To Newman, the main difficulty of all lay in the being of God. If there was a God, it seemed rational to him that there should be a revelation, taking into account the actual condition of men. If there was a revelation, the Catholic Church presented more signs of being its bearer and custodian than any other body or institution of men. I think if we are disposed to question the rationality of his course, we shall find, if we examine the matter carefully, that it is because we question his postulates, not his reasoning or results. Granted that there is a God, as men ordinarily understand that term, and I think that a revelation is antecedently probable; granted that a revelation has been made, as Protestants (save Unitarians) are agreed, and I think it but reasonable to suppose that some such body as the Catholic Church claims to be should be its bearer and unerring interpreter to men. We are mistaken if we think that Newman devised any short-cut to mental peace, or used any other instrument or method for arriving at his results than we ordinarily employ in sound reasonings of every day. He claimed no intuitions, no vision of theological truth, and he was less arbitrary and fanciful in defending Catholic dogma than I have known "philosophers" to be in defending the being of God and the immortality of the soul. He tells us in his _Apologia_ that he believed in a God on a ground of probability, that he believed in Christianity on a probability, and that he believed in Catholicism on a probability, and that these three grounds of probability, distinct from each other in subject-matter, were still, all of them, one and the same in nature of proof, as being probabilities--probabilities of a special kind, a cumulative, a transcendent probability, but still probability.