But they all preached.  What was the character of their sermons?

On this point, as on many others, the censure that has been passed upon the Church of the eighteenth century has been far too sweeping and far too severe.  When one hears the sermons of the period stigmatised without any qualification as ‘miserable moral essays,’ and ’as unspeakably and indescribably bad,’ one calls to mind almost indignantly the great preachers of the time, whose sermons have been handed down to us and may be referred to by anyone who chooses to do so.  Surely this is not a proper description of the sermons of such men as Sherlock, Smalridge, Waterland, Seed, Ogden, Atterbury, Mudge, Hare, Bentley, and last but not least, Butler himself, whose practical sermons might be preached with advantage before a village congregation at this day.  Too much stress has been laid upon a somewhat random observation of Sir William Blackstone, who ’had the curiosity, early in the reign of George III., to go from church to church and hear every clergyman of note in London.  He says that he did not hear a single discourse which had more Christianity in it than the writings of Cicero, and that it would have been impossible for him to discover, from what he heard, whether the preacher were a follower of Confucius, of Mahomet, or of Christ.’  The famous lawyer does not specify the churches which he visited.  He may have been unfortunate in his choice, or he may have been in a frame of mind which was not conducive to an unbiassed judgment;[681] but we have the best of all means of testing how far his sweeping censure may be fairly taken as applicable to the general character of the sermons of the day.  The most celebrated of them are still in existence, and will give their own contradiction to the charge.  It is not true that the preachers of this period entirely ignored the distinctive doctrines of Christianity; it would be more correct to say that they took the knowledge of them too much for granted—­that they were as a rule too controversial, and that they too often appealed to merely prudential motives.  Even Dr. Johnson, who set a very high value upon the sermons of his Church, and declared on one occasion that ’sermons make a considerable branch of English literature, so that a library must be very imperfect if it has not a numerous collection of sermons,’ yet confessed that they did not effect the good they ought to do.  A sensitive dread of anything like enthusiasm was a marked characteristic of the eighteenth century:  this dread did not originate with the clergy, but it was taken up by them and reflected in their sermons.  This, of course, was at first greatly intensified by the excitement raised by the Methodist movement, although it was afterwards dispelled by the same cause.  The orthodox preacher of the Hanoverian period felt bound to protest against the superstitions of Rome on the one hand and the fanaticism of sectaries on the other; in contrast with both of