religion that he blindly followed. One cannot help feeling that had
Newman been a Pharisee, he would have been, with his love of
precedent, and antiquity, and tradition, one of the most determined
and deadly opponents of the spirit of Christ. For the spirit of
Christ is the spirit of freedom, of elasticity, of unconventionality.
Newman would have upheld in the Sanhedrim with pathetic and
exquisite eloquence that it was not time to break with the old, that
it was miserable treachery to throw over the ancient safeguards of
faith, to part with the rich inheritance of the national faith
delivered by Abraham and Moses to the saints. Newman was a true
fanatic, and the most dangerous of fanatics, because his character
was based on innocence and tenderness and instinctive virtue. It is
rather pathetic than distressing to see Newman again and again
deluded by the antiquity of some petty human logician into believing
his utterance to be the very voice of God. The struggle with Newman
was not the struggle of faith with scepticism, but the struggle
between two kinds of loyalty, the personal loyalty to his own past
and his own friends and the Church of his nativity, and the loyalty
to the infinitely more ancient and venerable tradition of the Roman
Church. It was, as I have said, an aesthetic conversion; he had the
mind of a poet, and the particular kind of beauty which appealed to
him was not the beauty of nature or art, but the beauty of old
tradition and the far-off dim figures of saints and prelates
reaching back into the dark and remote past.

He had, too, the sublime egotism of the poet. His own salvation--
"Shall I be safe if I die to-night?"--that, he confesses, was the
thought which eventually outweighed all others. He had little of
the priestly hunger to save souls; the way in which others trusted
him, confided in him, watched his movements, followed him, was