Archbishop of Canterbury, born at Sowerby, Yorkshire, was elected a fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, in 1651. Ranged among the Presbyterians at the Savoy Conference (1661), he submitted to the Act of Uniformity (1662), and in 1663 became rector of Keddington, S. W. Suffolk, in 1664 preacher at Lincoln’s Inn, where his mild, evangelical, but undoctrinal morality was at first little relished. That same year he married a niece of Oliver Cromwell. In 1670 he became a prebendary, in 1672 dean, of Canterbury. Along with Burnet he attended Lord Russell on the scaffold (1683). In 1689 he was appointed Clerk of the Closet to King William and Dean of St. Paul’s, and in 1691 was raised to the see of Canterbury, vacant by the deposition of the Nonjuror Sancroft. He accepted this elevation with the greatest reluctance, nor could all the insults of the Nonjurors to the end of his life extort either complaint or retaliation. According to Burnet, “he was not only the best preacher of the age, but seemed to have brought preaching to perfection.” His “Posthumous Sermons” were edited by his chaplain, Dr. Barker (14 vols. 1694). His complete works appeared in 1707–12, with Life by Dr. Birch, 1752; and an annotated selection of his sermons by Weldon in 1886.

Personal

  Tillotson was a man of a clear head, and a sweet temper. He had the brightest thoughts and the most correct style, of all our divines; and was esteemed the best preacher of the age. He was a very prudent man; and had such a management with it, that I never knew any clergyman so universally esteemed and beloved, as he was, for above twenty years. He was eminent for his opposition to popery. He was no friend to persecution, and stood up much against atheism. Nor did any man contribute more to bring the city to love our worship, than he did. But, there was so little superstition, and so much reason and gentleness, in his way of explaining things, that malice was long levelled at him, and, in conclusion, broke out fiercely on him.

  Tillotson taught by his sermons more ministers to preach well, and more people to live well, than any man since the apostles’ days. He was the ornament of the last century, and the glory of his function; in the pulpit, another Chrysostom; and in the episcopal chair, a second Cranmer.

  As a preacher, I suppose his established fame is chiefly owing to his being the first City-divine who talked rationally and wrote purely. I think the sermons published in his life-time are fine moral discourses. They hear indeed the character of their author, simple, elegant, candid, clear, and rational. No orator in the Greek and Roman sense of the word, like Taylor: nor a discourser in their sense, like Barrow; free from their irregularities, but not able to reach their heights. On which account I prefer them infinitely to him. You cannot sleep with Taylor; you cannot forbear thinking with Barrow. But you may be much at your ease in the midst of a long lecture from Tillotson; clear, and rational, and equable as he is.

  He was buried in the church of St. Lawrence Jewry, near Guildhall. It was there that he had won his immense oratorical reputation. He had preached there during the thirty years which preceded his elevation to the throne of Canterbury…. His remains were carried now through a mourning population. The hearse was followed by an endless train of splendid equipages from Lambeth through Southwark and over London Bridge. Burnet preached the funeral sermon. His kind and honest heart was overcome by so many tender recollections that, in the midst of his discourse, he paused and burst into tears, while a loud moan of sorrow rose from the whole auditory. The Queen could not speak of her favourite instructor without weeping. Even William was visibly moved. “I have lost,” he said, “the best friend that I ever had, and the best man I ever knew.”… Such was his fame among his contemporaries that those sermons [left in MS.] were purchased by the booksellers for the almost incredible sum of two thousand five hundred guineas, equivalent, in the wretched state in which the silver coin then was, to at least three thousand six hundred pounds. Such a price had never before been given in England for any copyright.

  A pattern of all the domestic and social virtues; the most admired preacher of his day; liberal, just, active, humble, cheerful; he was yet scarce fitted for the high requirements of the Metropolitan See; neither as a theologian nor as a bishop did he catch the true tone of the English Church.

  The last days of Tillotson were altogether embittered by the stream of calumny, invective, and lampoons of which he was the object. One favourite falsehood, repeated in spite of the clearest disproof, was that he had never been baptised. He was charged, without a shadow of foundation, with infamous conduct during his collegiate life. He was accused of Hobbism. He was accused, like Burnet and Patrick, of being a Socinian, though the plainest passages were cited from his writings, as well as from those of his colleagues, asserting the divinity of Christ. One writer, who was eulogised by Hickes as a person “of great candour and judgment,” described the Archbishop as “an atheist as much as a man could be, though the gravest certainly that ever was.” Nor was this a mere transient ebullition of scurrility.

