His awful rashness and blindness,

his self-confident, headstrong, cruel rage against the worshippers of the true Messiah, then his strange conversion, then the length of time that elapsed before his solemn ordination, during which he was left to meditate in private on all that had happened, and to anticipate the future – all this constituted a peculiar preparation for the office of preaching to a lost world, dead in sin.

John Henry Cardinal Newman