Superficially seen, Newman appeared to have abolished doubt. His faith was more conservative than that of the orthodox. He surrendered all that Victorian life for the narrowest of obscurantisms. The reasons he found for his course only riveted him impregnably to the rock of unreason. What my mind fastened on, however, was the emotional impulse that led him to his tortuous way. One detected there in him that same sinister note one feels in Pascal. It is a reasonableness that eats away at belief until it finally destroys either it or you. It is an uncanny honesty of soul which, struggling utterly for faith, saves it only by unconsciously losing it. For if you win your way through to belief by sheer intellectual force, you run the risk of over-reaching your belief. You do not know that you have passed it, but you have really dispensed with its use. If you are honest in mind and religious in temperament, you find yourself reduced to the naked reality of religion. You are left with only the most primitive mysticism of feeling. You are one with the primitive savage group. Ineffable feeling, ecstatic union with the universe,--this is your state. The more religious you become, the more you tear the fabric of your dogma. Belief is only for the irreligious. Intellectuality in religion, under the guise of fortifying faith, only destroys its foundations. Newman’s approach towards the certitude of dogma was really only an approach towards the certitude of mysticism. When he thought he was satisfying his intellectual doubts, he was satisfying his emotional cravings. Intending to buttress dogma, he only assured for himself the mystic state. How far he really attained mysticism is a fascinating problem for the reader of the _Apologia_. Popular impression is probably right that he bore to his incredibly lengthened age a pathos of uneasiness and sadness. But popular impression is probably wrong in ascribing this to lingering remorse or regret. If there was any uncertainty, it was not for having left his Anglican position, but for not having seen the thing wholly through. Intellectuality still clung around him like a cold swathing garment. He probably never attained that pure mysticism which his soul craved. One has the impression that Newman’s pathos lay in the fact that he never quite became a saint. The official world seemed to hang about him hamperingly. One wonders sometimes if he could not almost as easily have become a wan sweet pagan as a saint. The tragedy of Pascal was that intrinsically he was a pagan. The kind of Christianity to which he drove himself was for him the most virulent form of moral suicide. The terrible fascination of his _Pensées_ lies in that relentless closing in of the divine enemy on his human “pride,” which might have been, with his intellectual genius, so lusty an organ of creativeness and adventure. It was not disease that killed him but Christianity. Pascal is an eternal warning from the perils of intellectual religion.