a philosophy of religion.  But while it is compatible with a robust faith in the powers of the constructive intellect, personalism is beyond question a self-sufficient, independent, individualistic doctrine.  When it is combined with a nominalist theory of knowledge, it naturally suggests that every man may and should live by the creed which bests suits his idiosyncrasies.  Now there was much in Newman’s temperament which made him turn in this direction.  ‘Lead, kindly Light’ has been the favourite hymn of many an independent thinker, to whom the authority of the Church is less than nothing.  But on another side Newman was all his life a fierce upholder of the principle of authority.  His reason for accepting the dogmas of the Church, and for wishing to destroy heresiarchs like wild beasts, was certainly not that his basal personality testified to the truth and value of all ecclesiastical dogmas.  He believed them ’by confiding in the testimony of others’—­in other words, on the authority of the Catholic Church.  If we push back the enquiry one step further, and ask on what grounds he chooses to prefer the authority of the Catholic Church to other authorities, such as natural science or philosophy, we are driven again to lay great stress on the almost political necessity which he felt that such a Divine society should exist.  In accepting the authority of the Church, he accepted the authority of all that the Church teaches, in complete independence of human reason.  But the Roman Church never professes to be independent of human reason.  The official scholastic philosophy claims to be a demonstrative proof of theism.

Newman, then, was only half a Catholic.  He accepted with all the fervour of a neophyte the principle of submission to Holy Church.  But in place of the official intellectualist apologetic, which an Englishman may study to great advantage in the remarkably able series of manuals issued by the Jesuits of Stonyhurst, he substituted a philosophy of experience which is certainly not Catholic.  The authority claimed by the Roman Church rests on one side upon revelation, on the other upon an elaborate structure of demonstrative reasoning, which the simple folk are allowed to ‘take as read,’ only because they cannot be expected to understand it, but which is declared to be of irresistible cogency to any properly instructed mind.  To deny the validity of reasoning upon Divine things is to withdraw one of the supports on which Catholicism rests.  Subjectivism, based on vital experience, mixes no better with this system than oil with water.  Scholasticism prides itself on clear-cut definitions, on irrefragable logic, on using words always in the same sense.  For Newman, as for his disciples the Modernists, theological terms are only symbols for varying values, and he holds that the moment they are treated as having any fixed connotation, error begins.  It is no wonder if learned Catholics thought that Newman did not play the game.  Father Perrone, in spite of his friendship for the object of his criticism, declared that ‘Newman miscet et confundit omnia.’