But Newman’s use of infallibility was as a storage vault in which one puts priceless securities. They are there for service when one wishes to realize on their value. But in the business of daily living one need not look at them from one year to another. Infallibility is the strong lock of the safety-vault. It is a guarantee not of the value of the wealth but of its protection. The wealth must have other grounds for its valuableness, but one is assured that it will not be tampered with. By surrendering all your dogmas to the keeper-Church, you win, not certitude--for your treasures are no more certain inside the vault than they are in your pocket--but assurance that you will not have to see your life constantly interrupted by the need of defending them against burglars, or of proving their genuineness for the benefit of inquisitive and incredulous neighbors. The suspicion is irresistible that Newman craved infallibility not because dogma was so supremely significant to him, but because it was so supremely irrelevant. Nothing could be more revealing than his acceptance of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. He has no trouble whatever in believing this belated and hotly-disdained dogma. Because it is essential to his understanding of heaven and hell, eternity and the ineffable God? On the contrary, because it is so quintessentially irrelevant to anything that really entangles his emotions. His tone in acknowledging his belief is airy, almost gay. He seems to feel no implications in the belief. It merely rounds off a logical point in his theology. It merely expresses in happy metaphor a poetical truth. To him there is no tyranny in the promulgation of this new dogma. Infallibility, he seems to suggest, removes from discussion ideas that otherwise one might be weakly tempted to spend unprofitable hours arguing about.