The village of Over Worton lies about half a mile north of the narrow road connecting Great Tew and Duns Tew. It is very small: a farm, a handful of cottages, Over Worton House, the Rectory, the church; no shop and no pub. The lane leading to it is a dead-end for motor cars, though a track runs on downhill to Nether Worton in the valley below.
An examination of the first Ordnance Survey 1" map of the area (based on a field survey made between 1811 and 1818, revised in 1830-31) suggests that the village was much the same size in 1824, when a 23-year-old newly ordained Anglican curate preached his first sermon there. His name was John Henry Newman and he was to die, in 1890, a Cardinal of the Roman Church.
At the time Newman was a fellow of Oriel, and had just been appointed curate of St Clement's, Oxford. It is, therefore, surprising to find him making his debut in the pulpit in a small village church nearly twenty miles away. Neither Newman himself, at least in the journals and papers so far published, nor his biographers have found much to say about the event. It was no doubt an inauspicious occasion—it is hard to imagine that even in 1824 Evensong on a Wednesday evening in June was attended by many people other than the curate in residence and his immediate household—and yet in view of the tremendous influence that Newman was to exert as a preacher as Vicar of St Mary's, Oxford from 1828 to 1843, and later as a priest of the Oratory in Birmingham and Rector of the Catholic University in Ireland, it was a significant one. An opportunity to study the manuscript of the sermon itself, preserved, along with many of Newman's sermons and papers, at the Birmingham Oratory, [1] made me curious to find out why he went to Over Worton. The manuscripts also, incidentally, clear up a persistent confusion about the text on which he preached. But more of that later.
Newman's association with Over Worton sprang from his friendship with tne curate, the Rev Walter Mayers. Mayers had been the classical master at Dr Nicholas's school in Ealing, where Newman was a pupil from 1808 until December 1816, when he entered Trinity College, Oxford, some two months before his sixteenth birthday. But Mayers was more, much more, to Newman than a liked and inspected former schoolmaster: a strong Evangelical, in the autumn of 1816 he gave his pupil a number of devotional works, including Law's Serious Call and Bishop Beveridge's Private Thoughts on Religion. The impact of this reading is best told in Newman's own words:
He ever regarded this as the time of his true conversion, and the rest of his life, including his reception into the Roman Church in 1845, as growing and developing from it.
Mayers became curate of Over Worton in 1823 and moved into the rectory next to the church. There he took pupils, to supplement his income no doubt and possibly also to give him an occupation. In 1824 he married Sarah Giberne, whose younger sister, Maria Rosina, was to become one of Newman's dearest next to the church. There he took pupils, to supplement his income no doubt and possibly also to give him an occupation. In 1824 he married Sarah Giberne, whose younger sister, Maria Rosina, was to become one of Newman's dearest friends, and to be of great practical help to him in one of the blackest periods of his life, when he was sued for libel by the renegade priest Achilli in 1851. But there is no evidence that Maria Rosina was staying at Over Worton in June 1824. In her autobiography she recorded that she first became 'properly acquainted' with him in 1827.3
Both John Henry Newman and his younger brother, Frank, helped Mayers with coaching. It seems that Frank lived at the rectory for a time, but Newman would come from Oxford when required. In a cancelled, unpublished preface to one of the Historical Sketches, an essay on Cicero, he recorded how one day in the spring of 1824 'after working with his private pupils till the evening, he sat down to his article till four o'clock next morning, and then walked over from Oxford to Warton,4 a distance of eighteen miles, in order to appear punctually at the breakfast table of a friend, the Rev Walter Mayer, who on quitting home had committed his pupils in his parsonage to the author's charge. [5]
So Newman's appearance in the pulpit of Over Worton Church on the 23rd June 1824 seems natural enough. We may surmise that Mayers was close enough to him to know that he needed help to find his feet following his ordination—T feel as a man thrown suddenly into deep water' Newman had written in his journal on the evening of the 13th June, the day of the ceremony—and we know that he found composing sermons hard work. In the autumn of 1823 he had written a number of sketches of sermons (he burnt them in 1874), and on the 15th August 1824 he noted in his journal Two Sermons a week are very exhausting. This is only the third week, and I am already running dry . . .' [6] But the most eloquent testimony to the struggle is the manuscripts of the sermons themselves.
I mentioned earlier that confusion about the text of Newman's first sermon still persists. It springs from a passage in an Autobiographical Memoir of his early life which he wrote when in his seventies. In it (writing of himself in the third person) he refers to 'His first Sermon, on "Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the evening" (Ps civ. 23).' But this, though the first sermon that he wrote, was not in fact the first he preached, as the manuscripts make plain. 'No 1.' is headed 'St Clements—Sunday Morning June 27 1824 (The first sermon I ever wrote)', and No 2 'Over Worton: Wednesday Ev. June 23rd 1824 (The first sermon I ever preached)'. The text of this second sermon to be written is also taken from the Psalms: 'Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and He shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord.' (Ps xxvii. 14)
But what of the sermon, or sermons, themselves? He seems to have found No. 1 rather easier to write than No. 2, the opening pages of which are so scored through and altered that it is difficult to arrive at a coherent text. Some of the changes are in a different ink, and they may have been made a year or two later: he used the sermon twice more, on 4th July 1824 at St Clements and again at St Clements on 15th October 1826. Looking at the pages, one can sense the struggle to express his thinking as clearly as possible. His aim was always to persuade and convince, to lead his hearers on to reflect further on the text he had chosen, and the thoughts he drew from it, rather than to overwhelm them with oratory. One who heard him, Sunday after Sunday, at St Mary's has left a description of his manner, and matter, in the pulpit that deserves quoting at length.
Most of these qualities are evident in his very first sermons. There is delicacy of ¦style, a gentle and holy simplicity of manner, and even a new and unlooked-for |way of illustrating an old truth —
Above all, the themes of both sermons are deeply characteristic of their I author. The text of No. 1, 'Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the evening', was one of the 'notes' of his entire life, to use a favourite expression of his, and he used it again many times, notably for the profoundly moving, I grief-stricken, sometimes incoherent sermon with which he bade farewell to his Anglican Ministry in September 1843.8 The necessity of perseverance in religion, waiting on God for light, and waiting on Him for holiness, peace, and future happiness, is an equally familiar theme in Newman's writings.
Already in his first sermon he is moving away from the Calvinist ideas he had absorbed from Mayers, towards his own perfectly balanced and rounded understanding of the Christian faith. He urged his hearers at Over Worton to 'not idly and despairingly but with energetic progress': 'Let us be up and jloing' while we wait for the day when 'Faith is exchanged for sight, and hope for gtual enjoyment.' Sixty-six years later, in August 1890, he died in Birming-and the tablet marking his grave in the Oratory cemetery at Rednal bears the inscription Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem. He chose the words himself: they expressed, with the utmost simplicity, the faith which had sustained him throughout his long life.