St. John Henry Newman never called the Anglican Church a bulwark against infidelity in England
4 min • Digitized on April 30, 2023
From A Defense of the Teachings of Mary, page 11
By St. John Henry Newman
I know, indeed, and feel deeply, that your frequent references, in your Volume, to what I have lately or formerly written, are caused by your strong desire to be still one with me as far as you can, and by that true affection, which takes pleasure in dwelling on such sayings of mine as you can still accept with the full approbation of your judgment.
I trust I am not ungrateful or irresponsive to you in this respect; but other considerations have an imperative claim to be taken into account. Pleasant as it is to agree with you, I am bound to explain myself in cases in which I have changed my mind, or have given a wrong impression of my meaning, or have been wrongly reported; and, while, I trust that I have higher than such personal motives for addressing you in print, yet it will serve to introduce my main subject, and give me an opportunity for remarks which bear upon it indirectly, if I dwell for a page or two on such matters contained in your Volume as concern myself.
1. The mistake which I have principally in view is the belief which is widely spread, that I have publicly spoken of the Anglican Church as “the great bulwark against infidelity in this land.”
In a pamphlet of yours a year old, you spoke of “a very earnest body of Roman Catholics,” who “rejoice in all the workings of God the Holy Ghost in the Church of England (whatever they think of her), and are saddened by what weakens her who is, in God’s hands, the great bulwark against infidelity in this land.”
The concluding words you were thought to quote from my Apologia. In consequence, Dr. Manning, now our Archbishop, replied to you, asserting, as you say, “the contradictory of that statement.”
In that counter-assertion, he was at the time generally considered (rightly or wrongly as it may be), though writing to you, to be really correcting statements in my Apologia, without introducing my name.
Further, in the Volume, which you have now published, you recur to the saying; and you speak of its author in terms, which, did I not know your partial kindness for me, would hinder me from identifying him with myself.
You say, “The saying was not mine, but that of one of the deepest thinkers and observers in the Roman Communion,” p. 7. A friend has suggested to me that perhaps you mean De Maistre; and, from an anonymous letter which I have received from Dublin, I find it is certain that the very words in question were once used by Archbishop Murray; but you speak of the author of them as if now alive.
At length, a reviewer of your Volume in the “Weekly Register,” distinctly attributes them to me by name, and gives me the first opportunity I have had of disowning them; and this I now do. What, at some time or other, I may have said in conversation or private letter, of course, I cannot tell; but I have never, I am sure, used the word “bulwark” of the Anglican Church deliberately.
What I said in my Apologia was this:—That that Church was “a serviceable breakwater against errors more fundamental than its own.” A bulwark is an integral part of the thing it defends; whereas the words “serviceable” and “breakwater” imply a kind of protection, which is accidental and de facto.
Again, in saying that the Anglican Church is a defence against “errors more fundamental than its own,” I imply that it has errors, and those fundamental.