“The LORD is with me to the end. LORD, your mercy endures forever. Never forsake the work of your hands! – Psalm 138:8 -- The above verse is one of importance to John Henry Newman. He chose Psalm 138 as the epithet for his younger brother, Charles’s, headstone. Newman’s biographer, Sheridan Gilley, refers to Charles as “the black sheep of the family.”
Introduced here are three examples of lay women who were deeply influenced by Newman in particular as well as by the greater Oxford Movement. These three women had varying degrees of interaction with Newman personally.
It was all the more remarkable when I discovered a collection of “Newman detractors” on the premises, a collection indicating the conflict between Newman, the champion of Roman Catholicism in England, and mainly evangelical Free Church academics around the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century.
Despite their differences, and although Newman and Browning never met, they shared similar life experiences, and literary techniques, and both were concerned with the justification of Christianity, as well as the struggle between faith and doubt.
Newman’s influence is not relegated to the English-speaking world only; rather, it can be seen in the Spanish-speaking world as well.
Lingard remarked upon Newman’s career several times in his correspondence, usually with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity.
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