shut in my face....  Contemporaneously with this neglect on the part of those for whom I laboured, there has been a drawing towards me on the part of Protestants.  Those very books and labours which Catholics did not understand, Protestants did.  I am under the temptation of looking out for, if not courting, Protestant praise....  What I wrote as a Protestant has had far greater power, force, meaning, success, than my Catholic works.’

Such reflections might seem to indicate a disposition to return to the Anglican fold.  But a man must have vanquished pride in its most insidious form before he can leave the Church of Rome for any other.  The aristocratic hauteur of the civis Romanus among barbarians lives on in the sentiment of the Roman Catholic towards Protestants.  When Newman was publicly charged with intending to return to Anglicanism, this spirit broke out in a disagreeable and insulting manner.

The bitterness of these five years of neglect, in which he had been eating his heart in silence, must be remembered in connexion with the famous Kingsley controversy, which in 1864 roused him to put on his armour and fight for his reputation.  There had always been an element of combativeness in Newman’s disposition. ’Nescio quo pacto, my spirits most happily rise at the prospect of danger,’ he wrote early in life.  And when he could persuade himself that not only his honour but that of the Church was at stake, he could feel and show the true Catholic ferocity, the cruellest spirit on earth.  ‘A heresiarch,’ he had written even in his Anglican days, ’should meet with no mercy.  He must be dealt with by the competent authority as if he were embodied evil.  To spare him is a false and dangerous pity.  It is to endanger the souls of thousands, and it is uncharitable towards himself’!  This was the temper, soured by defeat and not mellowed by age, which Charles Kingsley in an evil moment for himself chose wantonly to provoke.  At Christmas 1863 there appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine a review of Froude’s ’History of England,’ in which Kingsley wrote ’Truth for its own sake has never been a virtue with the Roman clergy.  Father Newman informs us that it need not be, and on the whole ought not to be—­that cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world.’  This charge was in fact based on a careless reading, or an imperfect recollection, of the twentieth discourse in ‘Sermons on Subjects of the Day.’  The discourse in question is a somewhat nauseous glorification of the servile temper, but it only says that the meekness of the saints is (by Divine providence) so successful that it is always mistaken for craft.  The imputation of cunning is therefore a note of sanctity in its victim.  Kingsley ought to have read the sermon again, and withdrawn unreservedly from an untenable position.  But he thought that something less than