At Oxford, he was doomed. He could not withstand the last
enchantment of the Middle Age. It was in vain that he plunged
into the pages of Gibbon or communed for long hours with
Beethoven over his beloved violin. The air was thick with
clerical sanctity, heavy with the odours of tradition and the
soft warmth of spiritual authority; his friendship with Hurrell
Froude did the rest. All that was weakest in him hurried him
onward, and all that was strongest in him too. His curious and
vaulting imagination began to construct vast philosophical
fabrics out of the writings of ancient monks, and to dally with
visions of angelic visitations and the efficacy of the oil of St
Walburga; his emotional nature became absorbed in the partisan
passions of a University clique; and his subtle intellect
concerned itself more and more exclusively with the dialectical
splitting of dogmatical hairs. His future course was marked out
for him all too clearly; and yet by a singular chance the true
nature of the man was to emerge triumphant in the end. If Newman
had died at the age of sixty, today he would have been already
forgotten, save by a few ecclesiastical historians; but he lived
to write his Apologia, and to reach immortality, neither as a
thinker nor as a theologian, but as an artist who has embalmed
the poignant history of an intensely human spirit in the magical
spices of words.

When Froude succeeded in impregnating Newman with the ideas of
Keble, the Oxford Movement began. The original and remarkable
characteristic of these three men was that they took the
Christian Religion au pied de la lettre. This had not been done
in England for centuries. When they declared every Sunday that
they believed in the Holy Catholic Church, they meant it. When