Courtney McGrailPreaching in Belfast, 1747-72 – A Selection of the Sermons of James Saurin
ed. by Raymond Gillespie & Riobeard Ó Gallachóir
(Four Courts Press, €49.50)
Ian D’Alton
The sermon was one of the most important entertainments of the 18th Century. Popular preachers were in great demand and attracted the sort of devoted and loyal following that many celebrities today would envy. The likes of John Wesley could draw huge crowds. But so too could Fr Burke, the Dominican.
Rev. James Saurin, son of a conforming Huguenot minister in Dublin, and Anglican vicar of Belfast between 1747 and his sudden death at the age of 52 in 1772, was not one of these, though. Here we have a parish clergyman unglamorously working in a provincial town largely dominated by Presbyterians, nurturing his small flock (about 350 individuals) week-by-week by preaching to them about trust, morality, charity and the glue of religion which kept society together.
It is unusual to have such a complete corpus of 18th-Century sermons still extant. There are 61 of Saurin’s preserved in seven volumes in St Anne’s Anglican cathedral in Belfast. Twenty-four are reproduced here, much as Saurin would have written them in the small notebooks easily taken into pulpits. The fact that they are written down is a sort of Anglican marker – his Presbyterian colleagues would have been more likely, in the dissenting tradition, to speak extempore.
There are few political sermons here – none written for the high points of Protestant celebration, such as William III’s birthday on November 4, and none extant for the special days of thanksgiving and fasting, usually connected with momentous political or military events. The surviving sermons show little interest in confessional disputation – Presbyterians were too numerous to provoke, and Catholics were hardly on the radar.
There are, though, the usual attacks on those aspects of Catholicism most repellent to Protestants, such as monasticism, pilgrimage, relics and superstitious ceremonies. If Saurin had an animosity to Catholicism, it was largely due to his Whig principles, particularly relating to papal power as a manifestation of absolutism. Indeed, in a reflection of today’s ‘holy alliance’, Saurin saw the real danger to religion as coming from deists, atheists and freethinkers.
Saurin was perhaps an evangelical rather than a ritualist – for him, religion was revealed religion, with revelation through scriptural exegesis. The Bible was bedrock. Defending the temporalities of the established Church seemed not to be a priority. He had high expectations of his congregation, expressed in his first recorded sermon in 1747, in which he criticised those who would apparently adhere to the outward and visible attributes of religious observance without a corresponding inward and spiritual grace.
Although forgotten today, Saurin’s contemporary reputation in Belfast was high. On his death the Belfast Newsletter wrote of his charitable works and his affable manner: “In short it may justly be said that he was ‘an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile’.”
The sermons reproduced here have been fastidiously transcribed, warts and all, by Riobeard Ó Gallachóir. Excellently produced by Four Courts and supported by the Representative Church Body Library of the Church of Ireland as the latest in its series of Church texts and calendars, the book benefits from a relatively short, very readable, but scholarly, introduction by Prof. Raymond Gillespie.
This places Saurin’s sermonising in a number of important contexts – his family history, the nature of sermons in the 18th Century world, and the particular circumstances of a rapidly-growing Belfast, with its associated economic, social and cultural tensions.
In the round, the book throws a fascinating light onto, in miniature, the world of the 18th-Century Anglican cleric in Ireland.