the teachings of the authoritative and
universal Church. This is the problem which the last of the _Tracts_,
_Tract Ninety_, sets itself. It is one of those which Newman wrote. One
must find the sense of the Roman Church in the Thirty-Nine Articles.
This tract is prefaced by an extraordinary disquisition upon reserve in
the communication of religious knowledge. God's revelations of himself
to mankind have always been a kind of veil. Truth is the reward of
holiness. The Fathers were holy men. Therefore what the Fathers said
must be true. The principle of reserve the Articles illustrate. They do
not mean what they say. They were written in an uncatholic age, that is,
in the age of the Reformation. They were written by Catholic men. Else
how can the Church of England be now a Catholic Church? Through their
reserve they were acceptable in an uncatholic age. They cannot be
uncatholic in spirit, else how should they be identical in meaning with
the great Catholic creeds? Then follows an exposition of every important
article of the thirty-nine, an effort to interpret each in the sense of
the Roman Catholic Church of to-day. Four tutors published a protest
against the tract. Formal censure was passed upon it. It was now evident
to Newman that his place in the leadership of the Oxford Movement was
gone. From this time, the spring of 1841, he says he was on his deathbed
as regards the Church of England. He withdrew to Littlemore and
established a brotherhood there. In the autumn of 1843 he resigned the
parochial charge of St. Mary's at Oxford. On the 9th of October 1845 he
was formally admitted to the Roman Church. On the 6th of October Ernest
Renan had formally severed his connexion with that Church.

It is a strange thing that in his _Essay on the Development of Christian
Doctrine_, written in 1845, Newman himself should have advanced
substantially Hampden's contention. Here are written many things
concerning the development of doctrine which commend themselves to minds
conversant with the application of historical criticism to the whole
dogmatic structure of the Christian ages. The purpose is with Newman
entirely polemical, the issue exactly that which one would not have
foreseen. Precisely because the development of doctrine is so obvious,
because no historical point can be found at which the growth of doctrine
ceased and the rule of faith was once for all settled, therefore an
infallible authority outside of the development