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How, asks Mr. Darwin, can we possibly account for the manifest plan,
order, and arrangement which pervade creation, except we allow to it
this self-developing power through modified descent?

As Milne-Edwards has well expressed it, Nature is prodigal in variety,
but niggard in innovation. Why, on the theory of creation, should this
be so? Why should all the parts and organs of many independent beings,
each supposed to have been separately created for its proper place in
nature, be so commonly linked together by graduated steps? Why should
not Nature have taken a leap from structure to structure?--p. 194.

And again:--

It is a truly wonderful fact--the wonder of which we are apt to
overlook from familiarity--that all animals and plants throughout all
time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to
group, in the manner which we everywhere behold, namely, varieties of
the same species most closely related together, species of the same
genus less closely and unequally related together, forming sections
and sub-genera, species of distinct genera much less closely related,
and genera related in different degrees, forming sub-families,
families, orders, sub-classes, and classes.--pp. 128-9.

How can we account for all this? By the simplest and yet the most
comprehensive answer. By declaring the stupendous fact that all creation
is the transcript in matter of ideas eternally existing in the mind of
the Most High--that order in the utmost perfectness of its relation
pervades His works, because it exists as in its centre and highest
fountain-head in Him the Lord of all. Here is the true account of the
fact which has so utterly misled shallow observers, that Man himself,
the Prince and Head of this creation, passes in the earlier stages of
his being through phases of existence closely analogous, so far as his
earthly tabernacle is concerned, to those in which the lower animals
ever remain. At that point of being the development of the protozoa is
arrested. Through it the embryo of their chief passes to the perfection
of his earthly frame. But the types of those lower forms of being must
be found in the animals which never advance beyond them--not in man for
whom they are but the foundation for an after-development; whilst he
too, Creation's crown and perfection, thus bears witness in his own
frame to the law of order which pervades the universe.

In like manner could we answer every other question as to which Mr.
Darwin thinks all oracles are dumb unless they speak his speculation. He
is, for instance, more than once troubled by what he considers
imperfections in Nature's work. "If," he says, "our reason leads us to
admire with enthusiasm a multitude of inimitable contrivances in Nature,
this same reason tells us that some other contrivances are less
perfect."

Nor ought we to marvel if all the contrivances in nature be not, as
far as we can judge, absolutely perfect; and if some of them be
abhorrent to our idea of fitness. We need not marvel at the sting of
the bee causing the bee's own death; at drones being produced in such
vast numbers for one single act, and with the great majority
slaughtered by their sterile sisters; at the astonishing waste of
pollen by our fir-trees; at the instinctive hatred of the queen-bee
for her own fertile daughters; at ichneumonidae feeding within the
live bodies of caterpillars; and at other such cases. The wonder
indeed is, on the theory of natural selection, that more cases of the
want of absolute perfection have not been observed.--p. 472.

We think that the real temper of this whole speculation as to nature
itself may be read in these few lines. It is a dishonouring view of
nature.

That reverence for the work of God's hands with which a true belief in
the All-wise Worker fills the believer's heart is at the root of all
great physical discovery; it is the basis of philosophy. He who would
see the venerable features of Nature must not seek with the rudeness of
a licensed roysterer violently to unmask her countenance; but must wait
as a learner for her willing unveiling. There was more of the true
temper of philosophy in the poetic fiction of the Pan-ic shriek, than in
the atheistic speculations of Lucretius. But this temper must beset
those who do in effect banish God from nature. And so Mr. Darwin not
only finds in it these bungling contrivances which his own greater skill
could amend, but he stands aghast before its mightier phenomena. The
presence of death and famine seems to him inconceivable on the ordinary
idea of creation; and he looks almost aghast at them until reconciled to
their presence by his own theory that "a ratio of increase so high as to
lead to a struggle for life, and as a consequence to natural selection
entailing divergence of character and the extinction of less improved
forms, is decidedly followed by the most exalted object which we are
capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals" (p.
490). But we can give him a simpler solution still for the presence of
these strange forms of imperfection and suffering amongst the works of
God.

We can tell him of the strong shudder which ran through all this world
when its head and ruler fell. When he asks concerning the infinite
variety of these multiplied works which are set in such an orderly
unity, and run up into man as their reasonable head, we can tell him of
the exuberance of God's goodness and remind him of the deep philosophy
which lies in those simple words--"All thy works praise Thee, O God, and
thy saints give thanks unto Thee." For it is one office of redeemed man
to collect the inarticulate praises of the material creation, and pay
them with conscious homage into the treasury of the supreme Lord.

