Christian Literature a sermon delivered May 8th, 1870, in Kensington Chapel, at the seventy-first anniversary of the Religious Tract Society — Themes and Context

The Twofold Object of the Religious Tract Society

Stoughton distinguishes two aims that the Society has pursued since its founding. The first, conversion through direct evangelistic tracts, he calls “originally the only one, and has ever been the chief.” He singles out The Dairyman’s Daughter and The Young Cottager as exemplary works that “can never be out of date.” The second aim, “the hallowing of literature with a Christian spirit,” has grown in prominence without displacing the first. Stoughton lists the Society’s catalogue: “solid divinity, lively histories, pleasant biographies, sparkling fictions, religious, moral, and descriptive poetry.” He notes that old works are reissued under competent editors and that new works receive the Committee’s sanction. The periodicals The Leisure Hour and Sunday at Home are praised for their artistic and literary standing, “conciliating prejudice, producing favourable impressions of Christian truth.”

Numbers, Scale, and the Unfinished Task

Stoughton cites striking statistics: an annual circulation from the London depot of 41,044,772 tracts, and a seventy-one-year total of nearly 1,335,000,000. Yet he immediately undercuts any triumphalism. “It would seem, looking at these almost incredible numbers, as if the world could not contain so many books written of Him; and yet how many, many millions of the men and women in the world know nothing of Him.” He contrasts the Society’s output with “shoals … full of infidelity and superstition and vice” issuing from other presses. The rhetorical effect is to keep the Society’s work provisional: “the work of this Society is not half done.” The hyperbole of John 21:25 is thus inverted—the world cannot contain the books, but the books have not yet reached the world.

Ezekiel’s River as a Figure for Literary Influence

Stoughton turns to Ezekiel 47 for a typological image. The prophet watches waters flow from the Temple, deepening from ankle to knee to loins to a river “which could not be passed over,” and when it reaches the Dead Sea it heals the waters. Stoughton applies this directly: “Such is the Old Testament type of the Gospel of Christianity. … We venture to employ it as a figure of what this Society is doing.” The Society issues “fertilizing, life-giving, and healing streams” because it fills the world with books about what Jesus did, is doing, and will do. The quotation from Ezekiel—about trees whose leaf does not fade and fruit that is not consumed—closes the figure. The choice of this particular Old Testament passage reinforces the sermon’s insistence on gradual, cumulative, and transformative literary influence.

Diction and the Rhetoric of Restraint

Stoughton’s prose is measured and periodic, favoring balanced clauses and parallel constructions. He describes the Evangelist “reading over his own Gospel, dwelling with delight upon sacred memories … thinking of one act of his after another, one word of his after another, never written.” The repetition of “one … after another” mimics the inexhaustible list it describes. He avoids sensational language even when citing enormous numbers; the phrase “almost incredible numbers” is followed immediately by a sobering qualification. His diction is consistently elevated but not ornate: “asseveration,” “inexhaustible fulness,” “overwhelming conviction.” The sermon’s tone is that of a careful expositor who treats the Society’s work as an extension of scriptural logic rather than as a merely institutional achievement.

Readers should note that Stoughton’s sermon is not a general defense of religious reading but a historically situated argument about one Society’s dual mandate. The excerpts do not reveal whether he addresses controversies over tract content, the economics of distribution, or the reception of the Society’s fiction. His reliance on Ezekiel’s river as a controlling image suggests a preference for organic, gradual influence over direct confrontation. The sermon rewards attention to how Stoughton moves between exegesis, institutional history, and metaphor—and to the precise numbers he deploys as evidence of both success and insufficiency.

Reading Stoughton’s sermon again, I found myself thinking of how he insisted that truth must have room to breathe—that sacred words need the world’s language to reach us. It reminded me, quietly, of another old volume I once held, its title promising to blend two ways of seeing. The Story of Creation as Told By Theology and By Science — Edition Insights felt like a familiar friend in that regard. Both seemed to long for a gentler conversation.