PLAIN PRACTICAL SERMONS. BY JOHN WOOD WARTER, B.D. CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD; RECTOR OF PATCHING, AND VICAR OF WEST TARRING, SUSSEX; Deo et Ecclesiæ. IF there be any thing profitable in these volumes, it is to be attributed, under God, to the following causes; I. To my having been born of Christian parents in a Christian land, for which blessing, like as for the light of the Sun, it is questionable if any of us ever return thanks sufficient. "Whosoever he is," says South, "who in his minority has been kept from those extravagances which his depraved nature would otherwise have carried him out to, and so has grown up under the eye of a careful and severe tuition, has cause with bended knees to acknowledge the mercy of being born of religious parents, and bred up under virtuous and discreet governors; and to bless God, without any danger of pharisaical arrogance, that upon this account he is not as many other men are 1." II. That having been so born, and presently regenerate in Baptism, I was brought up in the nurture 'See South's Sermons, vol. vii. p. 158. and admonition of the Lord, by parents righteous (after the capacities of a creature) before God, even as were Zacharias and Elisabeth, whose names are in the Book of life. III. That having been well grounded by one gone before,(the Rev. William Tindall, a faithful and loyal subject in disaffected times,) and afterwards stablished and settled in solid learning by that excellent man and amiable Prelate-(the late Bishop Butler, whom I was privileged to call a Friend, and whose blessing I received in the midst of his sore sufferings at Eccleshall,)-I used my classic lore as an Handmaid to Divinity, and so pursued the stream of Ecclesiastical History to its source, giving myself up at the same time to the severer study of the Bible, insomuch so, that I think I might say I was as familiar with the language of the LXX. Version, and with the original Greek of the New Testament, as I was with our own incomparable translation. IV. That I was enabled to do so in the University of Oxford, properly called Alma Mater, as the 2 There are many, I dare be bold to say, who, like myself, will never fail to express what obligations they were under to the late Bishop Lloyd, whose private lectures the lamented Professor Burton so worthily followed up. With the first I read the Catholic Epistles, with the latter the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius. Since that time the greatest advantage has been derived from the Hebrew Lectures of Dr. Pusey. I was on his list, when I was appointed Chaplain to the British Embassy at Copenhagen, |