John Henry Newman (1801–1890) spent his life on a single question: where does authoritative religious truth reside? Raised in the Church of England, he became the most formidable Anglican preacher and thinker of his generation, then shocked Victorian Britain by resigning his Oxford post and entering the Roman Catholic Church in 1845. The biographical and critical writings gathered here — a Dictionary of National Biography entry by William Samuel Lilly and an accompanying essay on Newman’s mind and work — trace that long argument from a London banking family to the cardinalate in Rome, and assess what his lifelong resistance to religious liberalism amounted to.
“I was very superstitious,’ he adds, ‘and for some time previous to my conversion used constantly to cross myself before going into the dark.”
From Ealing Schoolroom to the Oriel Fellowship
Newman was born in the City of London on 21 February 1801, the eldest of six children of John Newman, a partner in Ramsbottom, Newman, & Co., and Jemima Fourdrinier, descended from Huguenot engravers and papermakers. At seven he was sent to Dr. Nicholas’s school at Ealing, run on Eton lines, where he prospered through good conduct and diligence. The boy read Walter Scott in bed, delighted in the Bible, and peopled his imagination with magical powers and talismans; he was superstitious enough to cross himself before entering the dark. He dated his inward conversion to the autumn of 1816, at fifteen, when he fell under the influence of a definite creed and received impressions of dogma he said were never effaced. His reading then was chiefly Calvinistic, though Law’s Serious and Devout Call impressed him deeply, and through extracts in Milner’s Church History, read alongside Newton on the Prophecies, he became firmly convinced that the pope was the antichrist foretold by Daniel, St. Paul, and St. John.
He entered Trinity College, Oxford, in December 1816, two months short of sixteen, and formed a close friendship with John William Bowden. In 1818 he won a Trinity scholarship; in 1819 his father’s bank stopped payment — no bankruptcy, and every creditor was paid in full — and Newman was entered at Lincoln’s Inn while his father destined him for the bar. The scholarship proved his only academical distinction: he over-read himself, was called up a day early for the final examination, broke down after seven days, and took his B.A. below the line in the second class. He stayed in Oxford taking private pupils and prepared in Latin composition, logic, and natural philosophy for a fellowship at Oriel, the acknowledged centre of Oxford intellectualism. His election on 12 April 1822 he called the turning-point of his life.
Ordained deacon on Trinity Sunday 1824, he became curate of St. Clement’s, Oxford, doing hard parish work; his first sermon, at Warton on 23 June, took the text “Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the evening,” and he preached his last sermon as an Anglican from the same text nineteen years later. Edward Hawkins, then vicar of St. Mary’s, did much to root evangelical doctrines out of his creed. In 1825 Dr. Whately made him vice-principal of Alban Hall; intercourse with Whately largely cured his extreme shyness, and from him Newman derived the idea of the Christian Church as a divine appointment, a substantive body independent of the State and endowed with rights and powers of its own. He had a large share in composing Whately’s Logic. Becoming tutor of Oriel in 1826, he resigned the vice-principalship, and in the same year Richard Hurrell Froude was elected fellow — a friend whose influence Newman felt powerful beyond all others, one of the acutest and deepest men in the memory of man. In 1828 Hawkins was elected provost in preference to Keble, largely through Newman’s influence; Pusey later regretted it, but Newman wrote that without it there would have been no Movement, no Tracts, no Library of the Fathers. Hawkins’s promotion vacated St. Mary’s, and the college presented Newman to the vicarage.
The Via Media and the Shadow on the Wall
Dean Church held that the Anglican view of the Church of England set out in Newman’s 1837 volume on Romanism and popular Protestantism became the accepted Anglican view — though by 1839 Newman himself had begun to doubt it. Studying the Monophysite controversy that summer, he first doubted whether Anglicanism was tenable at all, describing the doubt as the shadow of a hand on the wall. In September a friend handed him Dr. Wiseman’s article on the Anglican Claim in the Dublin Review; its quotation of St. Augustine against the Donatists — Securus judicat orbis terrarum — seemed to pulverise the Via Media theory, since Antiquity was deciding against itself. He called it the first real hit from Romanism and said it gave him a stomach ache; Church records that his hope gave way to uneasiness.
