Henry Venn earned an honourable name as a writer no less than as a pastor and preacher.  It is not necessary here to dwell upon the few sermons of his which are extant, and which probably give us a very inadequate idea of his preaching power; nor yet upon his correspondence, although it deserves a high place among those letters which form a conspicuous feature in the literature of the eighteenth century.  But he wrote one work which requires further notice.  The ‘Complete Duty of Man’ would, if nothing else did, prevent his name from sinking into oblivion.  It deserves to live for its intrinsic merits.  It is one of the few instances of a devotional book which is not unreadable.  It is not, like some of the class, full of mawkish sentimentality; nor, like others, so high-flown that it cannot be used for practical purposes by ordinary mortals without a painful sense of unreality; nor, like others, so intolerably dull as to disgust the reader with the subject which it designs to recommend.  It is written in a fine, manly, sensible strain of practical piety.  Venn’s Huddersfield experience no doubt stood him in good stead when he wrote this little treatise; the faithful pastor had been wont to give advice orally to many an anxious inquirer, and he put forth in print the counsel which he had found to be most effectual among his appreciative parishioners.  It is this fact, that it is evidently the work of a man of practical experience, which constitutes the chief merit of the book.  Regarded as a literary composition, it by no means attains a high rank, for its style is somewhat heavy and its arguments are not very deep.  If we would appreciate its excellence we must take it simply as the counsel of a sincere and affectionate friend.  Among the devotional books of the century[807] it stands perhaps only second—­longo sed proximus intervallo—­to the great work which, more than any other, originated the Evangelical revival.  This, after all, is not necessarily very high praise; for the devotional books of the eighteenth century do not reach a very high degree of excellence;[808] with the single exception of the ‘Serious Call,’ not one of them can be compared with the best of the preceding century—­with Jeremy Taylor’s ‘Holy Living and Holy Dying,’ for instance, or Baxter’s ’Call to the Unconverted,’ or his ‘Saint’s Everlasting Rest,’ or Howe’s ’Living Temple.’

But there is an historical interest in the ‘Complete Duty of Man’ quite apart from its intrinsic merits.  It may be regarded generally as a sort of manifesto of the Evangelical party; and specially as a counterblast against the defective theology of what Whitefield called ’England’s greatest favourite, “The Whole Duty of Man."’ The very title of Venn’s work indicates its relationship to that once famous book.  The ’Whole Duty of Man’ was written anonymously in the days of the Commonwealth, when Calvinism had in too many cases degenerated into Antinomianism.  It has been seen