John Henry Newman was born in 1801, the son of a London banker. His mother was of Huguenot descent. He came under Calvinistic influence. Through study especially, of Romaine _On Faith_ he became the subject of an inward conversion, of which in 1864 he wrote: 'I am still more certain of it than that I have hands and feet.' Thomas Scott, the evangelical, moved him. Before he was sixteen he made a collection of Scripture texts in proof of the doctrine of the trinity. From Newton _On the Prophecies_ he learned to identify the Pope with anti-Christ--a doctrine by which, he adds, his imagination was stained up to the year 1843. In his _Apologia_, 1865, he declares: 'From the age of fifteen, dogma has been a fundamental principle of my religion. I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion.' At the age of twenty-one, two years after he had taken his degree, he came under very different influences. He passed from Trinity College to a fellowship in Oriel. To use his own phrase, he drifted in the direction of liberalism. He was touched by Whately. He was too logical, and also too dogmatic, to be satisfied with Whately's position. Of the years from 1823 to 1827 Mozley says: 'Probably no one who then knew Newman could have told which way he would go. It is not certain that he himself knew.' Francis W. Newman, Newman's brother, who later became a Unitarian, remembering his own years of stress, speaks with embitterment of his elder brother, who was profoundly uncongenial to him.
The year 1827, in which Keble's _Christian Year_ was published, saw another change in Newman's views. Illness and bereavement came to him with awakening effect. He made the acquaintance of Hurrell Froude. Froude brought Newman and Keble together. Henceforth Newman bore no more traces either of evangelicalism or of liberalism. Of Froude it is difficult to speak with confidence. His brother, James Anthony Froude, the historian, author of the _Nemesis of Faith_, 1848, says that he was gifted, brilliant, enthusiastic. Newman speaks of him with almost boundless praise. Two volumes of his sermons, published after his death in 1836, make the impression neither of learning nor judgment. Clearly he had charm. Possibly he talked himself into a common-room reputation. Newman says: 'Froude made me look with admiration toward the Church of Rome.' Keble never had felt the liberalism through which Newman had passed. Cradled as the Church of England had been in Puritanism, the latter was to him simply evil. Opinions differing from his own were not simply mistaken, they were sinful. He conceived no religious truth outside the Church of England. In the _Christian Year_ one perceives an influence which Newman strongly felt. It was that of the idea of the sacramental significance of all natural objects or events. Pusey became professor of Hebrew in 1830. He lent the movement academic standing, which the others could not give. He had been in Germany, and had published an _Inquiry into the Rationalist Character of German Theology_, 1825. He hardly did more than expose the ignorance of Rose. He was himself denounced as a German rationalist who dared to speak of a new era in theology. Pusey, mourning the defection of Newman, whom he deeply loved, gathered in 1846 the forces of the Anglo-Catholics and continued in some sense a leader to the end of his long life in 1882.