All this seemed to me implicit in the _Apologia_. But if the use Newman made of infallibility destroys the Protestant position, it no less destroys the Catholic. For if you use infallibility as a technique for getting dogmas into a form in which they are easy to forget, you reduce the Church from a repository of truth to a mere political institution. When dogma is removed from discussion, religious truth becomes irrelevant to life as it is commonly lived. The Church, therefore, can touch life only through its political and organizing power, just as any human institution touches life. It no longer touches it through the divinely inspiring quality of its thought. Intellectually the Church will only appeal to those cowed minds which have no critical power and demand absolutism in thought. Spiritually it will appeal only to temperaments like Newman’s which crave a guarantor for their mystic life. Politically it will appeal to the subtle who want power through the devious control over human souls. To few other types will it appeal. Newman unveils the true paradox of dogma. If, on the one hand, you throw it open to individual judgment, you destroy it through the futile wranglings of faith which can never be objectively solved. If, on the other hand, you declare it infallible, you destroy it by slowly sending it to oblivion. Infallibility gets rid of dogma just as surely as does private judgment. Under the pretense of consolidating the Church in its cosmic rôle, Newman, therefore, has really put it in its proper parochial place as a pleasant grouping of souls who are similarly affected by a collection of beautiful and vigorous poetic ideas. Fundamentally, however, this grouping has no more universal significance than any other, than a secret society or any religious sect. Thus Newman unconsciously anticipates the most modern realist agnostic. For the latter would agree that to relegate dogma to the storage-vault of infallibility is exactly what ought to be done with dogma. At such an infallible as Newman pictures no modern radical need balk. Newman’s argument means little more than that infallibility is merely the politest way of sending an idea to Nirvana. What more can the liberal ask who is finished with theology and all its works? He can accept this infallible in even another sense. For there is not a single Christian doctrine in which he does not feel a kind of wild accuracy. Every Christian dogma has a poetic vigor about it which might just as well be called “true” because to deny its metaphorical power would certainly be to utter an untruth. Indeed is not poetry the only “truth” that can be called infallible? For scientific truth is constantly being developed, revised, re-applied. It is only poetry that can think in terms of absolutes. Science cannot because it is experimental. But poetry may, because each soul draws its own meaning from the words. And dogma is poetry.