Phases of Faith | Page 5

I need not shrink to name him:--I
mean my elder brother, the Rev. John Henry Newman. As a
warm-hearted and generous brother, who exercised towards me
paternal cares, I esteemed him and felt a deep gratitude; as a man of
various culture, and peculiar genius, I admired and was proud of him;
but my doctrinal religion impeded my loving him as much as he
deserved, and even justified my feeling some distrust of him. He never
showed any strong attraction towards those whom I regarded as
spiritual persons: on the contrary, I thought him stiff and cold towards
them. Moreover, soon after his ordination, he had startled and
distressed me by adopting the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration; and
in rapid succession worked out views which I regarded as full-blown
"Popery." I speak of the years 1823-6: it is strange to think that twenty
years more had to pass before he learnt the place to which his doctrines
belonged.
In the earliest period of my Oxford residence I fell into uneasy collision
with him concerning Episcopal powers. I had on one occasion dropt
something disrespectful against bishops or a bishop,--something which,
if it had been said about a clergyman, would have passed unnoticed:
but my brother checked and reproved me,--as I thought, very
uninstructively--for "wanting reverence towards Bishops." I knew not

then, and I know not now, why Bishops, _as such_, should be more
reverenced than common clergymen; or Clergymen, _as such_, more
than common men. In the World I expected pomp and vain show and
formality and counterfeits: but of the Church, as Christ's own kingdom,
I demanded reality and could not digest legal fictions. I saw round me
what sort of young men were preparing to be clergymen: I knew the
attractions of family "livings" and fellowships, and of a respectable
position and undefinable hopes of preferment. I farther knew, that when
youths had become clergymen through a great variety of mixed motives,
bishops were selected out of these clergy on avowedly political grounds;
it therefore amazed me how a man of good sense should be able to set
up a duty of religious veneration towards bishops. I was willing to
honour a Lord Bishop as a peer of Parliament; but his office was to me
no guarantee of spiritual eminence.--To find my brother thus stop my
mouth, was a puzzle; and impeded all free speech towards him. In fact,
I very soon left off the attempt at intimate religious intercourse with
him, or asking counsel as of one who could sympathize. We talked,
indeed, a great deal on the surface of religious matters; and on some
questions I was overpowered and received a temporary bias from his
superior knowledge; but as time went on, and my own intellect ripened,
I distinctly felt that his arguments were too fine-drawn and subtle, often
elaborately missing the moral points and the main points, to rest on
some ecclesiastical fiction; and his conclusions were to me so
marvellous and painful, that I constantly thought I had mistaken him. In
short, he was my senior by a very few years: nor was there any elder
resident at Oxford, accessible to me, who united all the qualities which
I wanted in an adviser. Nothing was left for me but to cast myself on
Him who is named the Father of Lights, and resolve to follow the light
which He might give, however opposed to my own prejudices, and
however I might be condemned by men. This solemn engagement I
made in early youth, and neither the frowns nor the grief of my
brethren can make me ashamed of it in my manhood.
Among the religious authors whom I read familiarly was the Rev. T.
Scott, of Aston Sandford, a rather dull, very unoriginal, half-educated,
but honest, worthy, sensible, strong-minded man, whose works were
then much in vogue among the Evangelicals. One day my attention was
arrested by a sentence in his defence of the doctrine of the Trinity. He

complained that Anti-Trinitarians unjustly charged Trinitarians with
self-contradiction. "If indeed we said" (argued he) "that God is three in
the same sense as that in which He is one, that would be self-refuting;
but we hold Him to be _three in one sense, and one in another_." It
crossed my mind very forcibly, that, if that was all, the Athanasian
Creed had gratuitously invented an enigma. I exchanged thoughts on
this with an undergraduate friend, and got no fresh light: in fact, I
feared to be profane, if I attempted to understand the subject. Yet it
came distinctly home to me, that, whatever the depth of the mystery, if
we lay down anything about it _at all_, we ought to understand our own
words; and I presently augured that Tillotson had been right in
"wishing our Church