From Cranmer to Sancroft: English Religion in the Age of Reformation Book

This prompted the deepest, most intense, most rewarding, and most difficult thinking I have done in a long while. Sermons X through XIV in particular, a brilliantly progressive account of the relationship between faith and reason, gratified my patience in slogging through the first two-thirds and answered my purposes in resorting to Newman this time around. The questions that preoccupy me most aren't personal in any customary sense of the word, and lately they've verged on surpassing portable proportions. Some people seek therapy: I seek spiritual counsel, which is another way of saying that I'm after someone who is wise. No living person I know fits the description, sadly, and no one but Newman came to mind as a possible resource for the question that absorbed me most. Well, I can't claim to have properly received his answer if I'm anything short of conversion, but the process of digesting it was one of the most instructive experiences I've had in the near to distant past. Newman's is such a gifted mind (and is there something miraculous about his writing, I wonder?) that it marks an occasion to think with it; the range, complexity, erudition, and elegance of his discussion would be staggering if his ideas weren't such rousing summons to thought. It only took the premise that faith "may be examined and defined as any other power of the mind," a premise with which I think much of Newman's writing begins, to secure my undivided attention, and long was it sustained. I wish I had more substantive content to add to this review, but as my numerous pages of notes don't belong here, I reckon it's time to embrace speechless awe!