Political Sermons of the American Founding Era: 1730–1805. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ this one, and most especially the cataloguers and bibliographers, for their wonderful, anonymous labors: without them we researchers would be lost.

      Lastly, my family is again thanked for continuing to tolerate my strange habits and for helping me look up this or that and to read proof as time allowed and as I could catch them: Jonathan, Erica, Lisa, and Ellis III. My wife Alverne showed hitherto unsuspected skill as bibliographer and chief assistant in organizing a mass of material. My appreciation of them rises far above mere gratitude.

      I hope all these benefactors and collaborators, having helped me with this project, will cherish the book and find their expectations for it at least partly fulfilled.

      E. S.

Editor’s Note to the 1998 Edition

      Reissue of Political Sermons of the American Founding Era in a two-volume edition allows inclusion of a comprehensive index to the work, one ably prepared by Linda Webster. The only other substantive addition to the original is a note identifying the seventeenth-century provenance of Item 24, entitled Defensive Arms Vindicated (at pages 712–713, herein).

      Demand for the book has been steady over the years since first publication in 1991. This is gratifying to the editor, and doubtlessly reflects the importance of the subject matter and intrinsic interest of the material itself. More than this, however, the demand suggests that readers thirst for learning about the relatively unknown eighteenth-century religious and philosophical underpinnings of our American public order, at the time of the founding, and as it continues into the present. It may be that these documents intimate a kind of secret history, one yet to be fully written.

      Ellis Sandoz

Editor’s Note

      The fundamental aim of this collection has been to print original, editorially unannotated editions of previously published, complete sermons that permit the authors to speak fully for themselves. The genre is the political sermon, but broadly construed so as to embrace certain essays and orations, pieces that are sermonic in sense and tone—that is, hortatory and relating politics to convictions about eternal verities. A second aim has been not to duplicate anything printed in John Wingate Thornton’s fine old collection, The Pulpit of the American Revolution (Boston, 1860), since that volume is available in a reprint edition. With one exception, John Leland’s Rights of Conscience Inalienable (no. 37), we also have avoided anything printed in Charles S. Hyneman and Donald S. Lutz, eds., American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1760–1805 (Indianapolis, 1983), still available from Liberty Fund. Of other comparable collections known to us, that of Frank Moore, ed., The Patriot Preachers of the American Revolution, published by subscription in 1860, overlaps this collection with two items, nos. 8 and 25, but the Moore book is rare and has not been reprinted. We also avoided publishing anything contained in the first volume of Bernard Bailyn’s Pamphlets of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1965); we have included several pieces (nos. 8, 9, 10, 15, and 17) announced for later volumes, but the series has been suspended for over twenty-five years and appears to be defunct.

      A third aim has been to provide readable and accessible texts for these sermons—accurate modern versions that scrupulously honor the integrity of the originals. Modernization has never been done for its own sake or permitted to alter meaning, and much has been done to maintain even the look of the originals. To effect our purpose, modernization rules, or guidelines, were developed over the course of several months in which the sermons were editorially analyzed—and with the assistance of the book’s designer, as well. It became clear that some across-the-board standardization was needed to get the job done, but that inconsistencies between sermons were unavoidable and that homogenizing the texts was unthinkable. Applying our modernizing rules in an absolutely rigid manner, then, was impossible if we were to remain sensitive to the originals. Exceptions to the rules were made where the individual text passages cried out for them. The sermons herein remain trustworthy replicas of some unique and (at times) originally quirky texts from America’s founding era.

      ITALICIZATION

      The original printings of the sermons, especially the earliest ones, presented us with some difficult decisions concerning the use of italics and, similarly, small capitals. To begin with, italics were used in certain texts for each proper name and for other words besides, but to say that they were used much of the time for emphasis would be incorrect. Rather, they seem to have been used for anything that might be construed as a key word as well as for emphasis, with the result that a large number of words appeared in italics. That this italicization could be related to oral delivery was not translatable into an editorial guideline. It was decided, then, that we would serve the reader best by not duplicating what strikes the modern eye as chaotic typography. Nevertheless, preserving the appearance of eighteenth-century typesetting also seemed desirable.

      Much of the original typography was sacrificed to modern tastes, therefore, with some important exceptions. Phrases of three or four and more words in italics were kept that way, while single words and nearly all two- and three-word phrases in italic were set in roman type. With the understanding that some measure of the author’s emphasis could be thus lost, we made exceptions to the rule on a case-by-case basis. It proved surprising, though, how infrequently italics had to be retained as exceptions. The rhetorical training of all the sermon authors led them to syntactical constructions that made their points of emphasis emerge (commonly by a use of parallelism) unmistakably and gracefully. Of course, they were organizing their points for the ear as much as for the eye, so their repetitions, enumerations, and references to a controlling scriptural thought, as well as other structural devices, all served to make the typographic augmentation of meaning that had once been favored much less necessary than might now be supposed.

      Occasionally an italicized phrase would have in it a word or two in roman. We elected to simplify this state of affairs and italicized these words. Otherwise, no italics were introduced into the texts for any reason.

      Words and phrases that were printed in small and/or large capital letters were viewed as italicized and then treated accordingly, except in the case of GOD, JESUS, and CHRIST. Here it was decided that the flavor of the early printings could be preserved. These words, where they had been entirely in capitals in the original, were uniformly presented in the large-capital/small-capital style shown here. Nowhere did we introduce this style, however, where the words had not been entirely in capitals in the original. Thus we give “GOD” as “GOD”; but we reproduce “God” without change, and so on.

      CAPITALIZATION

      Just as italicization can seem to have been too popular with early writers and printers, capitalization appears in many of the sermons to have followed only individual writers’ standards. In all the texts, we have modernized capitalization as follows: If a capitalized word would be lower-cased in modern usage, we lower-cased it, but we did not capitalize any word that appeared lower-cased in the original. Thus, the reader will notice an abundant number of instances where frequently capitalized words appear lower-cased (contrary to modern usage) later on—christian, king George, parliament, for example—because in the later instances they had not been originally capitalized. We did retain the capitalizations of coinages for the Deity—”Great Benefactor,” “Supreme Ruler,” even “Divine Word,” etc.—including the adjective if it had been originally capitalized.

      SPELLING

      For some sermons, errata were printed, and we made the corrections so noted without a signal to the reader. Spelling was not modernized for this edition, and spelling errors were not always corrected. The reappearance of a word in a text cued us to correct СКАЧАТЬ