By almost all accounts Cardinal Newman is one of the greatest intellects in the history of the Catholic church. But his intellectual greatness has made him all the more difficult to understand. To his contemporaries, he was a kind of intellectual conjurer, brilliant but unpersuasive, and it was no accident that Newman spent much of his life in disfavor. The present study is an attempt to correct several of the more common misconceptions about Newman’s work. It examines the origins of each of the longer Catholic volumes and evaluates the historical and philosophic accuracy of each of those same volumes.