s Catholicism or Rationalism. But "personality"
will not accept the dictation of reason; therefore it must accept the
authority of the Church.' It is a strange argument. All through his life
he enormously exaggerated the moral and intellectual weight which should
be attached to Church tradition. 'Securus judicat orbis terrarum' were
the words which rang in his ears at the supreme moment of his great
decision. His 'orbis terrarum' was the Latin empire. And when even in
those countries the authority of the Pope is rejected, he condemns
modern civilisation as an aberration. This however is a complete
abandonment of his own test. He first says 'The judgment of the great
world is final'; and then 'If the world decides against Rome, so much
the worse for the world.' After all, Newman had no right to complain if
his opponents found his reasoning disingenuous. To make up our minds
first, and to argue in favour of the decision afterwards, is in truth to
make the reason a hewer of wood and drawer of water to the irrational
part of our nature.

It is precisely his sympathy with Catholicism on the religious side, and
his alienation from its intellectual method, which makes Newman's
apologetic such a two-edged weapon. In attempting to defend Catholicism,
he has gone far to explain it. To the historian, there is no great
mystery about the growth and success of the Western Catholic Church.
Christianity was already a syncretistic religion in the second century.
Like the other forms of worship with which it competed for the popular
favour, it contained the necessary elements of mystery-cult, of ethical
rule, of social brotherhood, and of personal devotion. But besides many
genuine points of superiority, it had a decisive advantage over the
religions of Isis and Mithra in the exclusiveness and intolerance which
it derived from the Jewish tradition. When the failure of the last
persecution forced the Empire to make a concordat with the Church, the
transformation of the federated but autonomous Christian communities
into a centralised theocratic despotism, claiming secular as well as
spiritual sovereignty, was only a matter of time. It was inevitable,
just as the principate of Augustus and the sultanate of Diocletian were
inevitable; but there is nothing specially divine or glorious about any
of these phases of human evolution. The revolt of Northern Europe in the
sixteenth century was equally inevitable; and so is the alienation of
enligh