280 - The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England

The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England

By Harry S. Stout

New York, Oxford University Press, 1986. 398 Pp. $29.95.

To a twentieth century preacher, Harry Stout's description of preaching in colonial New England must convey some intimation of utopia. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the sermon stood alone as the society's regular weekly means of public communication. With no competing speakers offering alternative messages, the preachers provided, week after week, the images and information with which New Englanders constructed a cohesive society. The region's colonial clergy, as a group, preached over five million sermons; the average churchgoer-in an era when both political authority and communal tradition encouraged churchgoing-listened to something like seven thousand sermons in a lifetime. The topical range and social influence of the sermon were so powerful in shaping cultural values, Stout argues, "that even television pates in comparison."

Stout, who is the new professor of American religious history at the Yale Divinity School, grounded his conclusions in a reading of more than two thousand sermons, including hundreds of manuscripts that previous historians had not examined. His account rests on his distinction between "occasional" sermons, prepared for fast days, election days, and other special events, and "regular" sermons, preached at services of worship on the Lord's Day. The occasional sermons often made their way to the printer and therefore attracted the attention of later historians; the regular sermons remained hidden away in manuscript collections. By attending to both kinds of sermons, Stout tells a story with several surprises. In contrast to historians who have argued that piety in New England increasingly fell sway to moralism and rationalism, Stout argues the closer one gets to the normal activities of local congregations, the more one discovers the continuities in colonial religion. Throughout the colonial period, which commonly embraces the transition from the Puritan era to the enlightenment, the message of the Sunday sermons remained virtually the same.

282 - The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England

Stout does not ignore changes. He locates the pulpit within its changing social settings, and he sees in the occasional sermons a sensitive register of cultural transitions. The preachers changed with the times, and Stout is adept at tracing the changes in both rhetoric and. theme. Although they almost invariably returned on special occasions to standard topics-purity, power, and liberty-each clerical generation reinterpreted those topics. They consistently depicted New England, for example, as a New Israel with a distinctive covenantal heritage, but, whereas the first generation imbued that cultural identity with theocratic associations, later preachers substituted constitutional and republican imagery. Yet the broad themes even of the occasional sermons remained consistent over time. Stout argues that the clergy supported the Revolution not so much by introducing new republican theories as by recalling the older "sacred trinity" of purity, power, and liberty, "and in this sense the lack of change is the major theme of preaching in Revolutionary New England."

The absence of change was even more pronounced in the regular Sunday sermons, in which the clergy returned always to the old themes of sin, salvation, and service. The regular sermons advanced an otherworldly piety which endured comfortably alongside the topical preoccupations of the occasional sermons. The balance disappeared only in the nineteenth century, when election and fast day sermons lost their hold in the culture.

Social historians will undoubtedly object that Stout has told us what the preachers said but not how their auditors responded. Such an objection strikes me as useful but finally unconvincing. Stout has illumined the public vocabulary of a culture. Whatever the degree of enthusiasm or assent it might have engendered, no other vocabulary rivalled it as a means of public discourse. One can quibble with details of the argument. I doubt, for example, that it is accurate when Stout, like most other historians of colonial thought, describes the sense of identification with Israel in seventeenth century New England as "typological." Despite the many claims to the contrary, I think it can be shown that early seventeenth century New Englanders consistently viewed the church, not the society, as the antitype of Israel. I doubt, moreover, that the first generation of New Englanders thought of their settlement as a "laboratory" for England and Europe. Dwight Bozeman's recent research [New England Quarterly 59 (1986), pp. 31-51] and his forthcoming book on Puritan primitivism both cast doubt on that common assumption. But these are minor questions about a book of extraordinary range and subtlety. Stout has written an excellent account, an example of careful and graceful scholarship and a model, one hopes, for further study of the sermon in American culture.

E. BROOKS HOLIFIELD

Candler School of Theology
Emory University Atlanta, Georgia