More Nineteenth Century Studies: A Group of Honest Doubters (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Excerpt from More Nineteenth Century Studies: A Group of Honest Doubters

Significance, than that of the divergent courses of the brothers Newman. It is as if two rivers, taking their rise in the same dividing range, should yet be deflected by some minute original irregularity of level, so that one pours its waters into the Mediterranean, the other into the German Ocean. The Morning Leader newspaper, shortly after the death of Francis called John 'a spiritual Tory' and Francis 'a Spiritual radical'. Long before this - even five years before his own conversion to Rome - John took his younger brother as an omen of the dangers of Protestantism 'whether or not Anglicanism leads to Rome,' he wrote to his sister Jemima, 'so far is clear as day, that Protestantism leads to infidelity.' The career of Francis, indeed, seemed to him the clearest and most painful illustration of one of his own deepest beliefs, that there is no logical standing-point between Romanism and Atheism. One of my main objects in what follows will be to suggest that this antithesis represents a dangerous half-truth. The foundations of nineteenth cen tury Protestantism were indeed insecure, and out of this insecurity there was bound to emerge, and did emerge, a drift on the one hand towards Rome and on the other to wards unbelief. The brothers John and Francis Newman had a great deal in common; far more than might at first sight be supposed. They had not only drunk the same milk of evangelical doctrine in their childhood, but they both had subtle and dissolvent intellects, and the instinctive scepticism which questions received assumptions. But see ticrsm, as history has repeatedly shown, may be the basis of orthodoxy as well as of heresy; according to the proportion it bears to.

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