Loss and gain : the story of a convert [Paperback]

John Henry Newman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 25, 2009

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. This text refers to the Bibliobazaar edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 444 pages
• Publisher: BiblioBazaar (September 25, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 111380971X
• ISBN-13: 978-1113809711
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,246,335 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

61 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars LOSS AND GAIN: Arguably the best place to begin with Newman, July 21, 2002

By 

T. Patrick Killough "All about Patrick" (Black Mountain, NC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Loss and Gain (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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. He also lovingly enlivens a bygone time at Oxford University where until very recently he had himself been the foremost leader of the Oxford Movement to reform the Church of England in a Catholic but non-Papal direction. Had he persuaded in TRACTS FOR THE TIMES # 90 even one Anglican bishop of the correctness of his Catholic interpretation of the 39 Articles, very likely neither Newman nor hundreds of others would have so suddenly gone over to Rome.
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The book has color, humor, religious insight and respect for individual consciences. Charles Reding exemplifies Newman's belief that God leads each person of good will at an individual, unforced, respectful pace from his or her inherited religion toward ever closer union with Himself. He who first tastes Newman through reading LOSS AND GAIN will not be disappointed and will reach out for more and more of his works, both verse and prose.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Loss and Gain, January 19, 2011

By 

Michael G. Weddle (South Bend, IN USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Loss and Gain The Story of a Convert (Kindle Edition)

Whether you are interested in the book or not, read him. If you like to read, this takes reading to a new, higher, level. His ability is like music to enjoy. If you like the subject, that's a bonus.

4.0 out of 5 stars The Birth of Catholic Fiction, November 15, 2011

By 

Debra Murphy (Ashland, OR USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Loss And Gain: The Story Of A Convert (Paperback)

John Henry Newman was a leading spiritual and intellectual figure in the so-called "Oxford Movement" in the Anglican Church when, after a lengthy spiritual struggle, he converted to Catholicism in 1845. Some of his friends preceded him into the Church and many of his followers followed him, which made for considerable controversy in robustly anti-Catholic mid-Victorian England. A small number of these converts later "reverted" and one of these, a Miss Elizabeth Harris, published an anti-Catholic novel in 1847 entitled FROM OXFORD TO ROME: AND HOW IT FARED WITH SOME WHO LATELY MADE THE JOURNEY. Beyond hoping to dissuade other potential converts from "going over to Rome" as the saying went, Miss Harris hinted in her novel that Newman and some of the other converts from the Oxford Movement were likewise regretting their decision and contemplating a return to the Established Church of England.

Recently ordained a priest, Newman was in Rome when the novel was sent to him in the summer of 1847, and he quickly set about "answering" it with a novel of his own, his first, and the first book he ever published as a Catholic, LOSS AND GAIN: THE STORY OF A CONVERT. Insofar as the novel partakes a little of spiritual autobiography in a fictionalized form, it is often considered a sort of run-up to Newman's autobiographical masterpiece, APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA, published in 1864 and also written in response to an anti-Catholic work.

LOSS AND GAIN tells the story of Charles Reding, an earnest young student at Oxford in the 1840s, when the Oxford Movement was in full swing. Reding's ecclesiastical views, particularly in regards to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church, to which he must subscribe if he wishes to take his degree, undergo a sometimes painful process of transformation. This process, ultimately leading to Reding's conversion, takes place over the course of several years and is narrated in the book largely through Reding' conversations with other students and dons. The views of Reding' interlocutors run the gamut of mid-Victorian spirituality, from an indifferent Liberalism to a fervently anti-Catholic Evangelicalism to a High Church Aestheticism to a mushy-mystical Swedenborgianism. As the story--and Charles' change of mind--unfolds, the reader is given a glimpse, sometimes a surprisingly funny and even satirical one--Bl. Cardinal Newman, funny...who knew?---of the religious landscape in which Newman lived and moved and had his being.

Even when an Anglican, as his letters prove, Newman was particularly critical of theological loosey-gooseyness and the attitude of entitled complacency that he believed had developed in the English clergy as a result of the English Church's social and economic privileges, and its being under the spiritual headship of the English monarchy. Here, for example, is Newman's delicious description of one "Dr. Brownside, the new Dean of Nottingham, sometime Huntingdonian Professor of Divinity, and one of the acutest, if not soundest academical thinkers of the day":

"He was a little, prim, smirking, be-spectacled man, bald in front, with curly black hair behind, somewhat pompous in his manner, with a clear musical utterance, which enabled one to listen to him without effort. As a divine, he seemed never to have had any difficulty on any subject; he was so clear or so shallow, that he saw to the bottom of all his thoughts: or, since Dr. Johnson tells us that "all shallows are clear," we may perhaps distinguish him by both epithets. Revelation to him, instead of being the abyss of God's counsels, with its dim outlines and broad shadows, was a flat, sunny plain, laid out with straight macadamised roads. Not, of course, that he denied the Divine incomprehensibility itself, with certain heretics of old; but he maintained that in Revelation all that was mysterious had been left out, and nothing given us but what was practical, and directly concerned us. It was, moreover, to him a marvel, that every one did not agree with him in taking this simple, natural view, which he thought almost self-evident; and he attributed the phenomenon, which was by no means uncommon, to some want of clearness of head, or twist of mind, as the case might be. He was a popular preacher; that is, though he had few followers, he had numerous hearers; and on this occasion the church was overflowing with the young men of the place."

Perhaps my favorite scene in the novel takes place near the end, when news is getting round that Reding is about to be lost to the Established Church. (There's even notice of it in the newspaper--that's how seriously people took it when some educated Victorian "crossed the Tiber.") The emotionally exhausted young man is sitting in a hotel room near the monastery where he intends to be received into the Roman Church, suffering all the slings and arrows of anti-Catholic prejudice--of having to give up Oxford, friends and even the love and respect of his family, in order to follow his conscience--when a veritable Fool's Parade of well-meaning but insufferable strangers, reflecting every hue of the ecclesiastical spectrum in mid-Victorian England, comes knocking on Reding's inn door intent on dissuading him from turning papist. With Reding, the reader hardly knows whether to laugh or cry, but it is vintage Newman at his orneriest and most entertaining.

LOSS AND GAIN is an unusual novel by modern standards. There are no gunfights or love scenes; hardly anything "happens"...except that a soul undergoes a quietly momentous revolution, one conversation, one idea at a time, and this when the cost was still very high. Since in some senses the price of being Catholic is once again becoming culturally steep, LOSS AND GAIN, for all its Victorian peculiarities, may prove more relevant to twenty-first century readers than one would initially suppose. Beyond that, LOSS AND GAIN is a great way to get acquainted with the writings (here, in a somewhat "lighter" vein) of one of the greatest minds,and prose stylists in the history of both the Church and the English language.