The most extreme advocates amongst those who favoured ‘sacerdotalism’ if not theocracy, John Henry Newman was ‘deeply introspective, constantly self-concerned, tirelessly self-recording’. Subsequently he possessed a weak social conscience. In later life, Newman acknowledged that ‘he had never considered social questions in their relation to faith, and had always looked upon the poor as objects for compassion and benevolence’. On this indifference, E. B. Burgum comments that ‘there was no writer of the period, who wrote with a more complete unconsciousness of their existence in state or church’.

Parliamentary reform, educational changes, local government development, the Factory Acts, democracy’s progress, industrialism’s and technology’s dubious side-effects left Newman unstirred. Writes H. L. Stewart: ‘The famine in Ireland, the vast selfishness of the Corn Laws, Chartism, the opium war in China—how a Hebrew prophet would have dealt with them! But one would gather from Newman’s sermons that the social passion of an Isaiah or a Jeremiah had no place in Christianity’.’ Newman was as unconscious as Darwin upon the Beagle of great movements outside the Church. C. F. Harrold comments :