SOURCE: “Newman and the Convert Mind,” in Newman and Conversion, edited by Ian Ker, T&T Clark, 1997, pp. 5-20.

In the following essay, Gilley describes Newman as a figure representative of conversion to Roman Catholicism.

There would have been converts to Roman Catholicism in England even without John Henry Newman. Most converts have been ordinary folk, converted by some sort of family connection, especially on their marriage to a practising Catholic.¹ Even on a more exalted intellectual level, the tradition of conversion among poets like Hopkins and Patmore goes back to the seventeenth century, to Crashaw and Dryden, and in Newman's own day, some of the most notable Catholic converts owed little enough to him. Thus the convert makers of the Romantic Gothic revival, Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle, Augustus Pugin and Kenelm Digby, were all received into the Church before Newman came to national prominence,² while there were...