Distinctions and Reflections on Reserve, Part 1: Keble on Reserve

This article, presented in two parts, traces the use of “Reserve” in the writings of John Keble, John Henry Newman, and Isaac Williams. The principle of reserve was explored in the nineteenth-century Tractarian movement and is the idea that sacred truths should remain hidden until the person is prepared to receive them. Robin C. Selby published a book in 1975 on this topic, entitled, The Principle of Reserve in the Writings of John Henry, Cardinal Newman (Oxford University Press).

Part II, Newman and Isaac Williams on Reserve, is published here.
 

PART I: KEBLE ON RESERVE

The Tractarians stood in a religious and philosophical tradition in which God is infinite, while we are finite. This tradition stresses God’s hiddenness and total otherness, His infinite distance from our finite selves. Isaiah exclaims, “Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself,”1 and Job expresses the same idea:

Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him: On the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold him: he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him.2

There is a veil hanging between us and God, which obscures our sight. As St. Paul put it, “now we see through a glass, darkly.”3

The church fathers were familiar with this idea. Since God is incomprehensible, revealed only through the Logos, Clement tells us that the ruler of all is a being difficult to grasp and comprehend, “ever receding and withdrawing from him who pursues. But He who is far off has—oh ineffable marvel!—come very near … it is clear, then, that the truth has been hidden from us.”4

For Origen, too, God is hidden:

[L]et us grant that God is hard to perceive. Yet He is not the only being hard to perceive. For the divine Logos is hard to perceive; and the same is true of the wisdom in which God has made all things.5

Newman summarized the position in the starkest terms:

I can only answer, that either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded from His presence.6

The hiddenness of God has profound implications for the communication of religious truth. As Clement says, God reveals Himself gradually and in a way that matches our ability to understand:

For the Divine Being cannot be declared as it exists: but as we who are fettered in the flesh were able to listen, so the prophets spake to us; the Lord savingly accommodating Himself to the weakness of men.7

Origen makes the same point; Jesus “always expressed Himself in language appropriate to his hearers,”8 and after His Passion, He “with deliberate care measured out to each individual that which was right.”9

This is similar to the approach adopted by schoolteachers, who do not teach calculus before their pupils have mastered the multiplication tables.

Another implication is reverential awe in our approach to God. Newman expressed this thought on numerous occasions:

Next, if He is still on earth, yet is not visible (which cannot be denied), it is plain that He keeps Himself still in the condition which he chose in the days of his flesh. I mean, He is a hidden Saviour, and may be approached (unless we are careful) without due reverence and fear.10

Withholding truth until the individual is ready for it, the communication of religious truth in the way best suited for each individual, and reverential awe are all aspects of reserve. As Newman put it in his Arians of the Fourth Century, reserve “may be considered as withholding the truth, and the other [i.e., economy] as setting it out to advantage.”11 Reserve and economy are the opposite sides of the same coin.

At the time when Newman was awarded his fellowship in April 1822, Keble was one of the foremost men in Oxford. When Newman was invited to Oriel to receive the congratulations of the Fellows upon his fellowship, he wrote, “I bore it till Keble took my hand, and then felt so abashed and unworthy of the honour done me, that I seemed desirous of quite sinking into the ground.”12

One of the things that Newman learned from Keble was that “material phenomena are both the type and the instruments of real things unseen.”13 Newman was familiar with the concept of the hiddenness of God from a very early age. He recorded that when he was a child, he “thought life might be a dream, or I an Angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow-angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world.”14 At the other end of his life, the epitaph he composed expressed the same thought: “Ex umbris et imaginis in veritatem” —from shadows and phantoms to truth.

Thus, Newman and Keble had a similar cast of mind. It was natural that Newman should regard Keble as a role model. Keble practiced reserve as a matter of course in his everyday life. Isaac Williams recorded an occasion when Robert Wilberforce, who had been reading with Keble during the Long Vacation, observed:

What a strange person Keble is’; there is Law’s Serious Call, instead of leaving it about to do people good, I see he reads it and puts it out of the way, hiding it in a drawer.

This is reserve in action. Keble could not tell whether the book was suitable for whoever chanced to pick it up, so he put it away.

