sought an outlet for its message and so were started the Tracts for the Times. The Tracts were pamphlets issued at irregular intervals, each devoted to an important phase of religious history, tradition, or dogma, each the work of one of the Oxford group, and each playing some part in the great project of regeneration on which the Oxford Movement was embarked. The first Tract appeared September 9, 1833, and others followed on over a course of many years. They were distributed throughout the country, often in little wagons, and they awakened an interest among the clergy of the Church of England but probably found few readers outside their ranks.

This limited interest is not hard to account for. Most men found theological discussions hopelessly dry; besides, they accepted their religious tenets as they found them with little or no question as to their origin or their ultimate significance. As long as the churches remained open and the well-disposed foregathered there on Sunday, there seemed no reason for stirring up questions with which the clergy alone were concerned and which their ecclesiastical forebears were supposed to have settled with more or less finality generations earlier. To the clergy, however, the Tracts appeared in another light. At first with curiosity, then with tolerance, and finally with genuine interest they read them and found them quick with challenges to their faith. Steadily the Tracts reached an ever widening circle of readers until in 1838, after five years of existence, sixty thousand copies had been sold and their influence was causing a ferment among the thinking clergy.

The Tracts, however, scarcely reached beyond the surface of lay consciousness; indeed the unthinking many had never even heard of them. Suddenly, however, out of a clear sky Tract XC appeared and England awakened from her lethargy to find that a moral

Vesuvius had burst into flame and that the eruption was shaking her to the depths. The years of somnolence which had resisted eighty-nine tracts could resist no longer. Destruction seemed already at the nation's gates; peace and complacency gave way to panic and wrath. Here was a rude awakening indeed. Tract XC in all truth was a blow which struck England in a tender place, for it wounded both her religious and her political pride at a time and in a fashion of which she had never dreamed. In effect it destroyed the value of the thirty-nine articles as the "Declaration of Independence" proclaimed by the Church of England against the Church of Rome and minimized to the vanishing point the distinction between Catholicism and Anglicanism.

To say that such a pronouncement as that of Tract XC was revolutionary, is to put it mildly. Men felt that the corner stone of their carefully wrought religious establishment was being torn from its place, and the anonymous author was assailed by a storm of invective. Demand was made on all sides that the name of the perpetrator of this "treacherous attack" be disclosed and his teachings disavowed without another hour's delay. The secret was not far to seek. Soon all England learned that the author was an Oxford man, a graduate of Trinity and a Fellow of Oriel, ordained in the Church of England, the idol of the undergraduates. He was tall, thin, slightly stooped, with a pale face and prominent features, wore glasses, had a head amazingly like Julius Cæsar's, and a voice like a silver bell. He was forty years old and his name was John Henry Newman.

[II]

John Henry Newman was born in London, February 21, 1801. His father was a banker; his mother was

Jemima Fourdrinier, descended of a well-known Huguenot family long known in London as engravers and paper manufacturers. John Henry was the oldest of a family of six children, three boys and three girls. One brother, Frank Newman, between whom and John Henry there existed "an amiable but persistent and universal antagonism," was later to be known to fame as an Orientalist and a Greek scholar whose rendition of the Iliad furnished the immediate reason for Matthew Arnold's brilliant essay On Translating Homer.

Precocious child as he was, Newman made rapid progress in study. He was a solemnly serious little boy who never experienced the rough-and-ready life of a public school, but in the spring of 1808 entered the excellent private academy of Dr. Nicholas at Ealing. During the eight and a half years that he spent here he scarcely ever took part in sports or games, but his maturity and balance frequently made him arbiter among his fellow students in matters of boyish dispute. While they played cricket, he wrote poems and attempted a tragedy which was probably as hopelessly bad as the boyhood effusions of most other men who were afterwards to be known to literary fame. His diligence and keen mind won him a scholarship at Trinity College, Oxford, where he matriculated at the age of fifteen, followed by the confident predictions of his tutors that his University career would be a succession of triumphs.

As an undergraduate, Newman was well known in the University. Some men were as brilliant as he, a few as mature in mind, and many vastly less diffident, but there was something about the young scholar with his lean face, his prominent features, and his rare smile which even in his teens marked him out from among his fellow students. His intellect showed a rare development and a many-sided power. Had he lived in Renaissance England he would have challenged the universally

minded More on his own ground and been equally conspicuous for intellectual avidity and genius in satisfying it.

Newman was an omnivorous reader and paid the penalty by suffering from precarious health for many years and from defective vision all his life. But his brilliancy as a student experienced no setback and it was confidently predicted on every side that he would carry off the highest honors in his final examinations. He was not, however, the first man of genius to disappoint his friends. The anxiety caused by his father's unexpected financial reverses, the reaction from overstudy, and perhaps the anxiety of living up to the expectations of his friends had a disastrous result: Newman passed his examinations for his degree at Michelmas, 1820, while still in his twentieth year, but failed to gain the high honors which he sought.

Newman's friends were more disappointed at this unexpected reverse than he himself. He wrote his father: "Since I have done my part, I have gained what is good. . . . I have done everything to attain my object; I have spared no labor, and my reputation in my college is as solid as before if not as splendid." It is significant, however, of Newman that, despite his brave attempt to smile at failure, his feeling of disappointment was so keen as never to be forgotten even through the long and eventful years which followed.

The paramount question which now confronted him was the choice of a profession. His father had destined him for the bar and up to the threshold of graduation, Newman himself preferred the bar to the Church. But after his showing in his final examinations both changed their minds and the predilection which young Newman had for years felt for religion, never far removed from his thoughts, decided his course in favor of Holy Orders. Meanwhile he had not long to wait for a vindication

of his friends' confidence in his scholarship. He won the universally coveted election to a fellowship at Oriel College, one of the highest of scholastic honors, and by his triumph more than atoned for the anticlimax of Trinity. No wonder the quiet scholar thrilled with the joy of it. Years after, indeed, when the shadows of his sixties were lengthening, he recalled it as one of the happiest events in his career. It was that and something more: it proved in fact to be a turning point in his life. He would remain at Oxford, he told himself, take Holy Orders, and through whatever years might be vouchsafed, he would devote himself soul and mind to the call of religion and scholarship. He entered upon his new life with a feeling of profound satisfaction. His rooms at Oriel became a sanctuary of study and the only luxury ever seen there was a clean towel always at hand to dust the books on his shelves.

The bashful boy of 1821 steadily matured into the brilliant man of 1825, and while the influence of Hawkins taught him toleration, he owed most to the keen and magnetic Whately, to whom in later years he confessed his debt of friendship and abiding affection. His favorite pursuits were mathematics and church history. His sense of taste was so delicate that he was assigned the choosing of the college wines. Now and then books and study were set aside to good purpose: he played the violin for the sheer joy of it, took excursions into the country, and found delight in the beauties of nature.

His spiritual side developed steadily. Conscious though he must have been of unusual endowments of intellect, he was untouched by that ambition which was to stir his fellow Oxonian, Manning, in his early years, and indeed he prayed hard that he might not achieve wealth or advancement in the Church. In the midst of almost incessant study he found some time for writing and for the amenities bound up with generous friend