ENG BC3179x
Fall 2009
Gordis

READING SERMONS

The selections online come from published sermons by the three most prominent ministers in the first generation of New England settlers. These ministers were tremendously celebrated for their preaching; in some cases, their parishioners even followed them to Massachusetts from England. As you read, try to imagine what the appeal of each minister’s preaching might have been. I know that this may be difficult, as these sermons will seem very foreign and even dry to many of you. But try to approach this by comparing the selections. Which sermons do you like best? Which do you like least? Which seem most difficult, and why?

Consider differences in style among these sermons. How similar are the images that Hooker, Cotton, and Shepard use? Do they use the biblical text in similar ways? Are they describing similar spiritual experiences? How similar are their expectations of their audiences? What kinds of responses do they demand? How much do they assert their own presence, for example by using first-person pronouns?

Some differences among these selections stem from their varied publication histories. Each of the selections comes from a sermon series, a group of sermons unified by a common topic and preached over a period of months or years. Both Hooker’s The Soules Preparation for Christ and Shepard’s The Parable of the Ten Virgins were published as books, with breaks between individual sermons smoothed over or marked as chapters. Cotton’s Christ the Fountaine of Life, on the other hand, was published as a collection of sermons, with breaks between individual sermons preserved. Consequently, these sermons give you a somewhat better sense of how sermons were structured. (See the handout on sermon structure.We’ll go over this more in class.)

A few notes on typography: I’ve typed out the Hooker selections myself, and have not yet managed to eliminate all the typographical errors. Please bring any that you spot to my attention. The Cotton selections are facsimiles of a seventeenth-century printed edition, available through Early English Books Online.  Watch for the swash s (it looks like an f, but if you look carefully, you’ll notice that the crossbar doesn’t go all the way across the letter). Also note that generally seventeenth-century printers didn’t distinguish between u and v in the way that we do; they used the character v at the beginning of words and the character u in other positions, whether they meant to indicate the letter u or the letter v. Hence you’ll see the words loue (love) and vnless (unless). This may seem strange to you at first, but you’ll be surprised at how quickly you adjust; after all these years, I occasionally catch myself making these switches in my own prose.