The accusation of scepticism, which was not unnaturally brought against him, was hotly resented by Newman, and with some justice.  Of the intensity of his personal conviction there can be no doubt whatever.  Indeed, it was just because his faith was in no danger that he cared so little for any intellectual defence of it.  He might have made his own the lines of Wordsworth: 

’Here then we rest; not fearing for our creed
The worst that human reasoning can achieve
To unsettle or perplex it.’

Wordsworth too, it may be remembered, speaks of ‘reason’ with hardly more respect than Newman himself as: 

              ’The inferior faculty that moulds
    With her minute and speculative pains
    Opinion, ever changing.’

Robert Browning also, especially in his later years, uses anti-intellectualist language equally uncompromising.  ’Wholly distrust thy reason,’ he says in ‘La Saisiaz.’  Coleridge’s distinction between ‘understanding’ and ‘reason,’ or Westcott’s distinction between ‘reason’ and ‘reasoning,’ might have saved these great writers from the appearance, and perhaps more than the appearance, of blaspheming against the highest and most divine faculty of human nature.  For the reason is something much higher than logic-chopping; it can provide, from its own resources, a remedy for the intellectual error which is just now miscalled intellectualism; it is the activity of the whole personality under the guidance of its highest part; and because it is a real unification of our disordered nature, it can bring us into real contact with the higher world of Spirit.  Newman’s scepticism was not doubtfulness about matters of faith; it was only a wholly unjustifiable contempt and distrust for the unaided activity of the human mind.  This activity, as far as he could see, produced only various forms of ‘liberalism,’ which he strangely enough regarded as a kind of scepticism.  Thus he retorted, with equal injustice, the unjust charge brought against himself.

Newman has often been suspected or accused of quibbling and intellectual dishonesty.  Kingsley, whose healthy but somewhat rough English morality and common sense were revolted by Newman’s whole attitude to life and conduct, was unable to conceive how any educated man could believe in winking Virgins and liquefying blood, and thought that Newman must be dishonest.  More recently Dr. Abbott has accused him of being a philomythus.  Judged by ordinary standards, Newman’s criteria of belief do seem incompatible with intellectual honesty.  Locke, whom Newman resembles in his theory of knowledge, lays down a canon which condemns absolutely the Cardinal’s doctrine of assent.  ’There is one unerring mark,’ he says, ’by which a man may know whether he is a lover of truth in earnest, namely, the not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built on will warrant.’  Newman himself quotes this dictum, and argues against