'Set them to preach in a country congregation': Bishop Bull, practical divinity, and the sermon

From a visitation sermon by Bishop Bull, in which he emphasises to his clergy the importance of sermons addressing "moral or practical divinity". This is, of course, a characteristic of 18th century Anglican preaching that is routinely dismissed as supposed 'moralism'.  Bull, however, offers a robust defence of such preaching, a defence which continues to be relevant. It is not "barren subtleties" that are to be heard from the pulpit but, rather, teaching which expounds and encourages the stuff of practical divinity, "that our hearts may be set to obey thy commandments", that we might live "in love and charity with [our] neighbours".

Of this one speaks most truly: "The knowledge of controversies is made necessary by heretics, the study of piety by God Himself." Theology is doubtless a practical science, nothing in it but what aims at this end. And therefore, he that neglects this practical part of it, understands not the very design of his own profession. Without this, a man deserves no more to be accounted a Divine, than he a physician that understands little or nothing of therapeutics. It is true, there are some (otherwise not unlearned men) that despise this part of theology, as a vulgar, trivial, easy, obvious thing. But sure they very much disparage their own judgment, who let the world understand that they are of this mind. And the event commonly shews how much they are mistaken. For bring these Doctors out of their academic cells, set them to preach in a country congregation, and they soon become the objects of laughter, or rather of pity, to the wiser. To observe how they greedily snatch at every occasion of engaging in a controversy, and that, perhaps, such a one as was never before heard of by their hearers, but a controversy they had read in some of their books, though long ago dead and buried, thus manfully encountering ghosts and shadows. How learnedly they will discuss the barren subtleties of Aquinas or Scotus, which the poor souls no more understand, than if they had read them a lecture out of Cornelius Agrippa's Occult Philosophy.