Newman the preacher 2
Now Dr. Newman's manner in the pulpit was one about which, if you considered it in its separate parts, you would arrive at very unsatisfactory conclusions. There was not very much change in the inflexion of the voice; action there was none. His sermons were read, and his eyes were always bent on his book; and all that, you will say, is against efficiency in preaching. Yes, but you must take the man as a whole, and there was a stamp and a seal upon him; there was a solemn sweetness and music in the tone; there was a completeness in the figure, taken together with the tone and with the manner, which made even his delivery, such as I have described it, and though exclusively from written sermons, singularly attractive.
But though reality was the first of Newman's characteristics as a preacher, it would not have been half as effective as it was, had it not been combined with that profound and vivid apprehension of the truth and the marvel of revelation which is so seldom united with realism such as his. Sincere preachers have abounded in recent years, preachers who have shown their sincerity by openly discarding the belief in those truths of the Christian revelation which cannot, after some sort of fashion, be reconciled to what is called "modern thought." Newman held that modern thought needed reforming in the light of the Christian revelation, not the Christian revelation in the light of modern thought.
From Cardinal Newman by Richard H. Hutton (1891)