around John Hill (1786–1855) of St Edmund Hall. In 1827 he encountered Benjamin Wills Newton of Exeter College, a future Plymouth Brethren founder, and Joseph Charles Philpot of his own college, who was his predecessor in the Pennefeather household in Dublin, much impressed by Darby. Newman returned from Baghdad in 1833 a deist. He remained throughout life a believer in a theism, which has been described as "versatile". He had a believer's baptism in 1836 at Broadmead Chapel. He often attended both Unitarian and Baptist religious services, but was agnostic on many aspects of Christian doctrine. In London of the 1840s Newman associated with the radical group comprising also William Henry Ashurst, William James Linton, William Shaen, James Stansfeld, Peter Alfred Taylor, mixing Unitarians and freethinkers. Harriet Martineau wrote to William Johnson Fox in 1849 about the "religious state of the world", saying "I am in the midst of the F Newman set of friends", mentioning also Bonamy Price's praise for Newman. The liberal theological movement to which Newman belonged was hailed by George Jacob Holyoake, founder of British secularism. It equally received heavy criticism. The Anglican Clerical Journal, edited by Henry Burgess, wrote in 1854 of the "openly destructive volumes" of Newman and Theodore Parker. In that year, Newman published Catholic Union: Essays Towards a Church of the Future, as the Organization of Philanthropy. Journalism and controversy Newman wrote, anonymously, a favorable review of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation for the first issue in 1845 of the Prospective Review, a journal edited by James Martineau, John Hamilton Thom and two other Unitarian ministers in the north of England. The content is considered to reflect the influence on Newman at this time of Baden Powell, in the area of science and religion. With Martineau and others such as James Anthony Froude and Edward Lombe, he was one of the unorthodox but "respectable" backers when John Chapman took over the radical Westminster Review in 1851. The embattled Newman was a figure of controversy, particularly with Henry Rogers and his The Eclipse of Faith, or, A Visit to a Religious Sceptic of 1852, to which Newman replied. He was supported in the Westminster Review by a sympathetic article of 1858, "F. W. Newman and his Evangelical Critics", by Wathen Mark Wilks Call, that classed him as an "honest doubter". Considering the reception of ten books by Newman from the 1850s,