must have existed from
the beginning, to provide a means of distinguishing true development
from false. This infallible guide is, of course, the Church. It seems
incredible that Newman could escape applying to the Church the same
argument which he had so skilfully applied to Scripture and dogmatic
history. Similar is the case with the argument of the _Grammar of
Assent_. 'No man is certain of a truth who can endure the thought of its
contrary.' If the reason why I cannot endure the thought of the
contradictory of a belief which I have made my own, is that so to think
brings me pain and darkness, this does not prove my truth. If my belief
ever had its origin in reason, it must be ever refutable by reason. It
is not corroborated by the fact that I do not wish to see anything that
would refute it.[8] This last fact may be in the highest degree an act
of arbitrariness. To make the impossibility of thinking the opposite,
the test of truth, and then to shut one's eyes to those evidences which
might compel one to think the opposite, is the essence of irrationality.
One attains by this method indefinite assertiveness, but not certainty.
Newman lived in some seclusion in the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in
Birmingham for many years. A few distinguished men, and a number of his
followers, in all not more than a hundred and fifty, went over to the
Roman Church after him. The defection was never so great as, in the
first shock, it was supposed that it would be. The outward influence of
Newman upon the Anglican Church then ceased. But the ideas which he put
forth have certainly been of great influence in that Church to this day.
Most men know the portrait of the great cardinal, the wide forehead,
ploughed deep with horizontal furrows, the pale cheek, down which 'long
lines of shadow slope, which years and anxious thought and suffering
give.' One looks into the wonderful face of those last days--Newman
lived to his ninetieth year--and wonders if he found in the infallible
Church the peace which he so earnestly sought.

[Footnote 8: Fairbairn, _Catholicism, Roman and Anglican_, p. 157.]

MODERNISM

It was said that the Oxford Movement furnished the rationale of the
reaction. Many causes, of course, combine to make the situation of the
Roman Church and the status of religion in the Latin countries of the
Continent the lamentable one that it is. That position is worst in those
countries where the Roman Church has most nearly had fre