The classic chapter in Newman's Idea of a University on “University Preaching” remains at many points as timely and convincing as when it was written, in 1855. Its discrimination of real from spurious earnestness—“I do not mean that a preacher should aim at earnestness, but that he must aim at his object … which will at once make him earnest”; its warning against the recondite, remote, and abstract—“The most obvious truths are often the most profitable”; its advice that sermons should be prepared in writing, but spoken without notes—“While then a preacher will find it becoming and admirable to put into writing any important discourse beforehand, he will find it equally a point of propriety and expedience not to read it in the pulpit”—all these counsels and principles, though Newman throughout his preaching at St. Mary's violated the last of them, are as applicable as ever. Yet, on the other hand, the force of Newman's teaching is for many readers limited by his reiterated reference to ecclesiastical authority. What St. Francis de Sales, or St. Charles, or St. Antoninus, may have said about sermons is assumed to be of more significance than the judgments of the not less saintly Newman. The preacher whom Newman has in mind is a Roman priest, who “has before his mental eye the Four Last Things,” and feels “the horror and the rapture of one who witnesses a conflagration.”