The reason for so harsh a judgment is that Newman could see a coming storm of dissent throughout all of Western Christendom, especially with the rise of an educated Christian public:
"We live in a novel era - one in which there is an advance towards universal education. Men have hitherto depended on others, and especially on the clergy, for religious truth; now each man attempts to judge for himself. Now, without meaning of course that Christianity is in itself opposed to free inquiry, still I think it is in fact at the present time opposed to the particular form which that liberty of thought has now assumed. Christianity is of faith, modesty, lowliness, subordination; but the spirit at work against it is one of latitudinarianism, indifferentism, republicanism, and schism, a spirit which tends to overthrow doctrine, as if the fruit of bigotry, and discipline as if the instrument of priestcraft."
Now obviously the future author of The Idea of a University is not here recommending obscurantism or an illiterate laity. But the tension between orthodoxy and obedience, on the one hand, and liberalism and free inquiry, on the other, meant that the Church was entering into a new and dangerous era. "The church party," Newman ruefully admitted, was "poor in mental endowments," and relied too much "on prejudice and bigotry." That hardly meant, of course, that an uneducated faith was wrong. But it did mean that the Church needed great men who "alone can prove great ideas or grasp them," since moral truths are "gained by patient study, by calm reflection, silently as the dew falls" and do not show well "in the argument of an hour."
--Edward Oakes via Firstthings
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