Fictional sermons

This afternoon, I finished reading Mrs. Oliphant's Salem Chapel, a social-cum-sensation novel with a Dissenting minister as its protagonist.  (The novel is rather better as a Trollopesque social novel than it is as a Collinsesque sensation novel.)  Oliphant punctuates the narrative with a number of sermons, but--as one might expect, really--we don't "hear" most of the sermons; instead, we get an outline of the sermon in free indirect discourse and the occasional quotation.  But Oliphant emphasizes instead what the sermon does to the audience.  Are the auditors bored? Amazed? Puzzled? Inspired? Does the sermon have the intended effect? (In this novel, not necessarily; as speech acts go, poor Mr. Vincent's sermons tend to be "troubling," but not altogether successful calls to action.) 

Oliphant's substitution of the sermon's effect for most of the sermon itself is, I think, characteristic of Victorian literary fiction--and, for that matter, of didactic fiction.  This decision is largely a matter of craft and practicality; in print, after all, a Victorian sermon usually runs several pages in small type.  (Some didactic historical novelists do toss in the entire sermon--sometimes, in fact, an entire authentic sermon.)  But it also identifies the sermon less with the particulars of the clergyman's language and more with the audience's susceptibility to that language (or, for that matter, the extent to which the clergyman can make the audience susceptible).  Some didactic novelists use sermon scenes as a way of criticizing the contemporary parishioner, who is far too likely to succumb to boredom (or even, dare one say, the call of sleep) when faced with the prospect of a three-hour sermon.  Why, in the old days, everyone loved three-hour sermons!