Newman's Apprenticeship: The Sermons at St. Clement's

On May 25, 1824, a little less than three weeks before his ordination to the diaconate, John Henry Newman wrote to his father, “I am convinced it is necessary to get used to parochial duty early, and that a Fellow of a College after ten years’ residence in Oxford feels very awkward among poor and ignorant people” (Letters and Diaries 175). To be sure, the site of Newman’s prospective curacy, the Old Church of St. Clement’s, was not far distant from the “dreaming spires” of the university: outside the city limits on the London side of the Cherwell river (McGrath, Sermons 5: xviii–xix).1 In its general flavor, however, it was quite different from the academic environment of Newman’s previous eight years. Oxford itself was already undergoing its transformation into a bustling commercial center, and St. Clement’s stood in a parish which had doubled in population from 1800 to 1821 and was to double again over the four years immediately following. In his pastoral and preaching duties at St. Clement’s over the next twenty-one months, during which (in May 1825) he was ordained to the priesthood, Newman could not expect much practical assistance from the septuagenarian Rector John Gutch, under whom the duties of parish visitation appear to have largely lapsed. Newman preached his first sermon at St. Clement’s on Sunday morning, June 27, and presided over his first service the following week. On July 28, just a month after the initiation of his duties, he was writing to his mother: