The Tablet was born, at a time of bitter divisions, hunger and disease, into the world of railways, mills and factories, and dawning scientific awareness and religious doubt. The world’s oldest religious newspaper was launched just at the moment when the ‘sea of faith’ appeared to be draining away

Newman’s Apologia ends with his leaving his university, on 23 February 1845. It is a characteristically brilliant flourish of a sentence, but also something of a shock, because, for most of the book, he has taken the reader on a journey into a highly enclosed academic circle, asking themselves questions which, even by the standards of religious believers, are fairly esoteric: “I have never seen Oxford since, excepting its spires, as they are seen from the railway.”

It is an arresting sentence because the reader is suddenly brought into the modern age. The previous pages had been about dons from the age of Jane Austen discussing the implications of St Augustine’s dispute with the Donatists in the fourth century. Suddenly, we are looking through the window of a train. We see not just the spires of Oxford, but the belching chimneys of Birmingham.

Five years before Newman left Oxford, in the year that The Tablet was founded, England was on the verge of what came to be known as Railway Mania. The coming of the railways was not something which the Church had welcomed. The Pope, Gregory XVI, had condemned the contraptions as chemins d’enfer. He was in many ways an excellent Pope, who, among other things, established both the Etruscan and the Egyptian museums in the Vatican.