the preacher may feel himself bound to include a wide range of subjects. When the press comes to his aid, and relieves him for the most part of the more secular of his topics, he is the more at liberty to confine himself to matters which have a primary and direct bearing upon the spiritual life. In any case, however, whether the change be, on the whole, beneficial or not to the general character of preaching, it must evidently deprive it of some part of its former influence. Yet in the reigns of William and Queen Anne good preaching was still highly appreciated and very popular. Jablouski said of his Protestant fellow-countrymen in Prussia, that the sermon had come to be considered so entirely the important part of the service that people commonly said, 'Will you go to sermon?' instead of 'to Church.' It was not quite so in England; yet undoubtedly there was very generally something of the same feeling. 'Many,' said Sherlock, 'who have little other religion, are forward enough to hear sermons, and many will miss the prayers and come in only in time to hear the preaching.' We find it observed that it was injurious to the funds of a charity to advertise too generally that any favourite or well-known divine would preach in its behalf, for such a mob flocked to hear him that the 'paying' part of the congregation is crowded out.3 If some of the incentives to good preaching, and some of the attributes which had distinguished it, were no longer conspicuous, other causes had come in to maintain the honour of the pulpit. That stir and movement of the intellectual faculty which was everywhere beginning to test the power of reason on all questions of theology and faith had both brought into existence a new style of preaching, and had secured for it a number of attentive hearers. The anxious and earnest, but, notwithstanding its occasional virulence, the somewhat unimpassioned controversy with Rome, and the newly aroused hopes of reconciliating the moderate Dissenters, had tended to a similar result. A rich, imaginative eloquence, though it could not fail to have admirers, was out of favour, not only with those who considered Tillotson the model preacher, but also with High Churchmen. 'Jablouski's Correspondence, in Archbishop Sharp's Life, by his Son, ii. 157, App. 2, 3. 2 Sherlock, On Rel. Worship, 66. R. Nelson, quoted in Teale's Lives, 324. Jeremy Taylor would hardly have ranked high in Bishop Bull's estimation. His wit and metaphors, and 'tuneful pointed sentences,' would almost certainly have been adjudged by the good Bishop of St. David's unworthy of the grave and solid dignity of the pulpit.' And brilliant as were the sallies of Dr. South's vigorous and highly seasoned declamations, they were rarely of a kind to kindle imagination and stir emotion. The edge of his arguments was keen and cold; and they were addressed to the common reason of his hearers, no less than those of the 'Latitudinarian' Churchmen with whom he most delighted to contend. Hearers of sermons did not miss qualities which they did not greatly care for. After all, it was some credit to the age that the preaching which it chiefly valued should have been of a sort whose characteristic excellence was, that it ever sought in plain, unaffected language to commend the Christian faith to the sober reasoning of thinking people. The preacher who could do most to satisfy these desires had, as yet, no fear of empty churches. Atterbury was probably beyond comparison the most eloquent of the preachers of Queen Anne's reign. Doddridge entitled him 'the glory of English orators;' and the Duke of Wharton spoke in terms of no ordinary praise of the winning power of his language, 'as honey sweet, as soft as heavenly dew.' But the most celebrated preacher of his day is said to have been Fleetwood, whose ' peculiar talent was in making things plain which seemed to many difficult.'4 Archbishop Sharp, whose sermons were always marked with great plainness and simplicity, was also very popular in the pulpit. Nor was there any intrinsic reason why such sermons should be deficient in spiritual force,-still less, that they should degenerate into moral essays. In fact, their chief fault, during the Revolution period, and the generation that immediately followed it, was simply that they appealed too exclusively to the sense 3 Nelson's Life of Bull, 420. South was very alive to the special faults into which Jeremy Taylor was led by his too exuberant fancy, and has pointed them out with truth and pungency, and also with some malice. See II. Rogers's Contributions to the Ed. Rev., i. 431. 2 Quoted in Memoirs and Correspondence of F. Atterbury, by Folkestone Williams, i. 71. • Id. i. 314. Pref. to Fleetwood's Works, viii. of reason; and next, that labour was often spent in attempts to confute the infidel and the sceptic, which would have been better employed, as a rule, in exhortations to the conscience of believers. That degradation of religion, which, even in the earlier years of the century, was beginning to lower the Gospel of redemption into a philosophy of morality, has been spoken of in a previous chapter. Under its depressing influence, preaching sank to a very low ebb. Hurd, in 1761, said, with perfect truth, that 'the common way of sermonising had become most wretched, and even the best models very defective.' 