At the opening of the eighteenth century the pulpit was no longer the power it had been in past days.  It had been the strongest support of the Reformation; and monarchs and statesmen had known well how immense was its influence in informing and guiding the popular mind on all questions which bore upon religion or Church politics.  In proportion, however, as the agency of the press had been developed, the preachers had lost more and more of their old monopoly.  Numberless essays and pamphlets appeared, reflecting all shades of educated opinion, with much to say on questions of social morality and the duties of Churchmen and citizens.  They did not by any means interfere with the primary office of the sermon.  They were calculated rather to do preaching a good service.  When other means of instruction are wanting, the preacher may feel himself bound to include a wide range of subjects.  When the press comes to his aid, and relieves him for the most part of the more secular of his topics, he is the more at liberty to confine himself to matters which have a primary and direct bearing upon the spiritual life.  In any case, however, whether the change be, on the whole, beneficial or not to the general character of preaching, it must evidently deprive it of some part of its former influence.

Yet in the reigns of William and Queen Anne good preaching was still highly appreciated and very popular.  Jablouski said of his Protestant fellow-countrymen in Prussia, that the sermon had come to be considered so entirely the important part of the service that people commonly said, ‘Will you go to sermon?’ instead of ’to church.’[1202] It was not quite so in England; yet undoubtedly there was very generally something of the same feeling.  ‘Many,’ said Sherlock, ’who have little other religion, are forward enough to hear sermons, and many will miss the prayers and come in only in time to hear the preaching.’[1203] If some of the incentives to good preaching, and some of the attributes which had distinguished it, were no longer conspicuous, other causes had come in to maintain the honour of the pulpit.  That stir and movement of the intellectual faculty which was everywhere beginning to test the power of reason on all questions of theology and faith had both brought into existence a new style of preaching, and had secured for it a number of attentive hearers.  The anxious and earnest, but, notwithstanding its occasional virulence, the somewhat unimpassioned controversy with Rome, and the newly aroused hopes of reconciling the moderate Dissenters, had tended to a similar result.  A rich, imaginative eloquence, though it could not fail to have admirers, was out of favour, not only with those who considered Tillotson the model preacher, but also with High Churchmen.  Jeremy Taylor would hardly have ranked high in Bishop Bull’s estimation.  His wit and metaphors, and ‘tuneful pointed sentences,’ would almost certainly have been adjudged by the good Bishop of St. David’s unworthy of the grave and solemn dignity of the pulpit.[1204] And brilliant as were the sallies of Dr. South’s vigorous and highly seasoned declamations, they were rarely of a kind to kindle imagination and stir emotion.  The edge of his arguments was keen and cold; and they were addressed to the common reason of his hearers, no less than those of the ‘Latitudinarian’ Churchmen with whom he most delighted to contend.