The fundamental doctrine for Keble is that God hides himself and his ways from us:

[T]hrough all the history of God’s Church, as far as we are able to trace it, God’s will has almost always been, that His work should be done in a quiet, retiring way; a way little thought of at the time, either by those who were the chief workmen in it, or by others. Thus the kingdom of God has grown and spread and flourished and borne fruit, no person on earth knows how.15

God’s hiddenness places a heavy responsibility upon us to discern his presence and will, and so Keble tells us that it is a great mercy that, although in a common way God does hide his times from us, “yet He appoints signs, symptoms, forebodings for one spiritually wise to make use of.”16 This revelation may come through types. The religious man, Keble says, is continually instructing himself, or rather allowing God to instruct him, in this way:

He sees, in the course of this world, a constant succession of types and tokens of what will happen in the world to come.17

But more important than particular information, which may be learned in this way, is the habit of mind, which is inculcated by God’s hiddenness. Speaking of the parable “The Sower,” Keble tells us that its purpose is to show us that “His hand is in the waste as well as in the seed that prospers, but we do not see it; the difference is in us, not in the thing itself ... In the meantime, we are left in darkness and mystery, for the trial of our faith.” Then he continues:

Not but that sometimes, even in respect of these which we call accidents, it pleases God to teach us a little of His purpose, and from that little we may well guess what a deep and infinite meaning is hid in those whereof He has made no such disclosures.18

In this way, Keble shows us how little we understand, and how much is unknown to us; God hides himself to place mankind in a state of trial. The state of trial in which mankind lives is always present in Keble’s mind, and we find that it is a recurrent feature of the manifestations of reserve in his writings. He writes in the Sermons for the Christian Year (vol. 11) that God tries us by enabling us to love him and that the Blessed Sacrament furnishes a very special occasion for “trying the perseverance of beginners in the school of God’s love.” Keble continues:

In all such instances, the Divine Lord and Lover of souls (if we may speak it with reverence) would seem to be carrying out a certain law which He hath set Himself, for the perfecting of His Spouse the Church, and of each one of her faithful members. He withdraws Himself for a while, that He may be sought more earnestly, and found with an increase of blessing.19

Keble makes a similar point later, except that in this case he notes that God deliberately refrains from making his will known:

But there are some cases where the difference between slighter sins and those which are deadly is by no means so plain at first sight. God has on purpose forborne to draw the line, that He might put us on our trial, whether we would serve Him with a dutiful heart or no. As if a parent should say to his child, If you go too far in that direction, you will come to a dangerous place, and not tell the child exactly how far he might go: of course, the child would feel it his duty to be very cautious, and rather stop short too soon, than go on at all too far.20

And finally, in the sermon “Christ Present in His Church,” we read:

You will not see Him, but He will see you. He will hide Himself on purpose, that He may try our faith.21

The idea that God hides in order to try our faith is present in Newman’s writings, though not nearly as prominently as we see in Keble. According to Keble, mankind is in the position of children whose parent is mysteriously hidden and who have to keep their gaze fastened in his direction in the hope of discerning his wishes. In such circumstances, certainty is impossible as Keble tells us in the preface to his Sermons, Academical and Occasional, written in 1822:

A very few years’ thoughtful experience will tell us, that a reasonable hope is in general far better than absolute certainty of good, for such beings as most of us are: more in unison with all around us: more conducive to steady improvement: more apt to form in us that resigned, humble character, that “mind of little children,” to which all the promises are made. Scripture again, describing Faith not as full satisfaction of the intellect, but as πραγμάτων ἔλεγχον οὐ βλεπομένων—“making a venture on things unseen”—would seem to encourage a generous trust in that which it is our duty to love; and to discourage, as more or less selfish, all restless cravings for a more certain and systematic knowledge.22

Much of this, particularly the “generous trust,” will be familiar to us from Newman’s writings. But it is the question of certainty with which we are concerned, and it is there that the difference lies. On 12 June 1844 Keble wrote to Newman, saying:

You know I have always fancied that perhaps you were over sanguine in making things square, and did not quite allow enough for Bishop Butler’s notion of doubt and intellectual difficulty being some men’s intended element and appropriate trial.23

The justification of Keble’s position is to be found in his Sermons, Academical and Occasional:

Who among us have led such lives, that we may safely trust our own impressions of having received full satisfaction, either in our judgment or in our feelings? They have too much of a seeming Paradise in them, too little of the Cross. So that a rightly disposed and considerate person, I should think, would rather be startled and rendered suspicious by arguments and statements which sound entirely satisfactory; by experiments appearing to answer in every point, by systems which leave no spot unguarded or unprovided for.24

In this important difference can be seen the reason why Keble emphasizes the trial of faith so much more than Newman. Keble is willing to live without absolute certainty, and so to him God reserves himself in order to try faith. Newman strives for certainty and therefore does not stress this explanation of God’s reserve. Keble is firmly within the High Church tradition, so we may apply to him Charlotte Yonge’s description of her father: “of the old reticent school, reverent and practical.”25 He is afraid that to seek for certainty is to be presumptuous. Newman, on the other hand, shows traces of his Evangelical past in his quest for assurance.

