Gerard Manley Hopkins Religious Conversion

From its first stirrings in him, Hopkins's quest for oneness was a spiritual odyssey and adventure. Philosophy took its place there at his side but only as a ready squire to aid and support the Christian knight setting forth "to conquer the whole country."

He finally became convinced of the Catholic position in July of 1966 and was received into the Roman Church by Newman in October of that year.

One of the primary influences on Hopkins at Oxford was Henry Liddon, a priest in the Church of England. Liddon was one of the most popular men at Oxford, and many of those who came to his services were High Church enthusiasts like Hopkins. In time, though, Liddon's charm wore thin for Hopkins. The Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England was the direct descendant of the Oxford Movement, and it had changed considerably from its immediate ancestor. Two decades before, tracts ere issued by the Oxford Movement, frightening all of England with the prospect of a deep division

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rch of Rome had the strong point of universality, while the Church of England had "primitiveness," since the Catholic Church had added many things to the apostolic faith. Newman was desirous of freeing the Anglican Church from the condemnation of schism and to show her unyielding loyalty to the original apostolic church, and he therefore threw himself into a study of the Thirty-nine Articles drawn up by the Anglican church in the sixteenth century, asking how the Church of England could win back its "Catholic" character. He wrote a tract offering an answer to this question. Many Anglicans at the time were able to concede that their Creeds and Book of Common Prayer were capable of a Roman Catholic interpretation, but they did not feel this way about the Articles, which were considered distinctly Protestant: Newman, who wished to extend a Roman Catholic interpretation to the Articles, argued that the Articles were not directed to the teachings of the early church and to the formal dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church as set forth in her general councils. . . The thinking of Hopkins was directly influenced by Newman, and the two corresponded. For that matter, it was Newman who received Hopkins into the Catholic church. Hopkin
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