To make the impossibility of thinking the opposite, the test of truth, and then to shut one's eyes to those evidences which might compel one to think the opposite, is the essence of irrationality. One attains by this method indefinite assertiveness, but not certainty. Newman lived in some seclusion in the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Birmingham for many years. A few distinguished men, and a number of his followers, in all not more than a hundred and fifty, went over to the Roman Church after him. The defection was never so great as, in the first shock, it was supposed that it would be. The outward influence of Newman upon the Anglican Church then ceased. But the ideas which he put forth have certainly been of great influence in that Church to this day. Most men know the portrait of the great cardinal, the wide forehead, ploughed deep with horizontal furrows, the pale cheek, down which 'long lines of shadow slope, which years and anxious thought and suffering give.' One looks into the wonderful face of those last days--Newman lived to his ninetieth year--and wonders if he found in the infallible Church the peace which he so earnestly sought. [Footnote 8: Fairbairn, _Catholicism, Roman and Anglican_, p. 157.] MODERNISM It was said that the Oxford Movement furnished the rationale of the reaction. Many causes, of course, combine to make the situation of the Roman Church and the status of religion in the Latin countries of the Continent the lamentable one that it is. That position is worst in those countries where the Roman Church has most nearly had free play. The alienation both of the intellectual and civil life from organised religion is grave. That the Roman Church occupies in England to-day a position more favourable than in almost any nation on the Continent, and better than it occupied in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is due in large measure to the general influence of the movement with which we have been dealing. The Anglican Church was at the beginning of the nineteenth century preponderantly evangelical, low-church and conscious of itself as Protestant. At the beginning of the twentieth it is dominantly ritualistic and disposed to minimise its relation to the Reformation. This resurgence of Catholic principles is another effect of the movement of which we speak. Other factors must have wrought for this result besides the body of arguments which Newman and his compeers offered. The argument itself, the mere intellectual factor, is not adequate. There is an inherent contradiction in the effort to ground in reason an authority which is to take the place of reason. Yet round and round this circle all the labours of John Henry Newman go. Cardinal Manning felt this. The victory of the Church was not to be won by argument. It is well known that Newman opposed the decree of infallibility. It cannot be said that upon this point his arguments had great weight. If one assumes that truth comes to us externally