would assign pews so that people would know where to sit, and it would charge rent, thus raising badly needed revenue for the church. But he also wanted to improve discipline and encourage piety within families: families would sit together in cordoned-off pews (thus promoting unity) and parents could better keep an eye on their children (thus promoting order). In taking this position Green was once again showing his traditional, even aristocratic mien. In New England and elsewhere, the renting of pews reinforced the traditional order of colonial society: the wealthy and the powerful sat in front, in the choicest seats; the less well-off sat in the back or the gallery. Church seating, as a result, reinforced society’s gradations, and it helped to maintain order. The elite led; followers followed. Jacob shared this view, and he saw pews as an important aid in building the kind of congregation he wanted. Green felt so strongly about the need for pews that he volunteered to pay for them himself—a startling offer since Green felt he was badly underpaid. The board accepted his offer, although it promised to reimburse him later.41
To aid his efforts to raise standards among members, Green donned the cloak of a teacher. It was a task he performed daily. Green preferred meeting with congregants in private meetings, where he posed questions to them “and [would] hear them answer . . . as they thought proper.” On other occasions Green encouraged members to submit questions to him, which he treated as an opportunity to deliver a lecture: “At these meetings I thought it proper to speak upon some things, and in a manner, that would not have been proper for the pulpit.” He also encouraged discussion among attendees. Green worked hard to establish a rapport with his membership. He made a point of visiting every single family early in his pastorship, devoting two days a week to this task: “When I came to the house, and the family was collected together, I first prayed with them; and then I began with the youngest, and so proceeded on till I came to the heads of the family—asking questions and discoursing, according to their several capacities.”42
Prayer was an important part of these private meetings as well, and Green set aside at least one day a month for such sessions, “when my elders and I have, by turns, prayed and sung, &c. These days I have found useful in keeping up some sense of religion.” Green demanded a lot from his membership—and from himself. He understood that he led by example; as he put it, “I have been very sensible that my own personal religion was of great importance to myself, and to others.” He thus fasted at least once a month: “On these fasting days, I used to write my wants, or the things that I would, for each day, bear particularly on my mind before God.” He would then mediate on these wants and write out a series of resolutions.43
One evangelical tool Green had little use for was the revival. This was somewhat surprising, given his support of the Great Awakening, his belief in evangelism, and his assertion in his 1770 tract that one way to end all the arguing over admission standards was to spark a revival of religion and create more qualified applicants for the church. Yet in the prewar years, Green led only three revivals: in 1756, 1764, and 1774, and most can be traced to personal causes. In 1756, Jacob’s first wife, Anna Strong, died, and to assuage his grief, Jacob threw himself into his work. “I was for a twelve-month after that event remarkably stirred up, quickened and engaged,” he explained. “I prayed and preached with an increased sense of divine things.” The impetus for the 1774 revival came from another unfortunate development: Green suffered an “apoplectic fit” (in the words of his son Ashbel) so serious that his family and congregation feared he would die. The crisis produced soul-searching within both Jacob and church members. Although seemingly close to death, Jacob retained “perfect possession of his intellectual faculties,” Ashbel said. He asked his eldest daughter to read from the gospel of John, which “produced in him a kind of holy rapture.” Meanwhile, when doctors warned that Jacob might not make it through the night, neighboring ministers and the Hanover congregation gathered to pray for his life. Their intercession, according to Ashbel, produced miraculous results: “The man who expected to be in eternity before morning—an expectation in which physicians as well as friends concurred—was in the morning, free from almost every threatening symptom of his disease.” A relieved Jacob turned the episode into a lesson on God’s goodness, and he pressed on with the revival. “In this sickness, I had remarkable views of divine things, and received uncommon tokens of favour from my people, who were then full of religion,” Jacob recalled.44
But overall, this most serious of men was uncomfortable with the histrionics of the revival, and pressing outside obligations kept him from feeling the spirit. Instead, the sermon remained Green’s primary teaching tool and his preferred medium for bringing people to Christ. The sermon was the high point of the service, and it provided a forum for Green to inculcate religious and educational values to his parishioners. As his daybooks and sermon notes reveal, he put a tremendous amount of thought into the sermon. In a typical week, according to his diary, he delivered at least two of them—one on Sundays in Hanover, and one during the week at other Presbyterian churches in Morris County or at members’ houses. Often he gave a series of sermons on one theme that could last six weeks or more. Green wrote his weekly sermons on scraps of paper—some in Weston’s shorthand, others in partial sentences. These sermons were more than outlines, though. Throughout his forty-five-year career in the ministry, Jacob never possessed the confidence to speak extemporaneously as a George Whitefield would. Yet the meticulous preparation also reflected Jacob’s values. His approach was a hybrid between the latitudinarian and urbane sermons favored by many of his Harvard classmates such as Jonathan Mayhew, and the emotional and pietistic sermons of most Yale-trained pastors. His style, in other words, was closer to a Jonathan Edwards—studious, carefully prepared, well argued, but seeking to arouse an emotional response from the audience. Jacob carefully stated his thesis or argument based on the day’s biblical text (in fact, in his daybook, he stressed that the minister should select the text first and the discourse second), and he proceeded to defend it in clear, at times compelling prose, backing up his main points with everyday metaphors that his listeners could easily grasp.45
Green was remarkably consistent in his message. He wanted to change people’s behavior and get them to reform their ways. For him, that was the key to bringing them into the invisible church. He had little use for millennial themes. Nor, unlike many evangelical preachers and itinerants (especially Methodists on the frontier), did he discuss his own trials: his struggles to achieve a rebirth and avoid backsliding remained private. Instead, out of the hundreds of sermons that he delivered in the prewar years, one theme predominated: the importance of moral responsibility and the need for sinners to recognize the imminent dangers. In 1768, in Morristown, Green took to the pulpit at the Presbyterian church there. He drew his inspiration from the gospel of John and John’s warnings about arrogance—“You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life,” with his main point coming from chapter 5, verse 40: “But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life.” From that key line, Green delivered his sermon lesson, expounding on the threats from unregeneracy. “Unregenerate sinners,” he told his listeners, “are loath to believe that they are so bad, so wicked & blamable as they really are. They are willing to believe & at length do believe that they are not so very bad.” Jacob’s purpose in these sermons was to get people to understand the nature of sinning and the offensiveness of sinners’ behavior. “Light & happiness are to be obtained by coming to him or complying with the terms of salvation,” he told his listeners. In a line that reflected his views of an unregenerate’s spiritual inability, he added, “But sinners will not come, they are unwilling to comply.” They are, in other words, blind to the saving grace of Jesus Christ.46
Green believed he was delivering an effective sermon if he acted as “an advocate for Virtue & Religion; to attain that improvement of Understanding, that purity of heart, dignity & even severity of Character.” And he could do that only if he spoke from the heart and with a deep knowledge of his subject. “The authority of the speaker does not arise from superior station; or power annexed to the office,” he noted in his daybook. “But it is of a more sacred kind, founded in superior wisdom & Virtue. An uncommon Eloquence gives a superiority over the Minds of Men: but wisdom seen & acknowledged gives a greater & stronger superiority than Eloquence can give.”47
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