John Henry Newman preached these sermons as vicar of St. Mary’s, Oxford, through the 1820s and 1830s; they appeared in successive volumes and are gathered here in a later edition. Each takes a verse of Scripture as its text and works through it in plain prose addressed to ordinary believers. The subjects run from the passing of time and the natural man’s reluctance toward religion to the sacraments, prayer, self-denial, and the unity of the Church. The tone is pastoral rather than academic: Newman argues, warns, comforts, and exhorts, always with the practical question of how a person is actually to live before God.
The collection’s central conviction is that religion is not outward conformity or occasional feeling but a whole state of the soul, a new life implanted by grace and sustained by habitual communion with God. From this conviction Newman measures the ordinary Christian life and finds it wanting—not to condemn his hearers but to press them toward the change of heart Scripture demands.
From the Pulpit of St. Mary’s
The Volume and Its Opening Sermon
The seventh volume, issued in the 1891 Longmans edition, opens with the publisher’s advertisements for Newman’s wider works—the lectures on justification, the Oxford university sermons, the Copeland edition of the parochial sermons themselves, the selection arranged for the ecclesiastical year, the sermons on subjects of the day, and the Lyra Apostolica poems with a new preface by the Cardinal. The title page names him formerly Vicar of St. Mary’s, Oxford, and the contents list eighteen sermons, each keyed to a scriptural text.
The first, “The Lapse of Time,” takes Solomon’s counsel to do with our might whatever our hand finds and turns it toward the one great work of saving the soul, the more urgently at the turn of a new year. Sinners quiet conscience by protesting that they already know all this. Death, Newman answers, ends every plan beyond recall; the Psalmist speaks to high and low, rich and poor alike, and no man can deliver his brother, wise men dying as the ignorant do. The world forgets its dead and treats men as mere parts of a visible system, as though man had no pre-eminence over the beast. After death the soul’s lot is fixed for ever, and only then is the worth of time seen. Death comes on continually and life crumbles away; time is the seed of eternity, yet men give God at most a tithe of it. God showed His mind by sending His Only-begotten Son, and Christ spoke of the wicked going into everlasting punishment. The past year lies buried in the grave of past time, its sins recorded until the books are opened. The penitent thief’s prayer, “Remember me,” must be ours; those whom Christ saves attempt to save themselves and yet despair of saving themselves.
Religion a Weariness to the Natural Man
The second sermon takes up the world’s judgment that religion is a weariness, a thing the Prophet foretold of Christ when he said He had no form nor comeliness. Newman surveys the fact without flinching: children feel religion a weariness and dread ridicule for it; the young associate it with gloom while delighting in the world’s pursuits; in active life it proves impotent to kindle feeling; men of the world call it unnatural; the literature of the day is weary of revealed religion; even religious people hunt for excitements to make it palatable. Saints and strugglers alike confess nature’s reluctance to love God.
The argument presses on: man’s will runs contrary to God’s will, and the inspired word’s view of life and destiny does not satisfy us as it ought. Christ has no form nor comeliness in our eyes; the holy, merciful Saviour is a light shining in a dark place, and the darkness comprehends it not. Man’s nature is flesh, born of flesh, at enmity with God, and can never be religious of itself. Since the world passes away, the soul stripped of its worldly attire will stand before God’s majesty, and its future pleasures cannot be the same as here; a dark eternity looms unless we make new hearts. Even without Scripture it is plain we must be changed—the system of the universe, with its angels, apostles, prophets, martyrs, the Church, and God’s will, is fixed, and we must go over to it. Christ’s words stand: except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. It is self-interest to seek a changed heart; not loving Him is our loss, not His, for He is All-blessed regardless. Woe to us if at His coming we see nothing desirable in His wounds, or have made pride, selfishness, or the carnal mind our standard.
