Francis William Newman

“ To set up James or John or Daniel as my Model, and my Lord; to be swallowed up in him and press him upon others for a Universal Standard, would be despised as a self-degrading idolatry and resented as an obtrusive favouritism. Now why does not the same equally apply, if the name Jesus is substituted for these? Why, in defect of all other knowledge than the bare fact of his manhood, are we not unhesitatingly to take for granted that he does not exhaust all perfection, and is at best only one among many brethren and equals? ”

“ Thus Calvinism was found by me not only not to be Evangelical, but not to be logical, in spite of its high logical pretensions, and to be irreconcilable with any intelligent theory of religion. Of "gloomy Calvinism" I had often heard people speak with an emphasis, that annoyed me as highly unjust; for mine had not been a gloomy religion:—far, very far from it. On the side of eternal punishment, its theory, no doubt, had been gloomy enough; but human nature has a notable art of not realizing all the articles of a creed; moreover, this doctrine is equally held by Arminians. ”

“ Socrates and Cicero ask, where did we pick up our intelligence? It did not come from nothing; it most reside in the mind of him from whom we and this world came; God must be more intelligent than man, his creature.—But this argument may be applied with equal truth, not to intelligence only, but to all the essential high qualities of man, everything noble and venerable. Whence came the principle of love, which is the noblest of all! It must reside in God more truly and gloriously than in man. He who made loving hearts must himself be loving. ”

“ What shall I say of Calvin, who burned Servetus? Why have I been so slow to learn, that religion is an impulse which animates us to execute our moral judgments, but an impulse which may be half blind? These brethren believe that I may cause the eternal ruin of others: how hard then is it for them to abide faithfully by the laws of morality and respect my rights! My rights! They are of course trampled down for the public good, just as a house is blown up to stop a conflagration. Such is evidently the theory of all persecution;—which is essentially founded on Hatred. ”

“ Like the first Christians, they must become confessors of the Truth; not obtrusively, boastfully, dogmatically, or harshly; but, "speaking the truth in love," not be ashamed to avow, if they do not believe all that others profess, and that they abhor the unrighteous principle of judging men by an authoritative creed. The evil of Bigotry which has been most observed, is its untameable injustice, which converted the law of love into licensed murder or gratuitous hatred. But I believe a worse evil still has been, the intense reaction of the human mind against Religion for Bigotry's sake. ”

“ Then I rejoiced to feel how right and sound had been our principle, that no creed can possibly be used as the touchstone of spirituality: for man morally excels man, as far as creeds are concerned, not by assenting to true propositions, but by loving them because they are discerned to be true, and by possessing a faculty of discernment sharpened by the love of truth. Such are God's true apostles, differing enormously in attainment and elevation, but all born to ascend. For these to quarrel between themselves because they do not agree in opinions, is monstrous. ”

“ All Protestants see, how mischievous it is to a Romanist lady to have a directing priest, whom she every day consults about everything; so as to lay her own judgment to sleep. We readily understand, that in the extreme case such women may gradually lose all perception of right and wrong, and become a mere machine in the hands of her director. But the Protestant principle of accepting the Bible as the absolute law, acts towards the same end; and only fails of doing the same amount of mischief, because a book can never so completely answer all the questions asked of it, as a living priest can. ”

“ To declare the objections of our common adversaries valid against those first principles of religion which are older than Jesus or Moses, is certainly to surrender the cause of Christianity.
If this need more elucidation, let it be observed, that no Christian can take a single step in argument with a heathen, much less establish his claim of authority for the Bible, without presuming that the heathen will admit, on hearing them, those doctrines of moral Theism, which, it is pretended, I can have no good reason for admitting. ”

“ And as talents are various, so do moral natures vary, each having its own weak and strong side; and that one man should grasp into his single self the highest perfection of every moral kind, is to me at least as incredible as that one should preoccupy and exhaust all intellectual greatness. I feel the prodigy to be so peculiar, that I must necessarily wait until it is overwhelmingly proved, before I admit it. No one can without unreason urge me to believe, on any but the most irrefutable arguments, that a man, finite in every other respect, is infinite in moral perfection. ”

“ When such a man as he, the only mortal to whom I had looked up as to an apostle, had unhesitatingly, unrelentingly, and without one mark that his conscience was not on his side, flung away all his own precepts, his own theories, his own magnificent rebukes of Formalism and human Authority, and had made himself the slave and me the victim of those old and ever-living tyrants,—whom henceforth could I trust? ”

“ That a finite being should deserve infinite punishment, now was manifestly as incredible as that he should deserve infinite reward,—which I had never dreamed.—Again, I saw that the current orthodoxy made Satan eternal conqueror over Christ. In vain does the Son of God come from heaven and take human flesh and die on the cross. In spite of him, the devil carries off to hell the vast majority of mankind, in whom, not misery only, but Sin is triumphant for ever and ever. ”

