He had great gifts for leadership.  But as a party chief he was also deficient in some of the qualities which make a successful one.  His doctrine of the Church had the disadvantage of an apparently intermediate and ambiguous position, refusing the broad, intelligible watchwords and reasonings of popular religionism.  It was not without clearness and strength; but such a position naturally often leads to what seem over-subtle modes of argument, seemingly over-subtle because deeper and more original than the common ones; and he seemed sometimes to want sobriety in his use of dialectic weapons, which he wielded with such force and effect.  Over-subtlety in the leader of a party tends to perplex friends and give a handle to opponents.  And with all his confidence in his cause, and also in his power and his call to use it, he had a curious shyness and self-distrust as to his own way of doing what he had to do; he was afraid of “wilfulness,” of too great reliance on intellect.  He had long been accustomed to observe and judge himself, and while conscious of his force, he was fully alive to the drawbacks, moral and intellectual, which wait on the highest powers.  When attacks were made on him by authorities, as in the case of the Tract No. 90, his more eager friends thought him too submissive; they would have liked a more combative temper and would not accept his view that confidence in him was lost, because it might be shaken.[63] But if he bent before official authority the disapproval of friends was a severer trouble.  Most tender in his affections, most trustful in his confidence, craving for sympathy, it came like a shock and chill when things did not go right between himself and his friends.  He was too sensitive under such disapproval for a successful party chief.  The true party leader takes these things as part of that tiresome human stupidity and perverseness with which he must make his account.  Perhaps they sting for the moment, but he brushes them away and goes forward, soon forgetting them.  But with Mr. Newman, his cause was identified with his friendships and even his family affections.  And as a leader, he was embarrassed by the keenness with which he sympathised with the doubts and fears of friends; want of sympathy and signs of distrust darkened the prospect of the future; they fell like a blight on his stores of hope, never over-abundant; they tempted him, not to assert himself, but to throw up the game as convicted of unfitness, and retire for good and all to his books and silence.  “Let them,” he seemed to say, “have their way, as they will not let me have mine; they have the right to take theirs, only not to make me take it.”  In spite of his enthusiasm and energy, his unceasing work, his occasional bursts of severe punishment inflicted on those who provoked him, there was always present this keen sensitiveness, the source of so much joy and so much pain.  He would not have been himself without it.  But he would have been a much more