On Monday, St. John Henry Newman will be proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Pope Leo. It was Newman’s epistolary exchange with his brother Charles that first set the saint on the road to the composition of An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), which would draw on and show the limitations of natural religion, “in which God’s Law is known without His Gospel. Under such circumstances, religion becomes little more than a code of morals, the word and will of an absent God, who will one day come to judge and recompense, not the voice of a present and bountiful Saviour.”
