hat _Inglese italianato_, Cardinal Manning. Still less
can we fancy him haranguing strikers, and stealing the credit of
composing a trade dispute. No doubt he suffered under the sense of
injury; but probably he did what was in him to do. If the Roman Church
would not use him as a tool, it was probably because he would not have
been a good tool. There are some mistakes which that Church seldom
makes; it knows how to choose its men.

What will be the verdict of history on the type of Catholicism which
Newman represented? He was kept out in the cold by a conservative Pope,
and honoured by a liberal Pope. Which was right, from the point of view
of Catholic interests and policy? This is perhaps the most important
question which the life of Newman raises; for it affects our
anticipations of the future even more than our judgments of the past. Is
Newman a safe or a possible guide for Catholics in the twentieth
century?

Newman was no metaphysician; he confesses it himself. 'My turn of
mind,' he says, 'has never led me towards metaphysics; rather it has
been logical, ethical, practical.'[84] For metaphysics requires an
initial act of faith in human reason, and Newman had not this faith.
Even in his Anglican days he uttered many astonishing things in contempt
of reason. 'What is intellect itself (he asks) but a fruit of the Fall,
not found in paradise or in heaven, more than in little children, and at
the utmost but tolerated by the Church, and only not incompatible with
the regenerate mind?... Reason is God's gift, but so are the
passions.... Eve was tempted to follow passion and reason, and she
fell.'[85] 'Faith does not regard degrees of evidence.'[86] 'Faith and
humility consist, not in going about to prove, but in the outset
confiding in the testimony of others.' 'The more you set yourself to
argue and prove, in order to discover truth, the less likely you are to
reason correctly.'[87] The amazing crudity of this avowed obscurantism
is likely to make the orthodox apologist writhe, and to move the
rationalist to contemptuous laughter. In this and many other cases,
Newman seems to love to caricature himself, and to put his beliefs in
that form in which they outrage common sense most completely. We can
imagine nothing more calculated to drive a young and ingenuous mind into
flippant scepticism than a course of Newman's sermons. The _reductio ad
absurdum_ of his arguments is not left to the reader to make; it is
innocently pr