Rednall. June 18/64 My dear Hutton.
It is very difficult to explain all the ins and outs of any great truth viewed practically, and I do not like to speak on any such to a man of earnest and independent mind, as I believe you to be, lest I do more harm (as *I* should call it) than good;--yet I must say, on occasion of a phrase of yours, that I do *not* teach in *your* sense (if I understand it) that 'authority' is the 'only road to truth in theology.' At least I *cannot* understand you to mean that you have come to a belief in the Incarnation, without authority in *any shape whatever*--though it has not been through the word of the *Church*. For what is there in the phenomena of this world, what innate or quasi-innate idea, what deduction or induction from natural sources of information, which can possibly teach that God became man? Some extra-natural supernatural source of information there must be, some revealed word, on which belief depends, as its root. What you designate as 'self-revealing' is surely a truth which, *when told us from without*, commends itself intensely, manifoldly, intimately to our hearts. If you mean nothing more than this, I agree with your use of the world 'self-revealing'--but where I should differ from you is, that I should not consider such an internal acceptance or embrace of a doctrine a sine qua non condition of its being a truth. And on this ground, because, minds being very various, the subjective acquiescence in a doctrine cannot be the invariable measure and test of its objective reality or its truth. It seems to me that in a revelation one doctrine *must* be harder than another--first relatively to the human intellect generally, next to individuals--as to the latter case, what is hard to one man is not to another, and vice versa--If then a Revelation is made, faith, that is, assent upon pure authority, will necessarily enter into the act of acceptance when the intellect has been awakened. And, while I am far from denying, (just the contrary) that an externally--revealed truth may be in a certain sense, or to a certain point, self revealing, (indeed an eager spontaneous appropriation of an object of faith may in some sense be called an act of love) so on the other hand I am far from asserting that the instrument of revelation, or the oracle of the Authority on which we believe, must necessarily be the Church. The Church is the ordinary, normal Oracle; it is the only visible authority to which we appeal, the only authority which signs and seals a doctrine as the common property of Christians or an Article of the Faith, but still to individuals accidentally there are various instruments or organs of that Divine Authority from whom alone extra or super or praeter natural truth can primarily come, and the Scriptures constitute one of those channels--nay, I will say a Greek poem or philosophical treatise may be such--nay even the Koran. And thus, though I fully believe that certain theological truths, as a future retribution, can be probed independently of revelation, still I do not think any *religion*, as such, in the individual is without what may be called revelation--I mean that God reveals Himself to us *directly*, and we believe in 'Him' because He says 'I am He' to us, whether it be through our conscience, or through Scripture or in ay other way; and that such revelation is binding on the individual to accept, though it creates no obligation for any but himself. On the other hand mere reasonings and inferences, however true, are philosophy, not religion. Whether in nature then, or by the supernatural, all religion is a revelation--an acceptance of truths conveyed to us from a Personal God, but of course in theology we restrict the *word* 'revelation' to the communication of those truths which reason cannot reach, and the formal organ of those truths is the Church, but, I repeat, not the only organ to individuals. This being my view of the subject, there is nothing in what I hold to hinder me believing that you may have a real, (or what Catholics call a divine) faith, coming of supernatural grace, in the Incarnation, even though you gained it from the Scriptures (so that I had not cause to think you had wilfully set yourself against the Catholic Church, which is absurd) and believing too that in no slight degree your whole mind co-operated approvingly and lovingly with your assent to that revealed truth. And therefore I cannot simply accept your account of my doctrine with which I began, that I 'teach that the only road to theological truth is authority,' i.e. in your sense of the words. See how much I have spun out of one small test which you have given me. Very truly Yours John H Newman