Elsewhere, Keble makes use of the same reasons as Newman, in order to explain God’s hiddenness. God reserves himself from mankind so that men should be watchful and prepare themselves.

Thus, after referring to those who are slothful when they know how much time they have left, he writes:

By this, we may understand how great a mercy it is, that our Saviour has hid from us the exact time of the Last Day, as He has that of our own death. ... But now the uncertainty of the time of our death leaves us, in a manner more at liberty to think of death or not, as we like; to prepare for it or not, according as we choose rather to attend to the counsels of God Almighty, or to the corrupt whispers of the world the flesh and the devil.26

This argument extends even to charity:

However, it is certain that for the most part He does leave men in doubt how far their charitable labours have really done good to the souls of their brethren. This tends to keep them humble and earnest, and watchful to lose no opportunity: and in another way it tends to keep them hopeful.27

The whole meaning of God’s hiddenness is summed up in this sentence from the Sermons for the Christian Year (vol. 4):

He meant that the uncertainty of our spiritual condition should urge us on to continual improvement.28

Keble’s God is mysteriously hidden from men, but for those who are morally fit, God reveals himself and deals directly with them. Thus in the sermon, “The Secret of the Lord,” Keble writes:

Thus you see that a mixture of love and something like fear is the temper which best prepares a man to be trusted with his neighbour’s secrets. And the Scripture every where seems to teach, that it is much the same kind of character which makes a man fit to be entrusted with heavenly mysteries, with the secrets of God Almighty. ... Those who approach God with a deep reverence, with an earnest desire to please Him, and with a dread of offending Him; those are the persons, to whom He will, by degrees, reveal Himself more and more. He will open their eyes, that they may understand “wondrous things out of His law.” It is not much learning nor cleverness, nor being quick and ready to recollect the words of Scripture, which enables men to think rightly of such awful mysteries as this of to-day: but it is devotion and seriousness of heart.29

Direct communication such as this is all the more necessary because of the indistinctness of the Bible:

Again, there are certain great secrets of religion, wonders of Almighty God and of the world to come, which we are taught indistinctly in the Bible, and are given to understand, that the further knowledge of them is to be the reward of a holy and obedient life: such as the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity.30

Once more we see Keble firmly within the High Church tradition. For High Churchmen, such as Hawkins, the Provost of Oriel, the Bible was intended to prove, rather than to teach. Hence the High Churchmen disliked the distribution of Bibles by the Bible Societies, unless prayer books were distributed as well. Hence, too, they valued tradition as a means of elucidating the indistinctness of the Bible. Thus, when Keble writes like this, he is emphatically one whose desire is to cling fast to the tradition in which he was born, and whose most earnest advice was, “Never be original.”

If we react properly to the Bible’s indistinctness, live a holy life, and yield ourselves up to God’s instruction, then, like growing healthy children who come by degrees to understand the world, we, “without knowing how, shall have our eyes gradually opened to the glories of that other, that unseen world, which is round us on every side, if we did but know it.”31 All these are familiar Tractarian themes; the necessity for holiness, moral training, humble obedience, the indistinctness of the Bible, and the closeness of the unseen world. What follows, too, is familiar from Newman’s writings, except that Keble teaches a more absolute doctrine of divine instruction. Thus, he asks if there have never been moments when some saying of our Lord or St. Paul, which has been familiar all our life long, “has flashed upon you, you know not how or why, in a new light, and seemed different from what it ever was before; a ray from the All-seeing Eye, and an arrow aimed by the unerring Arm, lighting exactly where you needed warning or correction.” He continues,

O beware, as you love your soul, how you behave at such moments! God is then dealing directly with your heart and conscience in particular. It concerns you beyond measure that He deal not with you in vain.32

Indeed, in another sermon, Keble says that whenever a person thinks worthily on the secrets of God, “that person is under the immediate teaching of God’s Spirit: he is partaker, in some slight measure, of that which is called inspiration.”33

Keble goes on to make a point that is also made by Newman. We think that the truths of the Gospel, the meaning of the scriptures, and the lessons of the church, are matters on which we may use our judgment:

Be not deceived: it is not so. Left to your own skill and sense, you will surely go wrong in these things. If you are right in them, it is only because the Father is drawing you to Him by His Spirit. Think earnestly on this, and let it make you very humble, very full of fear and reverential awe.34

