Study Guide Island Christianity
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Island Sermons
Sermons played an important role both on Martha’s Vineyard and in colonial New England in general. Sermons were the centerpiece of most services and defined the desired limits of communal belief and practice. Parishioners often memorized sermons were often memorized by transcribed them at a later date. Cotton Mather suggests in Family Religion that some people formed their prayers out of sermon notes (Mather 10). Although some sermons were intended to stand alone, many ministers developed a theme over many weeks or months and created a “cycle” of sermons on the same theme or biblical verse.
Eighteen-century Protestant sermons had a triadic structure: (1) Text (or Doctrine), (2) Explication (Reason), and (3) Application (Use) (Davies 82). Sermons also heavily relied upon Ramist logic which held that the most logical way to understand any subject was to divide it into its two subordinate parts, and then to divide each of those parts into two, and so forth (Ames 41). Ministers often indicated to listeners where they were in this system of twos and threes by sign-posting the sections of their talk. These structural devices helped literate English listeners follow the often long and complicated arguments. In contrast, the content, form, and methodology used in these sermons would have almost certainly been foreign and counterintuitive to New England's Native oral-based cultures. Works such as John Eliot’s Logick Primer were intended to help Algonquians learn to follow Puritan “logic.”
Indian Converts includes excerpts from several Wampanoag sermons, though these excerpts do not clearly indicate how Wampanoag sermons differed from English ones either in content or style. Writings and sermons by other New England Algonquians, however, give us some sense that Native ministers were often better than white ministers at making their preachings familiar to Native Audiences. For example Mohegan minister Samson Occom speaks of employing a participatory style in his religious teachings. In this sense, Occom's sermon style was indicative of interactive nature of precontact ceremonies in New England. Descriptions of Algonquian rituals by missionaries emphasize the pivotal role community members played in the ceremonies and the centrality of verbal outbursts. Occom explains that his own "method" in religious meetings depended upon participatory elements such as group song and prayer (Occom 945). Occom's emphasis on hymns throughout his career reflects the role of singing in Algonquian ceremonies: indeed, some of the hymns that Occom used were sung to Algonquian melodies (Love 180-81). Perhaps part of the success of Wampanoag ministers was their greater knowledge of and attention to Wampanoag style and structures.
Although no complete Wampanoag sermons from Martha’s Vineyard were printed in the colonial era, full texts of white Puritan sermons given on the Vineyard in Wôpanâak and in English remain today. These include Cotton Mather’s “Family Religion Excited and Assisted” (1714) and “The Day which the Lord hath Made” (1703), and several of Mayhew’s own sermons such as: “A discourse shewing that God dealeth with men as with reasonable creatures” (1718), “All mankind, by nature, equally under sin” (1724), “A right to the Lord's Supper considered in a letter to a serious enquirer after truth” (1741), “Grace Defended” (1744), as well as several sermons that exist in manuscript form. Some of these sermons such as Mather’s “Family Religion” were intended as instruction manuals and hence were printed in both English and Algonquian. “Family Religion,” for example, provides directions on how to pray as well as hymns that are matched to “extraordinary occasions” (Titlepage).
Island sermons show that the religious community on Martha’s Vineyard struggled with the same crises as did worshippers on the mainland: Mayhew fielded questions such as, should only the “elect” receive the privilege communion, or is it a duty required by all? (The Right to the Lord’s Supper 2) Did God offer saving Grace to everyone, or only to the select (A Letter to a Gentleman)? Mayhew’s responses to these questions lie on the strict end for his generation: “no Person,” he proclaims, “has a RIGHT to partake of the Ordinance of the LORD’S SUPPER, but such as are ALLOWED and COMMANDED by God” (The Right to the Lord’s Supper 2). Yet by 1741 when this letter was published, many ministers had long allowed even the grandchildren of the saved to be church members without the rights of communion. Similarly Mayhew takes the traditional Calvinist position that although God may show favor and kindness to many, saving Grace is restricted to a smaller community of Christians (A Letter). The difference between common and saving Grace was a particularly timely issue during the First Great Awakening, when this tract was published. Minister William Homes of Chilmark also hit upon a topic that would be of central concern during the First Great Awakening when he spoke about the thorny debate between “revealed religion” and religion discovered through “man’s corrupt reason” (A Discourse Concerning the Public Reading of the Holy Scriptures, 1719: I). The excerpt in the archive from Cotton Mather’s “Family Religion Excited and Assisted” (1714) is interesting not only because it was deemed central enough to be translated into Algonquian, but also because the central role it places upon the family illuminates the structure and content of Mayhew’s Indian Converts. Like Mayhew’s sermons, Family Religion addresses the crisis in New England in which older family members, but not younger ones received “Saving Grace,” and argues for the need to make the family into a cohesive Christian unit.
Items Related to Island Sermons in the Archive
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