"Most men in this country," Newman once wrote, "like opinions to be brought to them, rather than to be at the pains to go out and seek for them." But Newman himself was cast in another mould; rationality, consistency, were an imperative craving with him; and feeling that the popular religious creed lacked these things, he went in search of them and started, as it were, on a journey. A memorandum, written down at the age of twenty-eight, speaks of himself as "now in my room in Orell College, slowly advancing, etc., and led on by God's hand blindly, not knowing whither He is taking me." His touching verses, beginning "Lead, kindly Light," betray the same feeling. Gloom did encircle him, but in the midst of it there was a light, which he strove and craved to follow. Though mystical, in a certain sense, by temperament, he resolved, he tells us, to be guided, not by his imagination, but by his reason. He had once a strange emotional experience, but when it was over he wished that it should not unduly influence him. "I had to determine its logical value," he says, "and its bearing on my duty." "What are we doing all through life, both as a necessity and as a duty," he wrote many years afterwards, "but unlearning the world's poetry and attaining to its prose? This is our education as boys and as men, in the action of life and in the closet or library; in our affections, in our aims, in our hopes, and in our memories. And in like manner it is the education of our intellect." This is little more than saying that the supreme rule of life is reason, that it is our life-task to bring all the varied motions of our minds into harmony with this ideal. The fact is that he became ultimately persuaded that the Catholic creed was that rational and consistent creed of which he was in search--rational and consistent that is, in the sense of being in harmony with, and an outgrowth of, those fundamental ideas of a God and of a revelation with which he started; and in addressing others after he became a Catholic, he said, "Be convinced in your reason that the Catholic Church is a teacher sent to you from God, and it is enough. I do not wish you to join her till you are."