Religion is not a matter on which we should employ private judgment; all we have to do is to obey faithfully, and not to trample heedlessly on forbidden ground. God is hidden from us, and all we have to go on are his commands. Thus, we are tempted to go by our own judgment and our own wishes, but if we really knew the true case, then we would know that we can have only one wish, which is to obey his wishes. Newman often made this point, for example:

The whole system of what is called cause and effect, is one of mystery; and this instance, if it may be called one, supplies abundant matter of praise and adoration to a pious mind. It suggests to us, equally with the topics which have already come before us, how very much our knowledge of God’s ways is but on the surface. What are those deep hidden reasons why Christ went and the Spirit came? Marvellous and glorious, beyond our understanding! Let us worship in silence; meanwhile, let us jealously maintain this, and every other portion of our Creed, lest, by dropping jot or tittle [i.e., the smallest part], we suffer the truths concealed therein to escape from us.35

We have considered the reasons assigned by Keble for the reserve employed by God towards ourselves, and we have seen how it is gradually removed to lead certain specially favored, morally fit persons in towards divine truth. Keble summarizes this process in the sermon “The Secret of the Lord”:

But as He in His mercy reveals to those blessed ones [angels] continually more and more of what He is about, so there are certain persons among men whom He favours in the same way, trusting them, and telling them His secrets.36

Keble distinguishes between those for whom God is entirely hidden, and those for whom the veil between them and God is removed. These are the people “who approach God with a deep reverence, with an earnest desire to please Him, and with a dread of offending Him.”37 In between these two groups are those who are gradually trained to look towards him, and this is done by means of the church. To illustrate this, Keble employs a striking image of the way in which we look at the sun. We do not shut our eyes and then look suddenly up at it. Instead, we look “first through a curtain, or through our shaded hand, and we let in more light by little and little, till at last we are able to bear as much as is good for us.”38 Similarly, if we darken the room of our heart by shutting out good thoughts and prayers, we shall be unable to bear the glory of his final appearing:

But if we use the helps which He has provided for us in His Church, then our eyes will gradually strengthen, and be able to look upon God. Our good works done in humble faith, our prayers, our holy readings, our Sundays, and Saints’ days, and most of all our Holy Communions, will be so many quiet openings of the shutters, so many partial liftings of the veil, whereby He will teach and school us to look up.39

Because God is hidden, the church is given its teaching role. Step by step, we are slowly taught to look through the veil. Church prayers play an important part in this, and in his sermon “On the Litany,” Keble shows how church prayers are channels in which emotions may flow, providing means for their expression without exposing them to the unsympathetic gaze of others. God knows how much good it does us to have the prayers one of another, and so he appoints that all should pray with all and for all.

[A]t the same time, because He knows also that it is generally neither good nor pleasant for men to intermeddle with their neighbors’ secret joy and sorrow… He has guided the Church to set down the prayers in such words as shall come home to every man, yet not draw particular attention to any It is a most sweet mixture of sympathy and reserve.40

This is a most important point, to which Keble devotes a good deal of space in his Lectures on Poetry. Keble believes that no one wishes to expose his emotions:

[T]here lingers, I believe, even in the most abandoned a higher and better instinct, which counsels silence as to many things: and, if they are willing to obey the instinct, they will rather die than declare openly what is in their mind.41

For Keble, poetry serves the function of a safety-valve for those pent-up emotions. In the Lectures on Poetry, he asks “how can the needs of modest reserve, and that becoming shrinking from publicity before noticed, be better served than if a troubled or enthusiastic spirit is able to express its wishes by those indirect methods best known to poets?”42 He therefore concludes that the glorious art of poetry is a kind of medicine divinely bestowed upon men, which gives “healing relief to secret mental emotion, yet without detriment to modest reserve: and, while giving scope to enthusiasm, yet rules it with order and due control.”43 Poetry then, provides a form that governs and shapes what would otherwise be inchoate emotion. “Enthusiasm” is harnessed, instead of allowed to burn itself uselessly and destructively out. Precisely the same function is performed by forms of prayers, which are vehicles for emotions. If Evangelical preaching roused strong emotions, as a means of inducing people to repent, then Keble was cautious of emotions, and preferred them to work through set forms of prayer. He did not wish to repress or avoid emotion, but he was distrustful of emotions for their own sake and wished to set them to useful work. Here Keble is again the true descendant of the eighteenth-century High Churchmen, who were suspicious. Newman’s feelings on this subject are very similar to Keble’s, except that while it was something Keble inherited, Newman had to discover it for himself, when he emerged from his Evangelicalism. This is why Newman, like Keble, urged his hearers to use the forms of prayers provided by the church, rather than to rely upon their own:

