'It was very unfair to those young men.' John Henry Newman's conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 shattered the intellectual credit of the Oxford Movement. The long struggle - first from the pulpit of the University Church of St Mary, later through the radical pages of Tracts for the Times - to state the case for the Apostolic authority of the Anglican church had ended, as the Movement's critics had always predicted, in total surrender to Catholic dogma. As Benjamin Jowett remarked, among the most profoundly affected were the clever and devout young men in Newman's circle who chose not to follow him to Rome. Many took Newman's apostasy as a personal betrayal of their intellectual investment in the cause of church reform. The experience left no one with deeper scars than Mark Pattison, then a young fellow at Lincoln College.

LRB 7 February 2008 | PDF Download