in the event. I saw that Reformation principles were powerless to rescue her. As to leaving her, the thought never crossed my imagination; still I ever kept before me that there was something greater than the Established Church, and that that was the Church Catholic and Apostolic, set up from the beginning, of which she was but the local presence and organ. She was nothing unless she was this. She must be dealt with strongly, or she would be lost. There was need of a second Reformation."

p. 80.

But, for all the beauty of the forms in which this writer casts his feelings and his thoughts, it must not be supposed that he has given to us a great or universal book. It is a most valuable and entertaining contribution to the history of

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