NEWMAN always had great resilience; in the Christmas holidays,
far from moping over his failure he amused himself going to the
theatre. By the next year he had read Wilberforce on Christian
living and was shocked at his own laxity. The puritan attitude to the
arts and entertainment is apt to become negative and self-righteous,
but the true basis of it is the necessity for the Christian to be on his
guard against slipping into a life of God-eclipsing self-indulgence.
It was as an ascesis that Newman accepted this outlook, which proved
a passing phase. Even so he never gave up his music, and concerts,
or adopted a censorious attitude to those who did frequent light
entertainment. 'Signor Giovanni Enrico Neandrini has finished his
first composition,' he announced, on returning to Oxford. He was
pleased with his harmonies.

That term, in reaction to his concentrated fagging of the year
before, he returned to mineralogy and scientific experiments, and
thought of learning Persian. But after Easter he spent a very serious
summer term reading (Evangelical) theology, studying the Bible and
making collections of texts on various themes. He was puzzled to
find his conversion did not fit the descriptions he read. He did not
doubt its reality, but nor did he yet doubt the theories he had learned
to associate with it. All the same the Calvinist doctrine of predestina-
tion, which he had never put in a high place, began to fade from his
mind. In any case he had not dwelt on the idea of others being
irrevocably destined to damnation; he had thought only of God's
mercy to him.

But his mind was occupied more deeply with the essentials of
Christian doctrine, especially the mystery of the Trinity. It is sig-
nificant that he had a dream in which a spirit came and spoke to him
so wonderfully of the Trinity that he fell on his knees in gratitude.
The threefold being of God was present to him not merely as a theo-
logical idea, but as an image of transforming psychological power, and
a spiritual reality evoking an act of adoration.

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