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 a 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