This will be our last treatment of St John Henry Newman’s novel Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert. Charles Reding comes to a critical question: is he obliged to treat a church he is in, the Church of England, as if it were infallible? It makes no such claim for itself and even criticises the Catholic Church for making it. Carlton realises there is a problem and says no, but one must, from a sense of duty act as if it were infallible. Reding then makes the obvious point: “If I am to make a Church infallible,” he said, “if I must give up private judgment, there is a Church which has a greater claim on us all than the Church of England.”
He means, of course, the Catholic Church. But there is a paradox. If, out of a sense of duty and loyalty to the church one was born in, one must give up private judgement, then in the case of Anglicans and Protestants, one has to give up a basic premise of that church, one of the very points on which they stoutly resisted the Catholic Church. This would involve one in an inevitable self-contradiction. On p.223, St Newman refers to further contradictions between Protestant and official Anglican doctrines which are often glossed over in practice, but these need not detain us here. He makes the significant point:
the Church of Rome is undeniably consistent in her formularies; this is the very charge {224} some of our writers make upon her, that she is so systematic. It may be a hard, iron system, but it is consistent. … When a system is consistent, at least it does not condemn itself. Consistency is not truth, but truth is consistency. Now, I am not a fit judge whether or not a certain system is true, but I may be quite a judge whether it is consistent with itself. When an oracle equivocates, it carries with it its own condemnation.
Saint Newman now uses the form of a novel to introduce pictures which arouse in us a feeling supportive of his intellectual arguments. Charles is on holidays, but he and his friend use the time in quiet and peaceful study. Day after day he has his “quiet routine employments,” all the while, increasing his knowledge and understanding. But the summer starts to fade, “heavy raw fogs” begin to hang about the hills, and storms set in. The fruits now were walnuts and mulberries: the walnut lacking any juice and the mulberry which he describes as “severe, and mouldy withal, as gathered not from the tree, but from the damp earth. And thus that green spot itself weaned them from the love of it.” (228-299)
This is a brilliant passage, an analogy with the illnesses which come upon us in the autumn of our lives. It is well-observed, because mulberries do often grow too high to be picked, and so have to be collected from the ground, bearing a slightly tart taste. The “green spot” is their country retreat. When he returns to Oxford, he finds that it is:
not quite what it had been to him: the freshness of his admiration for it was over; he now saw defects where at first all was excellent and good; the romance of places and persons had passed away. And there were changes too: of his contemporaries some had already taken their degrees and left; others were reading in the country; others had gone off to other Colleges on Fellowships. A host of younger faces had sprung up in hall and chapel, and he hardly knew their names. Rooms which formerly had been his familiar lounge were now tenanted by strangers, who claimed to have that right in them which, to his imagination, could only attach to those who had possessed them when he himself came into residence. The College seemed to have deteriorated; there was a rowing set, which had not been there before, a number of boys, and a large proportion of snobs. (229-230)
Meanwhile, a number of people at Oxford, who are described as “well-meaning men” established a “system of espionage” to identify those who were “inclined” towards Catholicism. St Newman wisely says that they:
did not perceive the danger such a course involved of disposing young men towards Catholicism, by attaching to them the bad report of it, and of forcing them farther by inflicting on them the inconsistencies of their position. Ideas which would have lain dormant or dwindled away in their minds were thus fixed, defined, located within them; and the fear of the world’s censure no longer served to deter, when it had been actually incurred.
