Newman was formed in the Church of England and all his major theological concerns were developed in an Anglican context. The rebuttal of utilitarian scepticism in the University Sermons; the ecclesial context of Christian faith and life in The Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church; the strong sense of mystery in Newman's epistemology and apologetic; the sacramental character of Christian truth are all significantly part of the Anglican inheritance that he took to the Roman Catholic Church. Furthermore Newman's early formation was ‘pre-Victorian’– he was engaged when writing his Essay on Scriptural Miracles with earlier debates with the Deists, as well as sharing in the rediscovery of the imagination that characterised Coleridge and the Romantic Movement. This paper explores these and other issues to show an important part of Newman's enduring Anglican inheritance.

Doctrinal discipline is a necessary concomitant of ministerial accountability and ecclesial integrity. When there is division in the Church the consequence of that division is expressed in articles or confessions of faith which, in the words of the Declaration of Assent, indicate how that Church ‘bears witness’ to the Christian Gospel and the faith once delivered to the saints.

In the first of the Tracts for the Times John Henry Newman famously posed the question of Anglican Identity, ‘On what ground do you stand, O presbyter of the Church of England?’ He answered his own question in terms of the apostolic commission and succession of the episcopate, and concluded—possibly drawing on what he had learnt from the Evangelical Joseph Milner's Church History, with its high praise of the martyr bishop St. Cyprian as an exemplar for all Christian bishops—that he could wish the episcopate of the Church of England no more ‘blessed termination of their course than the spoliation of their goods and martyrdom’.

Between 1845 and 1850 Manning, as Archdeacon of Chichester, published four volumes of collected sermons. They are not his only published sermons as an Anglican, but they are the ones with which this article will be concerned. They were published by the firm of William Pickering, whose list included the liturgical works of the Revd. William Maskell, chaplain to the High Church Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter, sermons by Manning’S nephew, W. H. Anderdon, and reprints of Bishop Wilson’s Sacra Privata and Lancelot Andrewes’ Preces Privatae, as well as Jeremy Taylor, George Herbert and Henry Vaughan. In 1882 as a Catholic Manning claimed that he had never been concerned that his Anglican sermons should be re-issued. ‘£250 was offered to me for an edition of the four volumes of Sermons. But I always refused. I wished my past, while I was in the twilight, to lie dead to me, and I to it.’ Yet, as Purcell points out, in 1865 he had consulted Dr. Bernard Smith in Rome about their re-issue. Smith’s verdict was negative. ‘These were the works of Dr. Manning, a Protestant. They were the fruits of the Anglican not of the Catholic Church.’ He was, nonetheless, impressed. ‘What I admired most in the perusal of these volumes was not the many strong Catholic truths I met with, but that almost Catholic unction of a St. Francis de Sales, or of a St. Teresa, that breathes through them all.’

Charles Hector de St. Georges, Marquis de Marsay (1688–1753), lived for the greater part of his life in the small and obscure principality of Wittgenstein in the upper Eder valley between the Rhineland and Hesse-Kassel. In his earlier years he was a disciple of the Flemish mystic, Antoinette Bourignon, and later came under the influence of the works of Madame Guyon. In Wittgenstein he attempted to put their teachings into practice by following an ascetic pattern of life. He attracted a number of followers, not only from the sectarian groups which had taken refuge in Wittgenstein, but also farther afield, notably in Switzerland, which he visited on a number of occasions. The fact that he was known in Britain to John Wesley and William Law, as well as by the group of mystically inclined gentry in north-east Scotland, is an indication of the contacts that existed between pietistic groups in different parts of Europe. The details of Marsay's life are not without interest is a considered attempt to practice the quietist spirituality of Madame Guyon in a Protestant context.