Loss and Gain

The quaintly punctuated title of Cardinal Newman's first novel, LOSS AND GAIN; OR, THE STORY OF A CONVERT says much. Nineteenth Century England abounded in conversion novels and Newman's stands head and shoulders above all the rest. That, at least, was the opinion of Harvard history professor Robert Lee Wolff in his monumental 1977 GAINS AND LOSSES: NOVELS OF FAITH AND DOUBT IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND....John Henry Newman (1801-1890) deserves a far wider non-specialist readership than he now enjoys. Once England hung on his every word: whether sermon, philosophy, church history, poetry, apologetics, satire or controversy. He does not lack for professional readers who take up formidable masterpieces such as APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA, THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY, ARIANS OF THE FOURTH CENTURY or A GRAMMAR OF ASSENT....LOSS AND GAIN may well be the easiest and best place for non-specialists to begin with myriad-minded John Henry Newman. It is a novel about Oxford and fleshes out Newman's belief that students form their deepest convictions from their discussions with one another and not from teachers. It is also a novel very much like a Platonic dialog that presents and wrestles with various theories of why intelligent young men are either content to stay with their inherited personal faith or are moved to seek another....LOSS AND GAIN covers six years in the life of Charles Reding (pronounced READing) and his interactions with family, teachers, tutors and fellow students of various Oxford University colleges about which of the Christian denominations and trends in England of the 1840s had greatest claim to be taken seriously and to teach the truth. Problems debated are perennial since the Reformation: is there a visible church? Does it have authority to teach definitively? What is faith? What is reason's role in reaching faith? Who needs a Pope?...A tutor's systematic lectures on the 39 Articles of the established Church of England, interpreted by the hero as mere 16th Century "articles of peace," a doctrinal hodgepodge of Roman Catholicism, Zwingli, Luther and Calvin, leaves an increasingly troubled Reding shaken in his inherited trust in his clergyman father's simple faith in the Church of England. Some of his Anglo-Catholic friends play at re-establishing Catholic practices without the Roman Catholic beliefs behind them. Others move towards rationalism and Unitarianism. Others yet are caught up in the emotional but action-oriented and society-transforming Evangelicalism of the age....In the end Charles (like Newman after a 12 year struggle) opted to become Roman Catholic, thereby losing his right to take an Oxford degree, and alienating friends and family alike. He gained, he judged, truth and peace....The debates of Oxford in the 1840s go on today in America and elsewhere. Recently converted himself to the Church of Rome, Newman pokes fun at the frequent shallowness and selfish career seeking that an Establishment of (the wrong) religion inevitably promotes.