The Gospel of the Pentateuch: A Set of Parish Sermons — Themes and Context

Moses the Meek Leader

Kingsley devotes considerable attention to Moses' character, especially the claim that he was 'very meek.' The preacher is at pains to distinguish this meekness from cowardice or passivity. He points out that Moses was 'brave, determined, out-spoken' from his youth, and that he had to act 'like the general of an army, or the commander of a ship of war.' The meekness, Kingsley argues, was a hard-won temperance: Moses spent eighty years learning to keep his temper, and only then was he fit to lead Israel out of Egypt. This reading transforms a conventional virtue into a dynamic, active discipline.

The Preacher's Polemical Context

Kingsley's preface reveals a specific intellectual battle. He references Paley's dictum that it is 'an unwarrantable, as well as unsafe rule' to demand that every particular of Jewish history be true or the whole false. He then attacks a book that he believes exercises a licence 'anything but rational and reverent.' The danger, he says, is not only to Cambridge's tradition of 'reverent and rational liberty in criticism' but to the thousands of unscholarly readers who must take the Bible's historic truth on trust. Kingsley positions his sermons as a pastoral response to unsettled minds and to the cynicism he sees spreading among the frivolous.

The Gospel in the Plagues

In the sermon on the plagues of Egypt, Kingsley takes his text from Exodus 9:13-14, where God declares he will send plagues so that Pharaoh may 'know that there is none like me in all the earth.' The preacher treats the plagues not as arbitrary punishments but as progressive revelations of God's power and justice. He emphasizes that the purpose is epistemological: the plagues are designed to produce knowledge of God. This fits Kingsley's broader argument that the Pentateuch is not a primitive law-code but a gospel—good news about who God is and what he requires.

Readers approaching these sermons should expect a Victorian clergyman wrestling with the intellectual pressures of his day. Kingsley does not offer a systematic commentary on the Pentateuch but a series of pastoral applications, each anchored in a specific passage. His voice is direct, colloquial, and occasionally combative. Those interested in the history of biblical interpretation or in the Victorian sermon as a literary form will find this a revealing document of how one prominent churchman tried to hold together critical thought and orthodox faith.