also is this disciple frequently associated in the gospel narrative, especially in its closing scenes. Again, James seems to have been excluded, for James fell an early martyr, and all the evidences point to a later date for this gospel. Thus John only is left as the possible one. With this result, moreover, all correlative facts agree. In the synoptic gospels and in the Acts John is seen to be the almost constant companion of Peter. If this unnamed disciple be not John, then we have in the fourth gospel but a single incidental reference to one who in the other gospels is one of the most prominent figures, which is hardly credible. Lastly, in this gospel alone the forerunner of Christ is never called the Baptist, but always simply John. To others some distinguishing epithet seemed needed. Not so to John the apostle when speaking of another bearing the same name.

In conclusion: Internal and external testimony combine in designating John, the son of Zebedee, disciple of our Lord, as the author of the gospel which has always been ascribed to him. And with Resh, in the last chapter of his Ausser-canonische Paralleltexte zu Johannes (Leipsic, 1896), above referred to, we conclude that "the apostolic authenticity and Johannine authorship of the fourth canonical gospel is the corner stone of all gospel research. On grounds of careful literary criticism the Johannine gospel appears as the firm basis of all further research concerning the life of Jesus, the safe shore from which one may look calmly upon the surging billows of synoptic criticism, and, if need be, venture courageously into its threatening depths, awaiting with confidence the maturing results, both of a more thorough objective, literary criticism and of a saner historical criticism as well."

A. Meyer

ART. IX.-J. H. NEWMAN AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT.

A HUMAN life is so varied, its relations so complex, its activities so numerous, so many streams of influence flow from it, such multitudes of thoughts and words and acts enter it, that it almost baffles analysis. There are lives that have social, religious, political, and literary phases. To follow such a life from beginning to end is not like unwinding a spool of carefully wrapped thread; it is more like lifting the meshes of a net. Especially is this true of the life of John Henry Newman-so rich in its personal features and its public experiences, so full of struggles, defeats, and victories, one scarcely knows through which open gate the most enticing entrance is afforded.

He was born in London, within the sound of Bow Bells, the eldest of six children. His parents belonged neither to the aristocracy nor to the so-called lower classes, but occupied a vantage ground of safety between the two extremes. The heads of the few previous generations had been small landed proprietors in Cambridgeshire, and the home life had been simple and free. On these outlying estates there was plenty of leisure time, and since the Newmans employed much of it in reading and study we are prepared to find that Newman's father was a man of culture, refined tastes, and gentlemanly bearing. He belonged to nature's nobility and labor's aristocracy. He entered the banking business in London, becoming a partner of the Ramsbottoms in Lombard Street. Cardinal Manning's father, too, was of the order of shekels and checks, being connected with the Bank of England. From quite similar conditions came these two boys, born within the same decade, who through ecclesiastical careers of sixty years stood as friends, counterparts, and contrasts. But to Newman's father reverses of fortune came, and upon the failure of the bank he took a brewery at Alton. Success, however, did not attend this venture, and little was left to the family but the mother's jointure.

Most interesting is it to note the production of character by the blending of ancestral traits, and in this instance much of the

required data would seem to be at hand. On the paternal side were elements of independence leading to loyalty to his personal convictions. Newman's mother was devout, consistent, conscientious. Her family was of direct descent from the Huguenot refugees, Fourdrinier by name. They were enterprising and progressive paper manufacturers, and had introduced many improvements into the process. Naturally, as his mother was a Calvinist, Newman's early training was in that direction. He took delight in reading Romaine, Newton, Milner, and Thomas Scott, whose "bold unworldliness" and "vigorous independence of mind" deeply impressed him. "He followed truth," said Newman, "wherever it led him, beginning in Unitarianism and ending in a zealous faith in the Holy Trinity." The critical spirit of the boy is shown in the fact that before he was sixteen he had made "a collection of Scripture texts in proof of this doctrine" and added remarks of his own upon them. A proof of his power to select and assimilate is afforded in the fact that he drew from Scott two principles as the scope and issue of his doctrine: "Holiness before peace" and "Growth the only evidence of life." He also took great delight in reading the extracts from "The Fathers," which Milner gives in his Church History.

