magnalia (“great works”) that Mather details in his ha-giographic history, but popular response has threatened to become a form of idolatry, “as if the good people had overdone in that affection.” Willing to blame neither Hooker nor the saints of New England, Mather imagines God’s check to clerical eloquence as a simple reminder that Hooker immediately comprehends and turns into an object lesson. Hooker’s “shattered and broken attempts” are no personal rebuke for vainglory (a sin that the minister Thomas Shepard sometimes ponders in his private journal entries). Rather, the incident is an emblem for all to remember that nothing of value can be done but by God’s will. The humbling even of the ordinary means of preaching is a reminder that “we have nothing, and can do nothing, without Christ” and an occasion to magnify God by remaining “humbly contented” with debility.
Preaching manuals of the period offer little insight into the zeniths and nadirs of Puritan preaching as figured in Mather’s anecdotes concerning Hooker. The authors of the two most influential preaching manuals in New England, William Perkins and Richard Bernard, draw largely on sixteenth-century continental and English guides. Very little innovation to plain style based upon a faith in the literal sense of scripture is to be discerned in Perkins’s almost ubiquitously repeated advice:
1. To read the Text distinctly out of the Canonical Scripture.
2. To give the sense and understanding of it being read, by the Scripture it self.
3. To collect a few and profitable points of doctrine out of the naturall sense.
4. To apply (if he have the gift) the doctrines rightly collected to the life and manners of men, in a simple and plaine speech.29
This type of “doctrine-use” structure of sermons, while typical of nonconformist preaching, was widely used by the early seventeenth century.30 Perkins’s rather ubiquitously cited directives are, in essence, a concise summary of trends in preaching, the roots of which go back to Calvin, if not Origen,31 and whose practical rhetorical evolution begins with Erasmus’s turn away from thematic preaching toward a more humanist model of classical oratory and Melancthon’s subsequent repudiation of varieties of classical oratory in favor of doctrinal and use-oriented preaching.32 No manual or theory of preaching, however, could instruct the would-be minister how to be an inspired instrument for the Holy Ghost but only how to explicate according to human ability. The best a minister might hope for, “if he have the gift,” is to offer application in persuasive but “simple and plaine” speech. Scholars have called the resulting sermons “formulaic” and “tedious.”33
One of the most immediately apparent features of this plain-style preaching was the rhetorical structure of Ramist branching—in which each point of explication might be subdivided into a multitude of subsequent numbered branching points for further explication.34 Ramist structure seems also to account for the remarkable fluency that auditors exhibited in recording, whether at the meetinghouse or at home after the sermon. Even more fundamentally, the method of Ramist logic is at the heart of sermon explication itself. Explanations of Ramist reaction to scholastic logic have suggested ways in which such rote configurations of prophesying might constitute innovative rhetorical change, yet such intellectual history approaches have failed to explain the exhilarating highs and lows of pulpit eloquence, especially for the auditor. Subsequent interventions into sermon literature scholarship—most notably, by Teresa Toulouse and Lisa Gordis—have tried to rescue sermon literature from its own apparent eye-glazing dictates by suggesting that the insufficiency of the guidelines requires fluidity and experimentation. Gordis, in particular, reframes the rhetorical problem as an exegetical issue, revealing not only how individual ministers interpreted preemptory directives such as Perkins’s but also how auditors took and adapted what ministers, with their virtuosity, rendered apparently straightforward.35
Puritan ministers often spoke ex tempore, a style of delivery that might suggest the enthusiasm and spontaneity associated with later trends in evangelical preaching from the Great Awakening through current-day revivalism, but such a comparison is misleading. Puritan ex tempore skill in the pulpit was developed through university training in which the memorization of lectures and sermons was standard pedagogical method. Under the influence of Ramist dialectic, method, memory, and composition theory dovetail not only in the theory of doctrine-use plain style but in the lived experience of the sermon.36 The incredible uniformity of notes—as produced by ministers either before or after delivery—is remarkably similar to that of notes taken by ministers listening to their colleagues’ preaching. The formulaic structure of the sermon served as a kind of vernacular of Puritan preaching.
The structural conventions of university training emphasizing memorization and re-creation of sermons and lectures appear to have informed the notetaking practices of many nonuniversity-trained auditors, as many lay notetakers appear to have learned techniques indirectly. Even rather divergent notetaking styles among some auditors demonstrate how fully naturalized the elements of university training in plain-style auditing became in New England, as notetakers appear to have picked up recording practices in a community where notes circulated freely and eclectically.37 Idiosyncratic variations on university notetaking practices constitute an eclectic vernacular of sermon language and structure. This dissemination of notetaking did not occur merely top-down. Rather, notetaking styles reinscribed but also affected clerical practices and styles. Most concretely, the phenomenon of print sermons based on notes (clerical and lay, authorized and unauthorized) vividly illustrates the interdependence of ministers and auditors in the creation of sermon literature, as hearers adapted to preachers and preachers to hearers. The ability to follow the formal structure and core doctrine of a sermon via systematic notetaking was crucial to the lived experience of preaching but also to the preservation and dissemination of sermons in print. For better and for worse, publishing ministers were dependent upon auditors’ experience and recording. Whether authorized or unauthorized, print sermons drew upon the notes of minister and lay auditor alike, ultimately reflecting a complexly discursive sermon culture.
The practices of sermon composition, delivery, and notetaking illuminate much that the preaching manuals fail to elaborate. Further understanding of a theory of the plain-style sermon can be found in discussions of scriptural interpretation itself. Gordis makes useful distinctions between Perkins’s emphasis on “the centrality of exegesis to sermon theory” and Bernard’s focus on
“the minister as interpreter and teacher.”38 Perkins’s relative emphasis on the relationship between scriptural exegesis and sermon composition (the interdependence of literal sense and plain style) suggests an explanation of why Puritan preaching manuals essentially seem to offer negative dictates (for example, not to go beyond the text, not to chase down fourfold exegesis, not to indulge in digressions of mere wit and foreign phraseology).39 Returning to Perkins’s handy list, we see that the first two directives (“To read the text” and “To give the sense and understanding of it”) are premised on the primacy of the literal sense of scripture and a faith that, as Bernard puts it, “No Scripture is in itselfe obscure, but that wee want eie-sight to behold what is therein conteined.”40 The practiced skill of the preacher, then, resides in the next two tasks of gathering doctrine (“out of the naturall sense”) and applying it to lived experience (“if he have the gift”). The series of negative dictates expressed as prescriptive formula imply something more akin to proscription.
From a theological perspective, the directives of plain-style explication accommodate the strenuous Protestant insistence on the five solas. A commitment to sola fide might be sought by the three closely related principles of solus christus, sola gratia, and soli deo gloria (only through Christ, by grace alone, and only for the glory of God, respectively), but sola scriptura suggests a potentially competing logic of salvation. As James Simpson has observed, sola fide and sola scriptura exist in Protestant thought in uneasy opposition.41 Which is it that will save you? Is it faith alone, a phenomenon that, after all, is an extratextual, likely passive, and possibly predetermined event? Or is your salvation textual, based on your reading of the Bible, with all the vagaries of its contingent wordiness? Conventional wisdom and scholarly tradition have long