John Henry Newman’s Historical Sketches gathers essays and lectures from across a long career, mixing history, biography, and religious polemic. The volume opens with a sustained study of the Turks and their relation to Europe, then turns to a life of Cicero, a critical examination of Apollonius of Tyana, and a set of essays on primitive Christianity. Newman wrote the pieces at different times and for different occasions—the Turkish lectures were delivered at the Catholic Institute of Liverpool in October 1853—and the book carries the marks of that occasional origin: a scholar thinking aloud before an audience, gathering what “any ordinarily furnished library” could supply and arranging old facts in his own way.
The dedication to Bishop David Moriarty of Kerry frames the whole enterprise as an act of gratitude. Newman admits he never sought formal leave for the volume because part of it was written while he was still an Anglican controversialist and could not consistently receive a Catholic bishop’s sanction. He recalls Moriarty finding him in the narrow streets of Birmingham twenty-four years earlier and never failing him since, especially when Newman was called to Ireland to initiate a great Catholic institution. The dedication is dated Birmingham, October 23, 1872.
From the Tartar Steppes to the Walls of Constantinople
A Dedication Forged in Birmingham
Newman opens the volume with a dedication to David Moriarty, Bishop of Kerry, and the gesture carries a quiet apology inside it. He did not seek formal leave for the inscription, he explains, because one portion of the book was written while he was still an Anglican controversialist and could not honestly carry a Catholic bishop’s sanction. The name is set there to acknowledge kindness rather than to claim patronage. Moriarty had taken an interest in Newman from the moment the Oratory came to Birmingham, had found him twenty-four years earlier in the narrow streets of that city, and had never failed him since. Newman remembers especially the bishop’s prudent counsel and anxious sympathy when he was called to Ireland to set a great Catholic institution on foot; it was Moriarty who directed him to men whose learning and zeal strengthened the University, and who opened a wide circle of friends to him. The dedication is dated from Birmingham, October 23, 1872.
A Prefatory Notice on Politics and Religion
The Turkish sketch, Newman explains, began as lectures delivered at the Catholic Institute of Liverpool in October 1853. He claims no more than to have gathered materials available in any ordinarily furnished library; never intending publication, he sometimes borrowed the very words and phrases of the authorities he consulted, and aimed only at grouping old facts in his own way. Then comes a protest that governs the whole book: a minister of religion should not be made a politician. Political questions are settled mainly by political expediency and touch theology only indirectly. The Holy See’s voice, he observes, has gone unheeded by the Powers of Europe for five centuries; had its advice been followed, there would be no Turks in Europe for the Russians to turn out. Christian Powers are bound to keep lawful promises to the Sultan; the Czar attacks an infamous Power, enemy of God and man; and the Catholic should beware of strengthening the Czar’s cause by ignoring its strong point. A reader who sides with the Spanish people against the Moors should, in consistency, wish Godspeed to any Christian Power that aims to deliver Eastern Europe from the Turkish yoke.
The Storehouse of Nations
The collision between Russia and Turkey, Newman argues, is one scene in an age-long conflict between North and South—the North aggressive, the South defensive—a pattern found in the earliest histories and in the Prophets, where the North is the quarter of judgment. The South holds gifts to tempt invaders; the North holds multitudes to be tempted. The North is the storehouse of nations: a vast plain stretching from the Chinese Sea to the Euxine, the Rhine, even the Bay of Biscay, lying between and beyond the fortieth and fiftieth degrees of latitude—the wild common, encampment, highway, and horse-path of restless populations. Its European portion has been reclaimed; the East remains in primitive neglect under roving barbarians. This Eastern territory is Tartary, some four hundred to eleven hundred miles wide north to south and nearly five thousand long east to west, divided by three or four mountain chains. Its valleys confine the wanderer to eastward or westward courses, and the westward slope invites him west. Near the meridian of the Sea of Aral the ranges cease, opening a north or south roaming. In the most northerly lofty range stands a great mountain identified by some geographers with classical Imaus, called Caf by the Saracens and Altai by the Turks—sometimes the Girdle of the Earth, sometimes the Golden Mountain from its gold and metals. It is said to lie two thousand miles equidistant from the Caspian, the Frozen Sea, the North Pacific, and the Bay of Bengal: the high capital of Tartary, which has sent forth innumerable populations into regions protected by their inland character from foreign observation and civilizing influence.
