ruary, received a
reply from my accuser towards the end of March, in another Pamphlet of
48 pages, entitled, "What then does Dr. Newman mean?" in which he
professed to do that which I had called upon him to do; that is, he
brought together a number of extracts from various works of mine,
Catholic and Anglican, with the object of showing that, if I was to be
acquitted of the crime of teaching and practising deceit and dishonesty,
according to his first supposition, it was at the price of my being
considered no longer responsible for my actions; for, as he expressed
it, "I had a human reason once, no doubt, but I had gambled it away,"
and I had "worked my mind into that morbid state, in which nonsense was
the only food for which it hungered;" and that it could not be called "a
hasty or farfetched or unfounded mistake, when he concluded that I did
not care for truth for its own sake, or teach my disciples to regard it
as a virtue;" and, though "too many prefer the charge of insincerity to
that of insipience, Dr. Newman seemed not to be of that number."

He ended his Pamphlet by returning to his original imputation against
me, which he had professed to abandon. Alluding by anticipation to my
probable answer to what he was then publishing, he professed his
heartfelt embarrassment how he was to believe any thing I might say in
my exculpation, in the plain and literal sense of the words. "I am
henceforth," he said, "in doubt and fear, as much as an honest man can
be, concerning every word Dr. Newman may write. How can I tell, that I
shall not be the dupe of some cunning equivocation, of one of the three
kinds laid down as permissible by the blessed St. Alfonso da Liguori and
his pupils, even when confirmed with an oath, because 'then we do not
deceive our neighbour, but allow him to deceive himself?' ... How can I
tell, that I may not in this Pamphlet have made an accusation, of the
truth of which Dr. Newman is perfectly conscious; but that, as I, a
heretic Protestant, have no business to make it, he has a full right to
deny it?"

Even if I could have found it consistent with my duty to my own
reputation to leave such an elaborate impeachment of my moral nature
unanswered, my duty to my Brethren in the Catholic Priesthood, would
have forbidden such a course. _They_ were involved in the charges which
this writer, all along, from the original passage in the Magazine, to
the very last paragraph of the Pamphlet, had so confidentl