These Sermons are published in deference to the wishes of many persons to whom from time to time they have been useful. As here arranged, they can make very little pretence to system; and, from the nature of the case, they often repeat each other, in substance if not in words. Some of them, however, are bound up with the formation or recovery of religious convictions in a manner and degree which exert a first claim on the author’s consideration; and this has made him unwilling to omit passages, or even entire discourses, which a true literary judgment would have proscribed.
It ought perhaps to be added that the 35th Sermon was preached in St. Paul’s, at the invitation of the late Dean Milman, and at a date when the preacher had not become a member of the Chapter.
If this volume should prove to be at all generally acceptable, the author might hereafter publish other Sermons preached during his Residences at St. Paul’s, since February 1870, in the months of August and December. Of these, the latter would relate, for the most part, to our Lord’s First and Second Coming. The former would deal with a wider range of subjects, although generally such as are suggested, however incidentally, by the Services of the Church.
3 Amen Court, St. Paul’s,
St. James’s Day, 1885.