whom the moderation of ‘our happy Establishment’ was extolled to the skies.  To such a morbid extent was his dread of extremes carried, so carefully had he to guard himself against being supposed to diverge one hair’s breadth from the middle course taken up by the Church of England, that in his fear of being over-zealous he became over-tame and colourless.  Tillotson was his model, and, like most imitators, he exaggerated the defects of his master.  So far as it is possible to group under one head so vast and varied an amount of composition, produced by men of the most diverse casts of mind, and extending over so long a period as a hundred years, one may perhaps fairly characterise the typical eighteenth century sermon as too stiff and formal, too cold and artificial, appealing more to the reason than to the feelings, and so more calculated to convince the understanding than to affect the heart.  ‘We have no sermons,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘addressed to the passions that are good for anything.’

These defects were brought out into stronger relief by their contrast to the very different style of preaching adopted by the revived Evangelical school.  And the success of this latter school called the attention of some of the most thoughtful divines to the deficiencies of the ordinary style of preaching, which they fully admitted and unsparingly but judiciously exposed.  Thus Archbishop Secker, in his Charge to the Diocese of Canterbury in 1758, in speaking of the ’new sect pretending to the strictest piety,’ wisely urges his clergy ’to emulate what is good in them, avoiding what is bad, to edify their parishioners with awakening but rational and Scriptural discourses, to teach the principles not only of virtue and natural religion, but of the Gospel, not as almost refined away by the modern refiner, but the truth as it is in Jesus and as it is taught by the Church.’  Still stronger are the censures passed in later years upon the lack in the sermons of the day of evangelical doctrines, by men who were very far from identifying themselves with the Evangelical school.  Thus Paley, in his seventh charge,[682] comments upon this point.  And Bishop Horsley, in his first Charge to the Diocese of St. David’s in 1709, stigmatises the unchristian method of preaching in that dignified but incisive language of which he was a consummate master.

If, on the one hand, a somewhat heartless and vague method of dealing with the great distinctive doctrines of Christianity, and especially the practical application of them, may fairly be reckoned among Church abuses, there was, on the other hand, an abuse of sermons which arose from an excess of zeal.  There were occasions on which the preacher could make strong enough appeals to the passions; but, unfortunately, the subjects were not those which fall primarily within the province of the pulpit.  But here again, as on so many other points, the abuse arose rather from the circumstances of the time than from the faults of the men.