meaning of life and the world.  He differs from Newman only in lacking that which to Newman was the most indefeasible thing which he had at all, namely, religious experience.  Newman was the child of his age, though no one ever abused more fiercely the age of which he was the child.  He supposed that he believed in religion on the basis of authority.  Quite the contrary, he believed in religion because he had religion or, as he says, in a magnificent passage in one of his parochial sermons, because religion had him.  His scepticism forbade him to recognise that this was the basis of his belief.  His diremption of human nature was absolute.  The soul was of God.  The mind was of the devil.  He dare not trust his own intellect concerning this inestimable treasure of his experience.  He dare not trust intellect at all.  He knew not whither it might lead him.  The mind cannot be broken to the belief of a power above it.  It must have its stiff neck bent to recognise its Creator.

His whole book, The Grammar of Assent, 1870, is pervaded by the intensest philosophical scepticism.  Scepticism supplies its motives, determines its problems, necessitates its distinctions, rules over the succession and gradation of its arguments.  The whole aim of the work is to withdraw religion and the proofs of it, from the region of reason into the realm of conscience and imagination, where the arguments which reign may satisfy personal experience without alleging objective validity or being able to bear the criticism which tests it.  Again, he is the perverse, unconscious child of the age which he curses.  Had not Kant and Schleiermacher, Coleridge and Channing sought, does not Ritschl seek, to remove religion from the realm of metaphysics and to bring it within the realm of experience?  They had, however, pursued the same end by different means.  One is reminded of that saying of Gretchen concerning Mephistopheles:  ’He says the same thing with the pastor, only in different words.’  Newman says the same words, but means a different thing.

Assuming the reduction of religion to experience, in which Kant and Schleiermacher would have agreed, and asserting the worthlessness of mentality, which they would have denied, we are not surprised to hear Newman say that without Catholicism doubt is invincible.  ’The Church’s infallibility is the provision adopted by the mercy of the Creator to preserve religion in the world.  Outside the Catholic Church all things tend to atheism.  The Catholic Church is the one face to face antagonist, able to withstand and baffle the fierce energy of passion and the all-dissolving scepticism of the mind.  I am a Catholic by virtue of my belief in God.  If I should be asked why I believe in God, I should answer, because I believe in myself.  I find it impossible to believe in myself, without believing also in the existence of him who lives as a personal, all-seeing, all-judging being in my conscience.’  These passages