I have long felt that suspicion produces the very problems it is intended to avoid, but I have neither heard nor seen such a powerful analysis: suspicion attaches its suspects the bad report which they might otherwise have feared; it forces them to confront the options before them with a closeness which they would not have had they merely been browsing, and the suspected opinions are forced upon their attention with a new firmness. It leaves them nothing to lose, and makes them wonder if the Catholicism they are accused of is not after all, a reasonable position. Sometimes it did scare people off Catholicism, but as he says, it was a “kill-or-cure remedy.” (233) This suspicion led to Charles becoming more serious in his consideration of Catholicism, and to an even more radical criticism of the Anglican ministers he saw around him: “Not that they don’t make it their final object to get to heaven; but their immediate object is to be comfortable, to marry, to have a fair income, station and respectability, a convenient house, a pleasant country, a sociable neighbourhood.” (257)
Later in the novel, Willis, the convert to Catholicism is again present, and the question of faith arises. He states:
I don’t know … what is meant by saying that we ought to have faith, that faith is a grace, that faith is the means of our salvation, if there is nothing to exercise it. Faith goes against sight; well, then, unless there are sights which offend you, there is nothing for it to go against. … supposing your friend, an honourable man, is accused of theft, and appearances are against him, would you at once admit the charge? It would be a fair trial of your faith in him; and if he were able in the event satisfactorily to rebut it, I don’t think he would thank you, should you have waited for his explanation before you took his part, instead of knowing him too well to suspect it. If, then, I come to the Church with faith in her, whatever I see there, even if it surprises me, is but a trial of my faith. (314)
When it is put to him that: “it is quite impossible that the worship paid by Roman Catholics to the Blessed Mary should not interfere with the supreme adoration due to the Creator alone.” Willis replies:
… you are judging à priori; you know nothing of the state of the case from experience, but you say, ‘It must be; it can’t be otherwise’. This is the way a Protestant judges, and comes to one conclusion; a Catholic, who acts, and does not speculate, feels the truth of the contrary.” (315)
This is a good answer, but then St Newman in his fairness gives his friend Bateman, the Anglican, an equally good reply: “Some things … are so like axioms as to supersede trial. On the other hand, familiarity is very likely to hide from people the real evil of certain practices.” Now Willis shows that the same argument can be used against Anglicans, for example, Unitarians say that the doctrine of the Atonement really comes down to a question of vengeance. It is a masterpiece of argument and counter-argument.
However, the truth of Catholicism is more and more steadily borne in on Charles’ mind, and finally there comes the point when he visits Oxford for what may be the last time. He looks at it, so serene in its natural beauty, and splendid in its churches and colleges. By losing it he is indeed losing something. “He could never have another Oxford, he could not have the friends of his boyhood and youth in the choice of his manhood. … All that had passed as a dream, and he was a stranger where he had hoped to have a home.” Not for nothing is the novel called loss and gain. (353-355) He takes a room in an inn, and reads this in the local newspaper:
“DEFECTION FROM THE CHURCH.—We understand that another victim has lately been added to the list of those whom the venom of Tractarian principles has precipitated into the bosom of the Sorceress of Rome. Mr. Reding of St. Saviour’s, the son of a respectable clergyman of the Establishment, deceased, after eating the bread of the Church all his life, has at length avowed himself the subject and slave of an Italian Bishop. Disappointment in the schools is said to have been the determining cause of this infatuated act. (357)
This means that was accused of finally leaving the Church because of an unexpectedly poor result in the exams. This is indicative of the sort of thing which was said of St Newman himself: there is no exaggeration here.
As we near the end of the novel, Charles meets a Catholic priest, who says to him: “A man’s moral self … is concentrated in each moment of his life; it lives in the tips of his fingers, and the spring of his insteps. A very little thing tries what a man is made of.” (379) In other words, our deepest inside nature is expressed in everything about us, even the smallest. This wise priest asks Reding whether a Unitarian, for instance, who rejects or at least passes over much which is in the Bible, really does accept that Book to be the Word of God, as he claims he does? “Certainly not,” said Charles. … Because it is plain,” said Charles, “that his ultimate standard of truth is not the Scripture, but, unconsciously to himself, some view of things in his mind which is to him the measure of Scripture.” (380) And of the Anglican approach to Scripture, Charles, who has not yet converted, says: “we do not profess to have faith in the mere text of Scripture. You know, sir,” he added hesitatingly, “that the Anglican doctrine is to interpret Scripture by the Church; therefore we have faith, like Catholics, not in Scripture simply, but in the whole word committed to the Church, of which Scripture is a part.” (381)
I have already dealt with the finale of the novel, where Charles Reding becomes a Catholic. I have shown that the young Charles Reding, an alter-ego of the young John Henry Newman, had one main goal, to find his true heart’s desire, God, the ground of the ultimate reality. To come to the real necessarily involves awakening to dreams and
coming out of shadows into realities”. For Reding, as for St Newman, his “characteristic, perhaps above anything else, was an habitual sense of the Divine Presence; a sense which, of course, did not insure uninterrupted conformity of thought and deed to itself, but still there it was—the pillar of the cloud before him and guiding him. He felt himself to be God’s creature, and responsible to Him—God’s possession, not his own. (230-231)
I said at the start that St John Henry Newman is a hero of the Church. He was not only one of the best, but also one of the sanest people who has ever lived and left enough evidence for us to judge. I selected three distinguishing aspects of his life and work: first, the unwavering firmness and completeness of his faith in God; second, his almost perfect intellectual judgment; and third, the diligent urgency with which he addressed the needs of the faithful and the Church. Together, these qualities contributed to his manifesting just the type of holiness needed for the place and age in which he lived.
May he remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the reward.