The Nomad and His Horse
To eat bread in the sweat of his brow is mankind’s original punishment, and the indolent savage shrinks from it. Corn, wine, and oil have no charms at such a price; he turns to the horse, the cow, and the sheep, choosing to be a grazier rather than a tiller. He feeds his animals on spontaneous vegetation and feeds himself on their flesh, remaining while the crop lasts and migrating when it is exhausted—the nomad life. In maritime countries he fishes; in woods he takes roots and wild honey or follows the chase. Inclosed in continent and wilderness, he draws domestic animals about him and becomes a king and father of beasts, advancing a first low step in civilization that the hunter or fisher never attains. The horse is the instrument of that civilization: it lets him govern and guide his sheep and cattle, carries him to the chase, transports him and his, and his very locomotion secures a household and personal property. The horse is food in life and death—its flesh nourishes when dead, its milk supplies the intoxicating liquor koumiss, which has from time immemorial served the Tartar instead of wine or spirits. He may be said to live on horseback, eating and sleeping without dismounting, till fable made him a centaur. Hence the ancient Saxons had a horse for their war ensign; Ottoman ordinances are dated from the imperial stirrup, and horsetails at the palace gate signal Ottoman war; the Turcomans and Usbeks speak of the time of a gallop, as Catholic ritual measures by a Miserere and St Ignatius by a Pater Noster. Tartars contemptuously called houses the sepulchres of the living and could hardly be persuaded to cross a threshold. Women and children could not live on horseback.
Friars and Merchants Before the Khan
The Pope’s missionaries reach the Tartar encampment on Persia’s northern frontier and announce their mission from the Vicar of Christ: a simple exhortation to repent and believe. The answer is prompt. The Tartars sentence the friars to execution, hesitating only over the mode—flaying them alive and stuffing their skins with hay to send back to the Pope, or placing them in the front rank against the Franks to die by their own countrymen’s weapons. One of the Khan’s wives begs them off; they are held in a sort of captivity for three years and finally sent away with their lives. The merchants fare differently. Returning to Venice after a quarter century, their appearance and poor apparel are so changed that even their nearest friends do not know them. Gaining entrance to their own house with difficulty, they give a splendid entertainment to the city’s principal persons; after the banquet, following Oriental custom, they put on and off a series of magnificent dresses, distributing them to attendants, then enter in their weather-stained travelling clothes. The company wonders, and wonders more when they unrip the linings and patches, pouring out a prodigious quantity of jewels—their expedient for conveying gains to Europe. Persons of all ranks and ages crowd to them; they are the wonder of their day.
Cruelty, Gluttony, and Magnificence
Three principal ethical characteristics of a Tartar prince emerge from the history of Scythians and Huns, illustrated from Zingis and Timour: savage cruelty, brutal gluttony, and barbarous magnificence.
The Holy League and the Standard of Lepanto
Pius V held the Pontifical throne barely six years, yet he carried forward his predecessors’ fixed hostility to the Turkish power. The Ottomans were still advancing: they had just taken Cyprus with the active help of the Greek population, massacring the Latin nobility and clergy and flaying the Venetian governor alive. Against this the Saint could not rouse Christendom to defend itself, for half of it had turned Protestant and perhaps secretly felt the Turk to be a friend and ally; England, France, and Germany were out of the question. With great effort he formed a holy league between himself, King Philip of Spain, and the Venetians. Don John of Austria, Philip’s half brother, took command-in-chief, with Colonna as admiral. The treaty was signed on 24 May, but cowardice and jealousy meant autumn came with nothing done: the armies were united only with difficulty, the commanders’ quarrels settled only with difficulty, while the Ottomans scoured the Gulf of Venice, blockaded the ports, and terrified the city itself.
The Pope secured success by weapons the Turks did not understand: a Triduo of supplication at Rome, a jubilee to the whole Christian world, and the Holy Virgin’s interest. After High Mass he presented his admiral a red damask standard embroidered with a crucifix, St. Peter and St. Paul, and the legend “In hoc signo vinces.” He sent to Messina assuring the armament that if, relying on divine rather than human help, they attacked the enemy, God would not be wanting to His own cause; he enjoined good conduct, repressing swearing, gaming, riot, and plunder. A three days’ fast was proclaimed, beginning with the Nativity of our Lady; all went to confession and communion and took the indulgences. They moved across the foot of Italy to Corfu, turned back to the Gulf of Corinth, and on 7 October found the Turkish fleet between Lepanto and the Echinades on the north and Patras in the Morea on the south, and began the engagement towards evening.
