Abbreviations
Introduction
I Invention, 1620 - 1665
1. The Institutional Seting of the Sermon
2. Regular Preaching and the Sequence of Salvation
3. Sion's Out-Casts
II Arrangement, 1666 - 1700
4. Days of Trouble and Thankful Remembrances
5. Returning unto God: The Conversion of the Children
6. Perpetuating the Covenant in Uncertain Times:
The Sermon at Century's End
III Style, 1701 - 1730
7. Anglicization
8. Regular Preaching and the New Pietism
9. Israel's Constitution
IV Delivery, 1731-1763
10. Awakening
11 A New Balance
12. War
V Memory, 1764 - 1776
13. Trust in God
14. A Natio Born at Once
Epilogue
Notes
Index

Throughout the colonial era, New England's only real public spokesmen were the Congregational ministers. One result is that the ideological origins of the American Revolution are nowhere more clearly seen than in the sermons they preached. The New England Soul is the first comprehensive
analysis of preaching in New England from the founding of the Puritan colonies to the outbreak of the Revolution. Using a multi-disciplinary approach--including analysis of rhetorical style and concept of identity and community--Stout examines more than two thousand sermons spanning five generations
of ministers, including such giants of the pulpit as John Cotton, Thomas Shepard, Increase and Cotton Mather, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Jonathan Mayhew, and Charles Chauncy. Equally important, however, are the manuscript sermons of many lesser known ministers, which never appeared in
print. By integrating the sermons of ordinary ministers with the printed sermons of their more illustrious contemporaries, Stout reconstructs the full import of the colonial sermon as a multi-faceted institution that served both religious and political purposes, and explicated history and society
to the New England Puritans for one and a half centuries.