Loss and Gain by John Henry Cardinal Newman

When I compare
What I have lost with what I have gained,
What I have missed with what attained,
Little room do I find for pride…
But who shall dare
To measure loss and gain in this wise?
Defeat may be victory in disguise;
The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.¹

Though a span of thirty-four years and an Atlantic Ocean separated the two, these words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow echo the sentiments and experience of John Henry Newman as retold in the story of his conversion, Loss and Gain, through the fictional character Charles Reding. This first novel penned in 1848 by the illustrious John Henry Cardinal Newman follows the spiritual and intellectual conversion of an English young man from Anglicanism to Catholicism.

Set in the first half of the 19th century, the novel is exemplary of Victorian prose and was published in the same golden era of literature as Dickens, Thackeray, and Bronte. It was not written in a self-aggrandizing manner but - as Newman indicates in the dedication - in response to From Oxford to Rome: And how it fared with some who lately made the journey, a novel by Miss Elizabeth Harris, a disillusioned convert and revert, who falsely alleged that Newman and other Oxford converts were insincere and would return to Anglicanism. While received with mixed reviews, it soon saw nine editions published in Britain during Newman's lifetime and a couple of editions in English, French, and Italian throughout the 1850’s.

John Henry Cardinal Newman - who lived from 1801 to 1890 - was ordained an Anglican priest and was renowned for his works of theology and for his role in the Oxford Movement which led many, including himself, to the Roman Catholic Church. After being received into the Church in 1845, he was ordained a Catholic priest and subsequently made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII. Of the many works he authored, some were apologetical, philosophical, and theological, while others were autobiographical or semi-fictional works of prose, including the present volume. "Saints are not literary men," Newman once wrote, "they do not love the classics, they do not write Tales”² - a surprising and pleasant comment from what might be considered an unusual source.

The novel begins with Charles arrival at Oxford where he is intent upon following in the footsteps of his father - an Anglican clergyman - with no desire to engage in factious or polemical disputations. Within the elevated world of the Oxford University, where the Oxford movement saw a lively debate over theological questions, Charles sought resolution over rising doubts involving consequential matters. He had extended intellectual conversations with friends on both sides of the issues - the sincere Anglican, Sheffield, and a recent Oxford convert, Willis. Church authority, unity, private judgement, and the Thirty-nine Articles are just some of the troubling issues of conscience wherein Charles soon finds in Catholicism the fullness of truth. Soon Jennings, the Vice Dean of Oxford, is troubled by the “Papist” sympathies expressed by Charles and isolates him from the body of students while he completes his examinations for his degree. His friend, Bateman, and a local Anglican clergyman, Campbell, attempt to dissuade him from moving toward conversion and “reconvert” Charles to the Anglican faith. Hoping at least for empathy and support from his family, Charles finds instead that they are distrustful and angry at him, and so he must courageously continue the journey alone. With a heavy heart, he leaves Oxford for London, where he receives kindly encouragement in conversation with a Catholic priest while continuing to be pressured on all sides by various Protestant sects before at last being quietly and joyfully received into the Catholic Church in a Passionist church. As Charles had approached “the Church in the way of reason”, he had now entered “into it in the light of the Spirit”.³ Despite his loss and gain, he was “so happy in the Present that he had no thoughts either for the Past or the Future.”⁴ Newman - in the person of Reding - indeed faced the reality in converting that “[w]hatever he was to gain by becoming a Catholic, this he had lost”: the loss of friends and family and sympathy, because there was “no one to believe he had given up anything; no one to take interest in him, to feel tender towards him, to defend him. He had suffered much, but there was no one to believe that he had suffered.”⁵

Loss and Gain is a retelling - through the fictitious character, Charles Reding - of not only the general course of conversion experienced by Newman but also of many of his fellow converts who were convicted of the truth of the Divine origin of the Roman Catholic faith. The principal theme involves the internal debate and external pressures experienced by Charles while attending school at Oxford University, gradually considering and resolving certain difficulties through narrative dialogue with his friends, family, and clergy in a graver tone than often associated with novels. The trials of faith which are experienced throughout the pages reveal how “He knew this was no mere intellectual conversion but a conversion of the heart, of his life, and so prayed earnestly “that whatever might be the consequences, whatever the trial, whatever the loss, he might have grace to follow whithersoever God should call him.”⁶

The contemporary English author, Joseph Pearce, posits that “[i]n choosing to use the medium of the novel to convey a quasi-autobiographical account of his own conversion in Loss and Gain, Newman was very much in tune with what might be called popular culture at the time, the novel being in vogue and in the aesthetic ascendant in early Victorian England.”⁷ Newman’s writing conveys the very intense and, at times, public nature of the interior life’s engagement with both faith and reason in the quest for truth. So many converts, like myself, can relate to a number of sub-themes related in the book involving theological and philosophical import but most of all to the painful cost of lost relationships due to the decision to convert to the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic faith.⁸ The novel is both contemplative and appealing, accessible to the general reader with an eye for the historical finesse of a semi-biographical narrative. Newman - in the character of Charles - was no exception to this reality but was graced with the supernatural perception of seeing how much more was gained than was lost in coming home to the Catholic faith.

1 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, In the Harbor (Poems) (London: Routledge and Sons, 1882), 79.^↩

2 C.S.Dessain et al. (eds.), The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. XIII, Thomas Nelson, London 1963, p. 419.^↩

3 John Henry Cardinal Newman, Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906), 385.^↩

4 Newman, Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert, 432.^↩

5 Newman, Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert, 354.^↩

6 Newman, Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert, 291.^↩

7 K.V. Turley, “Newman the Novelist: His Prolific Pen Highlights His Holy Life,” at National Catholic Register (12 October 2019), at www.ncregister.com.^↩

^8^ 8 Shaeffer, A. B. (2017). Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert. Reviews in Religion & Theology(1), 155–156. https://doi.org/10.1111/rirt.12865^↩, 24