Their drift was clear
enough; and nobody bothered over their exact meaning. But
directly someone found it important to give them a new and
untraditional interpretation, it appeared that they were a mass
of ambiguity, and might be twisted into meaning very nearly
anything that anybody liked. Steady-going churchmen were appalled
and outraged when they saw Newman, in Tract No. 90, performing
this operation. But, after all, he was only taking the Church of
England at its word. And indeed, since Newman showed the way, the
operation has become so exceedingly common that the most steady-
going churchman hardly raises an eyebrow at it now.
At the time, however, Newman's treatment of the Articles seemed
to display not only a perverted supersubtlety of intellect, but a
temper of mind that was fundamentally dishonest. It was then that
he first began to be assailed by those charges of untruthfulness
which reached their culmination more than twenty years later in
the celebrated controversy with Charles Kingsley, which led to
the writing of the Apologia. The controversy was not a very
fruitful one, chiefly because Kingsley could no more understand
the nature of Newman's intelligence than a subaltern in a line
regiment can understand a Brahmin of Benares. Kingsley was a
stout Protestant, whose hatred of Popery was, at bottom, simply
ethical--an honest, instinctive horror of the practices of
priestcraft and the habits of superstition; and it was only
natural that he should see in those innumerable delicate
distinctions which Newman was perpetually drawing, and which he
himself had not only never thought of, but could not even grasp,
simply another manifestation of the inherent falsehood of Rome.
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