South, ROBERT, a great English preacher, was born a London merchant's son at Hackney in 1633, educated for four years under Busby at Westminster, and elected student of Christ Church, together with Locke, in 1651. Three years later he took his bachelor's degree, and that same year wrote a Latin copy of verses congratulating the Protector Cromwell on his peace with the Dutch. He took his M.A. in 1657, but not, it is said, without some opposition from Dr John Owen, then Dean of Christ Church. Next year he received orders from a deprived bishop, and was appointed in 1660 public orator to the university. During his tenure of this office occurred many striking occasions for his eloquence—the installation of Clarendon as chancellor in 1661; the burial of Juxon and the translation of Laud in July 1663; the visit of the king and queen, and the presentation of Monmouth for a degree, in September 1663; the foundation of the Sheldonian Theatre in 1664, and its formal opening in 1669. His vigorous sermons, full of sarcastic mockery of the Puritans, were delightful to the restored royalists. He became domestic chaplain to Clarendon, and further preferment followed quickly. In 1663 he was made prebendary of Westminster, canon of Christ Church in 1670, and rector of Islip in Oxfordshire in 1678. He went as chaplain with Clarendon's son, Laurence Hyde, afterwards Earl of Rochester, on his embassy to congratulate John Sobieski on mounting the throne of Poland (1677), and in December wrote from Danzig his impressions in the long and interesting Account sent to Pocock, the Oxford professor of Hebrew. It is supposed that South might have been a bishop if he would, and there is one story on record of his preaching in 1681 before the king on 'The lot is cast into the lap' (Prov. xvi. 33). Speaking of the strange accidents of fortune he said, 'And who, that had beheld such a bankrupt, beggarly fellow as Cromwell, first entering the parliament-house with a threadbare, torn cloak and a greasy hat (and perhaps neither of them paid for), could have suspected that in the space of so few years he should, by the murder of one king and the banishment of another, ascend the throne, be invested in the royal robes, and want nothing of the state of a king but the changing of his hat into a crown?' At these words the king fell into a violent fit of laughter, and turning to Lord Rochester, said, 'Ods fish, Lory, your chaplain must be a bishop, therefore put me in mind of him at the next death.' Unfortunately for the story, this sermon—one of those published by South himself—is inscribed as 'Preached at Westminster Abbey, February 22, 1684-85,' a fortnight after Charles's death. South appears to have thought Charles too lenient rather than too severe against religious sectaries, but during the reign of James he suppressed his disapproval of the 'Declaration of Indulgence,' although Papists were almost as hateful to him as Puritans, and it is interesting to find in three of his published sermons, preached in 1688, not a single intelligible political allusion. Yet we are told that during Monmouth's rebellion he professed himself ready, if occasion required, to exchange his black gown for a buff coat. After some hesitation South acquiesced in the Revolution, but blazed out with anger against the proposed schemes of Comprehension and Toleration which quickly came to nothing. In 1693 began his great controversy with Sherlock, Dean of St Paul's. The latter, at first a Nonjuror, had been suddenly converted to the more politic course by Bishop Overall's Convocation Book (written 1606, but not published till 1690), and had been rewarded by being reinstated as Master of the Temple and appointed Dean of St Paul's. To the Socinian controversy then disturbing the minds of Englishmen he had contributed A Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity, the intention to prove that there was nothing in the dogma contradictory to right reason. In his endeavour to adapt it to the more modern philosophy he unhappily employed phraseology too capable of ambiguity, and such phrases, for example, as his description of the Three Persons of the Divine Tri-unity as 'Three distinct infinite Minds or Spirits' having 'self-consciousness and mutual-consciousness,' were loudly denounced as mere Tri-theism. South flung his Animadversions anonymously into the fray, but the bitter irony and fierce sarcasms quickly betrayed his hand. The book showed ample learning and masterly incisiveness of logic, but too large a part was mere abuse and personal invective. Not content with demolishing Sherlock's learning, he abuses his style, his orthography, the errors of the press, and even descends so low as to sneer at him as a henpecked husband. Sherlock published a Defence, to which South rejoined, and still anonymously, in his no less vigorous Tri-theism charged upon Dr Sherlock's new notion of the Trinity. The controversy became the talk of the town, and an extant doggerel ballad, beginning 'A dean and prebendary had once a new vagary,' satirises it together with Burnet of the Charterhouse's attack upon the Pentateuch in his Archæologia, as having by its noise driven religion itself away the while. The king himself interposed by an injunction addressed to the archbishops and bishops to the effect that no preacher should advance views on the Trinity other than those contained in Scripture, and agreeable to the three Creeds and the Thirty-nine Articles. One of the last things recorded of South is his activity in making interest on Dr Sacheverell's behalf, and he is said to have refused the see of Rochester and deanery of Westminster on the death of Dr Sprat (1713). He survived till eighty-three, died on Sunday, 8th July 1716, and was buried in Westminster.
South's sermons are masterpieces of clear thought expressed in direct vigorous English, sometimes rising to splendid eloquence, and often seasoned with a wit and sarcasm altogether unusual in the pulpit, and sometimes far beyond the limits of propriety. A masculine intellect, a mastery of arrangement and analysis, and an uncompromising strength of conviction and of confidence in his own opinions were qualities enough to make a great preacher, but the one supreme gift of the orator, that of genuine and quickening enthusiasm, was denied him. Still more, even his noblest passages are too often marred by a bitterness and party-spirit which warped his judgment and clouded his intellect with prejudice. 'A learned but ill-natured divine,' as Burnet calls him, he abhorred all mysticism and extravagance, sneers at the new philosophy and the recently founded Royal Society, and carried to a height unusual even among royalists the fatal Stuart theories of passive obedience and the divine right of kings. Yet, though South loved to be called the 'preacher of the Old Cavaliers,' he did not spare their vices, while it still remains true, as Dean Lake says, that hatred of vice is far less prominent in his preaching than hatred of Nonconformity. Yet South could rise to the height of a great argument, and such sermons as that on 'Man made in the Image of God' give him rank among the greatest masters of English eloquence. Just as on the one side his power of wrapping up in homely words the bitterest ridicule and invective recalls the stronger hand of Swift, so on the other his positiveness of mind, dialectic skill, and power of passionate indignation reminds us of the greater Bossuet.
He himself published many single sermons, and a collected edition in six volumes in 1692, which went through various editions, and was supplemented by five additional volumes in 1744. In 1717 appeared his Posthumous Works, with a Memoir, also his Opera Posthumus Latina. The foregoing were republished at the Clarendon Press, Oxford, in 7 vols. in 1823 (5 vols. 1842). A useful edition of the sermons was that published by Bohn (2 vols. 1844). See the Quarterly Review, vol. ccxiv. (1868), and Dean Lake in 'Classic Preachers of the English Church,' 1st series (1877).