Westminster Sermons

Westminster Sermons is a collection of sermons by Charles Kingsley, published in 1874 a year before his death. The sermons were delivered at Westminster Abbey, where Kingsley had been a canon since 1873, and the collection represents his late mature thinking on the religious and moral questions that had occupied him through a long career as a Broad Church Anglican clergyman, novelist, and social reformer.

The sermons cover the wide range of Kingsley’s interests. There are pieces on the relations between religion and the new natural science, a subject Kingsley had thought about for decades and where his position was unusually sympathetic to the Darwinian work then emerging. There are sermons on social and economic questions, where Kingsley’s earlier Christian Socialist commitments still showed through in modified form. There are sermons on the moral responsibilities of education, on the use of money, on family and household life, and on the various forms of courage that religion is supposed to support. The general tone is more reflective and less polemical than the early sermons of the 1840s and 1850s, partly because Kingsley was older and partly because his audience at Westminster was different from the Eversley parishioners and the Bristol working men he had earlier addressed.

What makes the collection still worth reading is the seriousness of the questions Kingsley puts forward and the direct manner in which he addresses them. He had no patience with religious posturing and he wrote and preached in the same plain strong English he used in his novels and his essays. The sermon on natural theology and evolution is one of the better Victorian attempts to think about how the new biology might fit with a religious vision of nature, and it deserves to be better known.

The book runs about three hundred and fifty pages and is best read in sermon sized pieces rather than straight through. For readers interested in Victorian religion at its most thoughtful, this is one of the better collections. It pairs naturally with the sermons of Phillips Brooks and with the more polemical earlier collections of Kingsley’s own work, particularly Twenty Five Village Sermons and Sermons on National Subjects.