{\b John Henry Newman}.

{\b Date of Birth}.: 21 February 1801

{\b Date of Death}.: 11 August 1890

{\b Works}.

Churchman and man of letters, perhaps best known as the leader of the Oxford 
movement in the Church of England. Newman also wrote and published numerous 
sermons, tracts and lives of saints as well as two novels - Loss and Gain 
(1848) and Callista (1856) - and his better-known texts such as the Parochial 
and Plain Sermons (1834-42), the Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the 
Church (1837) and University Sermons (1843). A number of his essays on the 
role of the University, a role that he saw as one of a training for the mind's 
faculties rather than the imposition of particular knowledge upon it, later 
appeared as The Idea of a University Defined (1873).

Newman's important later texts include his account of his own spiritual life 
and progress, Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864) and the  An Essay in Aid of a 
Grammar of Assent (1870). His poetry was published in the Lyra Apostolica, 
which included the hymn 'Lead, Kindly Light', and The Dream of Gerontus 
(1865), which included 'Firmly I Believe and Truly' and 'Praise to the Holiest 
in the Height', and was later set to music by Elgar. The influence of his 
polished prose was acknowledged by George Eliot.

{\b Featured Works}.

"Lead, Kindly Light, Amid the Encircling Gloom".

{\b General Comment}.

Newman, born in London, was educated at home and then at Trinity College, 
Oxford, before being made a fellow of Oriel College in 1822. This was followed 
by a period as vice-principal at Alban Hall and then vicar of St Mary's in 
1828. By the time the Oxford movement began in 1833, Newman had become 
convinced of the importance of the Anglican Church as the legitimate heir of 
the ancient Christian tradition. However, after some intrigues and 
denunciatons, Newman retreated, in 1842, to the chapelry of Littlemore, where 
he lived a monastic life and, one year later, resigned from St Mary's.

Two years later he converted to Roman Catholicism and published his Essay on 
the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). His The Idea of the University 
appeared just seven years later in 1852, following the failed attempt to take 
up the rectorship of Dublin's Catholic University. The  Apologia  and An Essay 
in Aid of the Grammar of Assent, as well as the second volume of poetry, had 
also appeared by the time of Newman's inauguration as cardinal-deacon of St 
George in Velabro.

Part at least of the merit of Newman's work lies in the impossibility of 
drawing a firm line between its theoretical and poetic elements. As Newman 
argues in the Grammar of Assent, certainty does not reside in logic alone. The 
poetry brings to the fore the absolute centrality, for Newman, of the 
intuitive and of faith.