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Parochial and Plain Sermons. By John Henry Newman, B.D., formerly
Vicar of St. Mary's, Oxford. Edited by W.J. Copeland, B.D. Saturday
Review, 5th June 1869.

Dr. Newman's Sermons stand by themselves in modern English literature; it might be said, in English literature generally. There have been equally great masterpieces of English writing in this form of composition, and there have been preachers whose theological depth, acquaintance with the heart, earnestness, tenderness, and power have not been inferior to his. But the great writers do not touch, pierce, and get hold of minds as he does, and those who are famous for the power and results of their preaching do not write as he does. His sermons have done more perhaps than any one thing to mould and quicken and brace the religious temper of our time; they have acted with equal force on those who were nearest and on those who were farthest from him in theological opinion. They have altered the whole manner of feeling towards religious subjects. We know now that they were the beginning, the signal and first heave, of a vast change that was to come over the subject; of a demand from religion of a thoroughgoing reality of meaning and fulfilment, which is familiar to us, but was new when it was first made. And, being this, these sermons are also among the very finest examples of what the English language of our day has done in the hands of a master. Sermons of such intense conviction and directness of purpose, combined with such originality and perfection on their purely literary side, are rare everywhere. Remarkable instances, of course, will occur to every one of the occasional exhibition of this combination, but not in so sustained and varied and unfailing a way. Between Dr. Newman and the great French school there is this difference—that they are orators, and he is as far as anything can be in a great preacher from an orator. Those who remember the tones and the voice in which the sermons were heard at St. Mary's—we may refer to Professor Shairp's striking account in his volume on Keble, and to a recent article in the Dublin Review—can remember how utterly unlike an orator in all outward ways was the speaker who so strangely moved them. The notion of judging of Dr. Newman as an orator never crossed their minds. And this puts a difference between him and a remarkable person whose name has sometimes been joined with his—Mr. F. Robertson. Mr. Robertson was a great preacher, but he was not a writer.

It is difficult to realise at present the effect produced originally by these sermons. The first feeling was that of their difference in manner from the customary sermon. People knew what an eloquent sermon was, or a learned sermon, or a philosophical sermon, or a sermon full of doctrine or pious unction. Chalmers and Edward Irving and Robert Hall were familiar names; the University pulpit and some of the London churches had produced examples of forcible argument and severe and finished composition; and of course instances were abundant everywhere of the good, sensible, commonplace discourse; of all that was heavy, dull, and dry, and of all that was ignorant, wild, fanatical, and irrational. But no one seemed to be able, or to be expected, unless he avowedly took the buffoonery line which some of the Evangelical preachers affected, to speak in the pulpit with the directness and straightforward unconventionality with which men speak on the practical business of life. With all the thought and vigour and many beauties which were in the best sermons, there was always something forced, formal, artificial about them; something akin to that mild pomp which usually attended their delivery, with beadles in gowns ushering the preacher to the carpeted pulpit steps, with velvet cushions, and with the rustle and fulness of his robes. No one seemed to think of writing a sermon as he would write an earnest letter. A preacher must approach his subject in a kind of roundabout make-believe of preliminary and preparatory steps, as if he was introducing his hearers to what they had never heard of; make-believe difficulties and objections were overthrown by make-believe answers; an unnatural position both in speaker and hearers, an unreal state of feeling and view of facts, a systematic conventional exaggeration, seemed almost impossible to be avoided; and those who tried to escape being laboured and grandiloquent only escaped it, for the most part, by being vulgar or slovenly. The strong severe thinkers, jealous for accuracy, and loathing clap-trap as they loathed loose argument, addressed and influenced intelligence; but sermons are meant for heart and souls as well as minds, and to the heart, with its trials and its burdens, men like Whately never found their way. Those who remember the preaching of those days, before it began to be influenced by the sermons at St. Mary's, will call to mind much that was interesting, much that was ingenious, much correction of inaccurate and confused views, much manly encouragement to high principle and duty, much of refined and scholarlike writing. But for soul and warmth, and the imaginative and poetical side of the religious life, you had to go where thought and good sense were not likely to be satisfied.

