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Quote

John Henry Newman


"The phenomenon, admitted on all hands,
is this:
That great portion of what is generally received as Christian truth is,
in its rudiments or in its separate parts,
to be found in heathen philosophies and religions.
For instance,
the doctrine of a Trinity is found both in the East and in the West;
so is the ceremony of washing; so is the rite of sacrifice.

The doctrine of the Divine Word is Platonic;
the doctrine of the Incarnation is Indian;
of a divine kingdom is Judaic;
of Angels and demons is Magian;
the connexion of sin with the body is Gnostic;
celibacy is known to Bonze and Talapoin;
a sacerdotal order is Egyptian;
the idea of a new birth is Chinese and Eleusinian;
belief in sacramental virtue is Pythagorean;
and honours to the dead are a polytheism.
Such is the general nature of the fact before us;

Mr. Milman argues from it,
These things are in heathenism, therefore they are not Christian:'
we, on the contrary, prefer to say,
'these things are in Christianity, therefore they are not heathen.

That is, we prefer to say,
and we think that Scripture bears us out in saying,
that from the beginning the Moral Governor of the world
has scattered the seeds of truth far and wide over its extent;
that these have variously taken root,
and grown as in the wilderness, wild plants indeed but living;
and hence that, as the inferior animals have tokens of an immaterial {381} principle in them,
yet have not souls, so the philosophies and religions of men have their life in certain true ideas,
though they are not directly divine.
What man is amid the brute creation,
such is the Church among the schools of the world;
and as Adam gave names to the animals about him,
so has the Church from the first looked round upon the earth,
noting and visiting the doctrines she found there.

She began in Chaldea,
and then sojourned among the Canannites,
and went down into Egypt, and thence passed into Arabia,
till she rested in her own land.
Next she encountered the merchants of Tyre,
and the wisdom of the East country,
and the luxury of Sheba.
Then she was carried away to Babylon,
and wandered to the schools of Greece.
And wherever she went, in trouble or in triumph, still she was a living spirit,
the mind and voice of the Most High;
sitting in the midst of the doctors,
both hearing them and asking them questions;'
claiming to herself what they said rightly,
correcting their errors, supplying their defects,
completing their beginnings,
expanding their surmises, and thus gradually
by means of them enlarging the range and
refining the sense of her own teaching.

So far then from her creed being of doubtful credit because it resembles foreign theologies,
we even hold that one special way in which Providence
has imparted divine knowledge to us has been by enabling her
to draw and collect it together out of the world,
and, in this sense, as in others,
to 'suck the milk of the Gentiles and to suck the breast of kings.'


John Henry Newman

QuoteConfiding then in the power of Christianity to resist the infection of evil, and to transmute the very instruments and appendages of demon worship to an evangelical use, and feeling also that these usages had originally come from primitive revelations and from the instinct of nature, though they had been corrupted; and that they must invent what they needed, if they did not use what they found; and that they were moreover possessed of the very archetypes, of which paganism attempted the shadows; the rulers of the Church from early times were prepared, should the occasion arise, to adopt, to imitate, or sanction the existing rites and customs of the populace, as well as the philosophy of the educated class."(Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, John Henry Newman, a cardinal by Pope Leo III in 1879, 1878, p351-353)