Newman illustrates the perpetual paradox of ecclesiasticism, that the more devoutly you accept the Church the less important you make it. As you press closer and closer to its mystic heart, its walls and forms and ideas crumble and fade. The better Catholic you are, the more insidious your vitiation of Catholicism. So that the Church has remained strong only through its stout politicians and not through its saints. As a casket for the precious jewel of mysticism, it cannot die. But shorn of its political power it shrinks to a poetical society of mystics, held together by the strong and earthy bond of men who enjoy the easy expression of power over the least intelligent and intellectually assertive masses in Western society. The Church declines towards its natural limits. No attack on it, no undermining of it from within, can destroy religious feeling, for that is an organization of sentiments that are incarnate in man. Newman’s emotion, whatever his mind may have done, reached through to this eternal heart. Implicit in his intellect, however, is that demolition of religious intellectuality which has freed our minds for the work of the future. He was an unconscious pioneer. Ostensibly reactionary, he reveals in his own _Apologia_ an anticipation of our modern outlook. His use of infallibility insidiously destroys the foundations of belief. IMPRESSIONS OF EUROPE 1913-14[1] It was my good fortune as holder of the Gilder Fellowship in this University to spend in Europe the thirteen months immediately preceding the war. I used the opportunity for extensive travel and general acclimatization rather than for specialized research, and was thus able to get an extensive survey of the European scheme on the eve of a cataclysm from which it may emerge entirely altered. No one can predict how truly that year will mark the “end of an era.” It seems true, however, that most of the tendencies of democracy, social reform, and international understanding, to whose development I gave my most eager attention, have been snapped off like threads, perhaps never to be pieced together again. And the material development, so striking in Germany and Italy, the rebuilding of the cities and the undertaking of vast communal projects, will be indefinitely checked, from sheer want of capital, wasted in the war. [1] Report to the Trustees of Columbia University, 1914.