A serious and sympathetic study of Newman’s theory of development has appeared recently from the pen of Mr Owen Chadwick. He concludes a painstaking historical account of theories on doctrinal development with a challenge to Newman’s claim to interpret Catholicism. ‘The question then for those who think Newman’s theology is Catholic, is this: these new doctrines, of which the Church had a feeling or inkling but of which she was not conscious—in what meaningful sense may it be asserted that these doctrines are not “new revelation”?’

That development for Newman was, in a certain sense, from an ‘idea’ held wordlessly and unreflexively to a formulation in words, I agree. But I am sorry that Mr Chadwick has used in this summary a word as un-Newmanic as ‘feeling’. I agree that Newman was a notoriously untechnical writer, and it is true that, in at least one place in his letters, he uses the word ‘feeling’ to represent what he elsewhere calls our partial or unconscious recognition of a truth which we have not yet learnt to formulate. But it is also true that, at other times, Newman explicitly rejects both ‘feeling’ and ‘experience’ as words too subjective to represent our relationship to the object of Christian faith or theology. Moreover, it is remarkable that, in his Sermon of 1843, on ‘Development in Religious Doctrine’, he never once uses either of these words. Nor does he, I believe, use them in the Essay on Development.