John Henry Newman: Apostle of Common Sense?

James M. Cameron

Newman has always been a puzzling character, often divisive, often 
taken to be enigmatic; he has been adored and disliked, the object of 
boundless trust and the object of deep suspicion. He was the loved 
leader of a party in the Church of England, and this love persisted 
even after he left this Church for that of Rome; his fellow-workers 
in the Tractarian Movement, above all Pusey and Keble, felt wounded 
by his departure but not betrayed. He always remained in their 
correspondence "My dearest Newman", and the younger generation of 
Tractarians, best represented by Dean Church, remained devoted to him 
and stayed his active friends. (One of the counts against Newman in 
the eyes of Manning was that when in his old age he visited London, 
he stayed with Church in the St. Paul's Deanery.) When he became a 
Catholic he was thought to be a great prize by Cardinal Wiseman; but 
it soon became plain that at Westminster and in Rome the Catholic 
authorities hadn't the slightest idea what to do with him. He had 
become a Catholic through his study of the Fathers and through the 
failure of his attempt to work out a distinctive Anglo-Catholic 
position within the Church of England, and his reasons, cogent or 
not, were set out in one of the great classics in the history of 
theology, <An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine> (1845), 
a book to be compared in its weight and its importance for the 
development of theology to the two <Summae> of Aquinas, to Calvin's 
<Institutes> and, in the nineteenth century, to Mohler's <Symbolism>,