He could not withstand the last enchantment of the Middle Age

If Newman had never lived, or if his father when the gig came round on the fatal morning, still undecided between the two Universities, had chanced to turn the horse's head in the direction of Cambridge, who can doubt that the Oxford Movement would have flickered out its little flame unobserved in the Common Room of Oriel. And how different, too, would have been the fate of Newman himself! ... At Oxford, he was doomed. He could not withstand the last enchantment of the Middle Age.It was in vain that he plunged into the pages of Gibbon or communed for long hours with Beethoven over his beloved violin. The air was thick with clerical sanctity, heavy with the odours of tradition and the soft warmth of spiritual authority.

[There's actually lots more of this. I'd urge you to read it]

L. Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1918), 23