NEWMAN, JOHN HENRY (1801-189o), English cardi nal, was born in London on Feb. 21, 1801, the eldest son of John Newman, banker, of the firm of Ramsbottom, Newman and Company. At the age of seven Newman was sent to a private school conducted by Dr. Nicholas at Ealing. At the age of 15 he experienced "conversion," an incident which throughout life re mains "more certain than that he had hands or feet." In 1816 he matriculated at Trinity college, Oxford. After graduation in 1821 he took pupils and read for a fellowship at Oriel, to which he was elected in 1822. Two years later he was ordained, and became curate of St. Clement's, Oxford. For a year he was vice principal of the St. Alban's hall, but in 1826 he became tutor at Oriel. In 1827 he was appointed vicar of St. Mary's (to which was attached the chapelry of Littlemore) and in 1831-32 was select preacher before the university. In 1832 a difference with Hawkins, provost of Oriel, on the "substantially religious nature" of a tutorship, led to his resignation from that post. He then went for a tour on the Mediterranean with R. H. Froude, but at that time was still strongly Protestant in his views, as his com ments on his stay in Rome show. During this tour he wrote many of the poems in the Lyra Apostolica, and "Lead, Kindly Light." Tractarian Movement.—He was at home again in Oxford on July 9, 1833, and on the 14th Keble preached at St. Mary's an assize sermon on "National Apostasy," which Newman after wards regarded as the inauguration of the Oxford Movement. In the words of Dean Church, it was "Keble who inspired, Froude who gave the impetus and Newman who took up the work"; but the first organization of it was due to H. J. Rose, editor of the British Magazine, who has been styled "the Cambridge originator of the Oxford Movement." It was in his rectory house at Had leigh, Suffolk, that a meeting of High Church clergymen was held, July 25-29 (Newman was not present), at which it was resolved to fight for "the apostolical succession and the integrity of the Prayer-Book." A few weeks later, Newman started, apparently on his own initiative, the Tracts for the Times, from which the movement was subsequently named "Tractarian." Its aim was to secure for the Church of England a definite basis of doctrine and discipline, in case either of disestablishment or of a determi nation of High Churchmen to quit the establishment. The teach ing of the tracts was supplemented by Newman's Sunday after noon sermons at St. Mary's, the influence of which was very great during the next eight years. In 1835 Pusey joined the movement, which, so far as concerned ritual observances, was later called "Puseyite"; and in 1836 its supporters secured further coherence by their united opposition to the appointment of Hampden as regius professor of divinity. His Bampton lectures (in the preparation of which Blanco White had assisted him) were suspected of heresy, and this suspicion was accentuated by a pamphlet put forth by Newman, Elucidations of Dr. Hampden's
Theological Statements.
At this date Newman became editor of the British Critic, and he also gave courses of lectures in a side-chapel of St. Mary's in defence of the via media of the Anglican Church as between Romanism and popular Protestantism. His influence in Oxford was supreme about the year 1839, when, however, his study of the monophysite heresy first raised in his mind a doubt as to whether the Anglican position was really tenable on those prin ciples of ecclesiastical authority which he had accepted ; and this doubt returned when he read, in Wiseman's article in the Dublin Review on "The Anglican Claim," the words of St. Augustine against the Donatists, secures iudicat orbis terrarum, words which suggested a simpler authoritative rule than that of the teaching of antiquity. He continued his work, however, as a High Anglican controversialist until he had published, in 1841, Tract 9o, the last of the series, in which he put forth, as a kind of proof charge, to test the tenability of all Catholic doctrine within the Church of England, a detailed examination of the XXXIX Articles, suggesting that their negations were not directed against the authorized creed of Roman Catholics, but only against popular errors and exaggeration. This theory, though not altogether new, aroused much indignation in Oxford, and, at the request of the bishop of Oxford, the publication of the Tracts came to an end. At this date Newman also resigned the editor ship of the British Critic, and was thenceforth, as he himself later described it, "on his deathbed as regards membership with the Anglican Church." He now concluded that the position of Anglicans was similar to that of the semi-Arians in the Arian controversy ; and the arrangement made at this time that an Anglican bishopric should be established in Jerusalem, the ap pointment to lie alternately with the British and Prussian Govern ments, was to him further evidence of the non-apostolical char acter of the Church of England. In 1842 he withdrew to Little more, and lived there under monastic conditions with a small band of followers, their life being one of great physical austerity as well as of anxiety and suspense. To his disciples there he assigned the task of writing lives of the English saints, while his own time was largely devoted to the completion of an essay on the development of Christian doctrine, by which principle he sought to reconcile himself to the elaborated creed and the practical system of the Roman Church. In Feb. 1843 he pub lished, as an advertisement in the Oxford Conservative Journal, an anonymous but otherwise formal retractation of all the hard things he had said against Rome ; and in September, after the secession of one of the inmates of the house, he preached his last Anglican sermon at Littlemore and resigned the living of St. Mary's.