This is what a great many persons do not understand; they think that none are to be accounted fellow-Christians but those who evidence themselves to be such to their fallible understandings; and hence they encourage others, who wish for their praise, to practise all kinds of display, as a seal of their regeneration. Who can tell the harm this does to the true modesty of the Christian spirit? Instead of using the words of the Church, and speaking to God, men are led to use their own words, and make man their judge and justifier. They think it necessary to tell out their secret feelings, and to enlarge on what God has done to their own souls in particular. And thus making themselves really answerable for all the words they use, which are altogether their own, they do in this case become hypocrites; they do say more than they can in reality feel.44

A clear echo of the Lectures on Poetry may be heard in Newman’s Sermons bearing on Subjects of the Day:

Scripture is a refuge in any trouble; only let us be on our guard against seeming to use it further than is fitting, or doing more than sheltering ourselves under its shadow. Let us use it according to our measure. It is far higher and wider than our need; and its language veils our feelings while it gives expression to them.45

Like Newman, Keble drew upon the principle of reserve to explain why God hid himself from men. Similarly, he found that Christ employed reserve, from the accounts in Scripture. Describing Christ’s general behavior, he tells us that

He disclosed not all His glory and greatness at once, but gave one token after another of His Presence; He manifested Himself, even to His best beloved, not all at once, but by little and little. And this He did for two reasons especially. His will was both to prepare us for His Coming, and to deal gently with us when He came.46

As before, Christ only discloses himself to those who are morally fit, and so Keble says that if a man neglects Communion, the fact of our Lord’s Godhead is apt to be lost out of his mind:

For it has ever been His way, to hide it on purpose from those who are unworthy, and to reveal it to those only, who, like Nicodemus, seriously seek Him.47

Even those in his confidence did not really understand:

[H]ow plainly soever He may now seem to us to have spoken, His hearers constantly misunderstood Him.48

In his eagerness to show that “in all the history of our Lord’s manifestation on earth ... there is a wonderful mixture of openness and reserve,”49 Keble subjects some texts of scripture to rather strained interpretation. Thus, he hastily qualifies the text “there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither is any thing kept secret, but that it should be known and come abroad” by adding:

Not, however, all at once, nor any how, nor to all sorts of persons, but in due order, manner, and time, and to those who are fitly prepared.50

It seems as though Keble had found an exception to his thesis that Christ reserved himself and so interpreted the text so that it conformed to his rule. Again, Keble quotes the passage where the disciples marveled that Jesus was talking with a woman, and asks if the words do not “imply a general rule of reserve in our Master’s conversation, which for our sakes He vouchsafed to set Himself, and which all who desire to walk warily and perfect themselves in His Divine image would do well to bear in mind?”51 Keble’s is not the only obvious interpretation of this passage; it is clear that his judgment was impaired by his desire to find reserve exemplified everywhere in Christ’s conduct. This is in marked contrast to Newman’s practice of reserve. Keble was perhaps obsessed by the subject of reserve and tended to see it everywhere, but Newman did not strain his subject-matter in this way.

We have seen that Keble suggested that we ought to follow Christ’s example, which is to practice reserve ourselves. To provide further models for the practice of reserve, he invested St. Bartholomew with the attributes for which he himself was famous. Keble first tells us that we know very little about most of the Apostles, and that we would like to know a great deal more of St. Bartholomew:

[B]ut it has pleased God to hide him from us. And we may be sure that, whatever good we might have gained from knowing more particulars of his holy works and ways, nothing could have done us more good than quietly following the pattern which he and his holy brethren have set us; doing our work faithfully in God’s household, without seeking to be praised or known for it.52

Keble is seen here at his strongest, recommending the quiet retirement and labor, which he practiced himself. He went further and taught his hearers to practice reserve in their preaching:

[W]e must so teach them as they may be able to bear; tempting them as little as possible to irreverent hearing or careless forgetting.53

It is evident that these two aspects of Keble’s teaching, and the example he set, impressed Newman greatly. In this sermon he combines both:

Never must we solicitously press the truth upon those who do not profit by what they already possess. It dishonours Christ, while it does the scorner harm, not good. It is casting pearls before swine. We must wait for all opportunities of being useful to men, but beware of attempting too much at once. We must impart the Scripture doctrines, in measure and season, as they can bear them; not being eager to recount them all, rather, hiding them from the world. Seldom must we engage in controversy or dispute; for it lowers the sacred truths to make them a subject for ordinary debate. Common propriety suggests rules like these at once. Who would speak freely about some revered friend in the presence of those who did not value him? or who would think he could with a few words overcome their indifference towards him? or who would hastily dispute about him when his hearers had no desire to be made love him?

