nd spiritual conflict, led to the resignation by N. of his benefice. In
1842 he retired to Littlemore, and after a period of prayer, fasting, and
seclusion, was in 1845 received into the Roman Catholic Church. In the
following year he went to Rome, where he was ordained priest and made
D.D., and returning to England he established the oratory in Birmingham
in 1847, and that in London in 1850. A controversy with C. Kingsley, who
had written that N. "did not consider truth a necessary virtue," led to
the publication of his _Apologia pro Vita Sua_ (1864), one of the most
remarkable books of religious autobiography ever written. N.'s later
years were passed at the oratory at Birmingham. In 1879 he was summoned
to Rome and _cr._ Cardinal of St. George in Velabro. Besides the works
above mentioned he wrote, among others, _The Arians of the Fourth
Century_ (1833), _Twelve Lectures_ (1850), _Lectures on the Present
Position of Catholics_ (1851), _Idea of a University_, _Romanism and
Popular Protestantism_, _Disquisition on the Canon of Scripture_, and his
poem, _The Dream of Gerontius_. Possessed of one of the most keen and
subtle intellects of his age, N. was also master of a style of marvellous
beauty and power. To many minds, however, his subtlety not seldom
appeared to pass into sophistry; and his attitude to schools of thought
widely differing from his own was sometimes harsh and unsympathetic. On
the other hand he was able to exercise a remarkable influence over men
ecclesiastically, and in some respects religiously, most strongly opposed
to him. His sermons place him in the first rank of English preachers.

_Lives_ or books about him by R.H. Hutton, E.A. Abbott. _Works_ (36
vols., 1868-81), _Apologia pro Vita Sua_ (1864), etc.

NEWTON, SIR ISAAC (1642-1727).--Natural philosopher, _b._ at Woolsthorpe,
Lincolnshire, the _s._ of a small landed proprietor, and _ed._ at the
Grammar School of Grantham and at Trinity Coll., Camb. By propounding the
binomial theorem, the differential calculus, and the integral calculus,
he began in 1665 the wonderful series of discoveries in pure mathematics,
optics, and physics, which place him in the first rank of the
philosophers of all time. He was elected Lucasian Prof. of Mathematics at
Camb. in 1669, and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1672, over which body
he presided for 25 years from 1703. In the same year his new theory of
flight was _pub._ in a paper before the society. His epoch-m