The World Our Enemy
The third sermon, on the text from the first epistle of John, asks what “the world” means, a phrase frequent in religious language but vaguely understood. First, the world is the present visible system of things, not necessarily sinful—John himself contrasts the world with the evil things in it. It takes in varied stations, mutual dependence, social virtues, industry, honesty, worldly goods, national affairs, education; it is God-framed and good, yet we are bidden not to love it, because things good in themselves are dangerous to sinners, promising more than they fulfil and seducing hearts from eternal good. The sciences of government, of wealth, and of relieving want are especially dangerous, fixing our exertions on this world. Paul contrasts sight and faith; as the Jewish temporal system grew carnal-minded, so men of the world are hardened by God’s good world into rejecting Christ—through the fault of the human heart.
Second, the world is positively sinful. Adam fell before the world fully grew, so its ranks, aims, and pleasures have been sinful from birth; the framework is good but the spirit within is evil. High station is God’s gift, but pride is from the Devil; poverty is God’s ordinance, but dishonesty and discontent are from Satan. History shows kingdoms rising and falling only through war and bloodshed, and the world honours conquerors. Proud philosophy and refined arts consecrated to idolatry and sensuality—evil preoccupied the whole. God revealed Himself and sent His Son, but the good work proceeds slowly, for evil has the strength of possession in the human heart. John’s warning holds: if any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. The world is our enemy because its innocent pleasures may engross us, and because the seeds of sin are sown in its best pursuits. A mistaken notion holds the world to be a particular set of persons to be shunned; such men are often great lovers of the world while thinking themselves far from it.
Third, how far is the world separate from the Church? The Church is within the world, a body in process of separation; all Christians are in the world so far as sin has dominion. The Church is of the world, not separate—the best of us have a light and a dark side, the dark outermost. Evil floats at the top; good is less seen because there is less of it, because evil forces itself on notice, and because the soul is known only to God, the hidden man of the heart. God alone sees circumstances, motives, and contrition. We are imprisoned in the body, and words feebly represent feelings, so Christians mislead each other and are the world to one another. Half-Christians affect to be worse than they are, ridiculing religion lest they be ridiculed. Thus none are not of the world; to shun the world as a body of men would mean shunning all men and ourselves. Practically, the world’s temptations lie close at hand: to neglect worship, to be ridiculed for conscience, to idle, to be over-anxious for credit, to be discontented or over-attached to our lot. At His coming Christ will destroy this world and its lusts; the world passes away and the lust thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.
The Soldier’s Rule and the Easy Yoke
Newman closes his sermon on self-denial by pressing the image of the soldier. No one fighting a war entangles himself in civilian affairs; no one is crowned unless he strives lawfully. Paul, he reminds his hearers, died daily, growing ever more dead to the world and laying up treasure in heaven. This is not an impossible standard reserved for apostles and miracle-workers; every Christian may imitate Paul according to the measure of grace given him. Fix the eyes on Christ, pray that the love of holiness be created in the heart, and the acts will follow in due time. There is no need to draw a precise line between the sinful and the merely allowable; deny yourself whatever you think Christ would have you relinquish. The difficulties will prove few. Christ bids us take up the cross by accepting the daily opportunities of yielding and unpleasant service, by bidding those who would be highest live as the lowest, by turning from ambition and resolving against authority, by selling and giving alms, by hating to spend on ourselves. Shut the ears to loud praise, set the face like a flint against ridicule, master the heart, curb the tongue, turn away the eye, rise for prayer a great while before day, and seek the Bridegroom by night on the bed. Then self-denial becomes natural, and like Jacob we shall see angels and a way into heaven.
Matthias and the Late-Comer’s Lent
The sermon on the yoke of Christ takes its text from Matthew: “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Newman preaches it for St. Matthias’s day, within Lent, and the choice of saint is deliberate. Christ had said the day would come when the Bridegroom would be taken away, and then his disciples would fast; that day had arrived when Matthias was chosen. The other apostles were called as children under tutors and governors, indulged with old wine lest the bottles burst; Matthias entered his inheritance at once, taking the power and penalty of the apostolate, his throne reared over the grave of one tried and fallen, under the shadow of the cross of the betrayer. His pastoral staff had always been a crosier; he had no youth, but bore the yoke in his youth and rejoiced in his long Lent.
