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