The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎646v] (183/239)

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FRANCIS WILLIAM NEWMAN.
is really common to all Christians except the use of a particular
terminology.
The dogmas have been dropped, and the terminology has been
retained—that, in a sentence, is the evolution which the Higher
Criticism has brought about in the course of the last half-century.
As a result of the change, theological controversy has lost half
its bitterness by losing all its meaning. The sceptic, on his part,
feels that to attack the dogmas of Christianity is to assail shadows
of perpetually changing shape. The Christian apologist, on his,
can say little to the sceptic, for fear lest, in denouncing him,
he should also by implication be denouncing Dean Fremantle, or
some other office-bearer in the household of faith. Quarrels,
therefore, subside for the lack of anything definite to quarrel
about; and all sensible men are of the same religion because the
religion is capable of being stretched to cover all sensible opinions.
For really embittered disputation—as also for really morbid
religiosity—the first thing needful is a rigid creed with penalties
for those who reject it. There are doubtless circles in which
that condition lingers still. One sees signs of it in the resolutions
passed by irresponsible bodies like the Church Association, and
in the speeches of delegates who wait upon the Archbishop of
Canterbury, imploring him to cling for his salvation to the
damnatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed. But it is a rare
condition, and it gets rarer as the Higher Criticism proceeds upon
its course, pouring new wine into old bottles, and attaching new
meanings to old words. When Francis Newman thought his
way through theology, it was general if not universal. That is
the first fact to be grasped by those who would understand the
nature of the man and the significance of his writings.
No one dreamed of asking “ What is Christianity? ” in those
days. All thought they knew. Outside the Church of Borne
Christianity mean Evangelicalism; and the central doctrine of
Evangelicalism was accurately, if profanely, summed up in
Matthew Arnold’s parable of the three Lords Shaftesbury. A
scheme of salvation had been settled in the Council Chamber of
the Trinity. Man, a sinner in sore need of grace, merited a
punishment of eternal torture, not so much on account of specific
sins, as because he had inherited a sinful nature from his fore
father Adam. But he might, prompted by the Third Lord
Shaftesbury, accept the sacrifice of the Second, and so avert the
just wrath of the First. The Doctrine of the Atonement was as
simple, and as cut and dried, as that. The attempt to explain
it away, which is now a mode of Christianity, was then a mode
of scepticism. If a man was a Christian at all, he started with
it Most Christians not only started with it, but went on with