He was critical of his own preaching and confessed to a friend that much of his preaching was too abstract and over the heads of the people. Albert Clare, for many years the church secretary at the City Temple, London, in his history of that historic pulpit supports this view. He writes: "Dr. Newton was scarcely a preacher for the Court of the Gentiles, but rather for those who had themselves made some real progress in the Christian life, and who most of all loved the inner sanctuary. He was far less concerned with intellectual problems and difficulties than with reaffirming the validity of the essential truths of Christianity. His preaching was richly positive, and, if the listener's personal life was being lived on a high enough level singularly fortifying and inspiring. To the mere objector or scoffer it was in large measure a foreign language."

Clare goes on to speak of the serenity and poise of Newton's preaching, which came from a mind that brooded much, and that had in it a deep strain of genuine mysticism. "Many of Dr. Newton's sermons were little classics of their kind. In the sympathetic hearer's mind there was a sense of completeness, allied with the feeling that the inner secret of the saying or incident dealt with had been discovered and set free. It was evident that the interpretations given sprang less from intellectual perception than from a deep well of spiritual insight and experience."8

In his later years Newton changed his style of preaching, making it simpler, full of shrewd practical remarks, and pictures of life as he had himself seen it. As he once said, "The truth of the Gospel must be clearly seen, deeply felt, and dipped and dyed in all the colors of human life, if it is to be made concrete and vivid. This simpler and more appealing manner of writing is to be seen in such a book as his Everyday Religion, which contains a number of brief talks published as a Saturday Sermon for a number of years in the Philadelphia Bulletin.

He used meaningful stories of everyday people -- vivid anecdotes and incidents that show how Christian living works in the world today. Based on timeless scriptural truths, these brief messages show how to make each day richer, fuller and more satisfying by living the Christian way, applying Christian attitudes and actions. On the title page are these words, "A faith to live by, a self fit to live with, a work fit to live for, somebody to love and be loved by -- these make life."

One thing that is evident throughout Newton's many books is his wide reading, of which he makes skillful use. In his autobiography he tells us that the books he read outside the field of theology were the things that did most for his development and lived longest in his heart. "Poetry, fiction, drama, essays, biography fed my soul; here were free spirits who had insight and art -- serenity, vision, beauty. As John Morley said, 'The purpose of wise reading is to bring sunshine into our hearts and to drive moonshine out of our heads'."9