The new Weekly Standard has a review  of volume IX of Newman’s collected letters. (Which is interesting because this apparently was released in May, and volume X, which covers the final two years of his life as an Anglican, is due to be published next week.)

(Article only available to subscribers. Portions quoted here.)

After first becoming aware, in 1839, that he might convert, he resolved to wait before making any decisive move. He could counsel others against precipitancy because he had given himself the same counsel. As it happened, he waited for six years. Of this period he wrote in the Apologia, "A death-bed has scarcely a history; it is a tedious decline, with seasons of rallying and seasons of falling back; and since the end is foreseen, or what is called a matter of time, it has little interest for the reader, especially if he has a kind heart." But the letters here reveal another more complicated history: his gradual acceptance of a new, if quite uncertain, Catholic future. His deathbed was also a cradle.

To understand how revolutionary converting to Roman Catholicism was in 19th-century England, we have to recognize that, for the English, it was not only spiritually misguided (Roman Catholicism being synonymous with corruption and superstition), but also profoundly un-English. When it became clear that Newman would soon commit the unthinkable and convert, the ranks of the Anglo-Catholic faithful were aggrieved. As one woman wrote Jemima, "A sound from Littlemore and St. Mary’s seems to reach us even here . . . but, when the voice ceases . . . we shall have sad thoughts . . . Such was our guide, but he has left us to seek his own path–our champion has deserted us–our watchman whose cry used to cheer us is heard no more."

Still, Newman was adamant about dissuading impetuous would-be converts from taking a step they might regret. "Converts to Rome," he insisted, must "not go out from St. Mary’s parsonage." The career of Richard Waldo Sibthorp became the great cautionary tale. A fellow of Magdalen College, Sibthorp converted in 1841 and was ordained a priest in 1842. Shortly thereafter, while holidaying on the Isle of Wight, he began to have second thoughts. In 1843, he converted back to Anglicanism, claiming that it was the sea air that convinced him that Rome was, after all, the "great whore."

snip

The letters in this volume, like those throughout this 33-volume series, are a fascinating record of a fascinating man. Francis McGrath has done a splendid job of including contemporary documents that illumine different aspects of the period, and not only excerpts from newspapers and letters but choice passages from the voluminous primary and secondary literature.

On Christmas Eve 1842, H.A. Woodgate, rector of Holy Trinity Church, Birmingham, wrote Newman asking him if he could suggest a motto for a new house that his brother had recently built. Newman wrote back suggesting a tag from Virgil: Uno avuloso non deficit alter–"When one thing is torn away, another succeeds." As it happened, Woodgate’s brother chose another motto, but it would have worked for Newman himself. However leery he might have been of success–in one letter he says that "I do not think I have ever been sanguine of success in my day or at all"–he did hope that in tearing himself away from the Church of England he was preparing himself for success of another kind, even if it looked to the world like the most dismal failure.

In any case, he was convinced, as he wrote Jemima, after resigning his living at St. Mary’s, that "Every thing that one does honestly, sincerely, with prayer, with advice, must turn to good."