About The Sermon Archive
The Sermon Archive gathers the preaching of the Christian church from the first century through the twentieth century — sermons, homilies, orations, catechetical lectures and expository discourses — and makes every one of them a page of its own, indexed by preacher, by the passage of Scripture it was preached on or cites, and by topic.
There is nothing to install, no account to create, and nothing to pay. The texts are in the public domain, printed as their editions printed them, and are yours to read, copy and reuse.
What is here
The Fathers — the Greek and Latin preachers of the first six centuries in the translations of the Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Chrysostom, Augustine, Basil, the Gregories, Ambrose, Leo, Cyril of Jerusalem, Cyprian and their companions.
The Middle Ages and the Reformation — Bernard, Tauler, Eckhart, Aelfric and Wycliffe; Luther’s postils, Calvin’s sermons in their sixteenth-century English, the Book of Homilies, Latimer, Jewel, Knox and Bullinger.
The Puritans and the eighteenth century — Donne and Andrewes; Sibbes, Owen, Manton, Bunyan, Watson, Flavel and Charnock; Wesley, Whitefield, Edwards and their heirs.
The nineteenth century and after — Simeon, Chalmers, Newman, Robertson, Maclaren, Ryle, Liddon, Moody, Beecher, Brooks — the whole of Spurgeon’s New Park Street and Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, 3,563 sermons — and the preachers of the generations that followed them into the twentieth century.
The archive is being built in phases; the Preachers page always shows what is in it today. Where a preacher’s sermons exist only in copyrighted modern translations, the preacher’s page says so rather than substituting a rewritten text.
How the index works
Every sermon carries the passage it was preached on and every passage it cites. Where the electronic edition already marked its references they are used as given; elsewhere the references are found in the text by a parser that understands the older ways of citing Scripture — Rom. viii. 28, Ps. cxix., Ecclus. iv. — and Vulgate numbering where an author used it. The Scripture pages show, for any book, chapter or verse, first the sermons preached on it and then the sermons that cite it. Topics are drawn from Nave’s and Torrey’s topical Bibles by way of those references and then curated by hand.
What the reader can do
Read. One sermon to a page, in the wording of its public-domain edition, with the printed footnotes, page numbers of the original volume, and the King James text of the passage at the head.
Follow a passage. Every reference in a sermon links to that passage’s page, and every passage page links back to every sermon on it — so a reader can move from Spurgeon on Romans 8 to Chrysostom on Romans 8 in one click.
Search. The search box takes words or a reference; 1 Cor. xiii works as well as 1 Corinthians 13. Results can be narrowed by preacher, century or book.
Cite and reuse. Each page carries a citation and standard metadata, and the whole index is available as JSON through the API. The pages follow your system’s light or dark preference, and a sermon prints cleanly.
Texts and editions
The base texts are the public-domain printed editions — Passmore & Alabaster’s Spurgeon volumes; the Edinburgh and New York editions of the Fathers; the Parker Society, the Text Creation Partnership’s transcriptions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printings, and nineteenth-century collected works — in electronic transcriptions from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, Project Gutenberg, Wikisource and the Internet Archive, each credited at the foot of the sermon it supplied. Every text is given as its edition printed it: thee and thou, British spelling and Victorian punctuation stand. Where a text was recovered by optical character recognition its page says so.
Older English, made readable. Some 1,200 of these sermons come from printings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — Calvin in Arthur Golding’s 1574 English, Latimer, Fisher, Jewel, Henry Smith, the two Books of Homilies, Donne and Andrewes. As printed, a page of Golding begins “And hee had seuen sonnes borne vnto him”, and most readers stop there. Those sermons therefore carry a second, modernised reading text, and the archive opens on it. The spelling is brought up to date; where the sermon has been fully reviewed the grammar is too, so that hath reads has and thou reads you. Nothing is silently changed. A modernised page says so at the top, says how far the modernisation goes, and the printing it was made from sits one click away, unaltered, labelled with its year. Modernising is an editorial act and the archive treats it as one: the old spelling is never destroyed, only set aside for readers who would rather not fight it.
What is not here, and why
Anything still in copyright — which in practice is what sets the archive’s later edge, not any chosen date. Sermons by anyone living. Modern translations still in copyright, however good. And popular “updated” versions of older sermons, which quietly rewrite a preacher and are then passed off as what he said — which is a different thing from the modernised reading text described above, where the change is declared and the printing sits beside it. Where such a rewrite is the only English text of a preacher’s sermons, the archive says so and waits.
About this site
The Sermon Archive is free, carries no advertising, sells nothing, and asks nothing of you — no account, no sign-up. Anonymous visit statistics are gathered with Google Analytics so that we can see which sermons are being read; nothing else is collected.
We are grateful to those who made this possible by giving their work away: the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, the Text Creation Partnership, Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, CrossWire and OpenBible.info.