Cardinal Newman And His Influence On Religious Life And Thought
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Newman's Personality It is obviously in Newman's life and in his personality that we must seek the key to his religion. We shall attempt to prove in the following chapter that the great crisis of his life, his conversion, is essentially a psychological problem. Newman himself has made psychology the foundation of religious science. It is the "illative sense," i.e. the personal equation, which gives the casting vote. As in the Imitation of Christ, so in Newman's writings, religion is above all a dialogue between God and Conscience. All through his life Newman has been given to analysis and introspection. Never has any religion been more personal and more subjective. A French Protestant clergyman, M. Raoul Gout, in an ingenious book has even gone so far as to see a morbid phenomenon in this hyper
...-analytical tendency. His contention is that the abuse of introspection has developed in Newman the hereditary germs of melancholia. If nothing could be more complicated than the personality of Newman, nothing could be simpler and more uniform than his life. It is entirely dominated by the religious idea. God is his first and his last thought. The material universe hardlyexists for him. He lives in the world without being of the world. And therefore the external history of this noble existence, which fills almost the whole of the nineteenth century (1801-91) and which for sixty years has been given over to the discussion of men, may be summed up in a few lines. The Italian journey may be said to be almost the only external incident of his biography. And its only dates are the publication of his works. His origin and heredity deserve to arrest our attention. It has often been said?and with a great deal of truth?in reply to those fanatics who asserted that there was ...
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