As I’ve been reading seventeenth-century New England sermons, I’ve come across some curious facts. Here are a few for your amusement:

  • John Wilson wins the prize for the shortest sermon of the seventeenth century. His last sermon, preached in 1677 and entitled A Seasonable VVatch-VVord unto Christians Against the Dreams & Dreamers of This Generation, was only eight pages long. The longest sermon I’ve come across so far was eighty pages long.
  • The most humorous title award goes to a treatise against Quakers entitled George Foxe Digged out of His Burrows . . . .
  • For quite awhile, Samuel Greene in Cambridge was the only printer in New England. Starting in the middle of the 1670s, however, he had some competition from John Foster in Boston. I haven’t been looking at other printed matter, but John Foster seems to have taken over a fair share of the market in sermons. Foster also sometimes prints elaborate mastheads and even puts the seal of Massachusetts on government decrees.
  • In 1673, the minister from Groton, a town that was then near the Massachusetts frontier, published a series of sermons on “Solemn Occassions.”
  • In 1676, Benjamin Tompson wrote a elegy in tribute to the deceased governor of Connecticut, John Winthrop (not the more famous John Winthrop). In the title, he calls Winthrop a “most charitable Christian, vnbiased politician, and unimitable pyrotechnist.” I looked up the word pyrotechnist in the Oxford English Dictionary, thinking that the word could not possibly mean what I thought it meant. But, sure enough, pyrotechnist is defined as “one employed or skilled in pyrotechny; a maker or displayer of fireworks,” and the OED lists its earliest occurrence as being in 1791. I’m still not sure what it means, but it seems intriguing.

Christianity Today has an interview with J. I. Packer entitled “Physicians of the Soul.” The interview is interesting but has some factual and interpretational problems. For example, Packer’s description of Puritan theology is not accurate, because (I suspect) his definition is closer to his own theology than to the Puritan’s; John Bunyan was a Non-Conformist, not a Puritan.