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Despite the numerous hardships the first Puritan colonists endured on the desolate and flint-edged shores of New England, their chief joy (wrote one of the colonists) “lay not in the increase of Corne, or Wine, or Oyle.” What “rejoyced the Heart of this People much” was the decision of between 80 and 90 Puritan ministers to join these colonists in their self-chosen exile from England, “preaching with all instancy the glad Tidings of the Gospell of Jesus Christ.”

In that age only the tiniest minority of the people could read. An even tinier minority possessed the means to buy books. So public preaching was the clearest and most direct method for Puritanism to appeal to people’s hearts and minds.

Furthermore, preaching was considered an almost-supernatural activity and an indispensable means of receiving divine grace. “The preaching of the Word is the Scepter of Christ’s Kingdome, the glory of a Nation, the Chariot upon which life & salvation comes riding,” Stephen Marshall told Parliament in November 1640. Only the preaching minister, added a note from the Geneva Bible (the Bible of American Puritans), had the authority to “open the gates of heaven with the word of God, which is the right key.”

Whatever else the word Puritan meant in the 1600s in England and the New England colonies, it meant the priority of preaching in the life of a Christian community.

Of the 300 or so English Protestant ministers who can be readily identified as Puritans in the Church of England in 1630, as many as a third of them (some with their entire congregations) joined the great Puritan migration to Massachusetts and its daughter colonies, Connecticut and New Haven. These preachers came in all varieties.

Thomas Hooker, who emigrated to New England in 1633, had such “a mighty vigor and fervour of spirit” in his preaching that his sermons “would put a king in his pocket.”

Richard Mather of Dorchester had a “loud and big” voice and preached with “a deliberate vehemency.”

John Cotton preached with “a very awful majesty.” His associate, John Wilson, claimed that “Mr. Cotton preaches with such authority, demonstration, and life, that methinks, when he preaches out of any prophet or apostle, I hear him not; I hear that very prophet and apostle; yea, I hear the Lord Jesus Christ himself speaking in my heart.”

Not many of the Puritans had much reputation for humor, although Samuel Moody (pastor of York, Maine, from 1698 to 1747) had a well-known talent for pulpit put-downs. When Moody was invited to preach in a neighboring parish, the pastor warned Moody that the congregation was in the annoying habit of drifting out of church before the sermon was over. Moody solved that problem by announcing at the beginning of his sermon that he intended to speak first to the sinners in the congregation, and then to the saints.

When he had preached to “sinners” as long as he thought proper, he paused and added, “There, sinners, I have done with you now; you may take your hats and go out of the meeting house as soon as you please.” No one dared leave.

The Puritan sermon was set off from all other English preaching by a peculiar homiletical technique known as “the plain style”—plain in vocabulary, structure, subject, and style.

Most sermons of the 1600s look, to our eyes, like collections of literary essays or devotional meditations, thick with metaphor and encrusted with elaborate Latin quotations. But because Puritan preaching was intended (according to Robert Cushman) “to paint out the Gospel in plain and flat English, amongst a company of plain Englishmen,” the Puritan preachers opposed elaborate and flowery literary devices.

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