SOURCE: "Clio and Ethics: Practical Morality in Enlightened Scotland," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Vol. 30, No. 1, Spring, 1989, pp. 45-72.

In the following excerpt, Dwyer discusses Blair's sermons in light of his influential role as a Moderate preacher and champion of sensibility.

Recent work on eighteenth-century Scottish culture demonstrates the significance of practical moral concerns within a relatively backward economy experiencing the tensions associated with modernization. In his magisterial Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment, Richard Sher argues that the Moderate clergy of the Church of Scotland helped to formulate that ethic of polite Stoicism which simultaneously reinforced personal integrity while it encouraged tolerance and benevolence towards one's fellows.¹ Sher and others also remark upon the renewed vitality of the civic tradition in late eighteenth-century Scottish society and its contribution to the enlightened but conservative Scottish consciousness.² Adopting a flexible definition of this same civic tradition, Nicholas...