第175章 Chapter VI(39)

But for the conscience he would be 'an atheist,a pantheist,or a polytheist when he looked into the world,'that is,if guided by experience alone.(260)What,then,is,as he puts it,the 'burdened conscience'which is my true informant?(261)The conscience is the sense of sin.It tells us of a judge;of one who is 'angry with us and threatens evil.'It tells us of the need of atonement,and yet of the absence of God from the world.Natural religion,the foundation of revealed religion,is therefore,as Lucretius said,a yoke;it 'burdens and saddens the religious mind.'It proves,too,the doctrine of which Butler was the 'great master,'the absolute necessity of 'vicarious punishment.'(262)Thus,as he says,in another famous passage,natural religion teaches gloom and horror of ourselves.To be 'superstitious.is nature's best offering,her most acceptable service,her most mature and enlarged wisdom,in the presence of a holy and offended God.They who are not superstitious without the gospel,will not be religious with it.'(263)This is,indeed,the real pith of the doctrine.Without asking what may be the logical demonstration,the actual persuasive force is the appeal to the conscience as a 'sense of sin.'Starting from the conception of the Church implied in Ward's Ideal,that is the foregone conclusion.We accept the Church theology,because we feel the terror which the Church soothes.Newman,as was inevitable from the confusion between rules of conduct and canons of logic,has given us the real cause of belief,but not a good reason for believing.And here the apologists are precisely at one with the ordinary deist of the eighteenth century.They agree that the doctrine was accepted because it fell in with 'natural religion'in 'superstition.'The power of the Church,or the power of priest-craft,depends essentially upon the belief in its power of pardoning sin and reconciling man to God.The difference is that the deist asserted the superstition to be false,and pardon a quack remedy;whereas Newman sees a fundamental truth in the superstition,and the full explanation in the revelation committed to the Church.How,then,is the issue to be decided?You are wrong,says Newman,as a blind man judging of colours is wrong.You have quenched the conscience,and therefore have no guide.Yet,if a blind man can never realise what sight is,no blind man ever doubts that sight exists.Nothing is easier than to prove to him that I have means of knowledge which he does not possess.Why,if conscience reveals truths,cannot the truths be impressed even upon those who have no conscience?Why should I believe that your theory is right,when the ultimate test is one which,by its nature,can appeal only to its own authority?If men have radically different instincts which can be brought to no common measure,scepticism is the inevitable result,unless a supernatural authority can be applied.That is precisely Newman's conclusion;leave men to themselves,he says,and they will have no 'common measure,'unless controlled by a supreme power.The 'absolute need of a spiritual supremacy'is the 'strongest argument in its favour.'(264)This gives Newman's relation to the philosophy of the time.

The 'irrefragable demonstrations'of the schools are left in the background.Granting them to be irrefragable,do they prove or disprove his point?Does the 'first cause'argument properly lead to Nature or to the God of Catholicism?To overlook this is to assume that your reasoning is confirmed by the very logic to which it is radically opposed.Is Newman really sceptical when he denies the validity of the scientific view,or the man of science when he denies the validity of Newman's?What is the relation of 'science'to philosophy?Private judgment is said to lead,in religion,to scepticism.The obvious reply is that in the physical sciences it has led to indisputable truths.Whence the difference?Newman speaks as though the proofs of scientific truths rested exclusively upon the arguments for each proposition separately.Men of science accept Newton's theory,he says,without rigidly testing it each for himself,and assume that it conforms to the facts,even if the conformity be not obvious.(265)Believers in theology should make similar assumptions.But this omits the real ground of conviction.We believe in Newton's theory of gravitation,not simply because we have read the Principia;not even simply because the argument is part of a whole system of consistent and independent truths;but also because it can be verified by proofs intelligible to all,and because it can predict facts open to the severest tests.The enormous authority of science is not due to the fact that it is believed by this or that expert or body of experts,but because it manifests its power by working wonders which are not miracles.

It can appeal to a criterion which is not supernatural,and is as valid for the sinner as for the saint.

Here is one result of the Oxford indifference to science.