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Newman on Love as the Safeguard of Faith

In one of the sermons that he preached at Oxford while still an Anglican, Newman argued that love is the safeguard of faith against superstition.1 This thesis strikes me as being false, for reasons which I shall indicate; but it merits consideration by students of the epistemology of religion, if only because it is a provocative ‘solution’ to some central problems of philosophy and theology which are disturbingly persistent in their relevance. Before we consider whether Newman's position is unsound, let us see how he arrived at it.