ound current as religion, Dr. Newman
sought, without leaving the old paths, to put before people a strong
and energetic religion based, not on feeling or custom, but on reason
and conscience, and answering, in the vastness of its range, to the
mysteries of human nature, and in its power to man's capacities and
aims. The Liberal religion of that day, with its ideas of natural
theology or of a cold critical Unitarianism, was a very shallow one;
the Evangelical, trusting to excitement, had worn out its excitement
and had reached the stage when its formulas, poor ones at the best, had
become words without meaning. Such views might do in quiet, easy-going
times, if religion were an exercise at will of imagination or thought,
an indulgence, an ornament, an understanding, a fashion; not if it
corresponded to such a state of things as is implied in the Bible, or
to man's many-sided nature as it is shown in Shakspeare. The sermons
reflect with merciless force the popular, superficial, comfortable
thing called religion which the writer saw before him wherever he
looked, and from which his mind recoiled. Such sermons as those on the
"Self-wise Enquirer" and the "Religion of the Day," with its famous
passage about the age not being sufficiently "gloomy and fierce in its
religion," have the one-sided and unmeasured exaggeration which seems
inseparable from all strong expressions of conviction, and from all
deep and vehement protests against general faults; but, qualify and
limit them as we may, their pictures were not imaginary ones, and there
was, and is, but too much to justify them. From all this trifling with
religion the sermons called on men to look into themselves. They
appealed to conscience; and they appealed equally to reason and
thought, to recognise what conscience is, and to deal honestly with it.
They viewed religion as if projected on a background of natural and
moral mystery, and surrounded by it--an infinite scene, in which our
knowledge is like the Andes and Himalayas in comparison with the mass
of the earth, and in which conscience is our final guide and arbiter.
No one ever brought out so impressively the sense of the impenetrable
and tremendous vastness of that amid which man plays his part. In such
sermons as those on the "Intermediate State," the "Invisible World,"
the "Greatness and Littleness of Human Life," the "Individuality of the
Soul," the "Mysteriousness of our Present Being," we may see
exemplified the