mand 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
of genius, and a lofty character, and the statesman's eye, taking in and
judging accurately the whole of a complicated scene, which conferred the
gifts, and imposed inevitably and without dispute the obligations and
responsibilities of leadership. Dr. Pusey of course was a friend of
great account, but he was as yet in the background, a venerated and
rather awful person, from his position not mixing in the easy
intercourse of common-room life, but to be consulted on emergencies.
Round Mr. Newman gathered, with a curious mixtur