he warning against those who, after putting
their hand to the plough, 'look back,' he proceeds to look back, because
he cannot help it.

'I live more and more in the past, and in hopes that the
past may revive in the future.... I think, as death comes
on, his cold breath is felt on soul as on body, and that,
viewed naturally, my soul is half dead now, whereas then [in
his Protestant days] it was in the freshness and fervour of
youth.... I say the same of my state of mind from 1834 to
1845, when I became a Catholic. It is a time past and
gone--it relates to a work done and over. "Quis mihi
tribuat, ut sim iuxta menses pristinos, secundum dies,
quibus Deus custodiebat me? Quando splendebat lucerna eius
super caput meum, et ad lumen eius ambulabam in tenebris?"
... I have no friend at Rome; I have laboured in England, to
be misrepresented, backbitten and scorned. I have laboured
in Ireland, with a door ever shut in my face....
Contemporaneously with this neglect on the part of those for
whom I laboured, there has been a drawing towards me on the
part of Protestants. Those very books and labours which
Catholics did not understand, Protestants did. I am under
the temptation of looking out for, if not courting,
Protestant praise.... What I wrote as a Protestant has had
far greater power, force, meaning, success, than my Catholic
works.'

Such reflections might seem to indicate a disposition to return to the
Anglican fold. But a man must have vanquished pride in its most
insidious form before he can leave the Church of Rome for any other. The
aristocratic _hauteur_ of the _civis Romanus_ among barbarians lives on
in the sentiment of the Roman Catholic towards Protestants. When Newman
was publicly charged with intending to return to Anglicanism, this
spirit broke out in a disagreeable and insulting manner.

The bitterness of these five years of neglect, in which he had been
eating his heart in silence, must be remembered in connexion with the
famous Kingsley controversy, which in 1864 roused him to put on his
armour and fight for his reputation. There had always been an element of
combativeness in Newman's disposition. '_Nescio quo pacto_, my spirits
most happily rise at the prospect of danger,' he wrote early in life.
And when he could persuade himself that not only his honour but that of
the Church was at stake,