olour in all its pictures of the spiritual life. From
first to last, in all manner of ways, the sermons are a protest, first
against coldness, but even still more against meanness, in religion.
With coldness they have no sympathy, yet coldness may be broad and
large and lofty in its aspects; but they have no tolerance for what
makes religion little and poor and superficial, for what contracts its
horizon and dwarfs its infinite greatness and vulgarises its mystery.
Open the sermons where we will, different readers will rise from them
with very different results; there will be among many the strongest and
most decisive disagreement; there may be impatience at dogmatic
harshness, indignation at what seems overstatement and injustice,
rejection of arguments and conclusions; but there will always be the
sense of an unfailing nobleness in the way in which the writer thinks
and speaks. It is not only that he is in earnest; it is that he has
something which really is worth being in earnest for. He placed the
heights of religion very high. If you have a religion like
Christianity--this is the pervading note--think of it, and have it,
worthily. People will differ from the preacher endlessly as to how this
is to be 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