Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

The Hulsean Sermon was established at the end of the eighteenth century by the will of John Hulse, a Johnian from Cheshire. From what I can discover about him, John Hulse was not an easily admirable man. He was irritable and difficult, seemingly unable for long to sustain good relations with family or friends – not the sort of person you would readily invite to dine at your college on Guest Night: or the sort you would without qualification select as a model to ‘direct our lives after his good example’, as it says in the Bidding Prayer. John Hulse was a person with faults and blemishes: a person not unlike ourselves. By his benefactions to his alma mater, however, his munificence has continued to advantage a long chain of students of this University for over 200 years. He is properly counted among those we gratefully remembered for their beneficence in the Bidding Prayer this morning.