This volume contains sermons delivered during Newman's post at Oriel College, Oxford. Most of the sermons in this collection include the date of delivery, making it easy to compare the practical, homiletical presentation of Newman's theories to the more intricate nuances of his argument in a corresponding essay.
“REVERENCE for the old paths is a chief Christian duty.” (Page 243)
“The Law was not so much taken away, as the Gospel given. The Gospel supplanted the Law. The Law went out by the Gospel’s coming in.” (Page 167)
“To maintain a religious spirit in the midst of engagements and excitements of this world is possible only to a saint” (Page 62)
“We are too well inclined by nature to live by sight, rather than by faith” (Page 63)
“could not bear any good fruit, for from above is every good gift. Far from it. Any such notion of man’s” (Page 224)
The quality of his literary style is so successful that it succeeds in escaping definition. The quality of his logic is that of a long but passionate patience, which waits until he has fixed all corners of an iron trap. But the quality of his moral comment on the age remains what I have said: a protest of the rationality of religion as against the increasing irrationality of mere Victorian comfort and compromise.
The philosophical and theological thought and the spirituality of Cardinal Newman, so deeply rooted in and enriched by Sacred Scripture and the teachings of the Fathers, still retain their particular originality and value.
—Pope John Paul II
Newman placed the key in our hand to build historical thought into theology, or much more, he taught us to think historically in theology and so to recognize the identity of faith in all developments.
—Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)