The contrast of Mr. Newman's preaching was not obvious at first. The outside form and look was very much that of the regular best Oxford type—calm, clear, and lucid in expression, strong in its grasp, measured in statement, and far too serious to think of rhetorical ornament. But by degrees much more opened. The range of experience from which the preacher drew his materials, and to which he appealed, was something wider, subtler, and more delicate than had been commonly dealt with in sermons. With his strong, easy, exact, elastic language, the instrument of a powerful and argumentative mind, he plunged into the deep realities of the inmost spiritual life, of which cultivated preachers had been shy. He preached so that he made you feel without doubt that it was the most real of worlds to him; he made you feel in time, in spite of yourself, that it was a real world with which you too had concern. He made you feel that he knew what he was speaking about; that his reasonings and appeals, whether you agreed with them or not, were not the language of that heated enthusiasm with which the world is so familiar; that he was speaking words which were the result of intellectual scrutiny, balancings, and decisions, as well as of moral trials, of conflicts and suffering within; words of the utmost soberness belonging to deeply gauged and earnestly formed purposes. The effect of his sermons, as compared with the common run at the time, was something like what happens when in a company you have a number of people giving their views and answers about some question before them. You have opinions given of various worth and expressed with varying power, precision, and distinctness, some clever enough, some clumsy enough, but all more or less imperfect and unattractive in tone, and more or less falling short of their aim; and then, after it all, comes a voice, very grave, very sweet, very sure and clear, under whose words the discussion springs up at once to a higher level, and in which we recognise at once a mind, face to face with realities, and able to seize them and hold them fast.

The first notable feature in the external form of this preaching was its terse unceremonious directness. Putting aside the verbiage and dulled circumlocution and stiff hazy phraseology of pulpit etiquette and dignity, it went straight to its point. There was no waste of time about customary formalities. The preacher had something to say, and with a kind of austere severity he proceeded to say it. This, for instance, is the sort of way in which a sermon would begin:—

Hypocrisy is a serious word. We are accustomed to consider the hypocrite as a hateful, despicable character, and an uncommon one. How is it, then, that our Blessed Lord, when surrounded by an innumerable multitude, began, first of all, to warn His disciples against hypocrisy, as though they were in especial danger of becoming like those base deceivers the Pharisees? Thus an instructive subject is opened to our consideration, which I will now pursue.—Vol. I. Serm. X.

The next thing was that, instead of rambling and straggling over a large subject, each sermon seized a single thought, or definite view, or real difficulty or objection, and kept closely and distinctly to it; and at the same time treated it with a largeness and grasp and ease which only a full command over much beyond it could give. Every sermon had a purpose and an end which no one could misunderstand. Singularly devoid of anything like excitement—calm, even, self-controlled—there was something in the preacher's resolute concentrated way of getting hold of a single defined object which reminded you of the rapid spring or unerring swoop of some strong-limbed or swift-winged creature on its quarry. Whatever you might think that he did with it, or even if it seemed to escape from him, you could have no doubt what he sought to do; there was no wavering, confused, uncertain bungling in that powerful and steady hand. Another feature was the character of the writer's English. We have learned to look upon Dr. Newman as one of the half-dozen or so of the innumerable good writers of the time who have fairly left their mark as masters on the language. Little, assuredly, as the writer originally thought of such a result, the sermons have proved a permanent gift to our literature, of the purest English, full of spring, clearness, and force. A hasty reader would perhaps at first only notice a very light, strong, easy touch, and might think, too, that it was a negligent one. But it was not negligence; real negligence means at bottom bad work, and bad work will not stand the trial of time. There are two great styles—the self-conscious, like that of Gibbon or Macaulay, where great success in expression is accompanied by an unceasing and manifest vigilance that expression shall succeed, and where you see at each step that there is or has been much care and work in the mind, if not on the paper; and the unconscious, like that of Pascal or Swift or Hume, where nothing suggests at the moment that the writer is thinking of anything but his subject, and where the power of being able to say just what he wants to say seems to come at the writer's command, without effort, and without his troubling himself more about it than about the way in which he holds his pen. But both are equally the fruit of hard labour and honest persevering self-correction; and it is soon found out whether the apparent negligence comes of loose and slovenly habits of mind, or whether it marks the confidence of one who has mastered his instrument, and can forget himself and let himself go in using it. The free unconstrained movement of Dr. Newman's style tells any one who knows what writing is of a very keen and exact knowledge of the subtle and refined secrets of language. With all that uncared-for play and simplicity, there was a fulness, a richness, a curious delicate music, quite instinctive and unsought for; above all, a precision and sureness of expression which people soon began to find were not within the power of most of those who tried to use language. Such English, graceful with the grace of nerve, flexibility, and power, must always have attracted attention; but it had also an ethical element which was almost inseparable from its literary characteristics. Two things powerfully determined the style of these sermons. One was the intense hold which the vast realities of religion had gained on the writer's mind, and the perfect truth with which his personality sank and faded away before their overwhelming presence; the other was the strong instinctive shrinking, which was one of the most remarkable and certain marks of the beginners of the Oxford movement, from anything like personal display, any conscious aiming at the ornamental and brilliant, any show of gifts or courting of popular applause. Morbid and excessive or not, there can be no doubt of the stern self-containing severity which made them turn away, not only with fear, but with distaste and repugnance, from all that implied distinction or seemed to lead to honour; and the control of this austere spirit is visible, in language as well as matter, in every page of Dr. Newman's sermons.

