faithfully attended to
his little parish, he trained up his family with admirable judgment in
the principles of piety, and had the satisfaction of living to see his
sons walking in his steps. One of them, John, became the respected and
useful rector of Clapham, to which place Henry Venn retired to die.
There are few names which are more highly esteemed among the Evangelical
party than the honoured name of Venn.

Henry Venn earned an honourable name as a writer no less than as a
pastor and preacher. It is not necessary here to dwell upon the few
sermons of his which are extant, and which probably give us a very
inadequate idea of his preaching power; nor yet upon his correspondence,
although it deserves a high place among those letters which form a
conspicuous feature in the literature of the eighteenth century. But he
wrote one work which requires further notice. The 'Complete Duty of Man'
would, if nothing else did, prevent his name from sinking into oblivion.
It deserves to live for its intrinsic merits. It is one of the few
instances of a devotional book which is not unreadable. It is not, like
some of the class, full of mawkish sentimentality; nor, like others, so
high-flown that it cannot be used for practical purposes by ordinary
mortals without a painful sense of unreality; nor, like others, so
intolerably dull as to disgust the reader with the subject which it
designs to recommend. It is written in a fine, manly, sensible strain of
practical piety. Venn's Huddersfield experience no doubt stood him in
good stead when he wrote this little treatise; the faithful pastor had
been wont to give advice orally to many an anxious inquirer, and he put
forth in print the counsel which he had found to be most effectual among
his appreciative parishioners. It is this fact, that it is evidently the
work of a man of practical experience, which constitutes the chief merit
of the book. Regarded as a literary composition, it by no means attains
a high rank, for its style is somewhat heavy and its arguments are not
very deep. If we would appreciate its excellence we must take it simply
as the counsel of a sincere and affectionate friend. Among the
devotional books of the century[807] it stands perhaps only
second--_longo sed proximus intervallo_--to the great work which, more
than any other, originated the Evangelical revival. This, after all, is
not necessarily very high praise; for the devotional books of the
eighteenth century d