The Pope’s Vision and the Turning of the Turkish Tide
The night before and the day itself the aged, malady-broken Saint passed in the Vatican in fasting and prayer, while monasteries and colleges prayed. When the Pontifical treasurer asked an audience, Pius suddenly stopped, threw open the window, gazed into heaven, and said, “This is no time for business; go, return thanks to the Lord God. In this very hour our fleet has engaged the Turkish, and is victorious.” The treasurer saw him fall on his knees before the altar.
The victory was memorable: upwards of 30,000 Turks said to have lost their lives, 3,500 taken prisoner, almost the whole fleet captured. Quoting Protestant authorities, the Sultan neither ate, drank, showed himself, nor saw anyone for three days; it was the greatest blow since Timour’s victory over Bajazet a century and a half before, the turning-point in Turkish history. Sultans had isolated successes afterwards, but from that day they undeniably and constantly declined, losing prestige and self-confidence, later victories being but complements and reverberations of Lepanto. The catastrophe reversed the hosts of Turkistan and Tartary by an old man—a repetition, under different circumstances, of the history of Leo and the Hun; in the combatants we see the contrast of good and evil, the Enemy rushing forward with the fury of wild beasts, the Church combating with the energetic perseverance and heroic obstinacy of St. Pius.
The Prospects of the Turks
A new lecture, “Barbarism and Civilization,” turns from past to future. The author’s object in sketching Turkish history has been to show the race’s relation to Europe and Christendom, not from interest in them for their own sake but because present circumstances bring them before us. He has considered their antecedents—whence, how, and where they came, and what title they have to be there—and now considers their future, without hazarding political prophecy, only setting down existing characteristics that suggest a direction.
It is safe to say the Ottomans will come to an end: all human power terminates, states rise to fall. Nineveh, Tyre, Babylon, Persia, Egypt, and Greece each had its day; the conqueror of Carthage wept over its flames foreseeing Rome’s conflagration. The Saracens and Moguls had their day; Spain, Poland, Venice, and Genoa are extinct or in decrepitude. Empires are commonly sudden manifestations of power, short-lived as sudden: the Roman empire did not last beyond five hundred years, the Saracenic three hundred, the Spanish three hundred, the Russian about a hundred and fifty since Czar Peter, the British not a hundred, the Ottoman four or five. Any empire not feeling this law must be more than human and has no place in the inquiry; we are concerned with the Ottoman empire, human and nothing more. There is neither risk nor merit in prophesying its eventual fall, as of the Seljukians and Gaznevides; the wonder is it has lasted four hundred years.
The Grip of Custom and the Pride of the Barbarian
Sultan Mahmood found the Turks’ multitude of small customs the most favourable subject for his incipient reformation. Sir Charles Fellows, panegyrist of Mahmood and his people, is cited: a Turk proud of his beard comes from the province as candidate for governor; the Sultan passes his hand over his own short-trimmed beard; the candidate takes the hint and appears shorn. The Sultan, always in a plain blue frock coat, asks if the aspirant admires it; the latter praises it; the Sultan suggests he would look well in it and in the red unturbaned fez; next day the officer throws off his costly costume and appears in the dull unsightly frock. Such is the triumph of loyalty and self-interest, and such its limit. Fellows adds that a regimental cloak may cover a fat body in full Turkish robes, strapped at the waist; figures broad as long look laughable on horseback; saddles are now European in form but of purple or crimson velvet embroidered with silver or gold. One unpopular reform was braces, necessary with trousers, because they form a cross, the badge of the infidel, on the back; many submit to severe punishment or death rather than bear this sign hostile to their religion. Trousers interfere with old habits: Turks turn in their toes from their manner of sitting, walk wide from full drapery; wide-topped boots push up trousers; Wellington boots would be inconvenient as they must be slipped off six times a day for prayers; they cannot comfortably sit or kneel on the ground, will be led to chairs, then tables, but their houses are too low. Thus by a little innovation their whole usages might be unhinged.
The _vis inertiæ_ of habit is not the whole account; an antagonistic principle, national pride, is at work—characteristic of the barbarian.
