Faithful involvement

But the Apologia was not to be only about his Anglican life: in the last chapter he was to touch on some of the most controverted aspects of contemporary Roman Catholicism.

As Newman wrote, he consulted old Anglican friends, warning that he was not attempting to write history of the Oxford Movement - it was a purely personal account to prove his honesty. As he composed the part which dealt with his early life up to the beginning of the movement in 1833, he was in tears and unable to read it loud...............But he had already decided that if anyone wellknown 'made an elaborate charge on me, İ was bound to speak'.

Now his only concern was 'to tell the truth, and to leave the matter in God's hands'. İt was a strange irony that Kingsley's attack had brought him into contact with old Anglican friends, who were now helping him to write a book that was ultimately critical of Anglicanism, at least to the extent that it was a defence of his own conversion to Catholicism.

The controversy with Kingsley occurred at a time in Newman's life when he had never been so depressed and when it seemed as if he had nothing more to look forward to in the way of achievment. He was now sixty-three years old. His fateful involvement in the affairs of the liberal Catholic Rambler that led to his publishing what is one of his most famous theological writings, his lengthy article 'On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine' (1859), had resulted in his falling under the suspicion and disapproval of the ecclesiastical authorities in Rome as well as England.
.............So low had Newman been feeling for so long that on 13 March 1864 he actually wrote down a last profession of faith 'in prospect of death'. He really was beginning to think that he was close to death, even though there was nothing actually wrong with his health. İt was his lowest point, and he could hardly have dreamed how dramatic and sudden the reversal in his fortunes would be. But as he began writing around to friends, asking for help and advice, we can sense in the new excited tempo a return of the old creative impulse; at last that essential 'external stimulus', without which he said he had 'scarcely written any'of his books, had come again.....



Apologia Pro Vita Sua, John Henry Newman, Edited by İan Ker, Penguin Classic, (1994)