of theological treatises, originally delivered as lectures in a chapel of St. Mary's: The Prophetical Office of the Church viewed relatively to Romanism and Popular Protestantism; Justification; Disquisition on the Canon of Scripture; and a Tractate on Antichrist. In these ways Newman was forming a school of opinion which "grew stronger and stronger every year, till it came into collision with the nation, and with the Church of the nation, which it began by professing especially to serve." Newman now also became editor of the British Critic, henceforth the chief Tractarian organ. Compared with him," says Froude, all the rest were "but as ciphers, and he the indicating number."

It was in 1839 that Newman began to be doubtful about the truth of his Via Media. Reading about the Monophysite controversy, he began to fear that, as far as the organisation of the Catholic Church was concerned (to him a matter of such tremendous and overwhelming importance and difficulty; to the adherents of Reformation principles so wide and simple), the Anglican position was false. "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 the moment had been,

The Church of Rome will be found right after all,' and then it vanished. My old convictions remained as before." Something else happened: he read a review by Cardinal Wiseman. The words of St. Augustine against the Donatists there quoted, Securus judicat orbis terrarum ("The united world makes no mistake in judgment"), seemed to him to pulverise the theory of the Via Media. The words "decided ecclesiastical questions on a simpler rule than that of antiquity." "From this time," says Dean Church, the hope and exultation with which, in spite of checks, he had watched the movement gave way to uneasiness and distress."

The general condemnation of Tract 90 in 1841, especially by the Board of Heads of Houses, showed Newman that his place in the movement was gone. He gave up the British Critic. "Confidence in me was lost, but I had already lost full confidence in myself. The question was, What was I to do? determined to be guided not by my imagination, but my reason. Had it not been for this severe resolve, I should have been a Catholic sooner than I was."

I

In 1841, too, it occurred to him, with regard to the Arians, that the Arians were the Protestants, the Semi-Arians the Anglicans, and that Rome was now what it was then. Further, the bishops, one after another, directed their charges against this combination of un-Reformed or Roman teaching with the principles of the Reformation. The Tractarian writers have constantly complained of the bishops for this; they think they ought to have accepted Newman's teaching with docility. But as they were themselves loyal sons of the Reformation, and as they probably understood the position and principles of the English Church better than was possible for Newman with his early bias towards Rome, they took the only course open to conscientious men in a responsible and authoritative position. Nothing is more pathetic than the calm and unhesitating manner in which Newman's great but tortuous intellect assumed all through that he was right and the bishops wrong. Lastly came the shock of the fraternisation of the English Church with the Lutheran Church of Prussia in the matter of the Jerusalem bishopric, which to Newman was monstrous and horrible.

"From the end of 1841 I was on my death

bed as regards my membership with the Anglican Church, though at the time I became aware of it only by degrees." Next year he withdrew from Oxford and settled at Littlemore, a few miles out, "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."1 "On the one hand I gradually came to see that the Anglican Church was formally in the wrong, on the other that the Church of Rome was formally in the right; then that no valid reason could be assigned for continuing in the Anglican, and again that no valid objections could be taken to joining the Roman." If only he could have put scriptural purity of doctrine before mere "formal" legitimacy and historical continuity! Or if he had really been a historian instead of dipping into history here and there, and could have seen how far nearer the English Church

1 W. S. Lilly, Dictionary of National Biography.

of the Reformation is to the truly Primitive Church than the perpetually self-developing Church of Rome!

In February 1843 he published in the Conservative Journal a retractation of all the hard things he had said in controversy against Romanism. In September he resigned St. Mary's. In 1845 he began his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Ward of Balliol-a grotesque but exceedingly brilliant person, with an abnormal and prodigious aptitude for deductive logic, but not caring so much how he obtained his premisses, and with a contempt for history -was constantly pressing him with inconvenient questions and forcing him to make important admissions. As he went on with his essay his doubts about Rome disappeared. He was received in his house at Littlemore on October 9th by Father Dominic, the Passionist.

The lead of the Oxford movement passed into the hands of Dr. Pusey. In after-years it took the form of what is known as Ritualism or Sacerdotalism. About three thousand persons of education and influence have followed Dr. Newman's example in joining the Church of Rome. His influence on the Church of England has been even greater. When he died, the