The Irish bench supplied one brilliant sermon-writer--whose compositions in that department are above all praise. Jeremy Taylor’s theology has been already considered, space here only permits the remark that his theology appears in his sermons, that he is the true Anglican throughout, and that all his opinions are there arrayed in robes of bewitching grace and splendour. His practical works,--for example _The Life of Christ_ and _Holy Living and Dying_,--may be classed with his discourses; and abound in rich specimens of that golden eloquence--stamped with an Anglican mint-mark--which he was wont copiously to issue from the pulpit. Sanderson’s sermons are exhaustive treatises, in which the homiletic character sometimes fades, but orthodox doctrine is always implied; the casuistry of Christian experience is handled sometimes in almost a Puritan spirit, and Christian ethics are ever treated in a clear, manly, incisive style. Barrow’s sermons are also treatises, many of them most decidedly doctrinal, orthodox and argumentative. But, of all these Divines, it may be said--not excepting Jeremy Taylor, who exerts a charm of another kind--that they lack the evangelical unction, the softness and fragrance of which is felt to be suffused over the Puritan homilies. Controversy tinges more or less most of the sermons of that period; but, for invective, Dr. South has won an unenviable notoriety. No one can admire more than I do, the good sense and masculine style of this author. There are sermons of his which are perfect models of pulpit address; but on reading others, who but must feel that perhaps there never was another man who _could_ so well enforce the truths of Christianity, who also _did_ so flagrantly violate their spirit. He never misses, or rather, he never fails to make, when he had any pretence for it, an opportunity of attacking his Puritan contemporaries; although he must have lived on terms of civility with them when at Oxford. As in a sermon by Chrysostom, preached at Antioch, one scarcely ever gets to the end, without finding him rebuking swearers, so South in his sermons preached at Westminster Abbey, and in other places, rarely concludes without assailing English schismatics, who were not less bad in his eyes, than were the most profane Syrians in the eyes of the orator of the Eastern Church. Men destitute of South’s power manifested a similar temper, vilifying the Nonconformists “as far more dangerous enemies than the Papists;”[451] and thus, in the treatment of opponents, they imitated and even exceeded the worst polemical vices of such men as Vicars and Edwards, under the Commonwealth. [Sidenote: ANGLICAN CRITICS.]