When he wrote from Littlemore to his friend De Lisle, he had no reason to economize the truth. De Lisle hoped that Newman would soon openly join the Church of Rome, but Newman answered: “You must allow me to be honest with you in adding one thing. A distressing feeling arises in my mind that such marks of kindness as these on your part are caused by a belief that I am ever likely to join your communion ... I must assure you then with great sincerity that I have not the shadow of an internal movement known to myself towards such a step. While God is with me where I am, I will not seek Him elsewhere. I might almost say in the words of Scripture, ‘We have found the Messias!’...” How true this is, and yet the same Newman went over to the unreformed Church, because the Archbishop of Canterbury had sanctioned Bunsen’s proposal of an Anglo-German bishopric of Jerusalem, quite forgetful of the fact that Synesius also had been bishop of Ptolemais. Again I say, What have such matters to do with true religion, such as we read of in the New Testament, as an ideal to be realized in our life on earth? And it so happened that at the same time I knew of families rendered miserable through Newman’s influence, of young girls, daughters of narrow-minded Anglicans, hurried over to Rome, of young men at Oxford with their troubled consciences which under Newman’s direct or indirect guidance could end only in Rome. Newman’s influence must have been extraordinary; the tone in which people who wished to free themselves from him, who had actually left him, spoke of him, seemed tremulous with awe. I would give anything to have known him at that time, when I knew him through his disciples only. They were caught in various ways. I know of one, a brilliant writer, who had been entrusted by Newman with writing some of the _Lives of the Saints_. He did it with great industry, but in the course of his researches he arrived at the conviction that there was hardly anything truly historical about his Saints and that the miracles ascribed to them were insipid, and might be the inventions of their friends; such legends, he felt, would take no root on English soil, at all events not in the present generation. In consequence he informed Newman that he could not keep his promise, or that, if he did so, he must speak the truth, tell people what they might believe about these Saints, and what was purely fanciful in the accounts of their lives. And what was Newman’s answer? He did not respect the young man’s scruples, but encouraged him to go on, because, as he said, people would never believe more than half of these Lives, and that therefore some of these unsupported legends also might prove useful, if only as a kind of ballast.