action there was none; his sermons were read, and his eyes were always on his book … but you take the man as a whole, and there was a stamp and a seal upon him; there was a solemn sweetness and music in his tone; there was a completeness in the figure, taken together with the tone and the manner, which made even his delivery such as I have described it, and though exclusively with written sermons, singularly attractive."
Newman tells us himself in his "Apologia" of how his influence was felt in Oxford, and so throughout all the country. [1]"As is the custom of a University," he said, "I had lived with my private, nay, with some of my public pupils, and with the junior Fellows of my College, without form or distance, on a footing of equality. Thus it was through friends younger, or the most part, than myself, that my principles were spreading. They heard what I said in conversation, and told it to others. Undergraduates in due time took their degrees and became private tutors themselves. In their new status they in turn preached the opinions with which they had already become acquainted. Others went down to the country, and became curates of parishes. Then they had down from London parcels of the Tracts and other publications. They placed them in the shops of local booksellers, got them into newspapers, introduced them to clerical meetings, and converted, more or less, their Rectors and their brother curates."
The Tractarian Movement, or High Church party, as it now began to be called, thus had considerable influence outside Oxford. Centres were started away from its home,
- ↑ Apologia, pp.58, 59.
