[48] The subjoined extracts record the impression made by Mr. Newman's preaching on contemporaries well qualified to judge, and standing respectively in very different relations to the movement. This is the judgment of a very close observer, and very independent critic, James Mozley. In an article in the _Christian Remembrancer_, January 1846 (p. 169), after speaking of the obvious reasons of Mr. Newman's influence, he proceeds:--
We inquire further, and we find that this influence has been of a peculiarly ethical and inward kind; that it has touched the deepest part of our minds, and that the great work on which it has been founded is a practical, religious one--his Sermons. We speak not from our own fixed impression, however deeply felt, but from what we have heard and observed everywhere, from the natural, incidental, unconscious remarks dropped from persons' mouths, and evidently showing what they thought and felt. For ourselves, we must say, one of Mr. Newman's sermons is to us a marvellous production. It has perfect power, and perfect nature; but the latter it is which makes it so great. A sermon of Mr. Newman's enters into all our feelings, ideas, modes of viewing things. He wonderfully realises a state of mind, enters into a difficulty, a temptation, a disappointment, a grief; he goes into the different turns and incidental, unconscious symptoms of a case, with notions which come into the head and go out again, and are forgotten, till some chance recalls them.... To take the first instance that happens to occur to us ... we have often been struck by the keen way in which he enters into a regular tradesman's vice--avarice, fortune-getting, amassing capital, and so on. This is not a temper to which we can imagine Mr. Newman ever having felt in his own mind even the temptation; but he understands it, and the temptation to it, as perfectly as any merchant could. No man of business could express it more naturally, more pungently, more _ex animo_.... So with the view that worldly men take of religion, in a certain sense, he quite enters into it, and the world's point of view: he sees, with a regular worldly man's eye, religion vanishing into nothing, and becoming an unreality, while the visible system of life and facts, politics and society, gets more and more solid and grows upon him. The whole influence of the world on the imagination; the weight of example; the force of repetition; the way in which maxims, rules, sentiments, by being simply sounded in the ear from day to day, seem to prove themselves, and make themselves believed by being often heard,--every part of the easy, natural, passive process by which a man becomes a man of the world is entered into, as if the preacher were going to justify or excuse him, rather than condemn him. Nay, he enters deeply into what even scepticism has to say for itself; he puts himself into the infidel's state of mind, in which the 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.