Note 324 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

It is difficult to free Mansel from the charge of seeking to confuse and bewilder; but mere contact with the processes of reasoning in his Bampton Lectures is almost refreshing after much acquaintance with the see-saw of vituperation and platitude which up to that time mostly passed muster for defence of religion in nineteenth-century England. He made for a revival of intellectual life. And he suffered enough at the hands of his co-religionists, including F. D. Maurice, to set up something like compassion in the mind of the retrospective rationalist. Accused of having adopted “the absolute and infinite, as defined after the leaders of German metaphysics,” as a “synonym for the true and living God,” he protested that he had done “exactly the reverse. I assert that the absolute and infinite, as defined in the German metaphysics, and in all other metaphysics with which I am acquainted, is a notion which destroys itself by its own contradictions. I believe also that God is, in some manner incomprehensible by me, both absolute and infinite; and that those attributes exist in Him without any repugnance or contradiction at all. Hence I maintain throughout that the infinite of philosophy is not the true infinite.”324 Charged further with borrowing without acknowledgment from Newman, the Dean was reduced to crediting Newman with “transcendent gifts” while claiming to have read almost nothing by him,325 and winding up with a quotation from Newman inviting men to seek solace from the sense of nescience in blind belief.