Charity sermons were one of the most familiar genres of sermons for Dissenting congregations during the first half of the eighteenth century. Dissenters routinely preached sermons to support charities. During the 1730s and 1740s, the variety of charity sermons increased with the founding of the Society for the Relief of the Widows and Orphans of Dissenting Ministers (SRWO), and some local charities such as charity houses. Sermons were regularly followed by collections for the charity, and preachers encouraged their hearers to make donations or become subscribers. Sometimes the sermons also were published to further promote and solicit funds. Scholars have extensively studied Anglican charity sermons during the eighteenth century, but they have paid much less attention to charity sermons by Dissenters. The few works on Dissenting charity sermons consider discourses by both Anglicans and Dissenters and often focus on charity school sermons. This relative neglect is perhaps unsurprising because Dissenters published significantly fewer charity sermons than Anglicans, likely due to the uncertain profitability of publishing these sermons, and much of the other evidence for these sermons is scattered in the records of individual Dissenting congregations, making these sermons less visible to scholars. This chapter considers the varieties of charity sermons preached by Dissenters; their use in fundraising for Dissenting charities; the arguments used by preachers to encourage support for the charities; and the trends in, and the economics of, the publication of charity sermons. Charity sermons were important for supporting the philanthropic causes of Dissenters and provide insight into the views of and the motivations for charitable giving during this period.

Dissenters’ charity sermons and fundraising Dissenting preachers addressed the important Christian duty of charity in their sermons on a variety of occasions. Sermons discussing charity would have been suitable before collections for the poor, which were common after the Lord’s Supper. Some congregations had annual sermons for local charities as well. For example, the Presbyterian meeting initially at Meeting House Court, and later at Carter Lane, London, had a sermon on 1 January for charity distributed by a religious society. Dissenters also heard sermons before collections to assist people in distress, both victims of local disasters and persecuted foreign Protestants.