POSITION OF NEWMAN

Now was the time at which Mr. Gladstone's relations with Manning and
Hope began to approach their closest. Newman, the great enchanter, in
obedience to his bishop had dropped the issue of the Tracts; had
withdrawn from all public discussion of ecclesiastical politics; had
given up his work in Oxford; and had retired with a neophyte or two to
Littlemore, a hamlet on the outskirts of the ever venerable city, there
to pursue his theological studies, to prepare translations of
Athanasius, to attend to his little parish, and generally to go about
his own business so far as he might be permitted by the restlessness
alike of unprovoked opponents and unsought disciples. This was the
autumn of 1843. In October Manning sent to Mr. Gladstone two letters
that he had received from Newman, indicating only too plainly, as they
were both convinced, that the foundations of their leader's anglicanism
had been totally undermined by the sweeping repudiation alike by
episcopal and university authority of the doctrines of Tract Ninety. Dr.
Pusey, on the other hand, admitted that the expressions in Newman's
letter were portentous, but did not believe that they necessarily meant
secession. In a man of the world this would not have been regarded as
candid. For Newman says, 'I formally told Pusey that I expected to leave
the church of England in the autumn of 1843, and begged him to tell
others, that no one might be taken by surprise or might trust me in the
interval.'[186] But Newman has told us that he had from the first great
difficulty in making Dr. Pusey understand the differences between them.
The letters stand in the _Apologia_ (chapter iv. Sec. 2) to tell their own
tale. To Mr. Gladstone their shock was extreme, not only by reason of
the catastrophe to which they pointed, but from the ill-omened shadow
that they threw upon the writer's probity of mind if not of heart. 'I
stagger to and fro like a drunken man,' he wrote to Manning, 'I am at my
wit's end.' He found some of Newman's language, 'forgive me if I say it,
more like the expressions of some Faust gambling for his soul, than the
records of the inner life of a great Christian teacher.' In his diary,
he puts it thus:--

_Oct. 28, 1843._--S. Simon and S. Jude. St. James's 11 A.M. with a
heavy heart. Another letter had come from Manning, enclosing a
second from Newman, which announced that since the summer of 1839
he had had the convictio