lowship, and leading a scholarly life for
over twenty years. In 1824 he was ordained in the Anglican church, and four
years later was chosen vicar of St. Mary's, at Oxford, where his sermons
made a deep impression on the cultivated audiences that gathered from far
and near to hear him.

A change is noticeable in Newman's life after his trip to the Mediterranean
in 1832. He had begun his life as a Calvinist, but while in Oxford, then
the center of religious unrest, he described himself as "drifting in the
direction of Liberalism." Then study and bereavement and an innate
mysticism led him to a profound sympathy with the mediaeval Church. He had
from the beginning opposed Catholicism; but during his visit to Italy,
where he saw the Roman church at the center of Its power and splendor, many
of his prejudices were overcome. In this enlargement of his spiritual
horizon Newman was greatly influenced by his friend Hurrell Froude, with
whom he made the first part of the journey. His poems of this period
(afterwards collected in the _Lyra Apostolica_), among which is the famous
"Lead, Kindly Light," are noticeable for their radiant spirituality; but
one who reads them carefully sees the beginning of that mental struggle
which ended in his leaving the church in which he was born. Thus he writes
of the Catholic church, whose services he had attended as "one who in a
foreign land receives the gifts of a good Samaritan":

O that thy creed were sound!
For thou dost soothe the heart, thou church of Rome,
By thy unwearied watch and varied round
Of service, in thy Saviour's holy home.
I cannot walk the city's sultry streets,
But the wide porch invites to still retreats,
Where passion's thirst is calmed, and care's unthankful gloom.

On his return to England, in 1833, he entered into the religious struggle
known as the Oxford or Tractarian Movement,[245] and speedily became its
acknowledged leader. Those who wish to follow this attempt at religious
reform, which profoundly affected the life of the whole English church,
will find it recorded in the _Tracts for the Times_, twenty-nine of which
were written by Newman, and in his _Parochial and Plain Sermons_ (1837-
1843). After nine years of spiritual conflict Newman retired to Littlemore,
where, with a few followers, he led a life of almost monastic seclusion,
still striving to reconcile his changing belief with the doctrines of his
own church. Two year