EEASON AND PREDISPOSITION 133 



Hence it is that Cardinal Newman says that in 

 his going over to Rome it was not logic that carried 

 him on ; " as well might one say that the quicksil- 

 ver in the barometer changes the weather. It is 

 the concrete being that reasons ; pass a number of 

 years and I find my mind in a new place ; how ? 

 The whole man moves ; paper logic is but the 

 record of it." The great cardinal may have been 

 logical after he once started for Eome, but what 

 made him drift that way ? It was because he was 

 a born papist from the first ; one can see the stamp 

 of Home upon him in his youth. 



Probably most of us come into possession of our 

 religious beliefs in the same way Newman did, — 

 we grow into them ; they are slowly and uncon- 

 sciously buUt up in our minds. We think we rea- 

 son ourselves into them, but we find ourselves in 

 possession of them, and then we seek to justify 

 our course by an appeal to reason. In our day re- 

 ligious opinion or religious feeling sets less and less 

 store by dogmas and creeds ; it no longer goes in the 

 leading-strings of set forms and outward authority. 

 Natural knowledge is in the ascendant. The sun of 

 science has actually risen, indeed rides high up in the 

 heavens, and the things proper to the twilight or half 

 knowledge of a few centuries ago flee away, or are 

 seen to be shadows and illusions. The great mother 

 church may draw her curtains and re-trim her 

 lamps and make believe it is still night in the world, 

 but those outside know better, and those inside are 

 bound to find it out by and by. Newman is a care- 



