Tracts for the Times: Volume One, 1833-1834: Tracts 1-46 and Records of the Church 1-18

by John Henry Newman, John Keble, Edward Bouverie Pusey

“What if, by the good providence of God, the line which began with the Apostles Peter and Paul should have continued even to this very day?” —John William Bowden, Tract 29

When figures like John Henry Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey, and John Keble looked out at the early nineteenth-century Church of England, they did not see many signs of hope. They feared that Prayer Book revision would leave lines from the Creeds and Psalms on the cutting-room floor. Meanwhile, Parliament seemed more and more content to settle religious matters as if the Church were just another department of state. And an extreme evangelicalism questioned the importance of that ancient treasure, the sacramental system of the Church. So, in 1833, the group that would soon be known as the Tractarians decided to issue a trumpet call, summoning clergy, scholars, and laypeople to defend the ancient deposit of the faith. In the first year alone, forty-six tracts and eighteen excerpts of patristic sources went viral.

This volume collects together that first year of the Tracts for the Times , allowing readers to encounter anew the wisdom and the passion of the Oxford Movement. In page after page, bishops are depicted—not as government functionaries—but as direct descendants of the apostles themselves. Patristic sources are lauded as steady guides for thought and devotion. And all are invited into the rich pattern of the Church’s life, its feasts and fasts, its frequent celebration of Holy Communion, and its daily cycle of prayer, which saturates time with Scripture. Indeed, the Tractarians aimed at nothing less than a second Reformation. Only time would prove the difficulty of such an effort.


About the Editors
John Henry Newman (1801-1890) served as the original editor of the Tracts for the Times . Before his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845, he was regarded as the leader of the Oxford Movement. In 2019, Newman was canonized as a saint in the Roman Church by Pope Francis.

Christopher Poore is the editor of Seminary Street Press. Formerly a Regenstein Fellow at the University of Chicago Divinity School, he is currently pursuing a Master of Divinity at Virginia Theological Seminary.

About the Library of Anglican Theology
Published by Seminary Street Press, the Library of Anglican Theology seeks to provide newly typeset editions of important works from the Anglican tradition for a wide array of contemporary readers—Christian laypeople, historians of the Church, seminary students, bishops, priests, deacons, catechists, and theologians. The Library will provide a rich foundation on which to build as Anglicans continue to theologically engage with the pressing questions of our time.

Genres: Theology

550 pages, Paperback

First published July 14, 2015

About the author

Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman was an important figure in the religious history of England in the 19th century. He was known nationally by the mid-1830s.
Originally an evangelical Oxford University academic and priest in the Church of England, Newman then became drawn to the high-church tradition of Anglicanism. He became known as a leader of, and an able polemicist for, the Oxford Movement, an influential and controversial grouping of Anglicans who wished to return to the Church of England many Catholic beliefs and liturgical rituals from before the English Reformation. In this the movement had some success. However, in 1845 Newman, joined by some but not all of his followers, left the Church of England and his teaching post at Oxford University and was received into the Catholic Church. He was quickly ordained as a priest and continued as an influential religious leader, based in Birmingham. In 1879, he was created a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in recognition of his services to the cause of the Catholic Church in England. He was instrumental in the founding of the Catholic University of Ireland, which evolved into University College Dublin, today the largest university in Ireland.

Newman was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI on 19 September 2010 during his visit to the United Kingdom. He was then canonised by Pope Francis on 13 October 2019.

Newman was also a literary figure of note: his major writings including the Tracts for the Times (1833–1841), his autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1865–66), the Grammar of Assent (1870), and the poem The Dream of Gerontius (1865),[6] which was set to music in 1900 by Edward Elgar. He wrote the popular hymns "Lead, Kindly Light" and "Praise to the Holiest in the Height" (taken from Gerontius).