quent
changes of thought, I have never been willing to disown.

I felt in the first place that he had a profound sense of the
difficulties of faith. There was no evidence that certain questions
had ever been open questions to him (such as the being of God and the
reality of a revelation), but he seemed to be as keenly aware of the
difficulties attending them as if they had been. He believed and yet
he knew the other side. Few are the apologists who have dared to say
what he has said; few are the unbelievers who could state their case
more strongly than he has stated it for them. It was this width of
imagination that, for one thing, separated him from the ordinary
theologian. One of his precepts to a zealous follower was, "Be sure
you grasp fully any view which you seek to combat." Let me illustrate.
Newman admitted in so many words that it was a great question whether
atheism was not as philosophically consistent with the phenomena of
the physical world as the doctrine of a creative and governing power.
He allowed Hume's argument against miracles to be valid from a purely
scientific aspect of things, and doubted the conclusiveness of the
design argument (though not the argument from order) for the being of
God. He knew to the full how hard it was to hold one's faith in God in
face of all that seems amiss and awry, purposeless, blind, and cruel
in the world. He held this faith, he believed there were reasons for
it (chiefly in man's conscience), it was the starting-point of his
religious system, and yet when he looked out of himself into the world
of men, the lie seemed to be given to it and the effect was as
confusing, he said, as if it were denied that he was in existence
himself. "If I looked into a mirror [these are his words] and did not
see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes
upon me when I look into this living, busy world and see no reflex of
its Creator.... Were it not for the voice speaking so clearly in my
conscience and my heart, I should be an Atheist, or a Pantheist, or a
Polytheist.... To consider the world in its length and breadth, its
various history, the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes,
their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits,
governments, forms of worship, their enterprises, their aimless
courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent
conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of
a supe