Grammar of Assent

I must somewhat enlarge what I have last been saying, but it is in order to increase the force and fulness of this explanation. There is a certain sense in which Analogy may be said to supply a positive argument, though it is not its primary and direct purpose. The coincidence of two witnesses independently giving the same account of a transaction is an argument for its truth; the likeness of two effects argues one cause for both. The fact of Mediation so prominent in Scripture and in the world, as Butler illustrates it, is a positive argument that the God of Scripture is the God of the world. This is the immediate sense in which I speak in the "Apologia" of the objective matter of Religion, Natural and Revealed, of the character of the evidence, and of the legitimate position and exercise of the intellect relatively towards it. Religion has, as such, certain definite belongings and surroundings, and it calls for what Aristotle would call a [pepaideumenos] investigator, and a process of investigation sui similis. This peculiarity I first found in the history of doctrinal development; in the first instance it had presented itself to me as a mode of accounting for a difficulty, viz. for what are called "the Variations of Popery," but next I found it a law, which was instanced in the successive developments through which revealed truth has passed. And then I reflected that a law implied a law-giver, and that so orderly and majestic a growth of doctrine in the Catholic Church, contrasted with the deadness and helplessness, or the vague changes and contradictions in the teaching of other religious bodies, argued a spiritual Presence in Rome, which was nowhere else, and which constituted a presumption that Rome was right; if the doctrine of the Eucharist was not from heaven, why should the doctrine of Original Sin be? If the Athanasian Creed was from heaven, why not the Creed of Pope Pius? This was a use of Analogy beside and beyond Butler's use of it; and then, when I had recognized its force in the development of doctrine, I was led to apply it to the Evidences of Religion, and in this sense I came to say what I have said in the "Apologia." "There is no medium in true philosophy," "to a perfectly consistent mind," "between Atheism and Catholicity."

The multitude of men indeed are not consistent, logical, or thorough; they obey no law in the course of their religious views; and while they cannot reason without premisses, and premisses demand first principles, and first principles must ultimately be (in one shape or other) assumptions, they do not recognize what this involves, and are set down at this or that point in the ascending or descending scale of thought, according as their knowledge of facts, prejudices, education, domestic ties, social position, and opportunities for inquiry determine; but nevertheless there is a certain ethical character, one and the same, a system of first principles, sentiments and tastes, a mode of viewing the question and of arguing, which is formally and normally, naturally and divinely, the organum investigandi given us for gaining religious truth, and which would lead the mind by an infallible succession from the rejection of atheism to theism, and from theism to Christianity, and from Christianity to Evangelical Religion, and from these to Catholicity. And again when a Catholic is seriously wanting in this system of thought, we cannot be surprised if he leaves the Catholic Church, and then in due time gives up religion altogether. I will add, that a main reason for my writing this Essay on Assent, to which I am adding these last words, was, as far as I could, to describe the organum investigandi which I thought the true one, and thereby to illustrate and explain the saying in the "Apologia" which has been the subject of this Note.

I have only one remark more before concluding. I have said of course there was a descending as well as an ascending course of inquiry and of faith. However, speaking in my "Apologia" of Evidences, and, following the lead of what I have said there about doctrinal development, I have mainly in view the ascending scale, not the descending. I have meant to say, "I am a Catholic, for the reason that I am not an Atheist." This makes the misinterpretation of my words which I am exposing the more striking, for it paraphrases me into a threat and nothing else, viz. "If you are not a Catholic, you must be an Atheist, and will go to hell." Mr. Lilly, in his letter in my defence, sees this, and most happily adopts the positive interpretation which is the true one.

This explanation, also, is an answer to some good, but easily frightened men, who have fancied that I was denying that the Being of a God was a natural truth, because I said that to deny revelation was the way to deny natural religion. I have but argued that the same sophistry which denies the one may deny the other.

That the ascending scale of my abstract alternative has been the prominent idea in my mind, may be argued from the following passage of a Lecture delivered many years before the "Apologia:"—

"A Protestant is already reaching forward to the whole truth, from the very circumstance of his really grasping any part of it. So strongly do I feel this, that I account it no paradox to say that, let a man but master the one doctrine of the Being of a God, let him really and truly, and not in words only, or by inherited profession, or in the conclusions of reason, but by a direct apprehension be a Monotheist," (that is, with what in the foregoing Essay I have called a "real assent" as following upon "Inference," and acting as a fresh start) "and he is already three-fourths of the way towards Catholicism."

I end by placing before the reader Mr. Lilly's apposite Letter, dated Nov. 18.

"Sir,—I observe in your issue of this evening a statement against which I must beg your permission to protest in the strongest manner as a most serious, although, I am quite sure, an unintentional, misrepresentation of my deeply venerated friend Cardinal Newman. The statement is that 'he has confined his defence of his own creed to the proposition that it is the only possible alternative to atheism.' It certainly is true that Cardinal Newman has said, 'There is no medium, in true philosophy, between Atheism and Catholicism' ('Apologia,' p. 198, Third Edition); and it as certainly is not true that he confines his defence of his creed to this proposition. He expressly recognizes 'the formal proofs on which the being of a God rests' (they may be seen in any text-book of Catholic theology) as affording 'irrefragable demonstration' ('Discourses to Mixed Congregations,' p. 262, Fourth Edition); but the great argument which comes home to him personally with supreme force is that derived from the witness of Conscience—'the aboriginal Vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informations, a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its blessings and anathemas.' The existence of God, 'borne in upon him irresistibly' by the voice within, is 'the great truth of which his whole being is full' ('Apologia,' p. 241)."