GEMMS-SERMON-18952 is a sermon in two parts by the Rev. Dr. Benjamin Wadsworth. A “[k]indly and intelligent” president of Harvard College who was known for tolerating the unruly drinking habits and pranks of his students for the duration of his term from 1725 to his death in 1737,[1] Wadsworth was also a minister of the First Church of Boston, where he remained as a pastor from the time of his ordination in 1696 to his taking the presidency of Harvard College in 1725.[2] As the first part of GEMMS-SERMON-18952 is dated 28 February 1708 and the second part 02 March 1708 and the manuscript contains no evidence of Wadsworth having travelled to a location other than the First Church of Boston in 1696,[3] it is safe to assume that GEMMS-SERMON-18952 was preached by Wadsworth from the pulpit of the First Church, “one of the most important pulpits in New England” in the period.[4] GEMMS-SERMON-18952 deconstructs the text of Judges 5 to warn that “Kings & great ones” should be mindful “of [God’s] vengeance on [thei]r oppressors; to prevent [thei]r being guilty of like wickedness” to that of the Israelites who forsook God.[5] By adopting an approach which is not dissimilar to the literary strategies of the sentimentalists of later decades, Wadsworth creates a sermon in the form of an essay on Judges 5 which is “usefull to Instruct men in and quicken [the]m to, a religious life.”[6] Of course, it would be anachronistic to claim that a text written in 1708 is representative of a mode of literature which did not firmly take hold of the American literary aesthetic until the approximate mid-point of the century. Nonetheless, Wadsworth’s sermon does betray a certain kind of proto-sentimentalism which precedes the movement by making space to process emotions of triumph and defeat, using Judges 5 to instruct on effective leadership and deliverance from oppression.
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| FIGURE 1: Benjamin Wadsworth (1669/70-1737) by an unidentified artist, oil on canvas, 17th-18th c. Photograph © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Harvard Art Museums, H3.[7] |
The rhetorical use of sympathy
In studying a manuscript, one must be mindful of what Lori Rogers-Stokes has dubbed as formalist “intentional gaps” in the source.”[8] Intentional gaps both carry and obscure great meaning in the study of manuscript sources, being a covert rhetorical strategy of “deliberate gaps that represent meaning and can be noted, addressed, and understood in that light.”[9] The first part of Wadsworth’s sermon is dated 28 February 1708, which falls on a Saturday in the Julian calendar used in the period; the second part is dated 02 March 1708, calculable as a Tuesday in the Julian calendar, due to 1708 being a leap year.[10] It is likely, therefore, that the first part of the sermon would have been preached on Sunday 29 February at the approximate onset of Lent. An intentional gap both between the date of the text’s authorship and the sermon’s probable preaching and in Wadsworth’s neglect to explain an ongoing deviation from normative preaching practice thus becomes evident. At the onset of Lent, Christian preaching traditionally follows a thematic focus on penitence and spiritual cleansing to align with Christ’s penitence and spiritual cleansing at his temptation in the desert by Satan. New Testament texts which document the event are normally taught at Lent alongside lessons on complementary Old Testament texts which foreshadow Christ’s temptation; the Old Testament book of Judges, particularly chapters 4 and 5, is normally preached in thanksgiving services on the second Sunday after Trinity Sunday.[11]
It has long been established that both the printed and the preached sermon in the period was “the principal literary means of getting across the Christian message” to an audience. The intentional gap in Wadsworth’s sermon on Judges 5, then, lies in the very choice to preach the book at this particular time of year. Shifting normative preaching practice and his sermon’s rhetoric away from the characteristically formalistic Puritan retrospection of Lent, Wadsworth moves in his rhetoric towards a focus on the holy season’s redemptive themes.[12] Constructing his sermon on Judges 5 according to a socially-engaged response to Lent’s theme of redemption is characteristic of an emotional and proto-sentimental interest in bringing “mens private affairs” into the public view to “promot[e]” the importance of Judges 5’s redemptive message and “[th]e cause of God and his people.”[13]
Judges 5 – and indeed many Old Testament texts with thematic concerns of oppression and a redemptive leader – formed a role in constructing notions of colonial identity in the period, addressing emotions of frustration and injustice in the face of restrictive policy and royal imposition on colonial affairs, following the implementation of the Charter of Massachusetts Bay in 1691.[14] The Charter removed a considerable degree of the colony’s autonomy in dictating restrictions on trade, revoking the privilege of its self-government through election in favour of the king appointing its governor and deputy, and expanding the powers of the governor, as well as guaranteeing the “liberty of Conscience [to be] allowed in the Worshipp of God to all Christians (Except Papists).”[15] The colonists took considerable exception to the loss of autonomy enforced on them by the Charter of 1691; from its implementation to its annulment by The Massachusetts Government Act of 1774, attempts by the Crown to regulate the colony’s governance and exert control over its functioning were met with continual resistance and dissatisfaction.