ew Arnold, too, experienced the
spell. "Who could resist," he says in a lecture on Emerson, "the charm
of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light
through the aisles of St. Mary's, rising into the pulpit, and then in
the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and
thoughts which were a religious music--subtile, sweet, mournful." To
Arnold, he was a man "never to be named by a son of Oxford without
sympathy;" and this, though Arnold, too, regarded his solution for the
doubts and difficulties which beset men's minds to-day as impossible.
Once Charles Kingsley brought against him a charge of intellectual
dishonesty and falsity; but, as Mr. Conway remarks, Kingsley's sword
broke in his hands and on all sides the demolition which he received
in Newman's reply (the _Apologia pro Vita Sua_) has been regarded as
complete. Even the _Saturday Review_ says, "His conversion was
transparently honest; no one, save the most contemptible of party
scribes, can ever hint a doubt of that." "He deliberately shut his
eyes," an "intellectual suicide," "his sympathies and sensibilities
were always his ultimate test of right thought and action." Such are
the comments of a recent reviewer; but on the morning of the day in
which Newman was received into the Catholic Church, he wrote to a
friend, "May I have only one tenth part as much faith as _I have
intellectual conviction_ where the truth lies! I do not suppose any
one can have had such combined reasons pouring in upon him that he is
doing right."

But how can Newman have had _reasons_ for his course? we may
incredulously ask. And here I revert to my particular state of mind
years ago. The question for me was, holding as I did that in Jesus,
God had spoken to the world, and that under God he was the Lord, and
Saviour, and Judge of men, could I remain standing in such a position?
It was a starting-point, but did it not lead somewhere? Holding so
much, despite the difficulties, was it not possible that consistently
therewith, I must hold more, despite further difficulties? Looking
about me among Unitarians, with whom I was then associated, I felt
that even this faith had scant acceptance among them. For example,
taking a country church for a year, I found that not in a decade or
more had there been any additions to the church membership, or even
efforts in that direction; the church was, practically, simply an
assemblage of pew-holders. My own efforts to