If Newman
had died at the age of sixty, today he would have been already
forgotten, save by a few ecclesiastical historians; but he lived
to write his Apologia, and to reach immortality, neither as a
thinker nor as a theologian, but as an artist who has embalmed
the poignant history of an intensely human spirit in the magical
spices of words.
When Froude succeeded in impregnating Newman with the ideas of
Keble, the Oxford Movement began. The original and remarkable
characteristic of these three men was that they took the
Christian Religion au pied de la lettre. This had not been done
in England for centuries. When they declared every Sunday that
they believed in the Holy Catholic Church, they meant it. When
they repeated the Athanasian Creed, they meant it. Even, when
they subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles, they meant it-or at
least they thought they did. Now such a state of mind was
dangerous--more dangerous indeed-- than they at first realised.
They had started with the innocent assumption that the Christian
Religion was contained in the doctrines of the Church of England;
but, the more they examined this matter, the more difficult and
dubious it became. The Church of England bore everywhere upon it
the signs of human imperfection; it was the outcome of revolution
and of compromise, of the exigencies of politicians and the
caprices of princes, of the prejudices of theologians and the
necessities of the State.
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