Rather, shunning all intemperate words, let us show light before men by our works. Here we must be safe. In doing justice, showing mercy, speaking the truth, resisting sin, obeying the Church,—in thus glorifying God, there can be no irreverence.54

Newman glances at the usual scripture quotation, then draws out some of the consequences of the principle of reserve, such as communicating religious knowledge gradually, or avoiding controversy. Where Keble is dogmatic or appeals to scripture, Newman appeals to everyday psychology.

Considerable differences can be detected between the teaching of Keble and Newman in the application of reserve to people’s behavior. Thus, Keble laments that we are sadly apt to forget what a great gift the Bible is:

[W]e take them as matters of course, as being what every body has. Yet three quarters of mankind never saw or heard of a Bible; and for you and me to have the use of one is indeed a mark of God’s distinguishing favour. If we neglect or abuse it, woe unto us!55

Here, Keble commits himself to the opinion that Isaac Williams took up in his tracts on reserve, when he regretted that the Bible had been so widely distributed. While Keble uses this to express one of his favorite themes, that advantages such as this make our responsibility all the greater, Williams merely deplores something which, as all his adversaries were not slow to point out, cannot be undone. Newman never entered this fruitless debate, since he held that in certain parts of the world the Gospel was preached just as effectively without the Bible.56

Again, Keble often advocated the employment of reserve towards those who are morally unfit. In the sermon “Worldly Toleration and Brotherly Love” he writes:

By this we see that a kind of reserve, a prudent way of keeping our distance, while the ungodly are in our sight, is very likely to please God far better than that cool undistinguishing good-nature which the men of our times so much approve.57

No great objections can be made to this. It is only when the idea is fully developed, as it is in the sermon “God’s Family, a School of Good Works,” that we see the extent of Keble’s proposals. There he asks if it would not be true Christian charity to act upon his rule a little more conscientiously than the world would teach us to do, “treating those persons, who are notoriously guilty of what God has condemned, however usual; treating them I say, with a kind of reserve, as though they were already excommunicated; as, no doubt, they are in heaven? I say, this would be the truest charity.”58

It is now plain that he is attempting to re-introduce the more rigorous Church discipline, including excommunication, advocated by his favorite Bishop Wilson.59 Keble refers to this topic many times during his sermons,60 but Newman, on the contrary, barely touches upon it.61 If a reason may be suggested for this difference, it is that he saw that Keble’s idea poses grave problems, for it places the decision to excommunicate, which in Wilson’s day was the Bishop’s into the hands of those who were not fit to excommunicate others. It encourages men to be officious and righteous in searching out faults. Newman knew, perhaps better than Keble, how deceptive appearances might be and how difficult it was to judge rightly of conduct.

Newman agreed with Keble on another practical application of reserve, that is avoidance of speculation and dispute. Thus, Keble writes:

All young persons, almost, require to be taught this submission [that is, subjecting themselves ‘to the directions of the most Holy Catholic Church’]; but those surely above the rest, who are inclined to dispute much about religion: who feel as if they could not refrain from uttering the words which rise to their lips, even on the most sacred subjects. Well would it be for such, and often it would be well for others too, if they would set themselves a rule to keep silence, and listen to the voice of better, though, to outward seeming, not wiser men.62

Newman echoes Keble:

The fashion of this day, indeed, is ever to speak about all religious things at once, and never to introduce one, but to introduce all, and never to maintain reserve about any.63

Again, we are not surprised to find that Keble anticipated Newman in showing that our own minds hide God from ourselves. In the sermon, “The Duty of Patience at Our Own Imperfections,” Keble tells us that we cannot follow where Christ has gone because we are subject to so many imperfections and wanderings, and exclaims:

How hard is it to most persons, even to those of the best intentions, to fix their minds entirely on the petitions which they are offering to their God, whether in Church or at home, whether alone or with others!64

Next, he describes the measures people take to fix their mind on what they are doing:

[Y]et, in some way, no one can tell how, some disturbing thought will interfere: often the merest and most contemptible trifle will be sufficient to interrupt our prayers or meditations, and come for the time between our God and us, so as effectually, for the time, to hide Him from us.