* * * * *

It is by putting restraint upon fancy that science is made the true
trainer of our intellect:--

"A study of the Newtonian philosophy," says Sedgwick, "as affecting
our moral powers and capacities, does not terminate in mere negations.
It teaches us to see the finger of God in all things animate and
inaminate [Transcriber's note: sic], and gives us an exalted
conception of His attributes, placing before us the clearest proof of
their reality; and so prepares, or ought to prepare, the mind for the
reception of that higher illumination which brings the rebellious
faculties into obedience to the Divine will."--_Studies of the
University_, p. 14.

It is by our deep conviction of the truth and importance of this view
for the scientific mind of England that we have been led to treat at so
much length Mr. Darwin's speculation. The contrast between the sober,
patient, philosophical courage of our home philosophy, and the writings
of Lamarck and his followers and predecessors, of MM. Demaillet, Bory de
Saint Vincent, Virey, and Oken,[1] is indeed most wonderful; and it is
greatly owing to the noble tone which has been given by those great men
whose words we have quoted to the school of British science. That Mr.
Darwin should have wandered from this broad highway of nature's works
into the jungle of fanciful assumption is no small evil. We trust that
he is mistaken in believing that he may count Sir C. Lyell as one of his
converts. We know indeed the strength of the temptations which he can
bring to bear upon his geological brother. The Lyellian hypothesis,
itself not free from some of Mr. Darwin's faults, stands eminently in
need for its own support of some such new scheme of physical life as
that propounded here. Yet no man has been more distinct and more logical
in the denial of the transmutation of species than Sir C. Lyell, and
that not in the infancy of his scientific life, but in its full vigour
and maturity.

[1] It may be worth while to exhibit to our readers a few of Dr. Oken's
postulates or arguments as specimens of his views:--
I wrote the first edition of 1810 in a kind of inspiration.
4. Spirit is the motion of mathematical ideas.
10. Physio-philosphy [Transcriber's note: sic] has to ... pourtray
the first period of the world's development from nothing; how the
elements and heavenly bodies originated; in what method by
self-evolution into higher and manifold forms they separated into
minerals, became finally organic, and in man attained
self-consciousness.
42. The mathematical monad is eternal.
43. The eternal is one and the same with the zero of mathematics.

Sir C. Lyell devotes the 33rd to the 36th chapter of his "Principles of
Geology" to an examination of this question. He gives a clear account of
the mode in which Lamarck supported his belief of the transmutation of
species; he interrupts the author's argument to observe that "no
positive fact is cited to exemplify the substitution of some _entirely
new_ sense, faculty, or organ--because no examples were to be found";
and remarks that when Lamarck talks of "the effects of internal
sentiment," etc., as causes whereby animals and plants may acquire _new
organs_, he substitutes names for things, and with a disregard to the
strict rules of induction, resorts to fictions.

He shows the fallacy of Lamarck's reasoning, and by anticipation
confutes the whole theory of Mr. Darwin, when gathering clearly up into
a few heads the recapitulation of the whole argument in favour of the
reality of species in nature. He urges:--[Transcriber's note: numbering
in original]

1. That there is a capacity in all species to accommodate themselves to
a certain extent to a change of external circumstances.

4. The entire variation from the original type ... may usually be
effected in a brief period of time, after which no further deviation can
be obtained.

5. The intermixing distinct species is guarded against by the sterility
of the mule offspring.

6. It appears that species have a real existence in nature, and that
each was endowed at the time of its creation with the attributes and
organization by which it is now distinguished.[1]

[1] "Principles of Geology," edit. 1853.

We trust that Sir C. Lyell abides still by these truly philosophical
principles; and that with his help and with that of his brethren this
flimsy speculation may be as completely put down as was what in spite of
all denials we must venture to call its twin though less-instructed
brother, the "Vestiges of Creation." In so doing they will assuredly
provide for the strength and continually growing progress of British
science.

