All Saints’ Day and Other Sermons

All Saints Day and Other Sermons is a posthumous collection of sermons by Charles Kingsley, published in 1878 three years after his death. The collection was edited by W Harrison and brings together sermons Kingsley had preached at various times during his career, including pieces from his years as rector of Eversley in Hampshire and from his later position as a canon of Westminster Abbey.

The sermons reflect the full range of Kingsley’s preaching career. There are pieces from the early polemical period of the late 1840s and 1850s, when Kingsley was associated with the Christian Socialist movement of F D Maurice and was preaching on social and economic questions as well as on conventional religious topics. There are pieces from the long middle period at Eversley, where Kingsley was preaching to a rural parish congregation and where the sermons tend toward the practical religious and ethical questions of ordinary country life. There are also late sermons from his Westminster years, where his audience was urban and educated and his concerns shifted toward the larger cultural and intellectual questions of late Victorian England.

What held audiences for Kingsley as a preacher was the same quality that made him a popular novelist. He preached in plain strong English, without the formal theological vocabulary that the older Anglican sermon tradition still depended on, and he was willing to talk directly about subjects that respectable congregations expected to be handled with more circumlocution. There are sermons in this collection on industrial work, on the use of money, on the moral effects of bad housing, on the responsibilities of the educated to the uneducated, and on the various social questions that ran through Kingsley’s other writing.

The book runs about three hundred pages and is best read a sermon at a time. For readers interested in Victorian Broad Church religion at its most socially engaged, this is one of the better posthumous collections. It pairs naturally with Westminster Sermons, the late collection published just before Kingsley’s death, and with the earlier polemical Sermons on National Subjects from the 1850s.