Keble feels that this is another trial which we must endure:

[N]othing at all to distract and teaze our spirits, all this, even for a very short time, would be too much joy and happiness for sinful man.65

It is at once apparent how similar this is to what Newman often says in the Parochial and Plain Sermons (vol. 4), that the human mind is so constituted that it receives true knowledge only with difficulty.66

The principle of reserve is particularly conducive to the temper of toleration. If a mind is able to withhold itself, to refrain from action, then it allows latitude of breathing-space. If no such space existed, then personality would play directly on personality. To give an example, if someone said something foolish, it might invite a crushing retort, but the principle of reserve dictates that such a display of force should be withheld. Newman understood this fully, as we see from his social theory, when he said that society gets on by a “refined system of mutual concession.”67

Thus, it is of interest to find that, in a hazy and incomplete fashion, Keble expressed something of this in a sermon, “Christian Forbearance.” There he tells us that the dutiful Christian way of bearing wrong and provoking things is to keep ourselves calm for Christ’s sake, and to quell the risings of anger and discontent. Then we shall be gentle and considerate in our behavior to others, attempting to make the best of things, and trying to do as we would have others do to us; this is true toleration.68

Reserve in Keble’s mind sprang from a “simple feeling that such and such topics have something holy about them, and require to be treated with a certain self-restraint.”69 It was spontaneous, something he believed was natural to every man. When Keble was brought up as a High Churchman, he imbibed the principle of reserve and was taught that the principle affected such topics as, for example, the question of emotion in religion. His brand of reserve does not wander far afield; it is content to stay in the pastures where it was born. Reserve was applied to several traditional subjects, but no more And so, in Keble we do not find the extraordinarily varied manifestations of reserve which are commonplace in Newman’s writings. And since the principle remained comparatively undeveloped in Keble’s mind, it is occasionally sophisticated, and at other times excessively literal. At such times, as we saw in his interpretation of scripture, he found reserve in everything.

The similarities and differences between the uses that Keble and Newman find for the principle of reserve are both instructive. Keble, we see, was imbued with reserve by upbringing, while for Newman the principle of reserve was constitutional. Enough has been said to show that reserve was prominent on the surface of Keble’s work, and we know from descriptions such as Isaac Williams’s that reserve was conspicuous in his behavior. Further, we have been able to detect cases where Keble’s influence on Newman is obvious.

The differences between Keble and Newman are principally in Newman’s use of economy. As we have seen, Newman defined economy as setting the truth out to advantage. In the Appendix on “Economy” in the Apologia, Newman gives an everyday example of economy in action:

When we would persuade others, we do not begin by treading on their toes.70

This is economy at its simplest. At the other end of the scale, economy relates to the idea of partial representation of unseen realities. Since the evidence on behalf of religion is imperfect, some logical and rhetorical means must be devised for using what has been given us to establish what has been withheld from us. In An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine Newman uses the language of the calculus:

[W]hole objects do not create in the intellect whole ideas, but are, to use a mathematical phrase, thrown into series, into a number of statements, strengthening, interpreting, correcting each other, and with more or less exactness approximating, as they accumulate, to a perfect image.71

In the Apologia, Newman distinguished his approach from Keble’s:

Mr Keble met this difficulty [the danger that Butler’s maxim that ‘probability is the guide of life’ might mean that absolute certainty is impossible] by ascribing the firmness of assent which we give to religious doctrine, not to the probabilities which introduced it, but to the living power of faith and love which accepted it.72

Newman considered that this was beautiful and religious, but not logical. For him, certitude “was the result of an assemblage of concurring and converging probabilities.”73 This was the approach he employed in the Grammar of Assent.

Thus, Keble’s distinction between Newman’s wish to make things square, and his own willingness to live in doubt and intellectual difficulty is fundamental to the difference between them. Reserve was natural to Keble, but he had no use for economy. Newman went much further than Keble in his application of reserve and economy. However, his friendship with Keble provided the right atmosphere in which his innate feeling for the principle of reserve could flourish. For the Tractarians, Keble provided a pattern of the principle of reserve at work, a pattern all the more striking for its narrow range. 

Continues in Part II: Newman and Isaac Williams on Reserve

1 Isaiah 45:15.

2 Job 23:8–9.

3 1 Corinthians 13:12.

4 Clement of Alexandria, The Writings of Clement of Alexandria, trans. W. Wilson (T & T Clark, 1867/1869), 2:4.

5 Origen, Contra Celsum, trans. H. Chadwick (Cambridge University Press, 1953), 363.

6 Newman, Apo, ed. M. J. Svaglic (Oxford University Press, 1967), 217.

7 Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis, in The Writings of Clement of Alexandria, 2:44.

