makes of it, the situation becomes a trying one.  Mr. Ward was continually forcing on Mr. Newman so-called irresistible inferences; “If you say so and so, surely you must also say something more?” Avowedly ignorant of facts and depending for them on others, he was only concerned with logical consistency.  And accordingly Mr. Newman, with whom producible logical consistency was indeed a great thing, but with whom it was very far from being everything, had continually to accept conclusions which he would rather have kept in abeyance, to make admissions which were used without their qualifications, to push on and sanction extreme ideas which he himself shrank from because they were extreme.  But it was all over with his command of time, his liberty to make up his mind slowly on the great decision.  He had to go at Mr. Ward’s pace, and not his own.  He had to take Mr. Ward’s questions, not when he wanted to have them and at his own time, but at Mr. Ward’s.  No one can tell how much this state of things affected the working of Mr. Newman’s mind in that pause of hesitation before the final step; how far it accelerated the view which he ultimately took of his position.  No one can tell, for many other influences were mixed up with this one.  But there is no doubt that Mr. Newman felt the annoyance and the unfairness of this perpetual questioning for the benefit of Mr. Ward’s theories, and there can be little doubt that, in effect, it drove him onwards and cut short his time of waiting.  Engineers tell us that, in the case of a ship rolling in a sea-way, when the periodic times of the ship’s roll coincide with those of the undulations of the waves, a condition of things arises highly dangerous to the ship’s stability.  So the agitations of Mr. Newman’s mind were reinforced by the impulses of Mr. Ward’s.[116]

But the great question between England and Rome was not the only matter which engaged Mr. Ward’s active mind.  In the course of his articles in the British Critic he endeavoured to develop in large outlines a philosophy of religious belief.  Restless on all matters without a theory, he felt the need of a theory of the true method of reaching, verifying, and judging of religious truth; it seemed to him necessary especially to a popular religion, such as Christianity claimed to be; and it was not the least of the points on which he congratulated himself that he had worked out a view which extended greatly the province and office of conscience, and of fidelity to it, and greatly narrowed the province and office of the mere intellect in the case of the great mass of mankind.  The Oxford writers had all along laid stress on the paramount necessity of the single eye and disciplined heart in accepting or judging religion; moral subjects could be only appreciated by moral experience; purity, reverence, humility were as essential in such questions as zeal, industry, truthfulness, honesty; religious truth is a gift as well as a conquest; and they dwelt on the great maxims of the New Testament: