The World's Great Sermons, Volume 02: Hooker to South — Reading Companion

Hooker's Accumulative Urgency

Hooker's prose moves by repetition and accumulation. He piles up synonyms for willingness—'resolvedly,' 'fixt,' 'inflamed'—and strings together lists of persecutions: 'fire and fagot, sword or halter, stinking dungeons, whips, bears, bulls, lions, cruel rackings, stoning, starving, nakedness.' The rhythm is breathless, designed to overwhelm resistance. His favorite device is the anaphoric 'I will, I will, I will,' which he uses to model the 'blest inflamed will for heaven' he demands of his listeners. This is not reasoned argument but rhetorical siege, battering the will into submission.

The Shift to South's Ironic Distance

Robert South, preaching a century later, adopts a markedly different tone. Where Hooker shouts, South insinuates. His sentences are balanced, his irony cool. He dissects hypocrisy with surgical precision, often using hypothetical objections—'I have a married wife, I have a farm'—to expose self-deception. South's voice is that of a moral diagnostician, not a revivalist. He expects his congregation to recognize their own evasions in his examples, and his humor (the 'self-willed people, nobody knows what to do with them') serves as a gentle but firm corrective.

The Middle Ground: Barrow and Tillotson

Between Hooker's fire and South's irony, the sermons of Isaac Barrow and John Tillotson occupy a middle register. Barrow's prose is dense with subordinate clauses, building logical fortifications around each point. Tillotson, by contrast, favors plain, almost conversational syntax, as if reasoning aloud with a friend. Both rely less on emotional appeal than on patient exposition. Their presence in the collection highlights a spectrum of pulpit oratory: from the prophetic urgency of the early Puritans to the rational persuasion of the Restoration divines.

Readers attentive to voice will find in this volume a compressed history of English preaching style. Hooker's hammering repetitions, Barrow's labyrinthine periods, Tillotson's lucid simplicity, and South's ironic edge each reflect a different theory of how language moves the soul. The sermons reward comparison: listen for how each preacher handles the same biblical text, and you will hear not just theology but the sound of a culture arguing with itself about what persuasion should feel like.

Folding down the corner of Hooker’s plain-spoken urgency, I thought of how both he and the later preachers wrestled with doubt in their own way—turning scripture over like a worn coin. That same patient insistence on context lingered with me afterward, and I found myself reaching for Islam — Text and Context. It felt less like a departure, more like an echo.