Indeed, form and matter are closely connected in the sermons, and depend one on another, as they probably do in all work of a high order. The matter makes and shapes the form with which it clothes itself. The obvious thing which presents itself in reading them is that, from first to last, they are a great systematic attempt to raise the whole level of religious thought and religious life. They carry in them the evidence of a great reaction and a scornful indignant rising up against what were going about and were currently received as adequate ideas of religion. The dryness and primness and meagreness of the common Church preaching, correct as it was in its outlines of doctrine, and sober and temperate in tone, struck cold on a mind which had caught sight, in the New Testament, of the spirit and life of its words. The recoil was even stronger from the shallowness and pretentiousness and self-display of what was popularly accepted as earnest religion; morally the preacher was revolted at its unctuous boasts and pitiful performance, and intellectually by its narrowness and meanness of thought and its thinness of colour in all its pictures of the spiritual life. From first to last, in all manner of ways, the sermons are a protest, first against coldness, but even still more against meanness, in religion. With coldness they have no sympathy, yet coldness may be broad and large and lofty in its aspects; but they have no tolerance for what makes religion little and poor and superficial, for what contracts its horizon and dwarfs its infinite greatness and vulgarises its mystery. Open the sermons where we will, different readers will rise from them with very different results; there will be among many the strongest and most decisive disagreement; there may be impatience at dogmatic harshness, indignation at what seems overstatement and injustice, rejection of arguments and conclusions; but there will always be the sense of an unfailing nobleness in the way in which the writer thinks and speaks. It is not only that he is in earnest; it is that he has something which really is worth being in earnest for. He placed the heights of religion very high. If you have a religion like Christianity—this is the pervading note—think of it, and have it, worthily. People will differ from the preacher endlessly as to how this is to be secured. But that they will learn this lesson from the sermons, with a force with which few other writers have taught it, and that this lesson has produced its effect in our time, there can be no doubt. The only reason why it may not perhaps seem so striking to readers of this day is that the sermons have done their work, and we do not feel what they had to counteract, because they have succeeded in great measure in counteracting it. It is not too much to say that they have done more than anything else to revolutionise the whole idea of preaching in the English Church. Mr. Robertson, in spite of himself, was as much the pupil of their school as Mr. Liddon, though both are so widely different from their master.

