The word apologia, as Newman himself reminds us, is not to be understood by its English equivalent. It admits no guilt and asks no pardon, but, on the contrary, repudiates the very suggestion that pardon is necessary. It is a defense, a justification and even as Socrates in his Apology had found that it was not the trivial charge of Meletus that had to be answered, but rather the vague suspicions aroused some twenty-five years earlier by Aristophanes Clouds, so Newman perceived that Kingsley was but the happy occasion whereby, presenting to the world the portrait of himself, he could clear up imputations which has lingered in the public mind for a quarter of a century.