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Correspondence of John Henry Newman with John Keble and Others, 1839-1845
Correspondence of John Henry Newman with John Keble and Others 18391845 Author:John Henry Newman 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: CHAPTER III TRACT XC. JANUARY TO APRIL 1841 Quae ignorabam interrogabant me The year 1841 was as eventful as the preceding one had been uneventful; for it... more » was the year of Tract 90, and the ill-starred Anglo-Prussian Jerusalem Bishopric. The editors have not in their hands many important letters written by Newman in connection with Tract 90 which have not already been published either by Miss Mozley or in the ' Life of Dr. Pusey,' but there are many of considerable interest which he received ; and from these, chiefly, a selection has been made.1 Tract 90 was published on February 27, 1841. Like its predecessors, with one or two exceptions, it was anonymous. But the veil of anonymity was so thin that everyone in Oxford must have seen through it. On March 8, four senior Tutors addressed to the Editor of Tracts for the Times, ' i.e. Newman, a not very happily worded letter— there was a tone of self-conscious correctness and moderation about it—in which they expressed their apprehension that the Tract had a highly dangerous tendency and their feeling that some one should avow himself responsible for it. In giving specimens of the grounds of their apprehension they betrayed such an entire misunderstanding of the scope of the Tract, that it might almost seem pardonable to suspect that every one of the four, feeling confident that the other three had studied it, omitted to do so himself. It is, of course, certain that none of them was competentto pronounce an opinion. A novel and complicated piece of critical research, such as was Tract 90, cannot be mastered by the most practised intellect in the space of eight days. 1 All the official documents connected with Tract 90, viz. the Tract itself; the Letter of the Four Tutors ; the Censure of the Tract ; Newman's Letter to th...« less