An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant
Kant · en
John Henry Newman was born in 1801, the son of a London banker. His
mother was of Huguenot descent. He came under Calvinistic influence.
Through study especially, of Romaine _On Faith_ he became the subject of
an inward conversion, of which in 1864 he wrote: 'I am still more
certain of it than that I have hands and feet.' Thomas Scott, the
evangelical, moved him. Before he was sixteen he made a collection of
Scripture texts in proof of the doctrine of the trinity. From Newton _On
the Prophecies_ he learned to identify the Pope with anti-Christ--a
doctrine by which, he adds, his imagination was stained up to the year
1843. In his _Apologia_, 1865, he declares: 'From the age of fifteen,
dogma has been a fundamental principle of my religion. I cannot enter
into the idea of any other sort of religion.' At the age of twenty-one,
two years after he had taken his degree, he came under very different
influences. He passed from Trinity College to a fellowship in Oriel. To
use his own phrase, he drifted in the direction of liberalism. He was
touched by Whately. He was too logical, and also too dogmatic, to be
satisfied with Whately's position. Of the years from 1823 to 1827 Mozley
says: 'Probably no one who then knew Newman could have told which way he
would go. It is not certain that he himself knew.' Francis W. Newman,
Newman's brother, who later became a Unitarian, remembering his own
years of stress, speaks with embitterment of his elder brother, who was
profoundly uncongenial to him.