led him to this correct conclusion. This was the end for him
of evangelical Protestantism. The recourse was then to the infallible
Church. Infallible guide and authority one must have. Without these
there can be no religion. To trust to reason and conscience as conveying
something of the light of God is impossible. To wait in patience and to
labour in fortitude for the increase of that light is unendurable. One
must have certainty. There can be no certainty by the processes of the
mind from within. This can come only by miraculous certification from
without.

According to Newman the authority of the Church should never have been
impaired in the Reformation. Or rather, in his view of that movement,
this authority, for truly Christian men, had never been impaired. The
intellect is aggressive, capricious, untrustworthy. Its action in
religious matters is corrosive, dissolving, sceptical. 'Man's energy of
intellect must be smitten hard and thrown back by infallible authority,
if religion is to be saved at all.' Newman's philosophy was utterly
sceptical, although, unlike most absolute philosophical sceptics, he had
a deep religious experience. The most complete secularist, in his
negation of religion, does not differ from Newman in his low opinion of
the value of the surmises of the mind as to the transcendental meaning
of life and the world. He differs from Newman only in lacking that which
to Newman was the most indefeasible thing which he had at all, namely,
religious experience. Newman was the child of his age, though no one
ever abused more fiercely the age of which he was the child. He supposed
that he believed in religion on the basis of authority. Quite the
contrary, he believed in religion because he had religion or, as he
says, in a magnificent passage in one of his parochial sermons, because
religion had him. His scepticism forbade him to recognise that this was
the basis of his belief. His diremption of human nature was absolute.
The soul was of God. The mind was of the devil. He dare not trust his
own intellect concerning this inestimable treasure of his experience. He
dare not trust intellect at all. He knew not whither it might lead him.
The mind cannot be broken to the belief of a power above it. It must
have its stiff neck bent to recognise its Creator.

His whole book, _The Grammar of Assent_, 1870, is pervaded by the
intensest philosophical scepticism. Scepticism supplies its motives,
determines its probl