The theology of these sermons is a remarkable feature about them. It is remarkable in this way, that, coming from a teacher like Dr. Newman, it is nevertheless a theology which most religious readers, except the Evangelicals and some of the more extreme Liberal thinkers, can either accept heartily or be content with, as they would be content with St. Augustine or Thomas À Kempis—content, not because they go along with it always, but because it is large and untechnical, just and well-measured in the proportions and relative importance of its parts. People of very different opinions turn to them, as being on the whole the fullest, deepest, most comprehensive approximation they can find to representing Christianity in a practical form. Their theology is nothing new; nor does it essentially change, though one may observe differences, and some important ones, in the course of the volumes, which embrace a period from 1825 to 1842. It is curious, indeed, to observe how early the general character of the sermons was determined, and how in the main it continues the same. Some of the first in point of date are among the "Plain Sermons"; and though they may have been subsequently retouched, yet there the keynote is plainly struck of that severe and solemn minor which reigns throughout. Their theology is throughout the accepted English theology of the Prayer-book and the great Church divines—a theology fundamentally dogmatic and sacramental, but jealously keeping the balance between obedience and faith; learned, exact, and measured, but definite and decided. The novelty was in the application of it, in the new life breathed into it, in the profound and intense feelings called forth by its ideas and objects, in the air of vastness and awe thrown about it, in the unexpected connection of its creeds and mysteries with practical life, in the new meaning given to the old and familiar, in the acceptance in thorough earnest, and with keen purpose to call it into action, of what had been guarded and laid by with dull reverence. Dr. Newman can hardly be called in these sermons an innovator on the understood and recognised standard of Anglican doctrine; he accepted its outlines as Bishop Wilson, for instance, might have traced them. What he did was first to call forth from it what it really meant, the awful heights and depths of its current words and forms; and next, to put beside them human character and its trials, not as they were conventionally represented and written about, but as a piercing eye and sympathising spirit saw them in the light of our nineteenth century, and in the contradictory and complicated movements, the efforts and failures, of real life. He took theology for granted, as a Christian preacher has a right to do; he does not prove it, and only occasionally meets difficulties, or explains; but, taking it for granted, he took it at its word, in its relation to the world of actual experience.

Utterly dissatisfied with what he found current as religion, Dr. Newman sought, without leaving the old paths, to put before people a strong and energetic religion based, not on feeling or custom, but on reason and conscience, and answering, in the vastness of its range, to the mysteries of human nature, and in its power to man's capacities and aims. The Liberal religion of that day, with its ideas of natural theology or of a cold critical Unitarianism, was a very shallow one; the Evangelical, trusting to excitement, had worn out its excitement and had reached the stage when its formulas, poor ones at the best, had become words without meaning. Such views might do in quiet, easy-going times, if religion were an exercise at will of imagination or thought, an indulgence, an ornament, an understanding, a fashion; not if it corresponded to such a state of things as is implied in the Bible, or to man's many-sided nature as it is shown in Shakspeare. The sermons reflect with merciless force the popular, superficial, comfortable thing called religion which the writer saw before him wherever he looked, and from which his mind recoiled. Such sermons as those on the "Self-wise Enquirer" and the "Religion of the Day," with its famous passage about the age not being sufficiently "gloomy and fierce in its religion," have the one-sided and unmeasured exaggeration which seems inseparable from all strong expressions of conviction, and from all deep and vehement protests against general faults; but, qualify and limit them as we may, their pictures were not imaginary ones, and there was, and is, but too much to justify them. From all this trifling with religion the sermons called on men to look into themselves. They appealed to conscience; and they appealed equally to reason and thought, to recognise what conscience is, and to deal honestly with it. They viewed religion as if projected on a background of natural and moral mystery, and surrounded by it—an infinite scene, in which our knowledge is like the Andes and Himalayas in comparison with the mass of the earth, and in which conscience is our final guide and arbiter. No one ever brought out so impressively the sense of the impenetrable and tremendous vastness of that amid which man plays his part. In such sermons as those on the "Intermediate State," the "Invisible World," the "Greatness and Littleness of Human Life," the "Individuality of the Soul," the "Mysteriousness of our Present Being," we may see exemplified the enormous irruption into the world of modern thought of the unknown and the unknowable, as much as in the writers who, with far different objects, set against it the clearness and certainty of what we do know. But, beyond all, the sermons appealed to men to go back into their own thoughts and feelings, and there challenged them; were not the preacher's words the echoes and interpreting images of their own deepest, possibly most perplexing and baffling, experience? From first to last this was his great engine and power; from first to last he boldly used it. He claimed to read their hearts; and people felt that he did read them, their follies and their aspirations, the blended and tangled web of earnestness and dishonesty, of wishes for the best and truest, and acquiescence in makeshifts; understating what ordinary preachers make much of, bringing into prominence what they pass by without being able to see or to speak of it; keeping before his hearers the risk of mismanaging their hearts, of "all kinds of unlawful treatment of the soul." What a contrast to ordinary ways of speaking on a familiar theological doctrine is this way of bringing it into immediate relation to real feeling:—

