in an effort to win more converts to Christ. Jacob’s bow to Stoddardean standards induced him to take an even more heretical stance: he began to accept “some notions that were Arminian, or that bordered upon Arminianism; especially as to the power of the creature, the freedom of the will, the origin of action.”8
Despite these vicissitudes—or more accurately because of them—Green never stopped studying after he left Harvard. He read widely and thought deeply in the late 1740s and 1750s, as he worked out the views that allowed him to soften Calvinism’s hard edges and pursue a purer church and society in the 1760s and later; this study also undergirded his political views of the 1770s. His most intense period of study took place over seven months, from November 1754 to May 1755. Several times a week he retreated to his study to write in two daybooks. The first daybook covered more than 160 pages and was a wide-ranging exploration of divinity and what Jacob termed “the coda of systems.” In tightly packed pages that combined standard English with a system of shorthand developed by James Weston in the mid-eighteenth century, Jacob ranged over the centuries, beginning with the ancient philosophers (figs. 3 and 4). His central concerns were basic but profound: does God exist? Is the Bible accurate? What is free will? That Jacob even asked such questions was evidence of the turmoil he continued to experience in the mid-1750s. As a graduate of Harvard, he was well aware of developments in Western thought since the seventeenth century and the arrival of the Enlightenment in America in the eighteenth. Theologians everywhere were grappling with the challenges to Christianity posed by science, which was lifting the veil on nature’s workings and, ultimately, raising questions about God himself. The questions were serious enough that the Christian faithful believed they had to reassert the primacy of God, demonstrate the accuracy of the Bible, and explain the relevance of the Trinity. Many, like Samuel Clarke and John Witherspoon, fought fire with fire—they used science itself to make their case for religion. Reason was their watchword as they combated the skepticism of Arians, Socians, deists, philosophers, and others.9
Jacob Green, as a result, was hardly alone as he studied his Bible and pondered the meaning of faith. He approached the review of religion in an enlightened manner—his exploration was reasoned, rational, systematic, measured. The views of men, he warned in one early entry in his daybook, tended to run to extremes. He would avoid that pitfall and, instead, coolly examine the various controversies of the different ages. Jacob’s perambulations began with the customs of the ancients, including the Druids, and the hostility that early Christians faced. His review then carried him on to Jewish history, the “absurdities” of Roman Catholicism, and the views of everyone from Peter Lombard to the Socians. In his rough jottings—many sentences were half thoughts and lacked punctuation—Jacob did not advance his own arguments. Instead, his purpose was to poke and to prod at conventional wisdom as he worked his way up to the arguments of modern times. He was fascinated by the seemingly irreconcilable—those who relied on reason to determine God’s existence versus those who turned to revelation. As he studied Christian history, Jacob kept returning to his core questions, stressing the importance of learning which parts of the Bible represented truth and which were inspired by God. He devoted “chapters” in his daybook to analyzing God’s powers—the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, and God the Son, among many others. In attempting to answer such questions, Jacob examined the origins of the world, the authority of the scriptures, and the nature of sin and evil.10
As he laboriously analyzed this coda, Jacob devoted one day a week (usually Wednesdays) to a second daybook, covering nearly one hundred pages, that broke down the mechanics of good writing and sermonizing. Here again he drew on his Harvard education and his experiences in the Great Awakening, focusing on Cicero and on how a “discourse . . . [can] move a heart.” Jacob wrote these daybook entries as if he was delivering a lecture to a classroom of college undergraduates: he would lay out his thesis and proceed to construct a carefully reasoned argument in support of that thesis. An important task for Jacob was determining in his mind what constituted bad writing. Such writing, he decided, “is weak and languid; i.e. what faintly conveys the authors sentiments.” Bad writers, he continued, “say nothing to inform the understanding, convince the Judgment, or please the Imagination . . . there is something awanting; which lies in this, that the discourse is not filled to make [an] Impression.” In other words, bad writers are boring—they are “pedantic” or bombastic.11
Good writing, by contrast, is “simple, natural, nervous, diffuse, sublime,” according to Jacob. Out of that list of attributes, “simple” and “natural” were the most important ones to him. He admiringly cited the writing in the Old Testament: “The thoughts are natural, & the choice of words is natural.” He also praised Demosthenes and Cicero, who managed to be eloquent and persuasive without giving the “appearance of art & study, or of affectation.” Effective writers, Jacob strongly felt, take care to “accommodate to the capacities of the hearers. This is a most important Rule of Eloquence.” The implications for the minister trying to win over souls to Jesus Christ were obvious. Sermons “ought to be plain & simple,” Jacob advised; regular English was much more effective than relying on “dead languages.” When delivering these sermons, the “Speaker ought generally, if not always to appear calm, composed, & without any emotion at all.”12
This was not surprising advice coming from someone who considered himself a poor public speaker. Yet in another sense it was surprising, considering how much Jacob admired Whitefield and Tennent. The powerful, emotional preaching of the leading awakeners had moved him profoundly, and he was recruited to Hanover to serve as an evangelical minister. Instead, Green’s views reflected his careful study of the ancients; the treatises of his contemporaries, especially Jonathan Edwards; and the rhetoric of the Enlightenment. Simple was best; calm reason was more persuasive than fervid outbursts. Jacob’s Harvard coursework taught him that a good sermon should be built around four parts—invention, the process by which the speaker determines the subject matter; arrangement, by which the speaker places his argument in proper order; style, the determination of the proper language to use; and delivery, by which the speaker decides what voice and body language to employ.13
Jacob’s writing and preaching style was far closer to Edwards than to the classic rhetoricians or to the Great Awakeners. Green rejected the two extremes in sermonizing—he found his “rationalist” peers too elitist, too learned, too argumentative, but he was not comfortable with the evangelical style of Whitefield and others that stressed emotion and the ability to deliver a sermon extemporaneously. Instead, Green found a kindred spirit in the famed minister from Northampton, Massachusetts. Edwards sought a middle ground in preaching that merged sound thinking and emotion. Edwards wanted to win over the “head” by going through the “heart.” To achieve this task he relied on vivid natural imagery that appealed to the emotions. Edwards at times was almost mystical in his use of language, stressing the beauty of nature and the wondrous ways of God.14
Jacob’s search for the middle ground is evident in his daybooks. He evinced little patience for college-educated ministers, who he said were more interested in showing off their education than in imparting sound evangelical principles to his listeners. He stressed that the careful minister should avoid excessive emotionalism, but he went on to say that emotionalism has its place in good writing and sermonizing. “We must be careful to set on the proper considerations before the Mind in the natural order; i.e., we must put first the plainest, & then the more complex, views of things”—all with an eye toward awakening the emotions in hearers. To pull off this feat, Jacob stressed, “a speaker must feel the emotions in himself.” He likened the process to a “contagion”; when the speaker feels warm emotion, he can pass it
