other matters, upon which he had written so much, he would now
explain in the simplest language. He would show that there was
nothing dangerous in what he held, that there was a passage in De
Lugo which supported him-- that Perrone, by maintaining that the
Immaculate Conception could be defined, had implicitly admitted
one of his main positions, and that his language about Faith had
been confused, quite erroneously, with the fideism of M. Bautain.

Cardinal Barnabo, Cardinal Reisach, Cardinal Antonelli, looked at
him with their shrewd eyes and hard faces, while he poured into
their ears which, as he had already noticed with distress, were
large and not too clean--his careful disquisitions; but, it was
all in vain-- they had clearly never read De Lugo or Perrone, and
as for M. Bautain, they had never heard of him. Newman, in
despair,
fell back upon St. Thomas Aquinas; but, to his horror, he
observed
that St. Thomas himself did not mean very much to the Cardinals.
With a sinking heart, he realised at last the painful truth: it
was not the nature of his views, it was his having views at all,
that was objectionable. He had hoped to devote the rest of his
life to the teaching of Theology; but what sort of Theology could
he teach which would be acceptable to such superiors? He left
Rome, and settled down in Birmingham as the head of a small
community of Oratorians. He did not complain; it was God's will;
it was better so. He would watch and pray.

But God's will was not quite so simple as that. Was it right,
after all, that a man with Newman's intellectual gifts, his
devoted ardour, his personal celebrity, should sink away out of