Newman loved dogma, but it was not dogma that he loved most. It was not to quiet a heart that ached with doubt that he passed from the Anglican to the Roman Church. As an Anglican Catholic he was quite as sure of his doctrine as he was as a Roman Catholic. His most primitive craving was not so much for infallibility as for legitimacy. It was because the Roman Church was primitive, legitimate, authorized, and the Anglican Church yawned in spots, that he made his reluctant choice. His Anglican brothers would not let him show them the catholicity of the Articles. They began to act schismatically, and there was nothing to do but join the legitimate order and leave them to their vulgar insufficiencies. This one gets from the _Apologia_. But this craving, one feels, sprang not from cowardice but from a sense of proportion. Newman was frankly a conservative. Here was a mind that lived in the most exciting of all intellectual eras, when all the acuteness of England was passing from orthodoxy to liberalism. Newman deliberately went in the other direction. But he went because he valued certain personal and spiritual things to which he saw the new issues would be either wholly irrelevant or fatally confusing. One of the best things in the _Apologia_ is the appendix on Liberalism, where Newman, with the clarity of the perfect enemy, sums up the new faith. Each proposition outrages some aspect of legitimacy which is precious to him, yet his intuition--he wrote it not many years after the Reform Bill--has put in classic form what is the Nicene Creed of liberal religion. No liberal ever expressed liberalism so justly and concisely. Newman understands this modern creed as perfectly as he flouts it. So Pascal’s uncanny analysis of human pride led him only to self-prostration. Why did Newman disdain liberalism? He understood it, and he did not like it. His deathless virtue lies in his disconcerting honesty. The air was full of strange new cries that he saw would arrest the Church. She would have to explain, defend, interpret, on a scale far larger than had been done for centuries. She would have to make adjustment to a new era. Theology would be mingled with sociology. The church of the spirit would be challenged with social problems, would be called down into a battling arena of life. Newman’s intuition saw that the challenge of liberalism meant a worried and harassed Church. He was not interested in social and political questions. The old order had a fixed charm for him. It soothed and sustained his life, and it was in his own life that he was supremely interested. He loved dogma, but he loved it as a priceless jewel that one does not wear. His emotion was not really any more entangled in it than it was in social problems. Given an established order that made his personal life possible, what he was interested in was mystical meditation, the subtle and difficult art of personal relations, and the exquisite ethical problems that arise out of them.