8 Origen, Contra Celsum, 97.

9 Origen, Contra Celsum, 117.

10 Newman, (25 December 1837), PS (Rivingtons, 1868), 4:249.

11 Newman, Ari (Rivingtons, 1876), 65.

12 Newman, Apo (Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1864), 76.

13 Isaac Williams, The Autobiography of Isaac Williams, BD (Longmans, Green, 1892), 28.

14 Newman, Apo, 56.

15 John Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year: From Advent to Trinity (J. H. Parker, 1875), 321.

16 John Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year: Lent to Passiontide (James Parker, 1875), 4:59.

17 John Keble, Sermons Occasional and Parochial (James Parker, 1878), 404.

18 Keble, Sermons Occasional and Parochial, 401.

19 John Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year (James Parker, 1880), 11:470.

20 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, first preached 1851, 4:357–58.

21 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, first preached 1848, 11:264.

22 John Keble, Sermons, Academical and Occasional (John Henry Parker, 1848), lxvii.

23 Edited at the Birmingham Oratory, Correspondence of John Henry Newman with John Keble and Others 1839–1845 (Longmans, Green, 1917), 320.

24 Keble, Sermons, Academical and Occasional, 307.

25 Quoted in Georgina Battiscombe, John Keble: A Study in Limitations (Constable, 1963), 11.

26 John Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year (James Parker, 1875), 1:229, 231.

27 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, first preached 1842, 11:163.

28 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, 4:133.

29 John Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year (James Parker, 1876), 7:345–46.

30 John Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year (James Parker, 1878), 9:174.

31 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, 9:175.

32 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, first preached 1863, 11:423–24.

33 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, 7:211.

34 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, 7:212.

35 Newman, PS (Rivingtons, 1868), end of 1834, 2:213.

36 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, 7:344.

37 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, 7:345–46.

38 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, 1:121–22.

39 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, 1:121–22.

40 John Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year (James Parker, 1876), 3:374.

41 Edward K. Francis, trans., Keble’s Lectures on Poetry 1832–1841 (Clarendon, 1912), 1:20.

42 Francis, Keble’s Lectures on Poetry, 1:22.

43 Francis, Keble’s Lectures on Poetry, 1: 22.

44 Newman, PS (Longmans, Green, 1894), first preached 23 October 1831, 1:149–50.

45 Newman, SD (Longmans, Green, 1909), first preached 25 September 1843, 408.

46 John Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year (James Parker, 1875), 2:2.

47 John Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year (James Parker, 1876), 5:116.

48 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, 11:418.

49 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, 2:279,

50 John Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year (James Parker, 1879), 10:410.

51 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, first preached 1863, 11:64–65.

52 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, 10:322.

53 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, 11:482.

54 Newman, PS, first preached May 8, 1831, 1:307–308.

55 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, 1:258–59.

56 See Newman, VM (Basil Montagu Pickering, 1877), 1:243: “Heathen nations have commonly been converted, not by the Bible, but by Missionaries.” See also Newman, HS (Basil Montagu Pickering, 1872), 3:15: “The Scriptures indeed were at hand for the study of those who could avail themselves of them; but St. Irenæus does not hesitate to speak of whole races, who had been converted to Christianity, without being able to read them.” See also Newman, Call (Burns and Oates, 1881), where only a small portion of the New Testament is available.

57 John Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year (James Parker, 1878), 8:50.

58 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, 9:383.

59 See, for example, Tract 37: “Bishop Wilson’s Form of Excommunication.” The preamble is: “It is well known that Bishop Wilson, who presided over the Church in the Isle of Man, from 1698 to 1755, was stirred up by Him who made him overseer, to revive the Primitive Discipline, and was remarkably blest in his undertaking. The principle of this discipline is, that no man who sinned openly, whether in creed or practice, should be allowed to remain in free and full communion with the Church; but should be censured, put to penance, suspended, or excommunicated, as the case might require. The following is the form he proposed to use, in inflicting the extreme punishment of excommunication.” Keble published Wilson’s “Life.”

60 Compare Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, 8:30.

61 Almost the only example is Newman’s PS (Longmans, Green, 1891), first preached 8 June 1834, 3:186: “And further, the Christian keeps aloof from sinners in order to do them good.”

62 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, 10:56.

63 Newman, DA (Basil Montagu Pickering, 1872), 181.

64 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, 5:96.

65 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, 5:96–97.

66 Compare Newman’s PS (Longmans, Green, 1891), first preached April 30, 1837, 4:75: “It is not at all easy to keep the mind from wandering in prayer, to keep out all intrusive thoughts about other things.”

67 Newman, LD, 15:402.

68 Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year, 9:130.

69 Keble, Sermons, Academical and Occasional, 160.

70 Newman, Apo, 71.

71 Newman, Dev (James Toovey, 1845), 94.

72 Newman, Apo, 78–79.

73 Newman, Apo, 78–79.