2 By that date, however, improvement had already begun. It was sometimes said, and the assertion was not altogether unfounded, that these cold pulpit moralities were in great measure the recoil from Methodist extravagances. But far more generally, as the century advanced, Methodism promoted the beneficial change which had already been noted in the case of Secker. The more zealous and observant of the Clergy could not fail to learn a valuable lesson from the wonderful power over the souls of men which their Methodist fellow workmen-the irregulars of the Church-had acquired. And independently of their example, the same leaven was working among those sharers in the Evangelical revival who remained steadfast to the Established order, as among those who felt themselves cramped by it. Whatever in other respects might be their faults of style and matter, they were, at all events, in no point what some sermons were called— 'Stoical Essays,' 'imitations from a Christian pulpit of Seneca and Epictetus. '3 There were many mannerisms, and there was much want of breadth of thought, but in heart and purpose it was a true preaching of the Gospel. Even towards the end of the century there were a few notable instances of the power which a great preacher might yet command. We are told of Dean Kirwan, who had left the Roman for the English Church, that even in times of public calamity and distress, his irresistible powers of persuasion repeatedly produced contributions exceeding a thou 1 Vol. i. 325-8, ii. 39–42. 2 Warburton and Hurd's Correspondence, 31. Horsley's Charges, 6; Reflection on the Clergy, &c., 1798, 42. sand or twelve hundred pounds at a sermon; and his hearers, not content with emptying their purses into the plate, sometimes threw in jewels or watches in earnest of further benefac A sermon of Bishop Horsley once produced an effect which would hardly be possible, except under circumstances of great public excitement. When he preached in Westminster Abbey, before the House of Lords, on January 30, 1793, the whole assembly, stirred by his peroration, rose as with one impulse, and remained standing till the sermon ended. Little need be said about faults of style and delivery. Ungracious manner, unhappy tones of voice, inelegant English, hurried pronunciation, affectations and singularities, a lifeless, dry and unimpressive style, or sometimes one that was florid and theatrical, occasional pedantry and foolish displays of learning, or a coarse and undignified homeliness-these, and such other faults as these, gave abundant material for good or ill natured censure. But even those who were most disposed to take a high estimate of English sermons generally acknowledged, that serious blemishes of these kinds were more general than might reasonably have been expected. 'The clergy of Great Britain,' said the "Tatler,' ' are, I believe, the most learned in the world, and yet this art of speaking is wholly neglected among them.' 3 Burnet spoke of written sermons as the almost universal practice of English divines, and said they had begun after the popular and loose extempore way of preaching among the friars. The custom had caused a deficiency of heat and fire, but had produced the greatest treasure of weighty, grave, and solid sermons that the Church of God ever had.'4 In Charles II.'s time, some attempt was made to effect a change in this custom. The Duke of Monmouth wrote to the University of Cambridge, of which he was Chancellor His Majesty hath commanded me to signify to you his pleasure that the said practice (which took beginning with the disorders of the late times) be laid aside, and that the aforesaid preachers deliver their sermons both in Pref. to W. B. Kirwan's Sermons, quoted in Q. Rev., xi. 133. Burnet's Hist. of the Ref., v. I., quoted in Life of Sharp, i. 40. Latin and English by memory, or without book, as being a way of preaching which his Majesty judgeth most agreeable to the use of foreign Churches, and to the custom of the University heretofore, and the nature and intendment of that holy exercise.' This injunction was very scantily obeyed, and the eighteenth century was even less than any other an exception to the general rule. The laity, said Swift, are all for extempore sermons, but the clergy are all for written. ones. Towards the end of the period, however, a considerable number of the clergy followed the example of the Methodists and laid aside the book. Extempore preaching,' as Polwhele somewhat oddly puts it, 'is one of the most obvious of the distinctions between the Evangelical and canonical clergy.' 3 Amid the excited and angry controversies which occupied the earlier years of the century, the pulpit did not by any means retain a befitting calm. Later in the century there was no great cause for complaint on this ground. Whiston says that he sometimes read in church one of the Homilies. So, no doubt, did others. But even in 1691 we find it mentioned that they could not be much used without scandal, as if they were read from laziness. The more the pity,' says the writer in question, for they are good preaching.' It was one of Tillotson's ideas to get a new set of Homilies written, as a supplement to the existing ones. There was to be one for each Sunday and principal holy day in the year; and the whole was to constitute a semi-authorised corpus of doctrinal and practical divinity adapted for general instruction and family reading. Burnet, Lloyd, and Patrick joined in the scheme, and some progress was made in carrying it out. It met, however, with opposition, and was ultimately laid aside. 5 To nearly every one of the London Churches in Queen. Anne's time a Lecturer was attached, independent in most cases of the incumbent. A great many of these foundations were an inheritance from Puritan times. The duty required 6 Of date Oct. 8, 1674, quoted in Justice of Restraining the Clergy, 28-9. 2 Letter to a Young Clergyman'-Works, 8, 214. Pref. to Lavington, 221. Birch's Life of Tillotson, cclv. Officium Cleri, 1691, 31. |