[16] Biblical texts such as Judges 5 were referred to with particular zeal during the time of the loss of colonial autonomy corresponding with the Charter of 1691’s implementation. As the colony was subject to the whims of a king who was deemed to be tyrannical in matters of ruling in colonial affairs, the use of Judges 5 in sermons of the period, with its redemptive themes and a maternal saviour-leader rescuing the people, speaks to a particular proto-sentimental concern with identifying with emotions related to oppression and the loss of autonomy. Likewise, the Israelites of Judges 5 may be read as being particular signifiers of emotional identification to the hearers of sermons in the early eighteenth century: the Israelites of Judges 5 are “guilty of like wickedness” to the colonists of early eighteenth-century New England, who had[17] – and exercised – the right to exercise their “liberty of Conscience” and reject the laws and legalism of the dominant congregationalism of the colonies, a problem which, although sanctioning individualism of belief and removing the issue of covert Antinomian rebellion against congregational structures,[18] rapidly became a matter of concern for ministers of the First Church of Boston such as Wadsworth.[19]
As the eighteenth century progressed and sentimentalism became the dominant mode of thought in ethics, philosophy, and literature, the Protestant sermon transformed “from form to forensics,” moving in its rhetorical construction from one of formulaic textual assembly to one centered in the “science of oratory” which sought to appeal to more individual and reflective concerns.[20] As the dominant methodology of sermon construction moved towards oratory, sensibility – “the acute physical and emotional ability to feel [...] and to empathize with the feelings of others” – became recognized as a series of rhetorical strategies that could (and should) be deployed to provoke feeling in audiences.[21] Simultaneously, tolerance for individualism of belief, opinion, and the personal expression of the emotions became increasingly legitimized as a “sourc[e] of spiritual authority.”[22] As a preacher writing in the early eighteenth century, Wadsworth – particularly in his sermon on Judges 5 – speaks to an early, proto-sentimental concern with thinking of “emotions and passions as legitimate sources of perception” in the interpretation of scripture.[23] Where Wadsworth maintains a focus in both parts of his sermon on Judges 5 being a celebratory “song of praise for God’s delivering Israel, and destroying their oppressors,”[24] he also employs the “rhetoric of emotion and sensation” to turn nouns demarcating emotion into verbs, thus increasing their sensational affect to his audience.[25] As is characteristic to sentimentalism’s later “dual ability” to “extend identification” with the emotions beyond that of previous centuries’ literary styles and techniques,[26] Wadsworth negates the positive connotations of the word “courage” in describing “Israel’s sin” as a verb by prefixing it with the word “not.”[27] Inviting his audience to become immersed with the Israelites’ “ha[ving] not courage” and thus experiencing “[thei]r punishment” for “bec[oming] Idolators,” Wadsworth unifies the emotions and identities of the audience with the Israelites of Judges 5.[28] By creating a rhetorical strategy grounded in a relatable experience of “ha[ving] not courage,” Wadsworth thus constructs a warning against “like wickedness” which is built on the sympathy, empathy, and expression of emotion (which, in this case, takes the form of a negation of emotion) characteristic of the sentimentalism of later decades.[29]
The language of sympathy
In his sermon, Wadsworth extends his rhetorical use of sympathy towards a use of the language of sympathy.[30] By underlining – and thus emphasizing – the words “not courage,” together with the underlined emphasis of “God rais.d up Deborah to deliver” the Israelites from their oppressors[31] – as in FIGURE 2 below – Wadsworth speaks to rhetoric’s unique ability to emphasize and articulate cultural concerns, giving them expression through a language of sympathy which unites the reader with him in a common experience of emotion and empathy with the Israelites:[32]
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| FIGURE 2: Extract of a sermon on Judges 5 by Benjamin Wadsworth, Congregational Library & Archives, Boston, MA, MS0992, p. 585.[33] |
In seeking to “recover the ‘particularity of past experience’” in approaching the issue of making sense of the commonality of experience that Wadsworth is addressing in his sermon – particularly in relation to the intentional gap of his writing a sermon on the redemptive themes of Judges 5 at the approximate onset of Lent – it is useful to acknowledge the deployment of the rhetorical strategy of emphasis.[34] In underlining extracts of his text in FIGURE 2’s extract of the manuscript, Wadsworth notes to emphasize through rhetorical parallelism and stressing words and phrases at the sermon’s performance to foreground the Israelites’ sin, punishment, and redemption as delivered by the figure of Deborah. Wadsworth, then, uses a form of proto-sentimental and sympathetic language in his manuscript by which he can warn of the “like wickedness” of which rulers may become susceptible, where “sympathy could be used as a handy rhetorical tool to both emphasize unity and increase the sense of it through the power of fellow feeling.”[35]
“Fellow feeling,” a set of rhetorical techniques designed to provoke emotions which would unify a reader or hearer of a sermon, was “aimed specifically” from the Puritan sermons of the seventeenth century onwards “at strengthening (or renewing) mutual affections” by forming arguments according to a language of sympathy reminiscent of the sentimentalism of later decades.[36] From around the mid-point of the eighteenth century, for example, a view of “motherhood that was defined by women’s spiritual and emotional work rather than by their physical labor” became the dominant mode of thought in the public, intellectual, and literary imaginations, shaping a language of sympathy which was used to articulate the role and the figure of the Christian mother.[37] Simultaneously, sentimentalism took hold of the American and wider transatlantic sensibility.
