Others gave their help, among them Mr. Perceval, Froude, the two Kebles, and Mr. Newman’s friend, a layman, Mr. J. Bowden; some of the younger scholars furnished translations from the Fathers; but the bulk and most forcible of the Tracts were still the work of Mr. Newman.  But the Tracts were not the most powerful instruments in drawing sympathy to the movement.  None but those who remember them can adequately estimate the effect of Mr. Newman’s four o’clock sermons at St. Mary’s.[48] The world knows them, has heard a great deal about them, has passed its various judgments on them.  But it hardly realises that without those sermons the movement might never have gone on, certainly would never have been what it was.  Even people who heard them continually, and felt them to be different from any other sermons, hardly estimated their real power, or knew at the time the influence which the sermons were having upon them.  Plain, direct, unornamented, clothed in English that was only pure and lucid, free from any faults of taste, strong in their flexibility and perfect command both of language and thought, they were the expression of a piercing and large insight into character and conscience and motives, of a sympathy at once most tender and most stern with the tempted and the wavering, of an absolute and burning faith in God and His counsels, in His love, in His judgments, in the awful glory of His generosity and His magnificence.  They made men think of the things which the preacher spoke of, and not of the sermon or the preacher.  Since 1828 this preaching had been going on at St. Mary’s, growing in purpose and directness as the years went on, though it could hardly be more intense than in some of its earliest examples.  While men were reading and talking about the Tracts, they were hearing the sermons; and in the sermons they heard the living meaning, and reason, and bearing of the Tracts, their ethical affinities, their moral standard.  The sermons created a moral atmosphere, in which men judged the questions in debate.  It was no dry theological correctness and completeness which were sought for.  No love of privilege, no formal hierarchical claims, urged on the writers.  What they thought in danger, what they aspired to revive and save, was the very life of religion, the truth and substance of all that makes it the hope of human society.

But indeed, by this time, out of the little company of friends which a common danger and a common loyalty to the Church had brought together, one Mr. Newman, had drawn ahead, and was now in the front.  Unsought for, as the Apologia makes so clear—­unsought for, as the contemporary letters of observing friends attest—­unsought for, as the whole tenor of his life has proved—­the position of leader in a great crisis came to him, because it must come.  He was not unconscious that, as he had felt in his sickness in Sicily, he “had a work to do.”  But there was shyness and self-distrust in his nature as well as energy; and it was the force