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