In 1841 came Tract 90, arguing that the Thirty-Nine Articles do not oppose catholic teaching, only partially oppose Roman dogma, and mostly oppose Rome’s dominant errors. Meant as a test of reconcilability with the Via Media, it met a storm of indignation at Oxford and nationwide. Archibald Campbell Tait, then senior tutor of Balliol, with three other senior tutors, charged the tracts with opening a way to violate solemn engagements to the university; the heads of houses concurred and placed the tractarian party under official ban. Newman handed the British Critic to his brother-in-law Thomas Mozley, saying confidence in him was lost and he had lost confidence in himself, and resolved to be guided by reason rather than imagination.
Later that year came, in his own phrase, three further blows which broke him. In the Arian history he saw that the pure Arians were the protestants, the semi-Arians the Anglicans, and Rome now was what it had been then. The bishops charged against him. And the Jerusalem bishopric affair showed the Anglican Church courting intercommunion with protestant Prussia and oriental heresy while forbidding sympathy with Rome. From the end of 1841, he wrote in the Apologia, he was on his deathbed as regarded Anglican membership. A year later he withdrew with young men to Littlemore, in the Littlemore Monastery, passing three years of prayer, fasting, and seclusion, and concluding that the Anglican Church was formally wrong and Rome formally right. In 1843 he retracted hard things said against Rome in the Conservative Journal and resigned St. Mary’s, writing that he despaired of the Church of England and was cast off by her. In 1845 he began the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, his doubts vanishing as he advanced; he resolved to be received, left the book unfinished, and was received at Littlemore on 9 October by Father Dominic the Passionist.
Secession, Cholera, and the Achilli Trial
Lord Beaconsfield described the secession as a blow under which the Church of England still reeled; Gladstone said its calamitous importance was never fully estimated. The Oxford Movement broke up. Newman quit Oxford on 23 February 1846 and did not return for thirty-two years. Dr. Wiseman, vicar apostolic of the midland district, called him to Oscott; in October he went to Rome, was ordained priest and made doctor of divinity, and on Christmas Eve 1847 returned with a commission from Pius IX to introduce the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, who reminded him of Keble. He lived at Maryvale, Old Oscott, St. Wilfrid’s College at Cheadle, and Alcester Street in Birmingham, the Oratory later removing to Edgbaston. His Discourses to Mixed Congregations appeared in 1849; that same year he and Father St. John volunteered at Bilston during a cholera outbreak; in 1850 he founded the London Oratory with Father Faber as head.
In July 1850 he published Twelve Lectures addressed to the party of the 1833 movement. In October the restoration of the hierarchy — the “Papal Aggression” — sparked agitation, including the apostate Dominican Achilli declaiming against Rome. Newman’s Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics (September 1851) exposed Achilli’s moral turpitude; a criminal information for libel followed, with a justification of twenty-three counts. At the Queen’s Bench trial of 21–24 June 1852 Italian witnesses established the facts, but the jury, influenced by Lord Campbell’s summing up, returned a verdict against him; a new trial was refused, and Mr. Justice Coleridge fined him 100l. on 23 January 1853. Expenses of over 14,000l. were met by public subscription.
In 1854 Newman went to Dublin as rector of the catholic university at the Irish bishops’ invitation, arranged through J. R. Hope Scott’s suggestion to Archbishop Cullen. The university was a predestined failure, owing to non-recognition by the state and Newman’s native incapacity for practical organisation; its chief outcome was the Idea of a University. After returning to Birmingham in 1858 he pursued an Oxford Oratory branch, purchasing ground, but it came to nothing through the opposition of Cardinal Manning and William George Ward; a Vulgate translation scheme failed through the hostility of booksellers. In 1859 he established at Edgbaston the school for sons of upper-class catholics.
In January 1864 Charles Kingsley, reviewing Froude’s History of England anonymously in Macmillan’s Magazine, remarked that truth for its own sake had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy and that Father Newman informs us it need not be. Newman complained to Messrs. Macmillan of grave and gratuitous slander, and the controversy that followed — the occasion of the Apologia — occupies the notes’ account at this point.
The Mind Behind the Movement
The accompanying essay takes its stand at the Palazzo delle Pigne in Rome, where Newman, receiving the biglietto announcing his elevation to the sacred college, addressed the assembled company and reviewed his life and work. He testified that for thirty, forty, fifty years he had resisted the spirit of liberalism in religion — the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion but that one creed is as good as another — and he saw this resistance as the main principle of all his writings and actions. The essayist affirms that Newman held Christianity to be the absolute religion, a revelation with supreme objective authority and inerrant teaching. In youth, influenced by Thomas Scott and Thomas Newton, he had adopted the evangelical view of the Bible as the present infallible and all-sufficient oracle of divine truth; that opinion gradually dropped off as he found the scriptures were not intended as arbiter of doctrine and practice — “We have tried the book… and it disappoints.” Hence he was led to the conception of an infallible church, sought for years to realise it in the national establishment (the true scope of the tractarian movement, which aroused Oxford from spiritual torpor), and after the Anglican episcopate’s condemnation cut away his basis of external authority, decided that the Church of Rome was the true home of the idea he could not surrender. In the words of his last Anglican sermon, The Parting of Friends, he passed over that Jordan.
