Project Gutenberg's Apologia Pro Vita Sua, by John Henry Cardinal Newman

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Title: Apologia Pro Vita Sua

Author: John Henry Cardinal Newman

Release Date: July 16, 2007 [EBook #22088]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

BEING

A History of his Religious Opinions.

BY

JOHN HENRY CARDINAL NEWMAN.

"Commit thy way to the Lord and trust in Him, and He will do it.
And He will bring forth thy justice as the light, and thy
judgment as the noon-day."

LONDON

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

AND NEW YORK: 15 EAST 16th STREET

1890.

PRINTED BY

KELLY AND CO., GATE STREET, LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS,

AND KINGSTON-ON-THAMES.

PREFACE.

The following History of my Religious Opinions, now that it is detached
from the context in which it originally stood, requires some preliminary
explanation; and that, not only in order to introduce it generally to
the reader, but specially to make him understand, how I came to write a
whole book about myself, and about my most private thoughts and
feelings. Did I consult indeed my own impulses, I should do my best
simply to wipe out of my Volume, and consign to oblivion, every trace of
the circumstances to which it is to be ascribed; but its original title
of "Apologia" is too exactly borne out by its matter and structure, and
these again are too suggestive of correlative circumstances, and those
circumstances are of too grave a character, to allow of my indulging so
natural a wish. And therefore, though in this new Edition I have managed
to omit nearly a hundred pages of my original Volume, which I could
safely consider to be of merely ephemeral importance, I am even for that
very reason obliged, by way of making up for their absence, to prefix to
my Narrative some account of the provocation out of which it arose.

It is now more than twenty years that a vague impression to