Christ first calls “Come unto Me,” then shows the way: “Take My yoke.” He told the apostles they must bear a yoke but not at once what it was; Peter inquired and was told to wait. Only after the resurrection, by the lake of Tiberias, did Christ tell Peter plainly what would befall him—when young he girded himself, but when old another would gird him—and then, “Follow Me.” What Peter underwent in fullness, every disciple must share in measure. To come to Christ is to come after Him; to take up the cross is to take His yoke. It is easy because He makes it easy, yet it remains a yoke, troublesome and distressing. All must come to Christ through things naturally unpleasant—bodily suffering, or the subduing of natural infirmities and the sacrifice of natural wishes. The way to rest lies through discomfort and distress of heart. This concerns young and old, rich and poor, who shrink from religion as gloomy or exorbitant; it is a deceit to lead them by making religion appear not difficult. Religion is full of joy and peace, but grace makes the yoke easy; in itself it is severe.
The Mortified Man and the World’s Contempt
The character Christ describes is meekness and lowliness, expanded in the seven notes of the Sermon on the Mount: the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, those hungering after righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peace-makers, and the persecuted. Such a man is a mortified man, a character not pleasing by nature; we do not like the look of mortification till we are used to it—”no beauty that we should desire Him.” Peter rebuked Christ at the announcement of His sufferings, being a child in grace. Paul’s description of charity and James’s account of wisdom—pure, peaceable, gentle—describe the same character, acceptable to God and unacceptable to man. Nothing short of suffering makes us gentle, meek, lowly, pure-hearted. Unless we chasten ourselves, God will chasten us; if we judge ourselves we shall not be judged; if we do not afflict ourselves in light things, He will in heavy things. David refrained his soul like a weaned child; Paul kept under his body. Satan will try to turn all to evil—illness, affliction, bereavement, self-chastisement may become temptations, but need not; their legitimate effect through the Holy Spirit is to make us like Christ, who suffered all pain, sin excepted. The world despises this temper. Education and custom keep men from reflecting on Christ’s own character, but in His followers the world discerns and condemns it, calling such a man unfit for life, tame, spiritless, cowardly, superstitious, a dreamer. Yet such was Christ’s pattern, such the apostles, such the character that has conquered the world—”in much patience, in afflictions… as deceivers and yet true”—weapons not carnal but mighty through God.
Moses and the Sight of God
The sermon on Moses turns on the apostle’s contrast: the Law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. In Christ God is fully and truly seen, so He is absolutely the Way, the Truth, and the Life; all our duties are summed up in His message. Those who look to Him for teaching and worship and obey Him will by degrees see the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in His face and be changed into the same image from glory to glory. Men of the lowest class and humblest education may thus know fully the ways and works of God—better than the most sagacious man of the world to whom the Gospel is hid. Religion has wonderful secrets no one can communicate to another, pleasant to know; God says by the prophet, “Call on Me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things which thou knowest not of”—a fact all who seek God find true. Strange truths about ourselves, God, duty, the world, heaven and hell, new modes of viewing things, discoveries that cannot be put into words, deep convictions inspiring joy and peace, are part of the revelation Christ brings to those who obey Him. Moses had much toil to gain scattered rays of truth for his personal comfort, not for all Israel; Christ brought for all the full and perfect way of life—grace as well as truth.
Yet many called Christians live heartlessly, quenching early grace, blocking the spiritual senses by sin—lying, deceit, intemperance, profaneness, uncleanness, trifling minds, neglect of prayer, obstinate selfishness. They forget they have left God, thinking they still see His face; like men asleep, the prospect flits in dreams out of shape, till death awakens them.
The Glory to Be Revealed
The sermon that closes here begins with the seer’s vision of Christ glorified—eyes like a flame of fire, feet like fine brass, countenance as the sun in its strength—and turns it into a promise: the saints shall become like him hereafter. Now they wear sinful flesh; then they will rise from the grave to inherit a glory ever young and shining. On that day even the careless and the lost will be forced to see that God’s servants alone are truly happy, though they cannot comprehend the blessedness of religion. Men who now laugh at seriousness, call strictness narrowness and regularity dullness, and pin bad names on the devout will find their mockery die on their lips; they will be amazed at the righteous man’s salvation and repent in anguish, remembering that they had made him a derision and a proverb of reproach. The preacher rouses his hearers to run toward heaven, not to grow weary in well-doing, to strive to enter the strait gate, to grow holier daily, to pray for guidance, and to submit to God for comfort and peace.
