world, as a great fact, seems to give the lie to all religions, converting them into phenomena which counterbalance and negative each other, and he goes down into that lowest abyss and bottom of things, at which the intellect undercuts spiritual truth altogether.  He enters into the ordinary common states of mind just in the same way.  He is most consoling, most sympathetic.  He sets before persons their own feelings with such truth of detail, such natural expressive touches, that they seem not to be ordinary states of mind which everybody has, but very peculiar ones; for he and the reader seem to be the only two persons in the world that have them in common.  Here is the point.  Persons look into Mr. Newman’s sermons and see their own thoughts in them.  This is, after all, what as much as anything gives a book hold upon minds....  Wonderful pathetic power, that can so intimately, so subtilely and kindly, deal with the soul!—­and wonderful soul that can be so dealt with.

Compare with this the judgment pronounced by one of quite a different school, the late Principal Shairp:—­

Both Dr. Pusey and Mr. Keble at that time were quite second in importance to Mr. Newman.  The centre from which his power went forth was the pulpit of St. Mary’s, with those wonderful afternoon sermons.  Sunday after Sunday, year by year, they went on, each continuing and deepening the impression produced by the last.  As the hour interfered with the dinner-hour of the Colleges, most men preferred a warm dinner without Newman’s sermon to a cold one with it; so the audience was not crowded—­the large church little more than half filled.  The service was very simple, no pomp, no ritualism; for it was characteristic of the leading men of the movement that they left these things to the weaker brethren.  Their thoughts, at all events, were set on great questions which touched the heart of unseen things.  About the service, the most remarkable thing was the beauty, the silver intonation of Mr. Newman’s voice as he read the lessons....  When he began to preach, a stranger was not likely to be much struck.  Here was no vehemence, no declamation, no show of elaborated argument, so that one who came prepared to hear “a great intellectual effort” was almost sure to go away disappointed.  Indeed, we believe that if he had preached one of his St. Mary’s sermons before a Scotch town congregation, they would have thought the preacher a “silly body"....  Those who never heard him might fancy that his sermons would generally be about apostolical succession, or rights of the Church, or against Dissenters.  Nothing of the kind.  You might hear him preach for weeks without an allusion to these things.  What there was of High Church teaching was implied rather than enforced.  The local, the temporary, and the modern were ennobled by the presence of the Catholic truth belonging to all ages that pervaded the whole.  His power showed itself chiefly in the new and unlooked-for