The Ephesus Proclamation and the Limits of Wonder-Working
The argument turns first to Apollonius of Tyana and the famous scene at Ephesus, where he is said to have cried out at the very moment of Domitian’s assassination. Even granting that Apollonius stood far from Rome and that the synchronism could be proved, such coincidences are notoriously hard to verify; and Apollonius was deeply entangled in imperial politics, actively promoting Nerva’s interests among the Ionians. His words, if spoken at all, might have sprung from knowledge of a plot or from a wish to advance one. Dion reports the prediction and professes firm belief in it, yet Dion was credulous, fond of marvels, and writing at the same time as Philostratus—one may simply have borrowed from the other.
Philostratus’s own account is then set out: Apollonius among the groves near the porticoes at noon, his voice dropping as if in terror, his speech faltering as he described an action he seemed to behold, then a sudden silence, a troubled gaze at the ground, a few steps forward, and the cry “Strike the tyrant, strike!”—not an image drawn from a mirror but the thing itself seen. After a suspense like that of spectators watching an undecided contest, he told the thronging Ephesians to take courage, for the tyrant was slaughtered that day—nay, now, now. Only an eye-witness could write so pictorially, and Philostratus was born eighty-six years after Apollonius died.
The deeper point follows: neither Apollonius nor his biographer ever claimed these acts were miracles in the Christian sense, works of the Supreme Being. Apollonius claimed no mission from on high and submitted his powers to no severe tests. He brought a secret from the East—a fuller insight into the fated laws of nature, the hidden springs on which it moves—and referred his gift to theurgic communion with the Powers of nature, not to a Supreme Intelligence. The genuine Pythagorean distinguished this from magic, the compulsory art of infernal spirits; but the distinction is unimportant here, for on either principle the acts stand independent of the First Cause. At most they exemplify that knowledge is power: predicting an earthquake, reading the discourse of birds, recognising souls in new bodies—all bespeak extraordinary penetration, not evident innovations on nature’s laws. Even Philostratus almost doubts the one decisive miracle, the resuscitation of the Roman damsel, insinuating she was only seemingly dead. Hence the charge of magic against the early Christians becomes intelligible.
Ambrose Before the Emperor
Ambrose’s defence against the charge of contumacy opens the next movement. He insists the Emperor’s father sanctioned by word and law that in matters of faith or of ecclesiastics the judges should be priests, not laymen; if a layman may set a bishop right, the bishop becomes the layman’s pupil. Scripture and history show it is the bishop’s business to judge the Christian Emperor, not the reverse. The Emperor’s father used to say, “I have no right to judge between bishops,” though baptized, while the Emperor, still to earn title to the sacrament, claims to judge in faith. Ambrose will not have the priesthood degraded for his sake; one man’s life is not so precious as the dignity of all the bishops who advised him. He would have come to Court, but neither his bishops nor his people would let him, saying matters of faith should be discussed before the people. He asks the Emperor to accept his declining to appear, as he is not practised in attending Court except on the Emperor’s behalf.
The editor’s note recalls Ambrose’s earlier service, when at Justina’s request he undertook the embassy to the usurper Maximus and preserved the peace of Italy; Maximus now interfered to defend him against parties he had formerly defended against Maximus, though other occurrences interposed.
Ambrose and the Martyrs
A persecution of the Church of Milan was ended by an occurrence of a very different nature from any in these days. Since such events do not occur now, we argue illogically that they did not occur then—the main objection to the narrative. If there are no miracles at present, neither are there martyrs; Ambrose and his brethren might as reasonably disbelieve parsonages in the nineteenth century as we martyrs and miracles in the primitive age. Another objection holds that because some alleged miracles were false, none were true; the author reasons contrariwise: pretences to revelation make a true Revelation probable, falsehood is the mockery of truth, a shadow implies a substance. If forgery in some proves forgery in all, this tells against the first century as well as the fourth; if it argues truth in others, it avails for the fourth as well as the first. Credulousness does not disqualify a witness; the sight of one true miracle could not but dispose a man to believe others too readily. If Elisha’s bones restored a dead man, there is no antecedent reason why the relics of Gervasius and Protasius should not have given sight to the blind.
