Buford on Newman

Peter Edman

Bob Buford has sent out a passage from John Henry Newman’s sermons as recommended summer reading for his e-mail list. I thought it worth sharing with those of you who might not be on that list. 

This is Newman’s Sermon 30, preached on the Feast of St. Luke, ”The Danger of Accomplishments,” from his Parochial & Plain Sermons (1908). As a literature person, I take exception to a good part of the sermon—he falls prey to false dichotomies—but its overall point is well taken.

Now the danger of an elegant and polite education is, that it separates feeling and acting; it teaches us to think, speak, and be affected aright, without forcing us to practise what is right. . . .

And here I must notice something besides in elegant accomplishments, which goes to make us over-refined and fastidious, and falsely delicate. In books, everything is made beautiful in its way. Pictures are drawn of complete virtue; little is said about failures, and little or nothing of the drudgery of ordinary, everyday obedience, which is neither poetical nor interesting. True faith teaches us to do numberless disagreeable things for Christ’s sake, to bear petty annoyances, which we find written down in no book. In most books Christian conduct is made grand, elevated, and splendid; so that any one, who only knows of true religion from books, and not from actual endeavours to be religious, is sure to be offended at religion when he actually comes upon it, from the roughness and humbleness of his duties, and his necessary deficiencies in doing them. It is beautiful in a picture to wash the disciples’ feet; but the sands of the real desert have no lustre in them to compensate for the servile nature of the occupation.

Buford himself has a new book out this summer, Finishing Well.

Gleanings, Character and Ethics, Leadership, Tue 12 Jul 2005