Occasional Papers eBook

Richard William Church
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 447 pages of information about Occasional Papers.

Occasional Papers eBook

Richard William Church
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 447 pages of information about Occasional Papers.
should follow him; a wish in which there is not the slightest reason to think that he will be gratified.  But differently as we must feel as to the result, we cannot help sharing the evident amusement with which Dr. Newman recalls a few of the compliments which were lavished on him by some of his present co-religionists when he was trying to do them justice, and was even on the way to join them.  He reprints with sly and mischievous exactness a string of those glib phrases of controversial dislike and suspicion which are common to all parties, and which were applied to him by “priests, good men, whose zeal outstripped their knowledge, and who in consequence spoke confidently, when they would have been wiser had they suspended their adverse judgment of those whom they were soon to welcome as brothers in communion.”  It is a trifle, but it strikes us as characteristic.  Dr. Newman is one of the very few who have carried into his present communion, to a certain degree at least, an English habit of not letting off the blunders and follies of his own side, and of daring to think that a cause is better served by outspoken independence of judgment than by fulsome, unmitigated puffing.  It might be well if even in him there were a little more of this habit.  But, so far as it goes, it is the difference between him and most of those who are leaders on his side.  Indirectly he warns eager controversialists that they are not always the wisest and the most judicious and far-seeing of men; and we cannot quarrel with him, however little we may like the occasion, for the entertainment which he feels in inflicting on his present brethren what they once judged and said of him, and in reminding them that their proficiency in polemical rhetoric did not save them from betraying the shallowness of their estimate and the shortness of their foresight.

When he comes to discuss the Eirenicon, Dr. Newman begins with a complaint which seems to us altogether unreasonable.  He seems to think it hard that Dr. Pusey should talk of peace and reunion, and yet speak so strongly of what he considers the great corruptions of the Roman Church.  In ordinary controversy, says Dr. Newman, we know what we are about and what to expect; “’Caedimur, et totidem plagis consumimus hostem.’  We give you a sharp cut and you return it....  But we at least have not professed to be composing an Eirenicon, when we treated you as foes.”  Like Archbishop Manning, Dr. Newman is reminded “of the sword wreathed in myrtle;” but Dr. Pusey, he says, has improved on the ancient device,—­“Excuse me, you discharge your olive-branch as if from a catapult.”

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