Two hundred years ago this week, Feb. 21, that enduring religious figure of the 19th century, John Henry Newman, was born, eldest of six, to a middle-class Anglican banking family. At his death in 1890, concepts of spirituality and devotional practice for Canterbury, Rome, and possibly Geneva, would be irreversibly altered -- largely, most think, for the better.

Which may explain why R.W. Church, dean of St. Paul's in Newman's time, could speak of Newman as "the founder, we may almost say, of the Church of England as we know it." Or why another contemporary, Scottish clergyman Principal Shairp, argued that, as a churchman, Newman was "perhaps the most remarkable the English Church has possessed in any century."

For Rome's Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), Newman became its ecumenical guide and moral preceptor, by emphasizing the significance of conscience for moral experience, by stressing the bearing of probability on practical judgments of faith, by clarifying the spiritual importance of the laity, and by highlighting the necessity of discourse between churches.

Finally, says Bishop Wand of London, author of Anglicanism in History and Today, "The average evangelical church services are conducted today much as Newman would have liked to see them." Yet, warns Lutheran scholar Yngve Brilioth, it would be presumptuous "if any single communion claims him entirely for its own."

That rich and reverential complexity of Newman's mind united prophecy and patristic wisdom, sagacity and worship -- he was, said Henri Bremond, "so upright, so firm, so wonderfully balanced." Newman also fused the temperament and genius of an artist with the stark, unbending conscience of a saint.

Even now, Newman retains that power to inspire all who have "an eye and a heart for the truth." Agnostic Matthew Arnold, for example, claimed that Newman was "mixed up with all that is most essential in what I do and say." Gen. Charles Gordon, confronted at Khartoum with imminent and unspeakable dark disaster, quietly prepared his final meditations by underlining Newman's inspired poem of redemptive death, The Dream of Gerontius. That poem, incidentally, later set to music as an oratorio, many would acclaim composer Edward Elgar's magnum opus.

As pastor, religious thinker, devotional writer, and eloquent preacher, Newman attracted, and still attracts, those who believe that personal holiness is the primary purpose of religious truth. As a reflective poet, historian, critic, novelist, controversialist, and author of the Apologia pro vita sua (a revealing histoire de l'age deemed even by his enemies a masterpiece), Newman saw that self-knowledge "is at the root of all religious knowledge." It is thus implicitly theological. "God speaks to us primarily in our hearts," he said, and in our conscience, "Our great internal teacher of religion," "aboriginal Vicar of Christ."

For Newman, enlargement of the mind and perfection of the spirit are truly religious acts. "The object of Revelation," he suggests, "was to enlighten and enlarge the mind, to make us act by reason, and to expand and strengthen our powers." Because "faith operates by means of reason, and reason is directed and corrected by faith," growth is essential to both. A careless, unbelieving mind, contented with itself, Newman once said, "would feel as little pleasure, at the last day, at the words, 'Enter into the joy of thy Lord,' as it does now at the words, 'Let us pray'."

As a young man, Newman learned from biblical scholar Thomas Scott, "almost as proverbs," the truth of "Holiness rather than peace" and "Growth the only evidence of life."

His understanding of their truth clarifies why he believed that "enlargement of mind" and "perfection of intellect" are religious and educative necessities. Perfection of the intellect, he said, involves "the clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things, so far as the finite mind can embrace them." Its power is that "of viewing many things at once as one whole." Is this not the meaning of Christian vision?

A disciplined intellect cannot be partial, cannot be exclusive, cannot be impetuous, Newman argued, if only "because it discerns the end in every beginning, the origin in every end, the law in every interruption, the limit in each delay; because it ever knows where it stands, and how its path lies from one point to another." The disciplined intellect is prepared to grow in wisdom and age and grace. As Newman said in his Development of Christian Doctrine: "to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often."

A self-satisfied mind (which is a mind without self-knowledge) cannot be interested in spiritual growth and perfection, because it leaves no place for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit -- the essence of Christian life. It is, after all, the Holy Spirit who makes Christ a "Sacred Presence" to the believer. "Our true righteousness is the indwelling of our glorified Lord."

Newman was an Englishman to the core. He relished all things English, excepting only English sins. He delighted, with English passionate restraint, in the irony of the English nation, in the exquisiteness of the English tongue, of which he was an incomparable master. Above all things English, he loved the English Church. This is why he strove so mightily to defend it against secularists.

As Newman returned from a Mediterranean trip in 1833 -- when he wrote the prescient verse (later hymn) "Lead, Kindly Light" -- he saw, with alarmed insight, how England's parliamentary liberalist-secularists threatened the very meaning of the English Church.

Was the church merely another bureaucracy of British Civil Service? Or was it the body of Christ, deriving its authority, through apostolic succession, from Christ himself?

It was, for Newman, not merely that these church-revisers were secularists. It was that their secularity left no room for redemption, and thus no room for God. Their church would simply be social rather than sacred.

Understanding, in his protest for spiritual renewal in the church, that there was "everything against us but our cause," Newman and others chose the day of John Keble's "National Apostasy" sermon, July 14, "as the start of the religious movement of 1833." Ever after, it would be known as the Oxford Movement. It would become its own story.

Dr. D. A. Drennen, a psychotherapist and former lay preacher, is a member of Church of the Ascension, Carrabelle, Fla.