After Edward VI’s coronation in 1547, the radical group of English reformers known as the Puritans took every opportunity to complain to the young king—that “blessed ympe”—about the “Dumme Doggs, Unskillful sacrificing priestes, Destroying Drones, or rather Caterpillars of the Word” who occupied the pulpits of England. As they attempted to recapture the ethos of the primitive church, these Puritans focused on the importance of the spoken word, beginning with Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. They reminded themselves that the greatest of the church fathers, such as Augustine, had been powerful preachers. And they invoked the admonition of St. Paul, echoed by John Calvin, “How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? … So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”

In particular, the Puritans were outraged that so many ministers of the established church substituted affected eloquence for sound scriptural knowledge and indulged themselves in “fonde fables to make their hearers laughe, or in ostentation of learning, of their Latin, their Greke, their Hebrue tongue, and of their great reading of antiquities.” Instead, the Puritan clergy aligned themselves behind the “plain style” of the Cambridge divine William Perkins. As followers of Perkins, they wore simple Geneva gowns and delivered sermons that were straightforward explications of scripture, divided into three sections: an expanded reading of the “text,” a discussion of the “doctrine” embodied in it, and, finally, the “use” or “application” of the text and doctrine in everyday life. By the 1630s, for their nonconformity, the Puritans found themselves deprived of their pulpits by Charles I and his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. Many of those dissatisfied with the Church of England—clergy and laity alike—emigrated to the fledgling settlements of New England so that they could properly attend to the means of grace embodied in the spoken word of an educated ministry.

New England, it can therefore be argued, was founded so that men and women could listen to sermons. And, listen to sermons they did. From the very first, in 1630, aboard the ship Arbella, barely clear of English waters, the earliest cluster of settlers destined for Massachusetts Bay heard the future Governor John Winthrop preach “A Modell of Christian Charity,” with its vision of a Christian commonwealth that would be a light to the old world and its attendant warning that in case of discord or failure “wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill” for all to see.

Once established in New England, settlers could hardly get enough of the sermons previously denied them. There were sermons both morning and afternoon on Sunday, a weekly Thursday “lecture,” and sermons for every occasion from civil elections, fast days, funerals, and ordinations, to militia elections and public executions. So insatiable was the New England appetite for preaching that ardent parishioners took down their ministers’ words in shorthand so that they might study them at leisure; especially significant sermons were often revised and printed for wider consumption. The atmosphere was so saturated with the word that, in the late 1630s, even the minister Thomas Shepherd could observe “we have ordinances to the full, Sermons too long, and Lectures too many, and private meetings too frequent.”

For their part, ministers strove for vivid preaching: memorizing lengthy texts and speaking from the barest of outlines. They spoke on every subject from salvation and the duties of the Christian life—the cultivation of “weaned affections” toward the undeniably good things of this world—to the proper conduct of government officials— “nursing fathers” toward the community —from New England’s “errand into the wilderness” to “the late stupendous growth of witches.” They took to heart Thomas Hooker’s 1659 advice, “It’s not enough that we be stirring in the house, and people be up, but we must knock at mens doors, bring a Candle to their bed-sides, and pinch the sluggard, and then if he have any life he wil stir.” Yet, these were also literate, thoughtful, sophisticated addresses, aiming at both heart and intellect. As Perkins himself remarked, “the Minister may, yea and must privately use at his libertie the arts, Philosophy, and variety of reading, whilest he is in framing his sermon: but he ought in publike to conceale all these from the people, and not make the least ostentation.”

The sermon, thus, occupied a central place in the development of a distinctive American culture. Arguably, the first “national” event was not the colonies’ resistance to the Stamp Act of 1765 but the Great Awakening of the 1740s—precipitated by the revival tours of George Whitefield, the great English Methodist preacher. Thousands of people, both north and south, flocked to hear Whitefield preach, and reports of the “surprising work of God” occasioned by his sermons appeared in colonial newspapers from Georgia to Massachusetts.

As a peculiarly American art form, the sermon became a bellwether for the wider culture. Thus, after the revolution, a more democratic brand of evangelical religion came to dominate American life. And, while the spoken word retained its importance in American Protestantism, its expression changed. The rapid growth of egalitarian denominations, including the Baptists and the Methodists, with their embrace of frontier religious institutions such as the camp meeting and the lay exhorter, led to an upsurge in extemporaneous preaching, with an emphasis on informality and emotionalism.

Although the earlier tradition of structured pulpit eloquence survived in certain prosperous urban enclaves through the Gilded Age, much of Protestant America grew accustomed to an extraordinarily vernacular sermon, what Perkins cautioned against as “barbarism” in the pulpits. By the late nineteenth century, at one end of the spectrum, the so-called Princes of the Pulpit—theological liberals such as Henry Ward Beecher and Phillips Brooks—held forth in polished, if sentimental, phrases to sophisticated and wealthy congregations, while at the other, itinerant evangelists, such as Dwight Moody and Billy Sunday, pioneered a more downmarket version of the sermon, a cleavage that, at the risk of oversimplification, persists to this day. Indeed, as religion moved to the margins of American intellectual life during the twentieth century, the role of the learned sermon as a vehicle for serious public discourse was all but forgotten—until the “rediscovery” of the Puritan tradition in the 1950s by such scholars as the late Perry Miller.

