Tracts for the Times

John Henry Cardinal Newman

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009 - 282 pages

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: to be judged of by Analogy from other practical Matters. 11 extensive inquiry would establish; premising, however, the i 8. following cautions, as necessary to be kept in view throughout the inquiry. First, that since we are to speak of the Fathers collectively, we must be careful to select those points, in which they exhibit a tolerably general agreement. This limitation disposes at once of many of the most plausible objections to the views of Antiquity, and also of many of the unworthy and inadequate allegations of its timid defenders; as I hope to shew hereafter in some important examples. But to make the rule a practical one, we should well understand, secondly, what is to be accounted general agreement among the Fathers. For it is the third particular in the rule of Vincentius, Quod ab omnibus, which has ever afforded most scope for cavil to the rationalist, and for perplexity to the unwary. But let us only apply to this matter the same rules of common sense, which guide us on analogous subjects in ordinary life. A person not regularly trained in medicine desires to know what are safe rules of diet: is he to believe that there are no such rules at all, because he finds none from which, at some time or other, ingenious innovators have not contrived to dissent ? Another wishes to ascertain some point of common law: does he think it necessary for that purpose, that cases in all points exactly like his own shall have come under the cognisance of each former generation of jurists ? Or, in matters of navigation, would it be said there were no fixed rules, because but a few out of many seamen have left the results of their experience anywhere on record ? The question about the Fathers is so far like these, that it is strictly a question of practice: men want to know whi...

About the author

English clergyman John Henry Newman was born on February 21, 1801. He was educated at Trinity College, University of Oxford. He was the leader of the Oxford movement and cardinal after his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church. In 1822, he received an Oriel College fellowship, which was then the highest distinction of Oxford scholarship, and was appointed a tutor at Oriel. Two years later, he became vicar of St. Mary's, the Anglican church of the University of Oxford, and exerted influence on the religious thought through his sermons. When Newman resigned his tutorship in 1832, he made a tour of the Mediterranean region and wrote the hymn "Lead Kindly Light." He was also one of the chief contributors to "Tracts for the Times" (1833-1841), writing 29 papers including "Tract 90", which terminated the series. The final tract was met with opposition because of its claim that the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England are aimed primarily at the abuses of Roman Catholicism. Newman retired from Oxford in 1842 to the village of Littlemore. He spent three years in seclusion and resigned his post as vicar of St. Mary's on October 9, 1845. During this time, he wrote a retraction of his criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church and after writing his "Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine," he became a Roman Catholic. The following year, he went to Rome and was ordained a priest and entered the Congregation of the Oratory. The remainder of Newman's life was spent in the house of the Oratory that he established near Birmingham. He also served as rector of a Roman Catholic university that the bishops of Ireland were trying to establish in Dublin from 1854-1858. While there, he delivered a series of lectures that were later published as "The Idea of a University Defined" (1873), which says the function of a university is the training of the mind instead of the giving of practical information. In 1864, Newman published "Apologia pro Vita Sua (Apology for His Life)" in response to the charge that Roman Catholicism was indifferent to the truth. It is an account of his spiritual development and regarded as both a religious autobiography and English prose. Newman also wrote "An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent" (1870), and the novels "Loss and Gain" (1848), Callista" (1856) and "The Dream of Gerontius" (1865). Newman was elected an honorary fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, in 1877 and was made cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879. He died on August 11, 1890.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Tracts for the Times
• Author: John Henry Cardinal Newman
• Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009
• ISBN: 145894493X, 9781458944931
• Length: 282 pages