which deeply moved him.  ‘From the first,’ he says, ’my battle was with liberalism.  By liberalism I mean the anti-dogmatic principle.  Secondly, my aim was the assertion of the visible Church with sacraments and rites and definite religious teaching on the foundation of dogma; and thirdly, the assertion of the Anglican Church as opposed to the Church of Rome.’  Newman grew greatly in personal influence.  His afternoon sermons at St. Mary’s exerted spiritual power.  They deserved so to do.  Here he was at his best.  All of his strength and little of his weakness shows.  His insight, his subtility, his pathos, his love of souls, his marvellous play of dramatic as well as of spiritual faculty, are in evidence.  Keble and Pusey were busying themselves with the historical aspects of the question.  Pusey began the Library of the Fathers, the most elaborate literary monument of the movement.  Nothing could be more amazing than the uncritical quality of the whole performance.  The first check to the movement came in 1838, when the Bishop of Oxford animadverted upon the Tracts.  Newman professed his willingness to stop them.  The Bishop did not insist.  Newman’s own thought moved rapidly onward in the only course which was still open to it.

Newman had been bred in the deepest reverence for Scripture.  In a sense that reverence never left him, though it changed its form.  He saw that it was absurd to appeal to the Bible in the old way as an infallible source of doctrine.  How could truth be infallibly conveyed in defective and fallible expressions?  Newman’s own studies in criticism, by no means profound, led him to this correct conclusion.  This was the end for him of evangelical Protestantism.  The recourse was then to the infallible Church.  Infallible guide and authority one must have.  Without these there can be no religion.  To trust to reason and conscience as conveying something of the light of God is impossible.  To wait in patience and to labour in fortitude for the increase of that light is unendurable.  One must have certainty.  There can be no certainty by the processes of the mind from within.  This can come only by miraculous certification from without.

According to Newman the authority of the Church should never have been impaired in the Reformation.  Or rather, in his view of that movement, this authority, for truly Christian men, had never been impaired.  The intellect is aggressive, capricious, untrustworthy.  Its action in religious matters is corrosive, dissolving, sceptical.  ’Man’s energy of intellect must be smitten hard and thrown back by infallible authority, if religion is to be saved at all.’  Newman’s philosophy was utterly sceptical, although, unlike most absolute philosophical sceptics, he had a deep religious experience.  The most complete secularist, in his negation of religion, does not differ from Newman in his low opinion of the value of the surmises of the mind as to the transcendental