For the work of preaching no endowment or training is too high. Yet Newton recognized that the most perfect intellectual equipment is not enough, for, as Aristotle said, "intellect moves nothing." There must be sympathy that comes from a knowledge of and love for people. "The preacher must live with the people if he is to know their problems and he must live with God if he is to solve them."7 Above all, the preacher must have a prophetic soul, a power of spiritual perception. Intellect, sympathy, and insight are the secrets of inspired preaching.

Newton defines preaching as persuasion, agreeing with 'Father' Taylor, the sailor evangelist, when he said that "It is the business of the preacher to take something hot out of his own heart and shove it into mine."

Preaching in the New Testament sense is the urgent announcement of a message. The preacher is a herald of God. The ministry of Jesus may be summed up in the phrase, "His Word was with power." If preaching is persuasion, the person in the pulpit must be utterly persuaded if he is to persuade anyone else. Today, says Newton, the pulpit is so vexed by misgiving that its gospel ceases to be an apostolate and becomes an apology. No eloquence or charm of manner, no homiletic artistry can atone for a lack of a vital inward experience of spiritual reality. The preacher should be the channel of a communication, not the source of it.

In the seventh lecture in The New Preaching, Newton uses five words to outline the method of approach to the mind of today: translation, reconciliation, interpretation, explanation, and cooperation.

The truths of faith must be translated into the idiom of today if they are to be real and vivid. There must be reconciliation between the generations, youth and age, the ancient faith and the modern mind. The business of preaching is to interpret the way and the will of God to man. The new preaching must be inductive in its emphasis and approach for an age which has a peculiar bent towards discovery, especially for the presentation of difficult or unpopular truth. The new preaching will not be content with cultivating a private piety. It will be the prophet of public religion, not only social in its insight but international in its aspiration.

In his concluding lecture, Newton divides great preachers into three categories. The first group is made up of poetic seers, like Newman and F. W. Robertson, and in this class Newton himself would be included. The second group consists of the genetic thinkers, the spiritual miners who dig deep and bring new ore to the surface, like Horace Bushnell. The third group is the orators, the masters of assemblies, like Phillips Brooks and Spurgeon.

Newton published eighty-three books in all, many of them collections of sermons, of which Things I Know in Religion is the most representative; biographical studies of David Swing, the poet-preacher, and of Abraham Lincoln; a fine book of pulpit prayers entitled Altar Stairs; and three studies of preachers, Some Living Masters of the Pulpit, Preaching in London and Preaching in New York, which reveal that his chief passion was preaching.