John Henry Newman in the “Realms of Superstition”

This article looks at Newman’s treatment of superstition in the early Church in his revised edition of An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1878) and compares it to the way the Whig historians treated superstition in their work, in order to show how the historian in Newman demonstrates how first-century and nineteenth-century perceptions of superstition reaffirm the continuity of the Roman Catholic Church.