Indeed, not only do all laws for the study of nature vanish when the
great principle of order pervading and regulating all her processes is
given up, but all that imparts the deepest interest in the investigation
of her wonders will have departed too. Under such influences a man soon
goes back to the marvelling stare of childhood at the centaurs and
hippogriffs of fancy, or if he is of a philosophic turn, he comes like
Oken to write a scheme of creation under "a sort of inspiration"; but it
is the frenzied inspiration of the inhaler of mephitic gas. The whole
world of nature is laid for such a man under a fantastic law of glamour,
and he becomes capable of believing anything: to him it is just as
probable that Dr. Livingstone will find the next tribe of negroes with
their heads growing under their arms as fixed on the summit of the
cervical vertebrae; and he is able, with a continually growing neglect
of all the facts around him, with equal confidence and equal delusion,
to look back to any past and to look on to any future.

ON CARDINAL NEWMAN

[From _The Quarterly Review_, October, 1864]

_Apologia pro Vita sua_. By JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, D.D.

Few books have been published of late years which combine more distinct
elements of interest than the "Apologia" of Dr. Newman. As an
autobiography, in the highest sense of that word, as the portraiture,
that is, and record of what the man was, irrespective of those common
accidents of humanity which too often load the biographer's pages, it is
eminently dramatic. To produce such a portrait was the end which the
writer proposed to himself, and which he has achieved with a rare
fidelity and completeness. Hardly do the "Confessions of St. Augustine"
more vividly reproduce the old African Bishop before successive
generations in all the greatness and struggles of his life than do these
pages the very inner being of this remarkable man--"the living
intelligence," as he describes it, "by which I write, and argue, and
act" (p. 47). No wonder that when he first fully recognised what he had
to do, he

shrank from both the task and the exposure which it would entail. I
must, I said, give the true key to my whole life; I must show what I
am, that it may be seen what I am not, and that the phantom may be
extinguished which gibbers instead of me. I wish to be known as a
living man, and not as a scarecrow which is dressed up in my
clothes.... I will draw out, as far as may be, the history of my mind;
I will state the point at which I began, in what external suggestion
or accident each opinion had its rise, how far and how they were
developed from within, how they grew, were modified, were combined,
were in collision with each other, and were changed. Again, how I
conducted myself towards them; and how, and how far, and for how long
a time, I thought I could hold them consistently with the
ecclesiastical engagements which I had made, and with the position
which I filled.... It is not at all pleasant for me to be egotistical
nor to be criticised for being so. It is not pleasant to reveal to
high and low, young and old, what has gone on within me from my early
years. It is not pleasant to be giving to every shallow or flippant
disputant the advantage over me of knowing my most private thoughts, I
might even say the intercourse between myself and my Maker.
--pp. 47-51.

Here is the task he set himself, and the task which he has performed.
There is in these pages an absolute revealing of the hidden life in its
acting, and its processes, which at times is almost startling, which is
everywhere of the deepest interest. For the life thus revealed is well
worthy of the pen by which it is portrayed. Of all those who, in these
later years, have quitted the Church of England for the Roman communion
--esteemed, honoured, and beloved, as were many of them--no one, save
Dr. Newman, appears to us to possess the rare gift of undoubted genius.

That life, moreover, which anywhere and at any time must have marked its
own character on his fellows, was cast precisely at the time and place
most favourable for stamping upon others the impress of itself. The
plate was ready to receive and to retain every line of the image which
was thrown so vividly upon it. The history, therefore, of this life in
its shifting scenes of thought, feeling, and purpose, becomes in fact
the history of a school, a party, and a sect. From its effect on us,
who, from without, judge of it with critical calmness, we can form some
idea of what must be its power on those who were within the charmed
ring; who were actually under the wand of the enchanter, for whom there
was music in that voice, fascination in that eye, and habitual command
in that spare but lustrous countenance; and who can trace again in this
retrospect the colours and shadows which in those years which fixed
their destiny, passed, though in less distinct hues, into their own
lives, and made them what they are.

Again, in another aspect, the "Apologia" will have a special interest
for most of our readers. Almost every page of it will throw some light
upon the great controversy which has been maintained for these three
hundred years, and which now spreads itself throughout the world,
between the Anglican Church and her oldest and greatest antagonist, the
Papal See....

The first names to which it introduces us indicate the widely-differing
influences under which was formed that party within our Church which has
acted so powerfully and in such various directions upon its life and
teaching. They are those of Mr.--afterwards Archbishop--Whately and Dr.
Hawkins, afterwards and still the Provost of Oriel College. To
intercourse with both of whom Dr. Newman attributes great results in the
formation of his own character: the first emphatically opening his mind
and teaching him to use his reason, whilst in religious opinion he
taught him the existence of a church, and fixed in him Anti-Erastian
views of Church polity; the second being a man of most exact mind, who
through a course of severe snubbing taught him to weigh his words and be
cautious in his statements.