The Library of America’s admirable new volume American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Michael Warner, a professor of English at Rutgers University, is a long overdue effort to “reclaim” this “neglected aspect of American literature” and to make it available to a wide readership. The collection consists of fifty-eight sermons by fifty-three authors, arranged chronologically from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. The authors range from such well-known figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), and Fulton J. Sheen, to those known only to specialists, such as Devereux Jarratt, an Anglican evangelist active in backcountry Virginia and North Carolina during the last third of the eighteenth century. The sermons range from the representative—Thomas Shepard’s 1641 “Of Ineffectual Hearing the Word”—to the individually significant—Jonathan Edwards’s 1741 “Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God”; from the spiritual—Solomon Stoddard’s 1698 “The Tryall of Assurance”—to the political—Jonathan Mayhew’s 1749 “A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers.”

The themes alter in subtle ways over the years. The nineteenth century shifts from social reform—opposition to war with Mexico, antislavery, and feminism in the Quaker Lucretia Mott’s 1849 “Uses and Abuses of the Bible”—to a greater focus on personal salvation after the carnage of the Civil War. Among the twentieth-century entrants, there are sermons concerned with ecclesiastical matters—Harry Emerson Fosdick’s 1922 “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”; ecumenicism—Abraham Joshua Heschel’s 1967 “What We Might Do Together”; and racial equality—Martin Luther King’s sermon of April 3, 1968. These were issues unknown to the Puritan pulpit in its golden age, when dissenters could be banished to Rhode Island and everyone took it for granted that “God Almightie in his most holy and wise providence hath soe disposed of the Condicion of mankinde, as in all times some must be rich some poore, some high and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subjeccion.” Even the incentives for religious belief have changed. When Puritans sought salvation, they emphasized that the proper end of man was to glorify God; in the 1950s, Fulton J. Sheen told a television audience that “the possession of God is happiness” in a talk entitled “How to Have a Good Time.”

The black church, fundamentalists, liberals, neo-orthodox, Catholics, and Jews all find their voices in this anthology. There is even a sermon by C. L. Franklin, a pillar of the black church through the 1960s, now better known as the father of the singer Aretha Franklin. And, while it is possible to differ with a few of the selections—I would have preferred Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” with its poetic evocation of New England spring to his “Lord’s Supper Sermon” and was a little put off by Zora Neale Hurston’s dialect transcription of an otherwise unknown black preacher’s sermon— and to wonder at the absence of figures such as the nineteenth-century evangelist Charles Grandison Finney (“Lectures on Revivals of Religion”), the ecclesiastical busybody Lyman Beecher (“A Plea for the West”), the educational liberal Horace Bushnell, or the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy—by and large, it is a well-chosen group of works.

F.settrack 10 85 ollowing the Library of America format, the anthology presents the sermons as pieces of literature simpliciter, unadorned by footnotes or commentary, an approach that has both benefits and drawbacks. The benefits come from the reader’s ability to appreciate the works themselves without distraction. The disadvantages are that, for the early sermons especially, some explanatory notes might well have enhanced that appreciation. After all, how many of us can quite put our finger on the meaning of Robert Cushman’s 1621 question “what doth this shifting, progging, and fat feeding which some use, more resemble any thing then the fashion of hoggs?”—although “progging” certainly does have a ring to it. In addition, the brief biographical sketches at the end of the volume—enormously well done though they are—might have been fleshed out and affixed to the sermons so that the casual reader could more easily date the pieces and place the authors in historical context.

The broader disadvantage of the format —and one which Professor Warner could do nothing to remedy, since you can only play the hand you’re dealt—is that the later sermons largely lack the literary appeal of the earlier ones; the stark presentation only highlights their limitations as literature, whatever their historical significance. Indeed, they amply document the progressive “dumbing down” of our public intellectual discourse. There is something urgent about the early Puritan sermons at their best— rigorous, challenging, pungent, imbued with a vivid sense of language and intellectual adventure. Although the twentieth-century sermons, in particular, address many of the same civic and spiritual concerns, they smell either of the academic study or of the street. Gone is the awareness of an appreciative and reflective audience of serious lay listeners; in its absence, sentimentality and the cult of personality do for both argument and eloquence. However, all is not lost. The literary enthusiast, at least, can take heart that almost half of the sermons in this collection were delivered before 1800; even among those drawn from the antebellum period, few stand outside the New England tradition—which is, after all, where the sermon flourished as a truly American art form.