"John H. Newman, February 11th, 1811, Verse Book;"
then follow my first verses. Between "Verse" and "Book" I have drawn
the figure of a solid cross upright, and next to it is, what may
indeed be meant for a necklace, but what I cannot make out to be
anything else than a set of beads suspended, with a little cross
attached. At this time I was not quite ten years old. I suppose I got
the idea from some romance, Mrs. Radcliffe's or Miss Porter's; or
from some religious picture; but the strange thing is, how, among
the thousand objects which meet a boy's eyes, these in particular
should so have fixed themselves in my mind, that I made them thus
practically my own. I am certain there was nothing in the churches
I attended, or the prayer books I read, to suggest them. It must be
recollected that churches and prayer books were not decorated in
those days as I believe they are now.

When I was fourteen, I read Paine's tracts against the Old Testament,
and found pleasure in thinking of the objections which were contained
in them. Also, I read some of Hume's essays; and perhaps that on
Miracles. So at least I gave my father to understand; but perhaps it
was a brag. Also, I recollect copying out some French verses, perhaps
Voltaire's, against the immortality of the soul, and saying to myself
something like "How dreadful, but how plausible!"

When I was fifteen (in the autumn of 1816) a great change of thought
took place in me. I fell under the influences of a definite creed,
and received into my intellect impressions of dogma, which, through
God's mercy, have never been effaced or obscured. Above and beyond
the conversations and sermons of the excellent man, long dead, who
was the human means of this beginning of divine faith in me, was the
effect of the books which he put into my hands, all of the school
of Calvin. One of the first books I read was a work of Romaine's; I
neither recollect the title nor the contents, except one doctrine,
which of course I do not include among those which I believe to have
come from a divine source, viz. the doctrine of final perseverance. I
received it at once, and believed that the inward conversion of which
I was conscious (and of which I still am more certain than that I
have hands and feet) would last into the next life, and that I was
elected to eternal glory. I have no consciousness that this belief
had any tendency whatever to lead me to be careless about pleasing
God. I retained it till