It is easy to speak of human nature as corrupt in the general, to admit it in the general, and then get quit of the subject; as if, the doctrine being once admitted, there was nothing more to be done with it. But, in truth, we can have no real apprehension of the doctrine of our corruption till we view the structure of our minds, part by part; and dwell upon and draw out the signs of our weakness, inconsistency, and ungodliness, which are such as can arise from nothing but some strange original defect in our original nature…. We are in the dark about ourselves. When we act, we are groping in the dark, and may meet with a fall any moment. Here and there, perhaps, we see a little; or in our attempts to influence and move our minds, we are making experiments (as it were) with some delicate and dangerous instrument, which works we do not know how, and may produce unexpected and disastrous effects. The management of our hearts is quite above us. Under these circumstances it becomes our comfort to look up to God. "Thou, God, seest me." Such was the consolation of the forlorn Hagar in the wilderness. He knoweth whereof we are made, and He alone can uphold us. He sees with most appalling distinctness all our sins, all the windings and recesses of evil within us; yet it is our only comfort to know this, and to trust Him for help against ourselves.—Vol. I. Serm. XIII.

The preacher contemplates human nature, not in the stiff formal language in which it had become conventional with divines to set out its shortcomings and dangers, but as a great novelist contemplates and tries to describe it; taking in all its real contradictions and anomalies, its subtle and delicate shades; fixing upon the things which strike us in ourselves or our neighbours as ways of acting and marks of character; following it through its wide and varying range, its diversified and hidden folds and subtle self-involving realities of feeling and shiftiness; touching it in all its complex sensibilities, anticipating its dim consciousnesses, half-raising veils which hide what it instinctively shrinks from, sending through it unexpected thrills and shocks; large-hearted in indulgence, yet exacting; most tender, yet most severe. And against all this real play of nature he sets in their full force and depth the great ideas of God, of sin, and of the Cross; and, appealing not to the intelligence of an aristocracy of choice natures, but to the needs and troubles and longings which make all men one, he claimed men's common sympathy for the heroic in purpose and standard. He warned them against being fastidious, where they should be hardy. He spoke in a way that all could understand of brave ventures, of resolutely committing themselves to truth and duty.

The most practical of sermons, the most real and natural in their way of dealing with life and conduct, they are also intensely dogmatic. The writer's whole teaching presupposes, as we all know, a dogmatic religion; and these sermons are perhaps the best vindication of it which our time, disposed to think of dogmas with suspicion, has seen. For they show, on a large scale and in actual working instances, how what is noblest, most elevated, most poetical, most free and searching in a thinker's way of regarding the wonderful scene of life, falls in naturally, and without strain, with a great dogmatic system like that of the Church. Such an example does not prove that system to be true, but it proves that a dogmatic system, as such, is not the cast-iron, arbitrary, artificial thing which it is often assumed to be. It is, indeed, the most shallow of all commonplaces, intelligible in ordinary minds, but unaccountable in those of high power and range, whether they believe or not, that a dogmatic religion is of course a hard, dry, narrow, unreal religion, without any affinities to poetry or the truth of things, or to the deeper and more sacred and powerful of human thoughts. If dogmas are not true, that is another matter; but it is the fashion to imply that dogmas are worthless, mere things of the past, without sense or substance or interest, because they are dogmas. As if Dante was not dogmatic in form and essence; as if the grandest and worthiest religious prose in the English language was not that of Hooker, nourished up amid the subtleties, but also amid the vast horizons and solemn heights, of scholastic divinity. A dogmatic system is hard in hard hands, and shallow in shallow minds, and barren in dull ones, and unreal and empty to preoccupied and unsympathising ones; we dwarf and distort ideas that we do not like, and when we have put them in our own shapes and in our own connection, we call them unmeaning or impossible. Dogmas are but expedients, common to all great departments of human thought, and felt in all to be necessary, for representing what are believed as truths, for exhibiting their order and consequences, for expressing the meaning of terms, and the relations of thought. If they are wrong, they are, like everything else in the world, open to be proved wrong; if they are inadequate, they are open to correction; but it is idle to sneer at them for being what they must be, if religious facts and truths are to be followed out by the thoughts and expressed by the language of man. And what dogmas are in unfriendly and incapable hands is no proof of what they may be when they are approached as things instinct with truth and life; it is no measure of the way in which they may be inextricably interwoven with the most unquestionably living thought and feeling, as in these sermons. Jealous, too, as the preacher is for Church doctrines as the springs of Christian life, no writer of our time perhaps has so emphatically and impressively recalled the narrow limits within which human language can represent Divine realities. No one that we know of shows that he has before his mind with such intense force and distinctness the idea of God; and in proportion as a mind takes in and submits itself to the impression of that awful vision, the gulf widens between all possible human words and that which they attempt to express:—

