ses every strength; but holds it tainted with
every weakness; that it seems alternately both to rise above and to fall
below the standard of average humanity; that there is no allegation of
praise or blame which, in some one of the aspects of its many-sided
formation, it does not deserve; that only in the midst of much default,
and much transgression, the people of this United Kingdom either have
heretofore established, or will hereafter establish, their title to be
reckoned among the children of men, for the eldest born of an imperial
race.

In this imperfect survey, I have carefully avoided all reference to the
politics of the day and to particular topics, recently opened, which may
have undergone a great development even before these lines appear in
print on the other side of the Atlantic. Such reference would, without
any countervailing advantage, have lowered the strain of these remarks,
and would have complicated with painful considerations a statement
essentially impartial and general in its scope.

For the yet weightier reason of incompetency, I have avoided the topics
of chief present interest in America, including that proposal to tamper
with the true monetary creed which (as we should say) the Tempter lately
presented to the Nation in the Silver Bill. But I will not close this
paper without recording my conviction that the great acts, and the great
forbearances, which immediately followed the close of the Civil War form
a group which will ever be a noble object, in his political retrospect,
to the impartial historian; and that, proceeding as they did from the
free choice and conviction of the people, and founded as they were on
the very principles of which the multitude is supposed to be least
tolerant, they have, in doing honor to the United States, also rendered
a splendid service to the general cause of popular government throughout
the world.[18]

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN.

BORN 1801.

PRIVATE JUDGMENT.

BY JOHN HENRY NEWMAN.

There is this obvious, undeniable difficulty in the attempt to form a
theory of Private Judgment, in the choice of a religion, that Private
Judgment leads different minds in such different directions. If, indeed,
there be no religious truth, or at least no sufficient means of arriving
at it, then the difficulty vanishes: for where there is nothing to find,
there can be no rules for seeking, and contradiction in the result is
but a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the attemp