Prayer Without Ceasing
The next sermon takes up the command “Pray without ceasing,” and at once distinguishes two modes of prayer: prayer at set times, places, and forms, whether public or private, and continual or habitual prayer—holding communion with God and living in his sight. Both are natural duties, binding even on those born in heathen lands, since conscience and reason would lead us to them; but the sermon confines itself to the inward, habitual kind, treating it first as a natural duty and then as the mark of a Christian.
Nature teaches that we are creatures of the Great God, bound to serve him and be religious. Religion is a habit, a state of mind always upon us, an inseparable garment of the soul; a man cannot be religious one hour and not the next, any more than he can be in good health one hour and bad the next. The religious man is religious morning, noon, and night; his religion is a character, a mould casting thoughts, words, and actions into one whole. He sees God in all things, directs every action toward revealed spiritual objects, and measures every occurrence, person, and piece of news by God’s will—thus almost literally praying without ceasing, addressing God reverently in inward prayer and praise, confession and trust. Scripture calls this doing all things to God’s glory, so that all we do becomes one body and course of obedience. Religious obedience is a spirit dwelling in us, reaching every motion of the soul, as healthy, strong men show health and strength in step, voice, gestures, and countenance. None does this perfectly; that only means none has reached perfection. The preacher draws the picture of a perfectly obedient man as a pattern, and growing in grace we approximate to Christ, our great example, who alone of all the sons of Adam lived in the perfection of unceasing prayer. The command is therefore reasonable as a natural duty, religion being no accident coming and going by fits and starts, but a spirit or life.
The Pulse of the Soul
Scripture confirms this by describing religious obedience as a kind of life. As bodily life is a state of the body—pulse beating, all things in motion—so the life of the soul. The soul was not possessed of this life of God when first born; we are born with dead souls, dead as regards religious obedience. Left to ourselves we should grow up haters of God, tending toward utter spiritual death, an inward fire of hell maturing in evil through eternity. Were it not for the gospel promise, the birth of children would be a miserable event—poor beings containing the fearful root of sin, sure to reign unto everlasting woe. But God has given all, even little children, a good promise through Christ; through his Holy Spirit he implants at once a new principle, a new spiritual life. St. Paul says God “hath quickened us” together with Christ, raised us up, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. How God quickens souls we do not know, as little as how he quickens bodies; our spiritual life is hid with Christ in God. As bodily life discovers itself by activity, the Holy Spirit’s presence is discovered by spiritual activity—the spirit of continual prayer. Prayer is to spiritual life what the pulse and breath are to bodily life; it would be as absurd to call a soul alive which does not pray as to suppose life could last in a cold, motionless, senseless body. The state of spiritual life consists in the continual activity of prayer.
Wherever Scripture speaks of the connexion between the new birth and faith, it says the same; prayer is the expression, the voice, of faith. St. Paul to the Galatians: “The life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me.” Faith is looking to God and thinking of him continually, holding habitual fellowship, speaking to him in our hearts all day—praying without ceasing. Paul calls the availing principle faith working by love, then a new creature; so new birth and living faith are inseparable. The gift of grace received at baptism must not be supposed a thing to be neglected.
Remembering Our Baptism
The sermon on baptism closes by urging hearers who wish to serve God to remember, in their ordinary prayers, habitual thoughts, and daily business, that they were once baptized. If baptism were merely a ceremony—a decent form it would be neither creditable nor expedient to neglect—it would be no subject for a Christian minister, since Christ’s religion has no fellowship with bare forms. Those who degrade baptism into a mere ceremony with no spiritual promise must defend their practice of baptizing infants as they can. The preacher instead presents baptism as a true and plain pledge of God’s grace to the souls receiving it, a real means and instrument of blessing, and warns his hearers to remember what a talent has been committed to them. Many do not think of baptism religiously, do not bless God for it, do not ground their hope of answered prayer on its promise, and above all do not fear to sin after baptism—an omission, and in many cases a sin. Outward signs are calculated to strike, affect, subdue, and change the mind. He is blessed who makes the most of these privileges; the Sign of the Cross set on us in infancy is our profession; the water poured on us was like the blood on the door-posts when the destroying angel passed over. We should fear to sin after grace given lest a worse thing come, learning that we can do nothing good without God’s grace yet can sin against it.
