[13] Newman was also a literary figure: his major writings include the Tracts for the Times (1833–1841), his autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), the Grammar of Assent (1870), and the poem The Dream of Gerontius (1865),[14] which was set to music in 1900 by Edward Elgar.

Newman assisted Whately in his popular work Elements of Logic (1826, initially for the Encyclopædia Metropolitana), and from him gained a definite idea of the Christian Church as institution:[27] "a Divine appointment, and as a substantive body, independent of the State, and endowed with rights, prerogatives and powers of its own".

In the same year Newman was appointed vicar of St Mary's University Church, to which the benefice of Littlemore (to the south of the city of Oxford) was attached,[41] and Pusey was made Regius Professor of Hebrew.

On board the mail steamship Hermes they visited Gibraltar, Malta, the Ionian Islands and, subsequently, Sicily, Naples and Rome, where Newman made the acquaintance of Nicholas Wiseman.

In the words of Richard William Church, it was "Keble who inspired, Froude who gave the impetus, and Newman who took up the work"; but the first organisation of it was due to Hugh James Rose, editor of the British Magazine, who has been styled "the Cambridge originator of the Oxford Movement".

He read Nicholas Wiseman's article in the Dublin Review on "The Anglican Claim", which quoted Augustine of Hippo against the Donatists, "securus judicat orbis terrarum" ("the verdict of the world is conclusive").

[62] In February 1846, Newman left Oxford for St. Mary's College, Oscott, where Nicholas Wiseman, then vicar-apostolic of the Midland district, resided; and in October he went to Rome, where he was ordained priest by Cardinal Giacomo Filippo Fransoni and awarded the degree of Doctor of Divinity by Pope Pius IX.

[63] Popular anti-Catholic feeling ran high at this time, partly in consequence of the papal bull Universalis Ecclesiae by which Pope Pius IX re-established the Catholic diocesan hierarchy in England on 29 September 1850.

John Wolffe assesses the Lectures as: an interesting treatment of the problem of anti-Catholicism from an observer whose partisan commitment did not cause him to slide into mere polemic and who had the advantage of viewing the religious battlefield from both sides of the tortured no man's land of Littlemore.

[74] Wilfrid Ward, Newman's first biographer, describes the Lectures as follows: We have the very curious spectacle of a grave religious apologist giving rein for the first time at the age of fifty to a sense of rollicking fun and gifts of humorous writing, which if expended on other subjects would naturally have adorned the pages of Thackeray's Punch.

[78] One of the features of English anti-Catholicism was the holding of public meetings at which ex-Catholics, including former priests, denounced their prior beliefs and gave detailed accounts of the alleged "horrors" of Catholic life.

You were deprived of your professorship, we own it; you were prohibited from preaching and hearing confessions; you were obliged to give hush-money to the father of one of your victims, as we learned from an official document of the Neapolitan Police to be 'known for habitual incontinency;' your name came before the civil tribunal at Corfu for your crime of adultery.

[45] Newman removed the libellous section of the fifth lecture and replaced it with the inscription: De illis quae sequebantur / posterorum judicium sit – About those things which had followed / let posterity be the judge.

[88] The University ... has this object and this mission; it contemplates neither moral impression nor mechanical production; it professes to exercise the mind neither in art nor in duty; its function is intellectual culture; here it may leave its scholars, and it has done its work when it has done as much as this.

In 1854 Cullen wrote a letter to the Vatican's Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (now called the Dicastery for Evangelization), criticising Newman's liberal exercise of authority within the new university: The discipline introduced is unsuitable, certainly to this country.

But the influence went deep, nonetheless, as can be seen in the literary remains of Muhlenberg's former pupils, especially in those of the missionary school-maker Lloyd Breck (1818-1876) and John Barrett Kerfoot (1816-1881), founder of Saint James School of Maryland.

The occasion came when, in the January 1864 issue of Macmillan's Magazine, Charles Kingsley, reviewing James Anthony Froude's History of England, incidentally asserted that "Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy.

[45] After the debate went public, Kingsley attempted to defend his assertion in a lengthy pamphlet entitled What then does Dr Newman mean?, described by a historian as "one of the most momentous rhetorical and polemical failures of the Victorian age".

"[101] In the conclusion of the Apologia, Newman expressed sympathy for the Liberal Catholicism of Charles de Montalembert and Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire: "In their general line of thought and conduct I enthusiastically concur, and consider them to be before their age.

[106] Subsequently, in a letter nominally addressed to the Duke of Norfolk when Gladstone accused the Roman church of having "equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history", Newman affirmed that he had always believed in the doctrine, and had only feared the deterrent effect of its definition on conversions on account of acknowledged historical difficulties.

[107][108] After an illness, Newman returned to England and lived at the Birmingham Oratory until his death, making occasional visits to London and chiefly to his old friend R. W. Church, now Dean of St Paul's.

[114] Some of Newman's short and earlier poems are described by R. H. Hutton as "unequalled for grandeur of outline, purity of taste and radiance of total effect"; while his latest and longest, The Dream of Gerontius, attempts to represent the unseen world along the same lines as Dante.

[107][123] Newman was worried about the new dogma of papal infallibility advocated by an "aggressive and insolent faction",[124] fearing that the definition might be expressed in over-broad terms open to misunderstanding and would pit religious authority against physical science.

He was relieved about the moderate tone of the eventual definition, which "affirmed the pope's infallibility only within a strictly limited province: the doctrine of faith and morals initially given to the apostolic Church and handed down in Scripture and tradition.

But he lived on into the age of the stiff upper lip, with the result that later generations, hearing of his tears on a visit to his mother's grave or at the funerals of old friends such as Henry Wilberforce, thought him not only sensitive but melancholy.

[131] The "sensitive recluse of legend"[128] had a wide currency, appearing, for instance, in Lytton Strachey's description, in his famously debunking set of portraits Eminent Victorians, as Newman's "soft, spectacled, Oxford manner, with its half-effeminate diffidence".

In both there was an original force of character which refused to be moulded by circumstances, which was to make its own way, and become a power in the world; a clearness of intellectual perception, a disdain for conventionalities, a temper imperious and wilful, but along with it a most attaching gentleness, sweetness, singleness of heart and purpose.

Kingsley, who interpreted the Biblical story of Adam and Eve as expressing a "binary law of man's being; the want of a complementum, a 'help meet', without whom it is not good for him to be",[139] feared and hated vowed sexual abstinence, considering it, in Laura Fasick's words, "a distinct and separate perversion".

Only with the emergence in the late nineteenth century of the doctrine of the stiff upper lip and the concept of homosexuality as an identifiable condition, did open expressions of love between men become suspect and regarded in a new light as morally undesirable".

[191] Newman's Dublin lecture series The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated is thought to have become "the basis of a characteristic British belief that education should aim at producing generalists rather than narrow specialists, and that non-vocational subjects—in arts or pure science—could train the mind in ways applicable to a wide range of jobs".