rintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be
great powers or truths; the progress of things, as if from unreasoning
elements, not towards final causes; the greatness and littleness of
man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over
his futurity; the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the
success of evil, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the
dreary, hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race so
fearfully yet exactly described in the apostle's words, 'Having no
hope and without God in this world'; all this is a vision to dizzy and
appall, and inflicts upon the mind a sense of profound mystery which
is absolutely beyond human solution." To have one's doubts, one's
misgivings, one's own blank confusion portrayed with such appreciation
and in such vivid detail by another--how could it fail to powerfully
affect me? Surely, I said to myself, whether this man's faith was true
or not, he did not hold it because the tremendous obstacles in the way
of it had not been brought home to him. Similarly he appreciated the
difficulties in connection with revelation itself, as when he said
that God "has given us doctrines which are but obscurely gathered from
scripture, and a scripture which is but obscurely gathered from
history," as when he admitted the real obstacles in the way of the
Jews admitting that Jesus was their Messiah.

But I will not linger over this point, and pass on to say that Newman
impressed me as one of those few men, in any age, who have an
intellectual life of their own. His was no hereditary belief; he had
faced the problems of religion for himself. What looks like faith in
many cases, he himself said, was a mere hereditary persuasion, not a
personal principle, a habit learned in the nursery, which is scattered
and disappears like a mist before the light of reason. His own
admiration went out evidently to the "bold unworldliness and vigorous
independence of mind" shown by one of his early teachers, Thos. Scott;
to the type of mind illustrated by an Oxford associate, who had an
intellect, he says, "as critical and logical as it was speculative and
bold." Whately, he records, had taught him to see with his own eyes
and to walk with his own feet; he thought of dedicating his first book
to him, in words to the effect that he had not only taught him to
think, but to think for himself. It was a first hand dealing with
almost all the problems he took up