and relative importance of its parts.
People of very different opinions turn to them, as being on the whole
the fullest, deepest, most comprehensive approximation they can find to
representing Christianity in a practical form. Their theology is
nothing new; nor does it essentially change, though one may observe
differences, and some important ones, in the course of the volumes,
which embrace a period from 1825 to 1842. It is curious, indeed, to
observe how early the general character of the sermons was determined,
and how in the main it continues the same. Some of the first in point
of date are among the "Plain Sermons"; and though they may have been
subsequently retouched, yet there the keynote is plainly struck of that
severe and solemn minor which reigns throughout. Their theology is
throughout the accepted English theology of the Prayer-book and the
great Church divines--a theology fundamentally dogmatic and
sacramental, but jealously keeping the balance between obedience and
faith; learned, exact, and measured, but definite and decided. The
novelty was in the application of it, in the new life breathed into it,
in the profound and intense feelings called forth by its ideas and
objects, in the air of vastness and awe thrown about it, in the
unexpected connection of its creeds and mysteries with practical life,
in the new meaning given to the old and familiar, in the acceptance in
thorough earnest, and with keen purpose to call it into action, of what
had been guarded and laid by with dull reverence. Dr. Newman can hardly
be called in these sermons an innovator on the understood and
recognised standard of Anglican doctrine; he accepted its outlines as
Bishop Wilson, for instance, might have traced them. What he did was
first to call 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.

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