Notwithstanding the dominant cultural proclivity in the eighteenth century for viewing the figure of the mother as the main spiritual and emotional laborer of the family, the idea that the mother could hold power as the head of the family or the ruler of a nation also carried weight in the period. The idea of the mother as a ruler with the power to affect significant sociocultural change finds part of its origins in Judges 5:7, where Deborah proclaims that she “arose” as a “mother in Israel” that was chosen by God to lead His people to victory against Israel’s oppressors.[38] In his sermon, Wadsworth similarly interprets Judges 5:7 as illustrating Deborah as an exemplar to “Rulers of a people.”[39] Stating that “Rulers of a people (as Deborah now was) should have a parental dear affection” to those that they rule, “as ready to pity & relieve them, as a mother is her children,” Wadsworth again notes through underlining to stress these key words and phrases through his oral performance of the sermon, emphasizing with underlining the rhetorical parallelisms Rulers, Deborah, parental, and mother, as in FIGURE 3 below:[40]
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| FIGURE 3: Extract of a sermon on Judges 5 by Benjamin Wadsworth, Congregational Library & Archives, Boston, MA, MS0992, p. 586.[41] |
The sentimental view of the mother as a spiritual and emotional leader of a society and its familial structures was indeed a feminized one. By stating that “Rulers of a people [...] should have a parental dear affection” to their people “as a mother” does towards “her children,” Wadsworth here draws the reader or hearer of the sermon away from a warning against “being guilty of like wickedness” of which the Israelites were guilty and towards instruction on how a ruler should behave. Playing into the proto-sentimental view of the mother as a spiritual and emotional leader while simultaneously recognizing the biological essentialism of Deborah’s maternal and female body, Wadsworth interprets Deborah’s and the ruler’s role as one that is – and should be– feminized.[42] The aspiration for a ruler’s role to be feminized in line with Deborah’s role as a “mother in Israel” speaks in Wadsworth’s sermon to a usage of sentimental rhetoric and the language of sympathy which carries an aim for rulers to adopt the unifying and redemptive role of the mother in favour of the more stereotypically destructive and war-like characteristics of the male leader.[43]
GEMMS-SERMON-18952 is a sermon, then, that “opens up a public moral space” that engages with proto-sentimental, emotive themes of redemption, unification, and maternity as tools by which to instruct “Kings & great ones.”[44] It is worth considering that, although it does remain anachronistic to claim that Wadsworth’s sermon is representative of sentimental literature, he does create a space in its text to work through emotions and address affective notions of suffering under an oppressor; by adopting techniques which are strikingly similar to those of the sentimentalists of later decades, Wadsworth “Instruct[s] men in and quicken[s] [the]m to, a religious life.” Further study of the complete collection of sermon notes (GEMMS-MANUSCRIPT-1357) or of the Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons’ database holdings on Wadsworth (GEMMS-PERSON-2721) would likely demonstrate a deeper engagement with proto-sentimental literary characteristics in his work, connecting his figure as a writer with an aesthetic sensibility which precedes the sentimentalists. However, in its engagement with the text of Judges 5 and in its rhetorical construction, GEMMS-SERMON-18952 shows a demonstrable early understanding of a proto-sentimental sensibility: namely, that “sentiment [wa]s indicative and necessary”[45] to the instruction of “Kings & great ones,” in “consider[ing] [th]e wonders of divine mercie on his peo-ple, and of his vengeance on [thei]r oppressors; to prevent [thei]r being guilty of like wickedness” to that of the Israelites of Judges 5.[46]
Note on the text:
The letter “y” in the manuscript source represents the abbreviated thorn or “th” sound in Benjamin Wadsworth’s hand. Where the manuscript states “yt”, for example, the corresponding word “that” has been written in full in square brackets to increase clarity for the reader.
