Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 40.djvu/350

 and with the church of the nation, which it began by professing especially to serve.’ At the same time Newman became editor of the ‘British Critic,’ which henceforth was naturally the chief organ of the tractarian movement (, Reminiscences;, pp. 77 &c.). William George Ward used to express his doubt whether there was anything in all history like Newman's influence at Oxford at this period. Professor Shairp writes: ‘It was almost as if some Ambrose or Augustine of elder days had reappeared;’ and Mr. J. A. Froude declares: ‘Compared with him,’ all the rest were ‘but as ciphers, and he the indicating number.’ There is a great consensus of testimony to the same effect.

Dean Church tells us that the view of the church of England put forward in Newman's volume on ‘Romanism and popular Protestantism’ (1837) has become the accepted Anglican view. But in 1839 its expounder began to question its truth. In the summer of that year he set himself to study the history of the Monophysite controversy. During this course of reading a doubt came across him for the first time of the tenableness of Anglicanism. ‘I had seen the shadow of a hand on the wall. He who has seen a ghost cannot be as if he had never seen it. The heavens had opened and closed again. The thought for a moment had been the church of Rome will be found right after all, and then it vanished. My old convictions remained as before.’ But in September of the same year a further blow came. A friend put into his hand an article by Dr. Wiseman on the ‘Anglican Claim,’ recently published in the ‘Dublin Review.’ The words of St. Augustine against the Donatists, quoted by the reviewer, ‘Securus judicat orbis terrarum,’ seemed to him to ‘pulverise’ the theory of the ‘Via Media.’ ‘They were words which went beyond the occasion of the Donatists, they applied to that of the Monophysites. … They decided ecclesiastical questions on a simpler rule than that of antiquity. Nay, St. Augustine was one of the prime oracles of antiquity; here, then, Antiquity was deciding against itself.’ He wrote to a friend that it was ‘the first real hit from Romanism which had happened to him,’ that it gave him ‘a stomach ache.’ ‘From this time,’ Dean Church tells us, ‘the hope and exultation with which, in spite of checks, he had watched the movement, gave way to uneasiness and distress.’

In 1841 Newman published ‘Tract 90.’ ‘The main thesis of the essay was this: the Articles do not oppose catholic teaching; they but partially oppose Roman dogma; they, for the most part, oppose the dominant errors of Rome.’ He meant the tract as a test to determine how far the articles were reconcilable with the doctrines of the ‘Via Media.’ It was received with a storm of indignation, at first in Oxford, and subsequently throughout the country. Archibald Campbell Tait [q. v.], then senior tutor of Balliol (afterwards archbishop of Canterbury), and three other senior tutors, published a letter charging the tracts with ‘suggesting and opening a way by which men might, at least in the case of Roman views, violate their solemn engagements to the university.’ And the board of heads of houses put forth a judgment expressing the same view. The tractarian party thus came under an official ban and stigma, and Newman saw clearly that his place in the movement was gone. In July he gave up the ‘British Critic’ to his brother-in-law, Thomas Mozley [q. v.] ‘Confidence in me was lost, but I had already lost full confidence in myself. The one question was, What was I to do? I determined to be guided not by my imagination, but by my reason. Had it not been for this severe resolve, I should have been a catholic sooner than I was.’

But later in the same year (1841) Newman received what he describes as ‘three further blows which broke me.’ In the Arian history he saw the same phenomenon which he had found in the Monophysite. He ‘saw clearly that, in the history of Arianism, the pure Arians were the protestants, the semi-Arians were the Anglicans, and that Rome now was what it was then.’ While he was in the misery of this new unsettlement, the bishops one after another began to charge against him, and he recognised it as a condemnation, the only one in their power. Then came the affair of the Jerusalem bishopric, which exhibited the Anglican church as ‘courting an intercommunion with protestant Prussia and the heresy of the orientals, while it forbade any sympathy or concurrence with the church of Rome’ [see ].

‘From the end of 1841,’ Newman tells us in the ‘Apologia,’ ‘I was on my deathbed as regards my membership with the Anglican church, though at the time I became aware of it only by degrees.’ A year later he withdrew from Oxford and took up his abode at Littlemore, ‘with several young men who had attached themselves to his person and to his fortunes, in the building which was not long in vindicating to itself the name of the Littlemore Monastery.’ Here he passed the three years of painful anxiety and suspense which preceded his final decision to join the Roman church, leading a life of prayer and fasting and of monastic seclusion. ‘On the