On the last Sunday of June in 1824, the sermon preached by Rev. Robert Marriott (1774–1841) in the tiny medieval Church of St. Mary’s, Cotesbach was on Genesis 2:3, on the sanctity of the Sabbath. Unless he had a curate working for him he would then have hopped in his carriage to preach in the nearby parishes of Shawell and Gilmorton, where he also had the living, and pastoral responsibilities. The sermon preached at these two parishes was also about creativity, but from a different angle.
“The LORD is with me to the end. LORD, your mercy endures forever. Never forsake the work of your hands! – Psalm 138:8 -- The above verse is one of importance to John Henry Newman. He chose Psalm 138 as the epithet for his younger brother, Charles’s, headstone. Newman’s biographer, Sheridan Gilley, refers to Charles as “the black sheep of the family.”
Introduced here are three examples of lay women who were deeply influenced by Newman in particular as well as by the greater Oxford Movement. These three women had varying degrees of interaction with Newman personally.
It was all the more remarkable when I discovered a collection of “Newman detractors” on the premises, a collection indicating the conflict between Newman, the champion of Roman Catholicism in England, and mainly evangelical Free Church academics around the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century.
Despite their differences, and although Newman and Browning never met, they shared similar life experiences, and literary techniques, and both were concerned with the justification of Christianity, as well as the struggle between faith and doubt.
