Journey Into Faith

THE biographer of Gerard Manley Hopkins chronicles the spiritual adventure of another famous English convert to Catholicism, John Henry (later Cardinal) Newman. The serious child, “smitten with intimations of a divine presence,” becomes the adolescent Evangelical; then the fiery champion of the English Church and founder of the Oxford Movement; then the anguished schismatic moving steadily closer to Rome. The story closes in 1845, with the end of Newman’s life as an Anglican. Its principal scene is Oxford — the Oxford whose leading figures were Keble, Pusey, and Fronde, a university aflame with theological debate. Journey Into Faith is a distinguished biography of an extraordinary man.