To an almost unknown degree, Oriel had at that time monopolised the
active speculative intellect of Oxford. Her fellowships being open,
whilst those of other Colleges were closed, drew to her the ablest men
of the University: whilst the nature of the examination for her
fellowships, which took no note of ordinary University honours, and
stretched boldly out beyond inquiries as to classical and mathematical
attainments in everything which could test the dormant powers of the
candidates, had already impressed upon the Society a distinctive
character of intellectual excellence. The late Lord Grenville used at
this time to term an Oriel Fellowship the Blue Ribbon of the University;
and, undoubtedly, the results of those examinations have been
marvellously confirmed by the event, if we think to what an extent the
mind, and opinions, and thoughts of England have been moulded by them
who form the list of those "Orielenses," of whom it was said in an
academic squib of the time, with some truth, flavoured perhaps with a
spice of envy, that they were wont to enter the academic circle "under a
flourish of trumpets." Such a "flourish" certainly has often preceded
the entry of far lesser men than E. Coplestone, E. Hawkins, J. Davison,
J. Keble, R. Whately, T. Arnold, E.B. Pusey, J. H. Newman, H. Froude, R.
J. Wilberforce, S. Wilberforce, G. A. Denison, &c., &c.

Into a Society leavened with such intellectual influences as these, Dr.
Newman, soon after taking his degree, was ushered. It could at this time
have borne no distinctively devout character in its religious aspect.
Rather must it have been marked by the opposite of this. Whately, whose
powerful and somewhat rude intellect must almost have overawed the
common room when the might of Davison had been taken from it, was, with
all his varied excellences, never by any means an eminently devout,
scarcely perhaps an orthodox man. All his earlier writings bristle with
paradoxes, which affronted the instincts of simpler and more believing
minds. Whately, accordingly, appears in these pages as "generous and
warmhearted--particularly loyal to his friends" (p. 68); as teaching
his pupil "to see with my own eyes and to walk with my own feet"; yet as
exercising an influence over him (p. 69) which, "in a higher respect
than intellectual advance, had not been satisfactory," under which he
"was beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral, was drifting
in the direction of liberalism"; a "dream" out of which he was "rudely
awakened at the end of 1827, by two great blows--illness and
bereavement" (p. 72).

Though this change in his views is traced by Dr. Newman to the action of
these strictly personal causes of illness and bereavement, yet other
influences, we suspect, were working strongly in the same direction. It
is plain that, so far as regards early permanent impression on the
character of his religious opinions, the influence of Whately was
calculated rather to stir up reaction than to win a convert. "Whately's
mind," he says himself (p. 68), "was too different from mine for us to
remain long on one line." The course of events round him impelled him in
the same direction, and furnished him with new comrades, on whom
henceforth he was to act, and who were to react most powerfully on him.
The torrent of reform was beginning its full rush through the land; and
its turbulent waters threatened not only to drown the old political
landmarks of the Constitution, but also to sweep away the Church of the
nation. Abhorrence of these so-called liberal opinions was the electric
current which bound together the several minds which speedily appeared
as instituting and directing the great Oxford Church movement. Not that
it was in any sense the offspring of the old cry of "the Church in
danger." The meaning of that alarm was the apprehension of danger to the
emoluments or position of the Church as the established religion in the
land. From the very first the Oxford movement pointed more to the
maintenance of the Church as a spiritual society, divinely incorporated
to teach certain doctrines, and do certain acts which none other could
do, than to the preservation of those temporal advantages which had been
conferred by the State. From the first there was a tendency to
undervalue these external aids, which made the movement an object of
suspicion to thorough Church-and-State men. This suspicion was repaid by
the members of the new school with a return of contempt. They believed
that in struggling for the temporal advantages of the Establishment, men
had forgotten the essential characteristics of the Church, and had been
led to barter their divine birthright for the mess of pottage which Acts
of Parliament secured them. Thus we find Dr. Newman remembering his
early Oxford dislike of "the bigoted two-bottle orthodox." He records
(p. 73) the characteristic mode in which on the appearance of the first
symptoms of his "leaving the clientela" of Dr. Whately he was punished
by that rough humorist. "Whately was considerably annoyed at me; and he
took a humorous revenge, of which he had given me due notice
beforehand.... He asked a set of the least intellectual men in Oxford to
dinner, and men most fond of port; he made me one of the party; placed
me between Provost this and Principal that, and then asked me if I was
proud of my friends" (p. 73). It is easy to conceive how he liked them.
He had, indeed, though formerly a supporter of Catholic Emancipation,
"acted with them in opposing Mr. Peel's re-election in 1829, on 'simple
academical grounds,' because he thought that a great University ought
not to be bullied even by a great Duke of Wellington" (p. 172); but he
soon parted with his friends of "two-bottle orthodoxy," and joined the
gathering knot of men of an utterly different temper, who "disliked the
Duke's change of policy as dictated by liberalism" (p. 72).

