The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎649r] (188/239)

FRANCIS WILLIAM NEWMAN.
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appeared and widened between Francis Newman and the other
missionaries. He returned to England two years after his
departure, intending to enlist other recruits for the missions. But
the dentist and the others had written home, speaking their minds
about him candidly. A letter which he received while in quaran
tine warned him that ‘ ‘ painful reports ’ ’ had been spread as to
his ‘ ‘ soundness ’ ’ ; and his ‘ 1 spiritual friends at home began
to turn on him. On the one hand his brother, the Cardinal,
hearing that he had spoken at some religious gathering of laymen,
accused him of assuming the priest’s office, and struck him off his
visiting list. On the other hand John Nelson Darby accused
him of ‘ ‘ endeavouring to sound the divine nature by the miserable
plummet of human philosophy,” and then, adjudging his
explanations unsatisfactory, wrote to certain mutual acquaint
ances to say that, if they did not instantly break off all intercourse
with the heretic, “they should, so far as his influence went,
themselves everywhere be cut off from Christian communion and
recognition.” It was a challenge—or, at any rate, might be
view T ed as such. The men whose minds were stagnant pools
were hectoring the man whose mind was a constantly, though
slowly, bubbling spring. Some men, in such a case, might have
been terrorised into the abdication of their intelligence. Others
would, in sheer obstinacy, have become aggressive atheists. To
Francis Newman neither course was possible. He could resist
neither his pietistic nature on the one hand nor the conclusions
forced upon his intellect on the other. So, though he was
inexpressibly pained, he neither submitted nor showed open
resentment. “Oh, Dogma! Dogma!” he exclaimed. “How
dost thou trample under foot love, truth, conscience, justice.
Was ever a Moloch worse than thou? ” And then, having thus
relieved himself, he sat down again, with his Bible before him,
and went on thinking.
Up to this stage, indeed, he had hardly begun to think. “ To
Election,” he writes, “to Preventing Grace, to the Fall and
Original Sin of Man, to the Atonement, to Eternal Punishment,
I reverently submitted my understanding.” “As to miracles,”
he adds, “ scarcely anything staggered me. I received the
strangest and the meanest prodigies of Scripture with the same
unhesitating faith as if I had never understood a proposition of
physical philosophy, nor a chapter of Hume or Gibbon.” But
the understanding was, in reality, not so much submissive as
buried beneath a great mass of preconceptions, and proceeding
to a slow but sure upheaval. It would take too long, and it
would be superfluous, to follow the process here step by step.
What is important to note is that the objections discovered to