Preparing the Soul for Christ: The Contrasting Sermon Forms of John Cotton and Thomas Hooker

Abstract

F THE PURITAN MINISTERS who immigrated to Massachusetts 0before the English civil wars, John Cotton (I584-I652) and Thomas Hooker (1586?-i647) were the most eminent and influential. They sailed to Boston on the same ship in i633 but separated three years later when Hooker, along with his congregation, moved to Hartford. The two men diverged in their sermons as well as in their lives. Hooker, as almost every student of the two preachers has observed, wrote vigorously and used many figures of speech and homely analogies, while Cotton was more dry and abstract and much more sparing in his use of figurative expressions.' Actually, this distinction which tradition has drawn between the sermons of the two ministers goes only a short way in defining the cleavage between them. Not only style but the issue of preparation and the supposedly invariable Puritan sermon form are involved in this pervasive and deep-seated cleavage. In this paper, which attempts to define the difference between the sermons of Cotton and Hooker, I shall make use of the rhetorical vocabulary of the Puritans; but I am convinced we must go beyond this vocabulary if we are to grasp what happens in the sermons of these two preachers.