Newman in person seemed to many a "spiritual apparition," yet he was also a natural leader of men, a planner of campaigns, an able editor, a practical and even shrewd churchman, a scholar, an enthusiastic amateur violinist, a poet, a novelist, a great literary stylist, and a dangerous opponent in controversy. In him were combined an acuteness of intellect and a devoutness of religious faith seldom found together in a single person. In The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated (1873) he wrote the ablest argument of modern times for the pure "culture of the intellect" as the end and aim of university education, while in the Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), in his sermons, and in his other religious writings, he argued with equal force and conviction that reason by itself is insufficient to guide the total life of man, that an assent to Christian truth is a moral, if not an intellectual, imperative.
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