Ambrose was proceeding to dedicate a church at Milan, still called “St. Ambrose the Greater,” and the people urged him to bury relics of martyrs under the altar, as he had lately done in the Basilica of the Apostles. He ordered the ground opened in the church of St. Nabor, a likely burying-place of martyrs under the heathen persecutions. Augustine, then at Milan, alleges Ambrose was directed by a dream; Ambrose himself, in his letter to his sister, is reserved, speaking only of his heart burning within him in presage of what was to come.
Apollinaris and the Peril of the Learned
A quotation from a heretical source describes Apollinaris of Laodicea as the originator of a doctrine. The writer and others at first disbelieved that so venerable a man, dear to Athanasius, could admit such an error, and argued that his youths had invented the statements themselves—youths at variance with one another, some saying Christ brought His body from above, others denying He had taken a soul. A second quotation laments that a quarrel should arise between brethren so exemplary; had no question been raised, the matter would be simple, but once raised it became formidable. No one of the ancients ever maintained it until this perplexing doctrine proceeded from that most learned man, first in Greek letters, master of dialectics, grave in life, and a confessor of banishment under the Arians.
Basil once got into trouble from a supposed intimacy with Apollinaris, having written him one letter in 356 when Basil was a layman and Apollinaris orthodox; Eustathius magnified this into intercommunion. Basil says he never considered Apollinaris an enemy, reverences him in some respects, yet has a complaint of his own from reading some of his compositions, and has fallen in with but few of his works. In another letter he calls Apollinaris no slight disturber of the Church, whose facility in writing has filled the world with compositions, despising the warning against making many books.
What the Turks Reveal About Barbarism and Civilization
The Turkish lectures carry an argument that runs deeper than their occasion. Newman treats the Russia–Turkey collision as one scene in an age-long conflict between North and South, with the North the quarter of judgment in the Prophets and the “storehouse of nations” stretching from the Chinese Sea to the Euxine. The nomad who chooses the horse over the plough, who drinks koumiss instead of wine and calls houses the sepulchres of the living, becomes in Newman’s telling a case study in what barbarism is: not merely poverty or rudeness, but a settled pride that esteems itself perfect and therefore incapable of improvement. He quotes Robertson on the Iroquois who call themselves “The chief of men” and the Cherokees who call Europeans “Nothings,” and then asks whether this self-adoration is traceable among the Turks. His answer is that Mahometanism, arising among barbarians, subserves the reign of barbarism: it fixes legislation in the Koran, forbids interest and so hands finance to the Armenians, and forbids the representation of the human form, so that sculpture loses its object and painting is almost extinguished. Christianity, by contrast, confines its revelations to theology and leaves human research and toil their keenness—a contrast Newman draws with deliberate force.
The historical narrative itself is vivid and unsentimental. The Pope’s missionaries reach the Tartar encampment and are sentenced to execution, spared only when one of the Khan’s wives begs them off; the Venetian merchants return after a quarter century so changed that their nearest friends do not know them, then unrip their linings and pour out a prodigious quantity of jewels. Timour’s palace at Samarcand, the six elephants with wooden castles, the leathern bags of meat dragged in with difficulty, the horse-tripe esteemed a delicacy, the gold and silver cups of koumiss—Newman lingers over these details because they make the point that a race capable of such magnificence remained faithful to the food of the old Scythians. The Spanish ambassador’s account of the towers of human skulls, with alternate layers of mud and skulls, sits alongside the story of Mahmood breaking open the idol of Somnaut and finding diamonds, rubies, and pearls inside. Newman’s judgment on the Turks is severe but not simple: Mahmood fought a worse superstition, and his sandal-wood gates “plead for him,” yet the westward tribes fought truth as tools of the Evil One, and for eight hundred years Seljuk and Othman have been the Church’s foe.
Cicero, Apollonius, and the Question of Miracles
The Cicero essay, reprinted from the Encyclopædia Metropolitana of 1824, is a literary-biographical survey written under pressure—two months allowed, prescribed subjects imposed—and Newman says so plainly in his prefatory notice. It moves through Cicero’s life, his literary position, his relation to the New Academy, his philosophical writings, his letters, his orations, and his style. Newman discusses the De Republicâ, of which only a fragment of the fifth book was formerly known until Monsignor Mai published portions from a palimpsest of St. Austin’s Commentary on the Psalms in 1822; the De Legibus, where law is pronounced the perfection of reason and the eternal mind; the Academicæ Quæstiones, the De Finibus, and the Tusculanæ Quæstiones. He notes the singular mental activity that grew more conspicuous as Cicero’s death approached, when in his last year, amid the confusion after Cæsar’s death and his Philippics, he wrote the De Naturâ Deorum, the De Divinatione, the De Fato, the De Senectute, the De Amicitiâ, the De Officiis, and the Paradoxa. The De Naturâ Deorum he calls perhaps his most splendid work, with Epicurean extravagance, Stoic enthusiasm, and Academic raillery contrasted in a subject whose sublimity lends grandeur.
