Practic Resurrection: The Sermons of John Hales

Abstract

In a work published in 1 752, Thomas Birch reported that Hales's sermons 'are scarce ever read by the most zealous admirers of his other writing' (Life of the Most Reverend Dr John Tillotson, p. 20). Today, Hales has fewer 'zealous admirers', and comment on the scope and technique of his sermons has been correspondingly perfunctory.1 This is unfortunate, because the sermons reveal an intense and subtle awareness of the communicative possibilities of a particular understanding of the nature of faith. The Great Tew theologians, Lucius Cary, William Chillingworth, and John Hales, have been regarded as important because of their contribution to the development of religious toleration, and because of their 'rationalist' and 'sceptical' attitudes to knowledge. This account certainly fits Chillingworth well enough, although a term like 'rationalism' proves to be an inadequate instrument of analysis, as Robert R. Orr has shown.2 The general tendency, most fully represented by Elson's John Hales of Eton, has been to cast Hales also in the 'progressive' mould; a tendency which seriously distorts his basic traditionalism. A brief discussion of the 'Letter to an Honourable