John Henry Newman's Personal Terror

Discovering no external assurance that history was guided by the hand of God, he looked out upon society and saw suffering, disease, squalor, misery, men falling away from Christianity and not returning, the long procession of the world, its Babel of languages, the astrologers of Chaldaea and the chariots of Egypt, and he shrank away with a sensitive horror. This bogy of skepticism was no bogy; it was his personal terror, the dead hand which scrabbled at him in the night when his faith was sleeping.

—Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman (1957)