Much of his ancestral and earned wealth passed to the Gooch baronets who took Sherlock for many generations thereafter in tribute; his picture hanging in Benacre Hall, their purchased home in the period of his death.

He was translated to Salisbury in 1734 (where he was admitted as ex officio Chancellor of the Order of the Garter on 20 February 1738); and in 1748 he was raised to London, where he was sworn of the Privy Council.

[1][5] He published against Anthony Collins's deistic Grounds of the Christian Religion a volume of sermons entitled The Use and Intent of Prophecy in the Several Ages of the World (1725); and in reply to Thomas Woolston's Discourses on the Miracles he wrote a volume entitled The Tryal of the Witnesses of the Resurrection of Jesus (1729), which soon ran through fourteen editions.

His Pastoral Letter (1750) on the late earthquakes had a circulation of many thousands, and four or five volumes of Sermons which he published in his later years (1754–1758) were also at one time highly esteemed.

Since the Deist controversy Sherlock's argument for the evidences of the resurrection of Jesus Christ has continued to interest later Christian apologists such as William Lane Craig and John Warwick Montgomery.