richness, a curious delicate music, quite instinctive and
unsought for; above all, a precision and sureness of expression which
people soon began to find were not within the power of most of those
who tried to use language. Such English, graceful with the grace of
nerve, flexibility, and power, must always have attracted attention;
but it had also an ethical element which was almost inseparable from
its literary characteristics. Two things powerfully determined the
style of these sermons. One was the intense hold which the vast
realities of religion had gained on the writer's mind, and the perfect
truth with which his personality sank and faded away before their
overwhelming presence; the other was 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 c