His main contribution, the essayist argues, was the thesis that the communion of Rome alone satisfies the conception of the church as a divine kingdom. He allowed the difficulties of the papal claims but concluded: “to believe in a church is to believe in the pope.” The essayist rejects the caricature that his defence was merely that his creed is the only alternative to atheism; starting from the being of God impressed by conscience, Newman holds a revelation urgently probable, to be sought in Christianity, catholicism being its only tenable form. His conclusion: “Either the catholic religion is verily and indeed the coming of the unseen world into this, or there is nothing positive… in any of our notions.”
Newman changed little, the essayist observes. The school of Alexandria — Origen and Clement — is key to his mind. Antichrist was long the pope for him, later replaced by the spirit of the world working in the church for temporal ends; a letter of 1876 puts it: “The church is in the world and the world in the church…” He held that the church’s strength lies in her proper gifts, not in earthly law. His attitude to modern thought was not hostile; early on he held freer views of inspiration, and though no German scholar he grew conscious of the untenableness of much biblical exegesis. His last publication, an essay in the Nineteenth Century of February 1884, cautiously lays down that the titles of the canonical books and their ascription to definite authors either do not come under inspiration or need not be accepted literally, and that it does not matter whether one or two Isaiahs wrote the book. In his History of the Arians he had enunciated: “There is something true and divinely revealed in every religion. Revelation… is an universal, not a local gift” — a position he held in substance still in a private letter of 1882. His adoption of evolution in the essay on Development is significant: the abandonment of the notion that Christianity issued as a complete dogmatic system from its first preachers, admitting that the creed grew gradually, is an immense concession to scientific history. The doctrine of the indefeasible supremacy of conscience found in him its most eloquent preacher; he agrees with Kant — whom up to 1884 he had never read — in regarding the categorical imperative of duty as the surest foundation of religion. His prescient intellect sympathised with the conquests of the modern mind and communicated that sympathy to his pupils; as he wrote in 1830, men live after death in the unwritten memory of a school of pupils tracing their moral parentage to them.
What the Writings Left Behind
The reference entry closes with a believed-complete list of Newman’s writings, asterisked where included in the new and uniform edition of thirty-six volumes issued between 1868 and 1881. It runs from St. Bartholomew’s Eve (1818, written with J. W. Bowden) and the Suggestions on behalf of the Church Missionary Society (1830) through The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833), the Five Letters on Church Reform (1833), the Tracts for the Times (six volumes, 1834, with the individual tracts by Newman identified), Lyra Apostolica (1834), The Restoration of Suffragan Bishops (1835), the Letter to Parishioners on Laying the First Stone of the Church at Littlemore (1835), the Elucidations of Dr. Hampden’s Theological Statements (1836), the Letter to the Margaret Professor of Divinity on Mr. R. H. Froude’s Statements on the Holy Eucharist (1836), the Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837), the Parochial Sermons (six volumes, 1837–42), A Letter to the Rev. G. Faussett (1838), the Lectures on Justification (1838), Plain Sermons (1843), The Tamworth Reading Room (1841), A Letter addressed to the Rev. R. W. Jelf, D.D. (1841), A Letter to Richard Bagot, Bishop of Oxford (1841), the Sermons on Subjects of the Day (1842), and the Sermons before the University of Oxford — the record breaking off there.
The essayist’s verdict is that Newman’s significance lies less in any single doctrine than in the completeness with which one mind worked out the logic of a single premise: that religion must rest on an external, divinely guaranteed authority, and that conscience points to a revelation which only one communion claims to hold in full. Whether one accepts his conclusion or not, the record traced here — the evangelical boy, the Oriel fellow, the preacher of St. Mary’s, the recluse of Littlemore, the defendant in the Queen’s Bench, the reluctant rector in Dublin, and at last the cardinal receiving his biglietto in Rome — shows a man who followed an argument wherever it led and paid for it at every stage.