This whole company shared the feelings which even yet, after so many
years and in such altered circumstances, break forth from Dr. Newman
like the rumblings and smoke of a long extinct volcano, in such
utterances as this: "The new Bill for the suppression of the Irish Sees
was in prospect, and had filled my mind. I had fierce thoughts against
the Liberals. It was the success of the Liberal cause which fretted me
inwardly. I became fierce against its instruments and its
manifestations. A French vessel was at Algiers; I would not even look at
the tricolor" (97). This was the temper of the whole band. Most of these
men appear in Dr. Newman's pages; and from their common earnestness and
various endowments a mighty band they were.

* * * * *

Here then was the band which have accomplished so much; which have
failed in so much; which have added a new party-name to our vocabulary;
which have furnished materials for every scribbling or declaiming
political Protestant, from the writer of the Durham Letter down to Mr.
Whalley and Mr. Harper; which aided so greatly in reawakening the
dormant energies of the English Church; which carried over to the ranks
of her most deadly opponent some of the ablest and most devoted of her
sons. The language of these pages has never varied concerning this
movement. We have always admitted its many excellences--we have always
lamented its evils. As long ago as in 1839, whilst we protested openly
and fully against what we termed at the time the "strange and
lamentable" publication of Mr. Froude's "Remains,"[1] we declared our
hope that "the publication of the Oxford Tracts was a very seasonable
and valuable contribution to the cause both of the Church and the
State." And in 1846, even after so many of our hopes had faded away, we
yet spoke in the same tone of "this religious movement in our Church,"
as one "from which, however clouded be the present aspect, we doubt not
that great blessings have resulted and will result, unless we forfeit
them by neglect or wilful abuse."[2]

[1] "Quarterly Review," vol. lxiii, p. 551.
[2] Ibid., vol. lxxviii, p. 24.

The history of the progress of the movement lies scattered through these
pages. All that we can collect concerning its first intention confirms
absolutely Mr. Perceval's Statements, 1843, that it was begun for two
leading objects: "first, the firm and practical maintenance of the
doctrine of the apostolical succession.... secondly, the preservation in
its integrity of the Christian doctrine in our Prayerbooks."[1] Its
unity of action was shaken by the first entrance of doubts into its
leader's mind. His retirement from it tended directly to break it up as
an actual party. But it would be a monstrous error to suppose that the
influence of this movement was extinguished when its conductors were
dispersed as a party. So far from it, the system of the Church of
England took in all the more freely the elements of truth which it had
all along been diffusing, because they were no longer scattered abroad
by the direct action of an organised party under ostensible chiefs.
Where, we may ask, is not at this moment the effect of that movement
perfectly appreciable within our body? Look at the new-built and
restored churches of the land; look at the multiplication of schools;
the greater exactness of ritual observance; the higher standard of
clerical life, service, and devotion; the more frequent celebrations;
the cathedrals open; the loving sisterhoods labouring, under episcopal
sanction, with the meek, active saintliness of the Church's purest time;
look--above all, perhaps--at the raised tone of devotion and doctrine
amongst us, and see in all these that the movement did not die, but
rather flourished with a new vigour when the party of the movement was
so greatly broken up. It is surely one of the strangest objections which
can be urged against a living spiritual body, that the loss of many of
its foremost sons still left its vital strength unimpaired. Yet this was
Dr. Newman's objection, and his witness, fourteen years ago, when he
complained of the Church of England, that though it had given "a hundred
educated men to the Catholic Church, yet the huge creature from which
they went forth showed no consciousness of its loss, but shook itself,
and went about its work as of old time."[2]