Essays in Rationalism

Whether this little volume will find sufficient patrons to defray the cost of its production is at least doubtful. The writer whose essays it contains lived in obscurity and will never be popular. But he possessed a fine intellect, however frustrated by circumstances; he belonged to an illustrious family; and it is well to let the public have access to the opinions of a brother of Cardinal Newman and of Professor Newman, a brother who took his own course, as they did, and thought out for himself an independent philosophy.

All Charles Robert Newman's writings that are known to have been printed, appeared in the Reasoner, edited by Mr. George Jacob Holyoake, at various dates during 1860-61. With trifling exceptions they are all reprinted in this collection.

Mr. Holyoake has kindly supplied a brief account of the atheistic Newman, and Mr. J. M. Wheeler has gathered all the information that is obtainable as to his life and personality.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

Of Charles Robert Newman, until the death of his brother, the Cardinal, almost nothing was known. Some reminiscences of him by Mr. Thomas Purnell and Precentor Edmund Venables appeared in the Athenæum at the time of his death in 1884, and these remain the chief sources of information concerning him. Mr. G. J. Holyoake also, in his paper The Present Day, wrote: "If the public come to know more of Charles R. Newman, it will be seen that all the brothers, John Henry, Francis William, and Charles R. Newman, were men of unusual distinction of character, and that while each held diverse views, all had the family qualities of perspicacity, candor and conscience." But these notes attracted little attention. Most people were under the impression there were only two brothers, who had long figured in the public eye as types of the opposite courses of modern thought towards Romanism and Rationalism. Yet the real type of antagonism to Rome was to be found in Charles Robert, who is dismissed by the Rev. Thomas Mozley with the words: "There was also another brother, not without his share in the heritage of natural gifts."

In a notable passage on change of religion, in his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, chap. vii., Cardinal Newman seems to allude to the career of himself and his brothers. He says: "Thus of three Protestants, one becomes a Catholic, a second a Unitarian, and a third an unbeliever: how is this? The first becomes a Catholic, because he assented, as a Protestant, to the doctrine of our Lord's divinity, with a real assent and a genuine conviction, and because this certitude, taking possession of his mind, led him on to welcome the Catholic doctrines of the Real Presence and of the Theotocos, till his Protestantism fell off from him, and he submitted himself to the Church. The second became a Unitarian, because, proceeding on the principle that Scripture was the rule of faith, and that a man's private judgment was its rule of interpretation, and finding that the doctrine of the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds did not follow by logical necessity from the text of Scripture, he said to himself, 'The word of God has been made of none effect by the traditions of men,' and therefore nothing was left for him but to profess what he considered primitive Christianity and to become a Humanitarian. The third gradually subsided into infidelity, because he started with the Protestant dogma, cherished in the depths of his nature, that a priesthood was a corruption of the simplicity of the Gospel. First, then, he would protest against the sacrifice of the Mass; next he gave up baptismal regeneration and the sacramental principle; then he asked himself whether dogmas were not a restraint on Christian liberty as well as Sacraments; then came the question, What after all was the use of teachers of religion? Why should any one stand between him and his Maker? After a time it struck him that this obvious question had to be answered by the Apostles, as well as by the Anglican clergy; so he came to the conclusion that the true and only revelation of God to man is that which is written on the heart. This did for a time, and he remained a Deist. But then it occurred to him, that this inward moral law was there within the breast, whether there was a God or not, and that it was a roundabout way of enforcing that law, to say that it came from God and simply unnecessary, considering it carried with it its own sacred and sovereign authority, as our feelings instinctively testified, and when he turned to look at the physical world around him, he really did not see what scientific proof there was of the Being of God at all, and it seemed to him as if all things would go quite as well as at present without that hypothesis as with it; so he dropped it, and became a purus putus Atheist."

I have transcribed this lengthy, but remarkable passage, not because I think it correctly describes the process of thought in his two brothers, but rather as an illustration that his own imaginative synthesis of their position derives its life and force from the fact that he had before him concrete instances in the person of his own nearest relatives.

Charles Robert Newman, younger brother of the Cardinal and elder brother of the Professor, was born on June 16, 1802, being one year and four months the junior of the former, and three years the senior of the latter. [1] Their father, a London man, and friend of Capel the eminent stockbroker, from having been clerk in a bank, became a partner, though he afterwards failed at a time of great commercial depression, both in this business and as a brewer. He was a Freemason, a musician, and had schemes of social improvement by reclaiming waste land and planting with trees. In religion his views appear to have been of a broad cast approximating to those of Benjamin Franklin. The mother, whose maiden name was Jemima Fourdrinier, was of Hugenot family, and of religious cast of mind. There were six children, equally divided as to sex. Harriet, the eldest girl, married the Rev. Thomas Mozley; Jemima, the second, married Mr. John Mozley; while Mary, the youngest, died unmarried.