and his colleague Hurrell Froude went to the south of Europe for Froude's health. In company with Froude and his father, Archdeacon Froude, he visited Gibraltar, Malta, the Ionian Islands, parts of Sicily, Naples, and Rome, where he made the acquaintance of Cardinal (then Dr.) Wiseman. He thought Rome ‘the most wonderful place in the world.’ But he was not attracted by its religion, which seemed to him ‘polytheistic, degrading, and idolatrous.’ It was in Rome that Newman and Froude began the ‘Lyra Apostolica;’ some of the poems included in it were written earlier, and one or two at a later period, but most were composed during this expedition. In April 1833 the Froudes left Rome for France, and Newman returned to Sicily, ‘drawn by a strange love to gaze upon its cities and its mountains.’ At Leonforte he fell dangerously ill of a fever, and during the height of his malady kept exclaiming, ‘I shall not die, I have a work to do.’ In June 1833 he left Palermo for Marseilles in an orange-boat. It was during this voyage, when becalmed for a whole week in the straits of Bonifacio, that his most popular verses, ‘Lead kindly light,’ were written. On 9 July 1833 he reached his mother's house at Iffley. Five days afterwards Keble preached his assize sermon at St. Mary's on national apostasy, which Newman considered the start of the Oxford movement.
Dean Church has observed that the Oxford movement was ‘the direct result of the searchings of heart and the communings for seven years from 1826 to 1833 of Keble, Froude, and Newman.’ ‘Keble had given the inspiration, Froude had given the impetus, then Newman took up the work.’ The moment of Newman's landing in England was, as he himself describes it, ‘critical.’ ‘Ten Irish bishoprics had been at a sweep suppressed, and church people were told to be thankful that things were no worse. It was time to move if there was to be any moving at all.’ Between 25 and 29 July William Palmer [q. v.], Hurrell Froude, Arthur Philip Perceval [q. v.], and Hugh James Rose [q. v.] met together at Rose's rectory at Hadleigh. It was then resolved to fight for the doctrine of apostolical succession and the integrity of the prayer-book. And out of this meeting sprang the plan of associating for the defence of the church and the ‘Tracts for the Times.’ It was Newman himself who began the tracts, ‘out of his own head,’ as he expresses it, in September 1833. ‘But the Tracts,’ Dean Church writes, ‘were not the most powerful instruments in drawing sympathy to the movement. Without Mr. Newman's four o'clock sermons at St. Mary's the movement might never have gone on, certainly would never have been what it was. While men were reading and talking about the Tracts they were hearing the sermons, and in the sermons they heard the living meaning and reason and bearing of the Tracts, their ethical affinities, their moral standard. The sermons created a moral atmosphere in which men judged the questions in debate.’
Newman had already finished in July 1832 his volume on the ‘Arians,’ which was published at the close of 1833. It was ‘a book,’ as Dean Church judged, ‘which for originality and subtlety of thought was something very unlike the usual theological writings of the day,’ and which made its author's mark as a writer.
Towards the end of 1835 Dr. Pusey joined the ‘Oxford movement,’ and ‘became, as it were, its official chief in the eyes of the world;’ ‘a second head in close sympathy with its original leader, but in many ways very different from him.’ In 1836 Dr. Hampden was appointed regius professor of divinity at Oxford, greatly to the indignation of a considerable section of the university, the liberalism of his Bampton lectures having given much offence. One effect of the controversy which arose, and in which Newman took a leading part, chiefly by his ‘Elucidations of Dr. Hampden's Theological Statements,’ was to open the eyes of many to the meaning of the movement, and to bring some fresh friends to its side. But further Newman felt that as the person whom he and his friends were opposing had committed himself in writing, they ought so to commit themselves too. Hence he was led to the composition of a series of works in defence of Anglo-catholicism, or the ‘Via Media,’ ‘the religion of Andrewes, Laud, Hammond, Butler, and Wilson,’ the principles of which the movement maintained. The first of these was the volume entitled ‘The Prophetical Office of the Church viewed relatively to Romanism and Popular Protestantism.’ This treatise employed him for three years, from the beginning of 1834 to the end of 1836, and was published in March 1837. It was followed in March 1838 by the book on ‘Justification,’ in May by the ‘Disquisition on the Canon of Scripture,’ and in June by the ‘Tractate on Antichrist.’ These volumes—the contents of which were originally delivered as lectures in ‘a dark, dreary appendage to St. Mary's on the north side,’ called Adam de Brome's Chapel—did much to form a school of opinion which ‘grew stronger and stronger every year, till it came into collision with the nation,
