, that I had the sense of in
reading Newman's pages, however far ahead he was of me in the line of
(what seemed then) religious advance.

And because he had thought, he had moved, he had had a history. He
started with certain truths (as he supposed them to be), but instead
of accepting them mechanically, he thought them out; he studied to see
what they implied, what other truths were consistent with them and
what were not; in other words, he gradually worked his way out to
something like a system, and therein consisted his history. The
ordinary idea of Newman (leaving the past tense for the moment) seems
to be that he sacrificed his intellect, that out of weariness he threw
himself into the Catholic fold. Such may be a true account of some
conversions, but it is a pitiable travesty of the facts in the case of
Newman. Newman went into the Church because it seemed rational to him
to do so; and it is still the great question, whether once assuming
certain fundamental ideas held by Protestant and Catholic alike, any
other course is rational. The "trouble" with Newman, as with his
brother Francis (in some ways also a remarkable man), was simply that,
as the London _Truth_ banteringly said, neither was able to swallow
the Athanasian creed in a comfortable and prosaic way, as good Britons
should; or, as the _Saturday Review_ in all seriousness urged, that he
did not hold as his supreme principle pride in the Church of England
as such, determination to stand shoulder to shoulder with others "in
resisting the foreigner, whether he came from Rome or from Geneva,
from Tuebingen or from Saint Sulpice"; in other words, that he opened
the windows of his mind, instead of keeping them shut; that he set out
on living a life of reason instead of one of prejudice; that he
determined to seek out and follow the truth on whatever shores that
quest should land him.

"Most men in this country," Newman once wrote, "like opinions to be
brought to them, rather than to be at the pains to go out and seek for
them." But Newman himself was cast in another mould; rationality,
consistency, were an imperative craving with him; and feeling that the
popular religious creed lacked these things, he went in search of them
and started, as it were, on a journey. A memorandum, written down at
the age of twenty-eight, speaks of himself as "now in my room in Orell
College, slowly advancing, etc., and led on by God's hand blindly,
not knowing whither He is takin