The Apollonius essay is a different kind of exercise: a cool dissection of a rival wonder-worker. Newman argues that Apollonius’s reported proclamation at Ephesus of Domitian’s assassination cannot be treated as a genuine miracle. Even if the synchronism could be proved, synchronisms are difficult to verify; Apollonius was known to have taken part in imperial politics and was then promoting Nerva’s interests among the Ionians; Dion, who reports the prediction, was credulous and fond of marvellous stories, and he was writing when Philostratus wrote, so one may have taken the account from the other. Philostratus was born eighty-six years after Apollonius’s death, and only an eye-witness is warranted to write so pictorially. More fundamentally, neither Apollonius nor his biographer claimed any direct mission from on high; Apollonius referred his power to theurgic virtues, a fuller insight into nature, not to a Supreme Intelligence. His acts at most exemplify the aphorism “Knowledge is power,” and his biographer is so aware of this as almost to doubt the resuscitation of the Roman damsel—the only decisive miracle of them all—insinuating that perhaps she was dead only in appearance.
Martyrs, Relics, and the Logic of Belief
The essays on primitive Christianity turn from narrative to controversy, and their method is forensic. Newman takes up Ambrose’s defence against the charge of contumacy, quoting the letter in which Ambrose insists that the Emperor’s father sanctioned by word and law that in cases of faith or of ecclesiastics the judges should be neither inferior in function nor separate in jurisdiction—so that priests decide about priests. Ambrose asks when it was ever heard that laymen should judge a bishop in a question of faith; if a layman may set a bishop right, the layman discusses while the bishop listens and becomes the layman’s pupil. The Emperor’s father used to say, “I have no right to judge between bishops,” though baptized, while the Emperor, still to earn title to the sacrament, claims to judge in faith.
From Ambrose the argument moves to the martyrs and to the relics of Gervasius and Protasius, and here Newman makes his most characteristic epistemological move. Since such events do not occur now, we argue illogically that they did not occur then—yet if there are no miracles at present, neither are there martyrs, and one might as reasonably disbelieve parsonages and pony carriages in the nineteenth century as martyrs and miracles in the primitive age. Pretences to revelation make a true Revelation probable; falsehood is the mockery of truth; a shadow implies a substance. If forgery in some proves forgery in all, this tells against the first century as well as the fourth; if forgery in some argues truth in others, this avails for the fourth as well as the first. Credulousness does not necessarily disqualify a person’s evidence for a particular miracle; the sight of one true miracle could not but dispose a man to believe others readily, nay too readily. If Elisha’s bones restored a dead man to life, there is no antecedent reason why the relics of Gervasius and Protasius should not have given sight to the blind.
The chapters on Apollinaris and on Jovinian extend the same logic to doctrine. Vincent of Lerins is quoted on the heat and perplexity Apollinaris created, when the authority of the Church drew his hearers one way and the influence of their teacher the other; he was so great a man that his word carried extraordinary credence, and had he not been incited by the profane lust of heretical curiosity to strike out something new, he would have been among the master-builders of the Church. Newman observes it is a solemn and pregnant fact that two of the most zealous of Athanasius’s companions in the good fight against Arianism, Marcellus and Apollinaris, fell away into heresies of their own, and the Church did not spare them for all their past services. The verse he appends—the gray-haired saint failing at last, and death only binding us fast to the bright shore of love—gives the controversial chapters their emotional centre.
The Book’s Place in Newman’s Work
Historical Sketches belongs to the years when Newman was assembling and reissuing the scattered writings of a lifetime, and its value lies in that very scatteredness. The Turkish lectures show him as a historian of empire with a moralist’s eye; the Cicero essay shows the young Oxford scholar of 1824, writing at speed and under constraint, surveying a whole philosophical corpus with confidence; the Apollonius and primitive Christianity pieces show the controversialist testing the credentials of miracle and doctrine with the same instruments he would later turn on the Church of Rome.
