but the hunting down of such reappearances was not engaged in. The reader will therefore detect spellings that could be construed as distorted by the original typesetter but that were not tampered with by us. Some corrections, we felt, required us to place a word or letters in brackets to signal the reader, but even these might have been silently fixed by different editors. For the most part the original spellings are preserved unless the meaning was imperiled. In no. 3, we changed least to lest because the sense dictated it. In no. 15, precicious was corrected to precious, for the error could interrupt communication. But in the same sermon, tremenduous was allowed to stand; in no. 17, terrestial; in no. 27, impulsies; and so forth. Who is to say that these words were not pronounced from the pulpit as they were spelled by their authors or, at least, were published? Of interest to some readers will be the spelling errors in no. 44, by the estimable Noah Webster.
As this edition makes obvious, we did modernize the long esses of eighteenth-century typography. We retained ampersands (&) and refrained from inserting missing apostrophes.
PUNCTUATION
The originals presented some interesting puzzles of punctuation. Because of the flaws in early type components and the bleed-through of inks on certain printing papers, spots and blobs occurred with frequency to seemingly alter punctuation marks, changing commas to semicolons and periods to commas, or adding commas and hyphens, and so on, wherever well-placed blobs might appear. Broken type could change a comma to a period or cause a hyphen to disappear. Many times, sentence construction pointed to the solution; other times, eighteenth-century punctuation habits made, let us say, a comma likely where an existing mark was illegible. Except in the case of some totally unintelligible words, our most difficult “calls” involved colons that looked like semicolons, for the colon then seemed to serve any number of purposes not clearly distinguishable from the semicolon’s. We simply made the best determination we could from a close examination of the printed symbol when we were in doubt.
Eighteenth-century writings tend to be rife with commas, by today’s standards; even so, some commas were certainly misplaced to begin with and were silently removed. In a very few instances, commas interfered with the sense and were deleted. Dashes were often used in combination with other marks,—commas, semicolons, even periods (as this sentence demonstrates). We deleted whichever mark that sense and/or syntax showed to be the extraneous one, by today’s standards.
In most of the sermons an old convention of punctuation was followed that placed a punctuation mark before a parenthesis, (as this sentence demonstrates;) we modernized the punctuation in these cases. The British custom of placing a period or comma after a closing quotation mark was similarly Americanized; it now precedes the closing quotation mark.
A number of longer quotations were printed as indented extract, where originally they had been “run in” as text and set off with quotation marks. As modern convention dictates, we deleted the quotation marks from these extracted passages. There was no attempt made to standardize the uses of quotation marks in the sermons. Each author had his own approach to this and other matters of style, and many inconsistencies will be evident to the reader from sermon to sermon and within individual sermons. Sometimes quotation marks set off hypothetical responses to the author’s main argument, for example, but frequently propositions of that type are merely signified by an initial capital letter in mid-sentence. These devices have not been tampered with, for in their own way they signal the reader clearly enough as to the author’s meaning and intent.
The reader may also note that some authors interpolate their own words into quotations without closing and reopening quotation marks. Since it was obvious enough that this was the case, we refrained from adding the marks. Wherever quotation marks or other punctuation marks did need insertion by us, we bracketed them.
BIBLICAL QUOTES AND CITATIONS
Naturally, the sermons are replete with references to scripture. On occasion, editorial considerations led us to check on the wording of a quotation (and some few mistakes thereby detected were silently corrected, particularly in citations of chapter or verse numbers). However, no systematic checking of biblical material was done, and for all practical purposes the quotations and citations can be considered to be reproduced as they originally appeared, correct or incorrect.
OTHER MATTERS
All footnotes are the work of the sermon authors and have been edited along the same guidelines as for the sermon proper. Footnote symbols were changed as necessary to key the notes to the sermon as the material received a new paging arrangement in this edition.
Many other elements in the originals, ornamental, typographic, or idiosyncratic, have been dispensed with. Most often this involved modernizing odd arrangements of text and/or blank space.
The original pamphlets in which the sermons appeared also included announcements, legislative resolutions concerning publication, dedications, prefaces, opening prayers, and appendices that have been deleted from this volume, except where they could not be considered extraneous to the sermon’s message and significance.
Not all the sermons were assigned titles by their authors, as a look at the title-page facsimiles included with each sermon will reveal. In such cases, we extracted from the pamphlet copy what we deemed appropriate as a stand-in title.
The facsimiles, while they add a visual element to this collection, also serve as testaments to the erudition and civility of the age that produced these works. They shed light on the sermons in the information and in the epigraphs they provide, the latter being an embellishing convention from the days of the Renaissance.
The facsimiles often provide two dates: the date of the sermon’s delivery and that of its publication, and in many cases, these dates are not far apart. But some of the items, as previously stated, were never orally delivered though they are sermonic in tradition. The publication date was the most consistent key to the placement of the works in a time frame, therefore. We opted, then, to order the sermons according to the date of their dissemination in print. The reader may note that this results in our placing no. 20 at 1778, though apparently it was preached in 1775; moreover, no. 43 was preached in 1789, but we reprint the second edition from 1794, in which the author, David Osgood, updated his text, and which prompted a number of responses then and in 1795. Finally, no. 37 is placed with a conjectural publication date at 1791, when it was preached. Yet it may not have appeared in print until eleven years later, as indicated on the facsimile page included with it.
No systematic bibliographic essay can be undertaken here, but some brief comments on the sources may be helpful to the reader.
A bibliography of generally relevant writings is included in Ellis Sandoz, A Government of Laws: Political Theory, Religion and the American Founding (Baton Rouge, La., 1990), a study that is in many respects a companion to the present volume. Extensive bibliographic information on the religious writings of the period and on pertinent secondary works can be gleaned from the notes to Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York, 1986); and to Donald Weber, Rhetoric and History in Revolutionary New England (New York, 1988), a work attentive to the politics–religion issues.
The Great Awakening in America, its significance and aftermath, is best presented by Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1966); and by Heimert and Perry Miller, eds., The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences (Indianapolis, 1967); valuable also is William G. McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition (Boston, 1967) and the same author’s “The Great Awakening as the Key to the Revolution,” in Jack P. Greene and William G. McLoughlin,
