But this is, after all, a matter of feeling.  No doubt, as Dr. Newman says, people are not pleased or conciliated by elaborate proofs that they are guilty of something very wrong or foolish.  What is of more interest is to know the effect on a man like Dr. Newman of such a display of the prevailing tendency of religious thought and devotion in his communion as Dr. Pusey has given from Roman Catholic writers.  And it is plain that, whoever else is satisfied with them, these tendencies are not entirely satisfactory to Dr. Newman.  That rage for foreign ideas and foreign usages which has come over a section of his friends, the loudest and perhaps the ablest section of them, has no charms for him.  He asserts resolutely and rather sternly his right to have an opinion of his own, and declines to commit himself, or to allow that his cause is committed, to a school of teaching which happens for the moment to have the talk to itself; and he endeavours at great length to present a view of the teaching of his Church which shall be free, if not from all Dr. Pusey’s objections, yet from a certain number of them, which to Dr. Newman himself appear grave.  After disclaiming or correcting certain alleged admissions of his own, on which Dr. Pusey had placed a construction too favourable to the Anglican Church, Dr. Newman comes to a passage which seems to rouse him.  A convert, says Dr. Pusey, must take things as he finds them in his new communion, and it would be unbecoming in him to criticise.  This statement gives Dr. Newman the opportunity of saying that, except with large qualifications, he does not accept it for himself.  Of course, he says, there are considerations of modesty, of becomingness, of regard to the feelings of others with equal or greater claims than himself, which bind a convert as they bind any one who has just gained admission into a society of his fellow men.  He has no business “to pick and choose,” and to set himself up as a judge of everything in his new position.  But though every man of sense who thought he had reason for so great a change would be generous and loyal in accepting his new religion as a whole, in time he comes “to have a right to speak as well as to hear;” and for this right, both generally and in his own case, he stands up very resolutely:—­

Also, in course of time a new generation rises round him, and there is no reason why he should not know as much, and decide questions with as true an instinct, as those who perhaps number fewer years than he does Easter communions.  He has mastered the fact and the nature of the differences of theologian from theologian, school from school, nation from nation, era from era.  He knows that there is much of what may be called fashion in opinions and practices, according to the circumstances of time and place, according to current politics, the character of the Pope of the day, or the chief Prelates of a particular country; and that fashions change.  His experience