  A liberal and fair-minded man and a polished though cold preacher.

  With the possible exception of Archbishop Herring, he was the most amiable man that ever filled the see of Canterbury, and was pronounced by the discerning and experienced William III. the best friend he had ever had and the best man he had ever known. To the meekness of the pastor Tillotson added the qualities of the statesman, and happy was it for the Church of England that such a man could be found to fill the primacy at such a time. As a master of oratory he is greatly inferior in eloquence to both Barrow and South, but historically is more important than either, for Addison was influenced by him, and his discourses long gave the tone to the English pulpit, affording the almost universally accepted model throughout the greater part of the eighteenth century.

  Testimony is unanimous as to Tillotson’s sweetness of disposition, good humour, absolute frankness, tender-heartedness, and generosity. A sensitive man, he bore with an unruffled spirit the calumnious insults heaped upon him by opponents. He spent a fifth of his income in charity…. He was perhaps the only primate who took first rank in his day as a preacher, and he thoroughly believed in the religious efficacy of the pulpit; “good preaching and good living,” he told Beardmore in 1661, “will gain upon people.”

General

  The way to obtain this, [perspicuity] is to read such books as are allowed to be writ with the greatest clearness and propriety, in the language that a man uses. An author excellent in this faculty, as well as several others, is Dr. Tillotson, late Archbishop of Canterbury, in all that is published of his.

  Art, eloquence, and perspicuity appear in the utmost perfection in Tillotson’s sermons; and when I would labour to compose a sermon, I would prepare my mind, and consequently my style, with reading some few of those discourses beforehand.

  His words are frequently ill chosen, and almost always ill placed; his periods are both tedious and unharmonious, as his metaphors are generally mean, and often ridiculous.

  There is nothing peculiar to the language of Archbishop Tillotson, but his manner of writing is inimitable; for one who reads him, wonders why he himself did not think and speak in that very manner.

  I should not advise a preacher at this day to imitate Tillotson’s style: though I don’t know; I should be cautious of objecting to what has been applauded by so many suffrages.

  Simplicity is the great beauty of Archbishop Tillotson’s manner. Tillotson has long been admired as an eloquent writer, and a model for preaching. But his eloquence if we can call it such, has been often misunderstood. For, if we include in the idea of eloquence, vehemence and strength, picturesque description, glowing figures, or correct arrangement of sentences, in all these parts of oratory the Archbishop is exceedingly deficient. His style is always pure, indeed, and perspicuous, but careless and remiss; too often feeble and languid; little beauty in the construction of his sentences, which are frequently suffered to drag unharmoniously; seldom any attempt towards strength or sublimity. But, notwithstanding these defects, such a constant vein of good sense and piety runs through his works, such an earnest and serious manner, and so much useful instruction conveyed in a style so pure, natural, and unaffected, as will justly recommend him to high regard, as long as the English language remains; not, indeed, as a model of the highest eloquence, but as a simple and amiable writer, whose manner is strongly expressive of great goodness and worth.

  Archbishop Tillotson is certainly a writer of some merit. There are few authors who convey more sound sense in more perspicuous expression. It is no mean art of composition, where every sentence comes to us with the force of a proverb, and presents us with “what oft was thought,” but never before set down in so manly a style. Tillotson however appears to have fallen into disrepute.

  Tillotson’s method is clear; his notions of religion are much in the Arminian strain; his style is defective both in harmony of numbers and energy of manner.

  The Archbishop has long been one of my most favourite divines; and a complete set of his sermons really “sets me up.”

  Without soaring to the height of eloquence, Tillotson refined the language of the pulpit.

