Newton's unwavering conviction was that the first and chief duty of a minister is to preach the Gospel with every art at his command, and with every variety of emphasis and appeal that he can devise. In his letter of acceptance of the invitation to the City Temple he said, "My solitary purpose is to make the Eternal Christ real and vivid to men and women today as a living Redeemer, Companion, and Friend, whose grace is equal to every mortal need and every immortal longing." His sermons in London were more appreciated than his later ones in Philadelphia and New York. His style was losing favor but he had insight as to the direction that preaching should take. As early as 1930 he was advocating 'talk-back' sessions after the sermon and combining social ideals in preaching with a mystical inner faith.

He recognized that the conditions of life today, especially in the crowded loneliness of our great cities, were a challenge to those who would interpret the things of the spirit. The fever and fret of modern life has produced people who lack the mental concentration, if not the capacity, to follow sustained thought. This creates a changed atmosphere for preaching. Newton said that this made expository preaching well-nigh impossible, for it assumed some knowledge of the Bible, in respect of which most of our hearers are ignorant. This means that the preacher of today must win by other arts. "If we are to preach to the motion-picture mind, we must preach in pictures, as Beecher trained himself to do, making his sermons picture-galleries of the Gospel. One day he wished to show our right of boldness of access to God, and wrote an argument to that effect but erased it and painted a picture instead which no one can forget, 'God is not a thunderstorm to be approached under an umbrella'."12

Newton pleaded for preaching to be inductive in its emphasis and approach. "In the old days the text was a truth assumed to be true, and the preacher need only to expound its meaning, deduce its lessons and apply them. Often enough a text was a tiny peg from which a vast weight of theology depended, and so long as men accepted both the text and the theology all went well. Of course, the old formula, "The Bible teaches, therefore it is true; the Church affirms, therefore it is valid," is still sufficient for those who accept such authorities. But in an age of inquiry, when the authority of the Bible and the Church is questioned by so many, such an appeal does not carry conviction."13 So he pleads with preachers to face the facts and be wise enough to win men on their own terms. If by appealing to the facts of life we can show the truths of faith to be real, we have reestablished the authority of the Bible and the Church.

Newton's sermons may not appeal to our age because his preaching was noble, stately, rich in beauty and power, suffused with that element of poetry which, according to Samuel Johnson, is "the art of uniting pleasure to truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason." But his conception of preaching does make a powerful appeal. The new preaching which he advocated is to be more simple, direct, human, more artless in its eloquence, and more intimate in its appeal but it proclaims the same Gospel which today as in days gone by, meets the needs and aspirations of men.