Hymns by John Henry Newman

04 November 2019

Last month John Henry Newman became the first canonised English saint since 1970. We take a look at some of his writing:

Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom

Written 16 June 1833 ‘At Sea’, in the Straits of Bonifacio, between Corsica and Sardinia. Newman had been on a visit to the Mediterranean and Rome with his friend Richard Hurrell Froude...

Firmly I believe and truly

Newman wrote his poem-sequence, ‘The Dream of Gerontius’, in January and February 1865. It was published in two issues of a new Roman Catholic periodical, The Month (May and June 1865), and separately in October of the same year...

Praise to the Holiest in the height

The hymn is a profound meditation on 1 Corinthians 15: 20-47, in which God in Christ, the second Adam, restores the world which had been lost by the sin of the first Adam. He does so by his Incarnation...