h the writer on the changes which this strange narrative
records, from his subscribing, in 1828, towards the first start of the
"Record" newspaper to his receiving on the 9th of October, 1845, at
Littlemore, the "remarkable-looking man, evidently a foreigner, shabbily
dressed in black,"[2] who received him into the Papal Communion, we see
abundant reason, even without the action of that prevalent suspicion of
secret dishonesty somewhere, which in English minds inevitably connects
itself with the spread of Popery, for the widely-diffused impression of
that being true which it is so pleasant to find unfounded.

[1] "Collection of Papers, &c." p. 16.
[2] "Historical Notes of the Tractarian Movement," by Canon Oakley.
Dublin Review, No. v, p. 190.

From first to last these pages exhibit the habit of Dr. Newman's mind as
eminently subjective. It might almost be described as the exact opposite
of that of S. Athanasius: with a like all-engrossing love for truth;
with ecclesiastical habits often strangely similar; with cognate gifts
of the imperishable inheritance of genius, the contradiction here is
almost absolute. The abstract proposition, the rightly-balanced
proposition, is everything to the Eastern, it is well-nigh nothing to
the English Divine. When led by circumstances to embark in the close
examination of Dogma, as in his "History of the Arians," his Nazarite
locks of strength appear to have been shorn, and the giant, at whose
might we have been marvelling, becomes as any other man. The dogmatic
portion of this work is poor and tame; it is only when the writer
escapes from dogma into the dramatic representation of the actors in the
strife that his powers reappear. For abstract truth it is true to us
that he has no engrossing affection: his strength lay in his own
apprehension of it, in his power of defending it when once it had been
so apprehended and had become engrafted into him; and it is to this as
made one with himself, and to his own inward life as fed and nourished
by it, that he perpetually reverts.

All this is the more remarkable because he conceives himself to have
been, even from early youth, peculiarly devoted to dogma in the
abstract; he returns continually to this idea, confounding, as we
venture to conceive, his estimate of the effect of truth when he
received it, on himself, with truth as it exists in the abstract. And as
this affected him in regard to dogma, so it reached to his relations to
ev