Definition of "hortatory"

The words were ordinary enough, and to my mind there was in them something so hortatory that I almost smiled.

1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter XXV, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […]

Some of these books were, on the face of it, frivolous and facetious; but many, on the other hand, were serious and prophetic, moral and hortatory.

1929 September, Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, uniform edition, London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, […], published 1931 (April 1935 printing), page 41

Not in a curse but in a hortatory appeal.

1992, Joyce Carol Oates, Black Water, paperback edition, Penguin Books, page 47

Inextricably from its analyses and polemic, above all, The Communist Manifesto is hortatory, ‘a call to arms in the service of the revolution’.

2022, China Miéville, chapter 1, in A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto

I did not know enough of the Book to understand his hortatory but it seemed to please Miz Ann, who thanked him for his blessings, said she did not require his other services, and that he had paid for his meal with his message.

2004, Dale L. Walker, Westward: A Fictional History of the American West, Macmillan, page 53

For here as in other points the development of the theory of Ethics would seem to be somewhat impeded by the preponderance of practical considerations; and perhaps a more complete detachment of the theoretical study of right conduct from its practical application is to be desired for the sake even of the latter itself: since a treatment which is a compound between the scientific and the hortatory is apt to miss both the results that it would combine; the mixture is bewildering to the brain and not stimulating to the heart.

1907, Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th edition, Macmillan and Company, page 12