That the Eirenicon was an attack and not an attempt at unity
4 min • Digitized on April 29, 2023
From A Defense of the Teachings of Mary, page 8
By St. John Henry Newman
Fully, then, do I recognize the rights of conscience in this matter. I find no fault with your stating, as clearly and completely as you can, the difficulties which stand in the way of your joining us. I cannot wonder that you begin with stipulating conditions of union, though I do not concur in them myself, and think that in the event you yourself would be content to let them drop.
Such representations as yours are necessary to open the subject in debate; they ascertain how the land lies, and serve to clear the ground. Thus I begin:—but after allowing as much as this, I am obliged in honesty to say what I fear, my dear Pusey, will pain you.
Yet I am confident, my very dear Friend, that at least you will not be angry with me if I say, what I must say, or say nothing at all, that there is much both in the matter and in the manner of your Volume, calculated to wound those who love you well but love truth more.
So it is; with the best motives and kindest intentions,—“Caedimur, et totidem plagis consumimus hostem.” We give you a sharp cut, and you return it. You complain of our being “dry, hard, and unsympathizing;” and we answer that you are unfair and irritating.
But we at least have not professed to be composing an Irenicon, when we treated you as foes. There was one of old time who wreathed his sword in myrtle; excuse me—you discharge your olive-branch as if from a catapult.
Do not think I am not serious; if I spoke seriously, I should seem to speak harshly. Who will venture to assert, that the hundred pages which vou have devoted to the Blessed Virgin give other than a one-sided view of our teaching about her, little suited to win us?
It may be a salutary castigation, if any of us have fairly provoked it, but it is not making the best of matters; it is not smoothing the way for an understanding or a compromise.
It leads a writer in the most moderate and liberal Anglican newspaper of the day, the “Guardian,” to turn away from your representation of us with horror. “It is language,” says your heviewer, “which, after having often heard it, we still can only hear with horror. We had rather not quote any of it, or of the comments upon it.”
What could an Exeter Hall orator, what could a Scotch commentator on the Apocalypse, do more for his own side of the controversy in the picture he drew of us? You may be sure that what creates horror on one side, will be answered by indignation on the other, and these are not the most favourable dispositions for a peace conference.
I had been accustomed to think, that you, who in times past were ever less declamatory in controversy than myself, now that years had gone on, and cireumstances changed, had come to look on our old warfare against Rome as cruel and inexpedient.
Indeed, I know that it was a chief objection urged against me only last year by persons who agreed with you in deprecating an Oratory at Oxford, which at that time was in prospect, that such an undertaking would be the signal for the rekindling of that fierce style of polemies which is now out of date.
I had fancied you shared in that opinion; but now, as if to show how imperative you deem its renewal, you actually bring to life one of my own strong sayings in 1841, which had long been in the grave,—that “the Roman Church comes as near to idolatry as can be supposed in a Church, of which it is said, ‘The idols He shall utterly abolish.’ ”—p. 111.