Paul's Conversion and Call

Paul’s Conversion and Call
Galatians 1.10-17

John Henry Newman was one of the great figures of nineteenth-century England. A brilliant thinker and writer, a spellbinding preacher and a deeply sensitive soul, he left the Anglican Church and became a Roman Catholic in 1845. After a long career in which his friends, at least, wondered what had become of the early brilliance, he was made a cardinal.

Many English Protestants could never forgive Newman for what they saw as his treachery. One in particular, the clergyman and novelist Charles Kingsley, accused Newman of what today we would call double-think, of sitting light to truth. Newman, goaded beyond endurance, produced as his answer one of the century’s classics, his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864). He went back to the beginning and told his own story up to and beyond his move to Rome. The depth and transparency of the story carried its own weight. Even those who did not agree with the positions Newman adopted could hardly doubt that they were reached sincerely and out of a passion for, not a disregard of, truth itself...

Taken from Paul for Everyone Galatians and Thessalonians – by Tom Wright