SOURCE: “Rhetoric as Confession in Newman's Parochial Sermons,” in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 4, December, 1987, pp. 339-63.

In the following essay, Goslee focuses on Newman's quest for a visionary apprehension of God's will.

Perhaps because of its affinity with twentieth-century thought, Newman's dark view of the human condition has come to seem increasingly evident: “Starting then with the being of a God, … I look out of myself into the world of men, and there I see a sight which fills me with unspeakable distress.”¹ Harold L. Weatherby uses this very passage to compare Newman's “modern” epistemology with that of Aquinas and Hooker: “Because those older theologians do, in fact, see [God in the natural order], they are able to build a cosmology, a polity, and a poetry upon it. For Newman, who must go on faith rather than sight, the object of the imagination, the central poetic image...