The Victorian and Earlier sermon: An Overview

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The preachers of any period are not to be censured for adapting their style of address and mode of arguing to their hearers. They are as necessarily bound to the preconceived notions, as to the language, of those whom they have to exhort. The pulpit does not so mould the forms into which religious thought in any age runs, it simply accommodates itself to those that exist. For this very reason, because they must follow and cannot lead, sermons are the surest index of the prevailing religious feeling of their age. — Mark Pattison, "Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750," Essays and Reviews (1860).

Preaching had its addictive side. "Nothing would satisfy me", wrote [the Evangelical] Matthias Joyce, "but hearing the people roar under the sermon, from a sense of their misery; and, on the other hand, shouting for joy. through a sense of pardoning love." — John Whale, "Scab on the Story," Times Literary Supplement (17 February 2006): 32.

The sermon as a Literary Form

• Introduction (needed)
• Rhetoric and Structure of the sermon (needed)
• The sermon and Orality

Political and Social Contexts

• Thomas Arnold and the 1832 Cholera Epidemic
• Class and Society (needed)
• The Great Exhibition of 1851
• The Sermon as Mass Entertainment
• Cartoonists on sermons

Gender Matters

• A Review of Christine Krueger's The Reader's Repentance: Women Preachers, Women Writers, and Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse

Individual Preachers and Examples of Their Sermons

• Thomas Arnold (Broad Church Anglican) Overview (sitemap)
• “Judgments and Chastisements” — text
• George Clayton (Evangelical)
  • “Encouragement and Advantages Connected with the Great Exhibition" text — discussion
• John Cumming (National Scottish Church)
• An Introduction
• John Keble (High Church)
• “National Apostasy” — text
• Charles Kingsley (Broad Church)
• “The Sea of Glass” — text
• Frederick Dennison Maurice (Broad Church)
• “Prosperity and Adversity"
• George MacDonald (originally Congregationalist; later Broad Church layman)
• Henry Melvill (Evangelical Anglican) — Sitemap
• “The Death of Moses" text — discussions
• “ The First Prophecy"text
• “Infidelity of the Jews" — discussion
• “Simon the Cyrenian" text —discussion
• “The Difficulties of Scripture" — text
• John Henry Newman (High Anglican and Roman Catholic)
  • introduction
  • Newman's attitude toward sermons, the role of the clergy, and the limitations of language
  • “Moses the Type of Christ" text — discussions
  • "The Unity of the Church" — text
  • "The Duty of Self Denial" — text
  • "Sudden Conversions" — text
• Daivid ("Navvy") Smith (Anglican)
• Sermons in The Navvy Mission — discussion
• Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Baptist)
  • introduction
  • Spiritual Crisis and Autobiography
  • Spurgeon on the use of illustrations, metaphors, and similes in preaching
  • Spurgeon on the use of anecdotes in preaching

Bibliography

Robert Ellison's The Victorian Pulpit (1998)

A New history of the Sermon: the Nineteenth Century. ed. Robert H. Ellison. Brill, 2010. xiii + 236 pp. [Review by Margaret Marwick]

Related Web Resources

• Alan Newbe's Scottish preachers Hall of Fame, which thus far contains the works of twenty preachers including
  • Thomas Chalmers
  • Robert Snmithy Candlish
  • Thomas Guthrie

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Last modified 24 July 2020