His father's idea was that he should read
for the bar, and he kept a few terms at Lincoln's Inn; but in the end
Oxford, which had, about the year of his birth, experienced a rebirth
of ideas, thanks to the widening impulse of the French Revolution,
held him, and Oriel College--the centre of the "Noetics," as old
Oxford called the Liberal set in contempt--made him a fellow. His
association there with Pusey and Keble is a matter of history; and
the Oxford Movement, in which the three worked together, was the
direct result, according to Dean Church, of their "searchings of
heart and communing" for seven years, from 1826 to 1833. A word might
be said of Whately too, whose _Logic_ Newman helped to beat into
final form in these Oxford experiences. Not since the days of Colet
and Erasmus had the University experienced such a shaking of the
branches. However, there is no need to do more than allude to these
intimately dealt with in the _Apologia_ itself.

There, indeed, the stages of Newman's pilgrimage are related with a
grace and sincerity of style that have hardly been equalled in
English or in any northern tongue. It ranges from the simplest facts
to the most complicated polemical issues and is always easily in
accord with its changing theme. So much so, that the critics
themselves have not known whether to admire more the spiritual logic
of the literary art of the writer and self-confessor. We may take, as
two instances of Newman's power, the delightful account in Part III.
of his childhood and the first growth of his religious belief; and
the remarkable opening to Part IV., where he uses the figure of the
death-bed with that finer reality which is born of the creative
communion of thought and word in a poet's brain. Something of this
power was felt, it is clear, in his sermons at Oxford. Dr. Barry
describes the effect that Newman made at the time of his parting with
the Anglican Church: "Every sermon was an experience;" made memorable
by that "still figure, and clear, low, penetrating voice, and the
mental hush that fell upon his audience while he meditated, alone
with the Alone, in words of awful austerity. His discourses were
poems, but transcripts too from the soul, reasonings in a heavenly
dialectic...."

About his controversy with Charles Kingsley, the immediate cause of
his _Apologia_, what new thing need be said? It is clear that
Kingsley, who was the type of a class of mind then common enough in
his Church, imp