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