“ I shall here reprint the pith of my argument, somewhat shortened:—
"No heaven-sent Bible can guarantee the veracity of God to a man who doubts that veracity. Unless we have independent means of knowing that God is truthful and good, his word (if we be over so certain that it is really his word) has no authority to us: hence no book revelation can, without sapping its own pedestal, deny the validity of our a priori conviction that God has the virtues of goodness and veracity, and requires like virtues in us. ”

“ If miraculous power holds him up and makes good his daring, he is more than man; but if otherwise, to have failed will break all his bones. I can no longer give the same human reverence as before to one who has been seduced into vanity so egregious; and I feel assured à priori that such presumption must have entangled him into evasions and insincerities, which naturally end in crookedness of conscience and real imposture, however noble a man's commencement, and however unshrinking his sacrifices of goods and ease and life. ”

“ That to inculcate religious beggary as the only form and mode of spiritual perfection, is fanatical and mischievous, even the church of Rome will admit. Protestants universally reject it as a deplorable absurdity;—not merely wealthy bishops, squires and merchants, but the poorest curate also. A man could not preach such doctrine in a Protestant pulpit without incurring deep reprobation and contempt; but when preached by Jesus, it is extolled as divine wisdom,—and disobeyed. ”

“ Man is finite and crippled on all sides; and frailty in one kind causes frailty in another. Deficient power causes deficient knowledge, deficient knowledge betrays him into false opinion, and entangles him into false positions. It may be a defect of my imagination, but I do not feel that it implies any bitterness, that even in the case of one who abides in primitive lowliness, to attain even negatively an absolutely pure goodness seems to me impossible; and much more, to exhaust all goodness, and become a single Model-Man, unparalleled, incomparable, a standard for all other moral excellence. ”

“ Nothing can be clearer, than that the New Testament is entirely pervaded by the doctrine,—sometimes explicitly stated, sometimes unceremoniously assumed,—that earthly things are very speedily to come to an end, and therefore are not worthy of our high affections and deep interest. Hence, when thoroughly imbued with this persuasion, I looked with mournful pity on a great mind wasting its energies on any distant aim of this earth. For a statesman to talk about providing for future generations, sounded to me as a melancholy avowal of unbelief. ”

“ Every persecuting church has numbered among its members thousands of pious people, so grateful for its services, or so attached to its truth, as to think those impious who desire something purer and more perfect. Herein we may discern, that every nation and class is liable to the peculiar illusion of overesteeming the sanctity of its ancestral creed. It is as much our duty to beware of this illusion, as of any other. All know how easily our patriotism may degenerate into an unjust repugnance to foreigners, and that the more intense it is, the greater the need of antagonistic principles. ”

“ Indeed, that the Epistle to the Hebrews is not from the hand of Paul, had very long seemed to me an obvious certainty,—as long as I had had any delicate feeling of Greek style.
That a human child, born with the nature of other children, and having to learn wisdom and win virtue through the same process, should grow up sinless, appeared to me an event so paradoxical, as to need the most amply decisive proof. ”

“ He more and more made me ashamed of Political Economy and Moral Philosophy, and all Science; all of which ought to be "counted dross for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus our Lord." For the first time in my life I saw a man earnestly turning into reality the principles which others confessed with their lips only. That the words of the New Testament contained the highest truth accessible to man,—truth not to be taken from nor added to,—all good men (as I thought) confessed: never before had I seen a man so resolved that no word of it should be a dead letter to him. ”

“ To impute to a person, without specific evidence, some definite frailty or fault, barely because he is human, would be a want of good sense; but not so, to have a firm belief that every human being is finite in moral as well as in intellectual greatness.
We have a very imperfect history of the apostle James; and I do not know that I could adduce any fact specifically recorded concerning him in disproof of his absolute moral perfection, if any of his Jerusalem disciples had chosen to set up this as a dogma of religion. ”

“ In the above my critics have represented me to say that Christianity has done nothing for women. I have not said so, but that what it has done has been exaggerated. I say: If the theory of Christianity is to take credit from the history of Christendom, it must also receive discredit. Taking in the whole system of nuns and celibates, and the doctrine which sustains it, the root of which is apostolic, I doubt whether any balance of credit remains over from this side of Christian history. ”

“ How much better no futurity for any, than that a few should be eternally in bliss, and the great majority [2] kept alive for eternal sin as well as eternal misery! My gospel then was bad tidings, nay, the worst of tidings! In a farther progress of thought, I asked, would it not have been better that the whole race of man had never come into existence? Clearly! And thus God was made out to be unwise in creating them. No use in the punishment was imaginable, without setting up Fear, instead of Love, as the ruling principle in the blessed. And what was the moral tendency of the doctrine? ”