these offers, leaves out some fundamental and essential factor of experience, and is therefore untenable.  If no metaphysical scheme can be constructed which is at once comprehensive and inwardly consistent, personalism insists that we must acknowledge defeat for the time, rather than take refuge in a logical system which may be free from inner contradictions but which does not satisfy the whole man as a living and active spiritual being.  This is a sound argument.  But it is absurd to suppose that our personality, acting as an undivided whole, can decide whether the institutional Church, or one branch of it, is the Body of Christ and the receptacle of infallible revelation; whether Christ was born at Bethlehem or Nazareth; or whether Nestorius was a heretic.  We have no magical sword for cutting these knots, and no miraculous guide to tell us that authority A is to be believed implicitly, while the possibility of authority B being right is not to be entertained even in thought.  Newman as usual supplies us with the best weapons against himself.  It startles us to find, even in 1852, such a sentence as this:  ’Revealed religion furnishes facts to other sciences, which those sciences, left to themselves, would never reach.  Thus, in the science of history, the preservation of our race in Noah’s ark is an historical fact, which history never would arrive at without revelation.’  The transition from belief on the purely internal ground of personal assent to belief on the purely external ground of Church authority is certainly abrupt and hard to explain; but Newman makes it habitually, without any consciousness of a salto mortale.  In the ‘Apologia’ he even says that the argument from personality is ’one form of the argument from authority.’  The argument seems to be—­’There is no third alternative besides Catholicism or Rationalism.  But “personality” will not accept the dictation of reason; therefore it must accept the authority of the Church.’  It is a strange argument.  All through his life he enormously exaggerated the moral and intellectual weight which should be attached to Church tradition.  ‘Securus judicat orbis terrarum’ were the words which rang in his ears at the supreme moment of his great decision.  His ‘orbis terrarum’ was the Latin empire.  And when even in those countries the authority of the Pope is rejected, he condemns modern civilisation as an aberration.  This however is a complete abandonment of his own test.  He first says ’The judgment of the great world is final’; and then ’If the world decides against Rome, so much the worse for the world.’  After all, Newman had no right to complain if his opponents found his reasoning disingenuous.  To make up our minds first, and to argue in favour of the decision afterwards, is in truth to make the reason a hewer of wood and drawer of water to the irrational part of our nature.