References
[4] “Wadsworth, Benjamin (1670-02-28 - 1737-03-16)” (GEMMS-PERSON-2721), GEMMS: Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons, last modified July 15, 2024,
https://gemms.usask.ca/node/793323.
[6] Wadsworth, Benjamin Wadsworth sermons, 1.
[7]
Benjamin Wadsworth (1669/70-1737), object number H3, 17th-18th c., oil on canvas, 82.5 x 69.5 cm (32 1/2 x 27 3/8”), Harvard Art Museums, accessed 08 August, 2024,
https://hvrd.art/o/304883.
[8] Lori Rogers-Stokes. “Reading for Unreadability; or, Embracing the Gaps in Congregational Church Records,” in The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art, ed. Matthew Pethers and Daniel Diaz Couch (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2024), 33, Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture.
[9] Rogers-Stokes, “Reading for Unreadability,” 40.
[10] “History of the Presidency.”
[11]
The Holy Bible, Containing the Old Testament, and the New: Newly Translated out of the Original Tongues: And with the former Translations diligently compared and verified, By his Maisties speciall commandement, King James Version (London: Robert Barker, printer to the Kings most Excellent Maiestie, 1614), JISC Historical Texts PDF, accessed 31 July, 2024,
https://data.historicaltexts.jisc.ac.uk/view?pubId=eebo-99837776e&terms=the%20holy%20bible&field=title&filter=publisher%7C%7CBy%20Robert%20Barker,%20printer%20to%20the%20Kings%20most%20excellent%20Maiestie.
[12] Philip Waller, Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1017.
[13] Wadsworth, Benjamin Wadsworth sermons, 585.
[17] Wadsworth, Benjamin Wadsworth sermons, 585.
[18] “The Charter of Massachusetts Bay – 1691.”
[19] James F., Cooper, Jr., Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts (Oxford University Press, 1999), ProQuest Ebook Central.
[20] Gregory S. Jackson, “America’s First Mass Media: Preaching and the Protestant Sermon Tradition,” in
A Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America, ed. Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 410, Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture Series, ProQuest Ebook Central PDF, accessed 21 July, 2024,
https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.salford.idm.oclc.org/lib/salford/detail.action?docID=243574.
[22] Jackson, “America’s First Mass Media,” 410.
[23] Jackson, 410.
[24] Wadsworth, Benjamin Wadsworth sermons, 585.
[25] Jackson, “America’s First Mass Media,” 410.
[27] Wadsworth, Benjamin Wadsworth sermons, 585.
[28] Wadsworth, 585.
[30] Van Engen, 143.
[31] Wadsworth, Benjamin Wadsworth sermons, 585.
[32] Gero Guttzeit, “Rhetoric and Literary Theory,” in
Handbook of English Renaissance Literature, ed. Ingo Berensmeyer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2019) 203-21, vol. 10, Handbooks of English and American Studies, ProQuest Ebook Central PDF, accessed 26 October, 2023,
https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.salford.idm.oclc.org/lib/salford/detail.action?pq-origsite=primo&docID=5158670.
[33] Wadsworth, Benjamin Wadsworth sermons, 585.
[34] Mary Morrissey, “Interdisciplinarity and the Study of Early Modern Sermons,”
The Historical Journal 42, no. 4 (December 1999): 1117, accessed 06 May, 2023,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3020939.
[35] Van Engen, Sympathetic Puritans, 143.
[36] Van Engen, 143.
[37] Doyle, Maternal Bodies, 5.
[38] The Holy Bible.
[39] Wadsworth, Benjamin Wadsworth sermons, 586.
[40] Wadsworth, 586.
[41] Wadsworth, 586.
[42] Doyle, Maternal Bodies, 91.
[43] Doyle, 91.
[44] Simon Strick,
American Dorologies: Pain, Sentimentalism, Biopolitics (New York: State University of New York Press, 2014), 21, Project Muse PDF,
https://doi.org/10.1353/book.28834.
[45] Strick, American Dorologies, 20.
[46] Wadsworth, Benjamin Wadsworth sermons, 585.
~ Lauren Pearl Holmes
