In 1863 John Henry Newman was sent a copy of an article that attacked his character. It had been written by Charles Kingsley, the popular novelist and Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, and it said that “truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole, ought not to be.”
Newman had been an Oxford don and Anglican priest, and one of the leaders of the Anglo-Catholic revival in his Church. This had infuriated anti-Catholic bigots like Kingsley, who thought that Newman, while posing as an Anglican, was in reality a covert Catholic who was leading good, honest Englishmen to cross the Tiber and “pope”. Then, when Newman left the Anglican Church to become a Catholic priest, Kingsley thought this confirmed his worst suspicions about Newman’s motives and truthfulness.
