of which he asserted, with special reference to the decrees of the Vatican council, that Rome had equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history, and that ‘no one can become her convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another.’ These propositions were shortly afterwards embodied and defended by their author in a pamphlet on the Vatican decrees in their bearing on civil allegiance. To which Newman replied in his ‘Letter to the Duke of Norfolk,’ his argument being that the papal prerogatives asserted by the Vatican council do not and cannot touch the civil allegiance of catholics. The weight of Newman's reply was the greater from the fact that, although personally holding the doctrine of the pope's infallibility, he had no sympathy with the tone and temper of some of its most prominent supporters, and in a private letter to his bishop, surreptitiously published, had denounced the proceedings of ‘an insolent and aggressive faction’ bent upon carrying it. Similarly in the ‘Letter to the Duke of Norfolk’ he expressed his aversion to ‘the chronic extravagances of knots of catholics here and there,’ who ‘stated truths in the most paradoxical form, and stretched principles till they were close upon snapping.’
In 1877 Newman was elected an honorary fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and in February 1878 he visited Oxford for the first time since his departure in 1846. In the same month Pius IX died, and was succeeded by Leo XIII. Towards the close of 1878 several leading English catholic laymen represented to Leo XIII the great work which Newman had accomplished for religion in England, and the high place he held in general estimation. Cardinal Manning supported these representations, and the pope showed his full appreciation of Newman's worth and merits by calling him to the sacred college. To Newman this honour was wholly unexpected. Such an elevation, he said, had never come into his thoughts, and seemed to him out of keeping with his antecedents. The honour was the greater as it was accompanied by an exemption from the obligation of residence at the pontifical court, hardly ever given save to cardinals who are diocesan bishops. Newman set out for Rome on 16 April 1879, and on 12 May was formally created cardinal of the title of St. George in Velabro. On 1 July he returned to Edgbaston. He paid another visit to Trinity College, Oxford, over Trinity Sunday and Monday, 1880, and preached in St. Aloysius's Church. But, with the exception of rare and short visits to London, he thenceforth remained at Edgbaston until his death on 11 Aug. 1890. After lying in state at the Oratory he was buried at Rednall.
Upon the occasion of his receiving in the Palazzo delle Pigne at Rome the biglietto, formally announcing his elevation to the sacred college, Newman delivered an address to the distinguished company assembled to do him honour, in the course of which he reviewed his own life and work. His testimony of himself was that ‘for thirty, forty, fifty years he had resisted, to the best of his power, the spirit of liberalism in religion,’ by ‘liberalism’ being meant ‘the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another,’ and in that resistance he found the main principle running through all his writings and through all his actions. No doubt Newman was well warranted in thus regarding his career. Certain it is that the conception of Christianity as the absolute religion, as a revelation possessing supreme objective authority, and offering a precise, definite, and inerrant teaching regarding all the great problems of life, was the dominant idea to which he ever clung. In his youth, under the influence of Thomas Scott (1747–1821) [q.v.] and Thomas Newton, he took the popular evangelical view that the bible is the present infallible and all-sufficient oracle of divine truth. Gradually this opinion dropped off from him. He found, as he thought, in matter of fact, that the sacred scriptures of Christianity were not intended nor fitted to serve as the arbiter of doctrine and practice in religion. ‘We have tried the book,’ he wrote, ‘and it disappoints, because it is used for a purpose for which it was not given. Either no objective revelation has been given, or it has been provided with a means of impressing its objectiveness on the world.’ Thus was he led to the conception of an infallible church. For years he sought to realise this notion in the national establishment, and to give to it—in its officers, its laws, its usages, its worship—that devotion and obedience which he deemed correlative to the very idea of a church. This was the true scope of the tractarian movement, which aroused Oxford from the spiritual torpor of centuries. The condemnation of that movement by the Anglican episcopate was a fatal blow to its leader. His initial principle, his basis, external authority, was cut away from under his feet. The choice open to him was either to forget his most keen and luminous convictions, or to look out for truth and peace elsewhere. After much anxious thought he decided that the church of Rome was the true home of the idea which he could not surrender. And
