From Newman's Sermons at Oxford: A Warning Not to Rely on Your Imagination

Newman helps us understand why we must be hesitant concerning what we read and what we believe. His appeal to a certain disposition of holiness can stop us from following our own imaginations regarding private revelations. Some will say that we are not all called to philosophy, but by buying into certain private revelations, we are assenting to those individuals philosophies, which may be contrary to the thinking of the Church.

And, if a visionary has been condemned or excommunicated, to follow that person makes the disciple a heretic, as the Church has determined the messages to be false. Do you want to lose your immortal soul because of allegiance to another person? I think the tendency to look for and follow private revelations is part of a protestant mind-set, a mind-set of anti-intellectualism and desiring private knowledge outside that of the teaching of the Catholic Church. Here is what Newman states on the protestant mind:

The usurpations of the Reason may be dated from the Reformation. Then, together with the tyranny, the legitimate authority of the ecclesiastical power was more or less overthrown; and in some places its ultimate basis also, the moral sense. One school of men resisted the Church; another went farther, and rejected the supreme authority of the law of Conscience. Accordingly, Revealed Religion was in a great measure stripped of its proof; for the existence of the Church had been its external evidence, and its internal had been supplied by the moral sense. Reason now undertook to repair the demolition it had made, and to render the proof of Christianity independent both of the Church and of the law of nature. From that time (if we take a general view of its operations) it has been engaged first in making difficulties by the mouth of unbelievers, and then claiming power in the Church as a reward for having, by the mouth of apologists, partially removed them.

As to character building, which includes a discipline of the mind, this process can help one withstand temptations to pride and the seeking of religious ideals outside the mainstream of the Church.

Again: modesty, patience, and caution, are dispositions of mind quite as requisite in philosophical inquiries as seriousness and earnestness, though not so obviously requisite. Rashness of assertion, hastiness in drawing conclusions, unhesitating reliance on our own acuteness and powers of reasoning, are inconsistent with the {9} homage which nature exacts of those who would know her hidden wonders. She refuses to reveal her mysteries to those who come otherwise than in the humble and reverential spirit of learners and disciples. So, again, that love of paradox which would impose upon her a language different from that which she really speaks, is as unphilosophical as it is unchristian. Again, indulgence of the imagination, though a more specious fault, is equally hostile to the spirit of true philosophy, and has misled the noblest among the ancient theorists, who seemed to think they could not go wrong while following the natural impulses and suggestions of their own minds, and were conscious to themselves of no low and unworthy motive influencing them in their speculations.

I quote this today as a warning to all my dear Catholic friends who are chasing after private revelations. This is part of a flaw in the mind and not from the Spirit.