One Body, One Spirit
The sermon on the unity of the church takes Matthew xvi. 18. Many persons forget, deny, or do not know that Christ has set up a kingdom in the world; they think to be his people without being his subjects, to serve him in their own way, and to separate from his chosen body yet remain among the chosen. In St.
The Hidden Life of the Soul
Running through the sermons is a single governing idea: the religious life is inward, secret, and known fully only to God. Newman returns again and again to “the hidden man of the heart,” to the soul that no external observer can read. This is why he is so suspicious of religious display and so insistent that “the excellence of a religious action consists in not being seen.” The Church itself, he argues, is not a separate society standing apart from the world but a body in process of separation, whose members have “a light and a dark side, the dark outermost.” Christians mislead one another because words feebly represent feeling, and half-Christians make themselves out worse than they are for fear of ridicule. The consequence is a striking humility about judgment: since motives and contrition are visible only to God, we cannot sort the world into the religious and the worldly by inspection. The same inwardness shapes his account of prayer, which he treats not as a duty performed at set hours but as the pulse of the new life—”prayer is to spiritual life what the pulse and breath are to bodily life.” A soul that does not pray is as absurd as a living body without breath.
The Natural Man and the Yoke of Christ
Newman’s anthropology is uncompromising. The natural man, born of flesh, is at enmity with God; religion strikes him as a weariness, and Christ has “no form nor comeliness” in his eyes. This is not a defect of education or temperament but the condition Scripture describes, and Newman refuses to soften it: it is “a deceit to lead them by making religion appear not difficult.” Yet the severity is not the whole picture. The yoke Christ imposes is easy because He makes it easy, and the character it forms—meekness, lowliness, purity of heart, peaceableness—is the very character that has conquered the world, even though the world calls it tame and unmanly. Newman’s treatment of self-denial follows the same logic: he does not ask his hearers to draw a precise line between the sinful and the allowable, but to deny themselves whatever they think Christ would have them relinquish, trusting that acts will follow in due time. The Christian life, on this account, is a long Lent—a patient bearing of the cross that becomes natural only through practice, as Jacob saw angels and a way into heaven.
Signs, Feasts, and the Visible Church
Against any reading of religion as pure inwardness, Newman gives the sacraments and the visible Church a central place. Baptism is “a true and plain pledge of God’s grace,” a real means and instrument of blessing, not a bare ceremony; the water poured in infancy is like the blood on the door-posts when the destroying angel passed over. The Holy Communion is prefigured throughout the Old Testament—Melchizedek’s bread and wine, the Passover lamb, the feast imagery of the prophets—and is the earnest of the future marriage of the Lamb. The Church, likewise, is one Body, the Bride of the Lamb, a spiritual temple of which the Jewish Temple was the type; individuals receive the promise of life by being incorporated into her, not in isolation. This is why Newman insists that Christians should live together in a visible society, regulated by laws and officers, so as to appear and act as one. The inward life and the outward means are not rivals: the sacraments are the channels through which the hidden life is fed.
A Voice from the Oxford Movement
The sermons belong to the years before Newman’s conversion to Rome, when he was a fellow and vicar at Oxford and a leader of the movement that became known as the Oxford Movement. Their insistence on the visible Church, the sacraments, and the authority of tradition would feed directly into the Tracts for the Times, which Newman cites in his discussion of Church unity. Yet the sermons are not polemics. They are the work of a pastor speaking to a congregation, and their enduring force lies in the way they hold together doctrines that later generations would separate: the severity of God’s demand and the gentleness of Christ’s yoke, the hiddenness of the soul and the visibility of the sacraments, the corruption of nature and the reality of grace. Readers who come to Newman through his later, more controversial writings will find here the pastoral ground from which those writings grew—a plain, unsparing, and often beautiful attempt to make the Gospel intelligible to ordinary men and women.
