THE P RTAL
March 2017 Page 10
Thoughts on Newman
Newman , Copleston , Hawkins , Sin and Justification
Dr Stephen Morgan surveys the scene
On the Sunday afternoon , on a day that , had it not fallen on the Sunday , would otherwise have been marked in the Book of Common Prayer as that of the feast of the Conversion of St Paul , that is on 25th January 1829 , the Rev ’ d Mr Newman ascended the steps of the pulpit of the Church of which he had lately been instituted as Vicar , St Mary the Virgin , on the High , Oxford . Newman ’ s star was very much in the ascendant .
St Mary ’ s was the University Church and it was to its ‘ reasonable service ’ that the Heads of House and University dignitaries repaired when it was fitting and certainly on those occasions when the University calendar directed them .
He had , as it were , a captive audience of those charged with the education of the better half of the men who would shape Victorian Britain and her global empire . As pulpits go , it was arguably higher in its position of influence than any other in the country .
Taking as his text the Epistle to the Romans – and remarking upon the irony that had it been St Paul ’ s Day rather than the Sunday there would have been no Epistle – Newman began a series of fourteen Sermons preached on successive Sundays from that Epistle , on the topic of Sin and Justification .
Outside the more advanced Evangelical congregations , these subjects might then have been considered somewhat obscure , recondite even – certainly unfashionable – but for Newman there was nothing more pressing .
In the Senior Common Room at Oriel , Newman was accustomed to be in the company of men of stellar intellect , academic excellence and wide influence . His first Provost , as the College Head was titled , had been Edward Copleston , a man of towering determination , who left Oxford in 1828 to become first Dean of Chester and then , in plurality , Bishop of Llandaff and Dean of St Paul ’ s . Copleston had , from his time as Professor of Poetry in the University onwards , gathered at Oriel men of the quality of Dr Arnold ( him of Rugby School ) and Richard Whateley , later Archbishop of Dublin ( and a
distant ancestor of the actor who played Lewis in the eponymous television series ). Copleston ’ s legacy was maintained and enhanced by his immediate successor , Edward Hawkins , who continued to hold the office until his death at the age of ninety three in 1882 .
Newman ’ s rooms , close to the Chapel at Oriel , were diagonally across Front Quad from the Provost ’ s Lodgings next to the Senior Common Room : relative positions that neatly captured the diametrically opposed notions of their duties to the college ’ s students the two men held .
Their disagreement is captured in a lengthy , frequent ( on one occasion three letters in a single day in each direction ) and fascinating correspondence across 1828 and 1829 . It turned on the duties of a college Tutor . For Hawkins , the role was limited to academic guidance but for Newman , although the intellectual was far from unimportant , the duty of moral guidance and formation was paramount .
Of course , he wanted the academic success of those in his care but supremely he wanted their success in the life of virtue and in that final examination we all face before the judgement throne of God . In that examination it is the question of sin and how we are justified that alone matters .
Newman ’ s predecessor in the pulpit of the University Church had been the same Edward Hawkins . He , as the Provost , was to win the battle , if not the argument , by refusing to send Newman any students to tutor , but it isn ’ t Provost Hawkins ’ sermons from the pulpit of St Mary the Virgin that anyone reads today , neither for moral guidance nor the philosophy of education .