Bishop Robert South Biography Quotes 10 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
Robert South was born in London in 1634, a child of an England already sliding toward civil war. He grew up as the old ecclesiastical order of the Church of England was contested in streets and pulpits alike, with Laudian ceremonialism, Puritan reform, and raw political necessity all colliding. That early atmosphere - of public worship treated as a referendum on loyalty - trained in him a lifelong sensitivity to the moral theatre of public speech, and to the danger of conscience being reshaped by faction.

He came of age under the Commonwealth and Protectorate, when Anglican clergy were displaced and university life itself was politically policed. The Restoration in 1660 did not simply return a king; it restored a career-path for articulate defenders of episcopacy and liturgy, and it rewarded those who could turn controversy into lucid, persuasive prose. South would become one of the era's most formidable sermon-writers, a man whose wit could bite, but whose central obsession was the repair of moral seriousness in a culture he believed was learning to perform virtue rather than practice it.

Education and Formative Influences
South was educated at Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford, where he took his degrees and absorbed the habits of classical rhetoric that later made his sermons read like tightened essays rather than extemporaneous exhortations. Oxford in the 1650s was a place where theology, politics, and philosophy were forced into proximity; the emerging "new philosophy" and the hard lessons of civil conflict encouraged a generation of churchmen to prize clarity, order, and argumentative discipline. South's formation also included the Anglican recovery project associated with figures such as John Fell at Oxford - rebuilding institutions, defending the church's settlement, and insisting that reasoned eloquence could serve devotion without collapsing into mere ornament.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points
After the Restoration, South became a prominent Oxford preacher and a royal chaplain, and he held the influential post of Public Orator of the University of Oxford, where he represented the institution's voice to power with polished Latin and pointed political sense. He was later made canon of Christ Church and of Westminster, and his reputation rested above all on the sermons he preached at court, at Westminster Abbey, and at Oxford - many published and repeatedly reprinted. South was a high-church Anglican controversialist: anti-Puritan, wary of latitudinarian softness, and deeply hostile to Roman Catholic claims, especially during the anxieties of the later Stuart period. A key turning point was the post-1688 settlement: the Glorious Revolution forced churchmen to choose between political prudence and principles of allegiance, and South's sermons from the period show a mind determined to preserve moral authority even as the nation's idea of authority changed.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes
South's theology was orthodox Anglican and strongly moral-psychological: he treated sin not as an abstraction but as an interior corrosion that reshapes perception, will, and speech. He believed the preacher's credibility was itself a moral instrument, because moral truth could be undone by the messenger's character; "Truth will lose its credit, if delivered by a person that has none". The line is not mere advice for clergy but a window into South's fear that Restoration religion could become a rhetorical performance detached from discipline - a fear sharpened by decades in which words had justified regicide, persecution, and sudden reversals of public loyalty.

His style fused classical balance with barbed epigram: he argued by sharp distinctions, concrete analogies, and an almost legal insistence on consequences. The inner life in South is not romanticized; it is audited. "Guilt upon the conscience, like rust upon iron, both defiles and consumes it, gnawing and creeping into it, as that does which at last eats out the very heart and substance of the metal". That image condenses his view of moral decline as gradual, secret, and finally structural - a slow eating-away of the self rather than a single dramatic fall. Yet he also read society with the same suspicion he applied to the individual: "Most of the appearance of mirth in the world is not mirth, it is art. The wounded spirit is not seen, but walks under a disguise". In a courtly culture trained in masks, South treated candor as spiritual work and cheerfulness as potentially defensive, a strategy that reveals his psychological realism and his readiness to expose the cost of living by appearances.

Legacy and Influence
South died in 1716, having outlived the Stuart century that formed him and entered an age increasingly shaped by party politics, polite letters, and a more self-consciously "reasonable" Christianity. His sermons remained influential for their muscular English, their quotable compression, and their example of how Anglican preaching could be both intellectually tight and morally urgent. Later readers did not always share his polemical targets, but they continued to admire the way he anatomized conscience, credibility, and self-deception - making him a durable presence in the history of English prose and in the long tradition of the sermon as literature as well as pastoral instrument.

Our collection contains 10 quotes who is written by Bishop, under the main topics: Motivational - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Honesty & Integrity.