At this time conflicting ideas came into his mind. While reading the experiences of those pious men, of their devotion and lives of beauty and worship, the cloistered cells and taper-lighted chapel, and over all the halo of mediæval romance, he was led to take up, from Newton's book on the Prophecies, the idea that the Roman Church is Antichrist-a conception which, he declares, "stained" his imagination even after his intellect had given judgment against it. He also was impressed with the conviction that it was God's will that he should lead a single life, a conviction which held its ground, with certain brief intervals of a "month now and a month then," up to the age of twenty-eight, after which it possessed him without any break at all. Add to these impressions, evidently not very coherent, the rather capricious doctrine which he borrowed from a book of Romaine's, that men know whether they are elect or not, and that, if elect, they are of course sure of their "final perseverance"-a view which he held till a year or two

after he had taken his degree at Oxford, when it gradually faded away-and we find enough material for theological fermentation in a dreamy, susceptible, and imaginative mind. And Newman's mind was of this cast. In reading he would stop upon every suggestion and project the thought into many a fertile fabrication of fancy. Through this habit of working over and amplifying what he read it became really his own, and took such a hold upon him that he never lost it. He is said to have known the Bible almost by heart. His love of dogma and his sense of the delusive unreality of all that lay outside the Bible soon threw him upon it, and it alone, as the basis of his religious faith.

After reaching mature years he put in writing his recollections of the thoughts and feelings on religious subjects which he had as a child and a boy. He says: "I used to wish the Arabian Tales were true; my imagination ran on unknown influences, on magical powers and talismans. I thought life might be a dream, or I an angel, and all this world a deception; my fellow-angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world." He was "very superstitious, and for some time previous to my conversion used constantly to cross myself on going into the dark. Of course, I must have gotten this practice from some external source or other, but I can make no conjecture of where; and certainly no one had ever spoken to me on the subject of the Catholic religion, which I only knew by name." "When I was at Littlemore I was looking over old copybooks of my schooldays, and I found among them my first Latin verse book; and on the first page of it there was a device which almost took my breath away with surprise. I had drawn the figure of a solid cross upright, and next to it is, what may indeed be meant for a necklace, but what I cannot make out to be anything else than a set of beads suspended with a little cross attached. At this time I was not quite ten years old. I suppose I got these ideas from some romance, but the strange thing is how, among the thousands of objects which meet a boy's eyes, these, in particular, should so have fixed themselves in my mind that I made them practically my own." From earliest boyhood Newman was a dogmatist. "From the age of fifteen," he says, "dogma

has been the fundamental principle of my religion. I have no other religion. What I held in 1816 I held in 1833 and I held in 1864. Please God, I shall hold it to the end." Referring to that great change of thought" which is called "conversion," he says: "When I was fifteen a great change of thought took place in me. I fell under the influence of a definite creed and received into my intellect impressions of dogma which, through God's mercy, have never been effaced or obscured." Such are the underlying principles and traits which help to explain the final outcome of the religious life and belief of John Henry Newman. He began his education in a private school. Going at an unusually early age from this private school to Trinity College, Oxford, he took his degree when he was not yet twenty-certainly a proof of extraordinary ability. However, he took no first places, this, doubtless, being due to his youth and resultant immaturity. In 1823 he was elected to a fellowship in Oriel. At this time he began to feel a certain disdain for antiquity, which showed itself in some flippant language against the Fathers. His old Calvinistic theology had given way, and he was "beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral," and drifting in the direction of the liberalism of the day," as he says. This was merely superficial. At the end of 1827, "under two great blows, illness and bereavement," he was rudely awakened from his intellectual dream, and the mists began to clear away. Keble's Christian Year, just issued, touched Newman, the tenderness and warmth of the devotion exhibited in the poems showing him the increasing coldness of his own heart.

But we pass on to the movement in which Newman was engaged, and which then claimed the attention of the Church.

Old Oxford and her schools have been the center of religious thought in England. Around her cluster the names of those who have directed the trend and fostered the development of the movements which have marked the changes in the sentiment of the Church, on which many volumes have been written. Possibly none has been more widely noted than that known as the Oxford Movement, an attention due as much to the character of those who participated as to the permanent effects or final outcome. In all human progress two extremes have been marked: liberalism and