At the time, however, Newman's treatment of the Articles seemed
to display not only a perverted supersubtlety of intellect, but a
temper of mind that was fundamentally dishonest. It was then that
he first began to be assailed by those charges of untruthfulness
which reached their culmination more than twenty years later in
the celebrated controversy with Charles Kingsley, which led to
the writing of the Apologia. The controversy was not a very
fruitful one, chiefly because Kingsley could no more understand
the nature of Newman's intelligence than a subaltern in a line
regiment can understand a Brahmin of Benares. Kingsley was a
stout Protestant, whose hatred of Popery was, at bottom, simply
ethical--an honest, instinctive horror of the practices of
priestcraft and the habits of superstition; and it was only
natural that he should see in those innumerable delicate
distinctions which Newman was perpetually drawing, and which he
himself had not only never thought of, but could not even grasp,
simply another manifestation of the inherent falsehood of Rome.
But, in reality, no one, in one sense of the word, was more
truthful than Newman. The idea of deceit would have been
abhorrent to him; and indeed it was owing to his very desire to
explain what he had in his mind exactly and completely, with all
the refinements of which his subtle brain was capable, that
persons such as Kingsley were puzzled into thinking him
dishonest. Unfortunately, however, the possibilities of truth and
falsehood depend upon other things besides sincerity. A man may
be of a scrupulous and impeccable honesty, and yet his respect
for the truth-- it cannot be denied-- may be insufficient. He may
be, like the lunatic, the lover, and the poet, 'of imagination
all compact'; he may be blessed, or cursed, with one of those
'seething brains', one of those 'shaping fanatasies' that