  The sermons of Tillotson were for half a century more read than any in our language. They are now bought almost as waste paper, and hardly read at all. Such is the fickleness of religious taste, as abundantly numerous instances would prove. Tillotson is reckoned verbose and languid. He has not the former defect in nearly so great a degree as some of his eminent predecessors; but there is certainly little vigor or vivacity in his style. Full of the Romish controversy, he is perpetually recurring to that “world’s debate;” and he is not much less hostile to all the Calvinistic tenets. What is most remarkable in the theology of Tillotson, is his strong assertion, in almost all his sermons, of the principles of natural religion and morality, not only as the basis of all revelation, without a dependence on which it cannot be believed, but as nearly coincident with Christianity in their extent; a length to which few at present would be ready to follow him. Tillotson is always of a tolerant and catholic spirit, enforcing right actions rather than orthodox opinions, and obnoxious, for that and other reasons, to all the bigots of his own age.

  His style is not brilliant; but it is pure, transparently clear, and equally free from the levity and from the stiffness which disfigure the sermons of some eminent divines of the seventeenth century. He is always serious: yet there is about his manner a certain graceful ease which marks him as a man who knows the world, who has lived in populous cities and in splendid courts, and who has conversed, not only with books, but with lawyers and merchants, wits and beauties, statesmen and princes. The greatest charm of his compositions, however, is derived from the benignity and candour which appear in every line, and which shone forth not less conspicuously in his life than in his writings.

  Archbishop Tillotson has pronounced an authoritative opinion in favour of Natural Religion as essential to the proof of Revealed. His admirable sermons abound in such statements,—thus, in the 41st…. The sermon on Steadfastness in Religion, one of the Archbishop’s great masterpieces, and in which he demonstrates as against Rome the right of private judgment, tallies with the 41st in the doctrine on Natural Religion.

  It is the general withholding of the all-enlivening and vivifying doctrines of the gospel, and frequent statements which tend another way, (statements to which the excesses of former times seem to have given rise), that form our grand objections to the divinity of Tillotson.

  Tillotson’s “Sermons,” still familiarly known by reputation, long continued to be the most generally esteemed collection of such compositions in the language; but are probably now very little read. They are substantial performances, such as make the reader feel, when he has got through one of them, that he has accomplished something of a feat; and, being withal as free from pedantry and every other kind of eccentricity or extravagance as from flimsiness, and exceedingly sober in their strain of doctrine, with a certain blunt cordiality in the expression and manner, they were in all respects very happily addressed to the ordinary peculiarities of the national mind and character. But, having once fallen into neglect, Tillotson’s writings have no qualities that will ever revive attention to them.

  Here is Tillotson first, the most authoritative of all, a kind of Father of the Church, so much admired that Dryden tells us that he learned from him the art of writing well, and that his sermons, the only property which he left his widow, were bought by a publisher for two thousand five hundred pounds. This work has, in fact, some weight; there are three folio volumes, each of seven hundred pages. To open them, you must be a critic by profession, or absolutely desire to get saved…. What a style! and it is the same throughout. There is nothing lifelike; it is a skeleton, with all its joints coarsely displayed. All the ideas are ticketed and numbered. The schoolmen were not worse. Neither rapture nor vehemence; no wit, no imagination, no original and brilliant idea, no philosophy; nothing but quotations of mere scholarship, and enumerations from a handbook. The dull argumentative reason comes with its pigeon-holed classifications upon a great truth of the heart or an impassioned word from the Bible, examines it “positively and negatively,” draws thence “a lesson and an encouragement,” arranges each part under its heading, patiently, indefatigably, so that sometimes three whole sermons are needed to complete the division and the proof, and each of them contains in its exordium the methodical abstract of all the points treated and the arguments supplied…. But he writes like a perfectly honest man; we can see that he is not aiming in any way at the glory of an orator; he wishes to persuade soundly, nothing more. We enjoy this clearness, this naturalness, this justness, this entire loyalty.

  A good, easy, clear-headed man, with not a little of the character of Paley. The merits of his style are simplicity, and a happy fluency in the choice and combination of words. He probably had no small influence in forming the style of Addison. The defects are considerable. In his easy way he lingers upon a idea, and gives two or three expressions where one would serve the purpose; passing on, he rambles back again, and presents the idea in several other different aspects. The result is an enfeebling tautology and want of method. Taken individually, the expressions are admirably easy and felicitous; but there are too many of them, and they are ill arranged.

  The debt which Dryden owed to Tillotson, was exaggerated by his own generosity; but his acknowledgment at least shows that the two were akin in their literary taste and judgment.