When we have deduced what we deduce by our reason from the study of visible nature, and then read what we read in His inspired word, and find the two apparently discordant, this is the feeling I think we ought to have on our minds;—not an impatience to do what is beyond our powers, to weigh evidence, sum up, balance, decide, reconcile, to arbitrate between the two voices of God,—but a sense of the utter nothingness of worms such as we are; of our plain and absolute incapacity to contemplate things as they really are; a perception of our emptiness before the great Vision of God; of our "comeliness being turned into corruption, and our retaining no strength"; a conviction that what is put before us, whether in nature or in grace, is but an intimation, useful for particular purposes, useful for practice, useful in its department, "until the day break and the shadows flee away"; useful in such a way that both the one and the other representation may at once be used, as two languages, as two separate approximations towards the Awful Unknown Truth, such as will not mislead us in their respective provinces.—Vol. II. Serm. XVIII.

"I cannot persuade myself," he says, commenting on a mysterious text of Scripture, "thus to dismiss so solemn a passage" (i.e. by saying that it is "all figurative"). "It seems a presumption to say of dim notices about the unseen world, 'they only mean this or that,' as if one had ascended into the third heaven, or had stood before the throne of God. No; I see herein a deep mystery, a hidden truth, which I cannot handle or define, shining 'as jewels at the bottom of the great deep,' darkly and tremulously, yet really there. And for this very reason, while it is neither pious nor thankful to explain away the words which convey it, while it is a duty to use them, not less a duty is it to use them humbly, diffidently, and teachably, with the thought of God before us, and of our own nothingness."—Vol. III. Serm. XXV.

There are two great requisites for treating properly the momentous questions and issues which have been brought before our generation. The first is accuracy—accuracy of facts, of terms, of reasoning; plain close dealing with questions in their real and actual conditions; clear, simple, honest, measured statements about things as we find them. The other is elevation, breadth, range of thought; a due sense of what these questions mean and involve; a power of looking at things from a height; a sufficient taking into account of possibilities, of our ignorance, of the real proportions of things. We have plenty of the first; we are for the most part lamentably deficient in the second. And of this, these sermons are, to those who have studied them, almost unequalled examples. Many people, no doubt, would rise from their perusal profoundly disagreeing with their teaching; but no one, it seems to us, could rise from them—with their strong effortless freedom, their lofty purpose, their generous standard, their deep and governing appreciation of divine things, their thoroughness, their unselfishness, their purity, their austere yet piercing sympathy—and not feel his whole ways of thinking about religion permanently enlarged and raised. He will feel that he has been with one who "told him what he knew about himself and what he did not know; has read to him his wants or feelings, and comforted him by the very reading; has made him feel that there was a higher life than this life, and a brighter world than we can see; has encouraged him, or sobered him, or opened a way to the inquiring, or soothed the perplexed." They show a man who saw very deeply into the thought of his time, and who, if he partly recoiled from it and put it back, at least equally shared it. Dr. Newman has been accused of being out of sympathy with his age, and of disparaging it. In reality, no one has proved himself more keenly sensitive to its greatness and its wonders; only he believed that he saw something greater still. We are not of those who can accept the solution which he has accepted of the great problems which haunt our society; but he saw better than most men what those problems demand, and the variety of their often conflicting conditions. Other men, perhaps, have succeeded better in what they aimed at; but no one has attempted more, with powers and disinterestedness which justified him in attempting it. The movement which he led, and of which these sermons are the characteristic monument, is said to be a failure; but there are failures, and even mistakes, which are worth many successes of other sorts, and which are more fruitful and permanent in their effects.