Joshua Moody’s Funeral Sermon for Thomas Daniel as Political Jeremiad

Joshua Moody'sFuneralSermon for ThomasDaniel asPolitical Jeremiad Terry Engebretsen Toshow how thoroughly conventional seventeenth-century American jeremiadshad grown, Perry Miller felt it necessary only to observe that they hadbecome "as fixed and stereotyped as the funeral sermon or latin oration:' 1 While Miller is right that without exception funeral sermons, like the deceased saintsfor whom they were written, appear other-worldly in their theology andbiography, the ministers who delivered them did not separate-as modemreaders are apt to-the changeless lessons of theology from immediate practical concerns. Especially as challenges to the New England Way mounted duringthe final decades of the seventeenth century, ministers carefully constructed funeral sermons to apply traditional metaphors of Protestant sainthoodto the specific political or social problems facing New Englanders. A brief survey of the development of the political jeremiad in colonial funeralsermons will provide the background for an examination of Joshua Moody'sfuneral sermon for Thomas Daniel, The Believers Happy Change ByDying,a sermon which exemplifies especially well the rhetorical strategies ofthese political jeremiads. I The political substratum of nearly all printed funeral sermons may, in part,be an attempt by ministers to legitimize the form; initially funerals were CanadianReview of American Studies, Volume 15,Number 4, Winter 1984,369-383 370 Teny Engebretsen civil ceremonies, and any sermons delivered were preached on the Sabbath or on Lecture Day following the funeral. Many felt that funeral sermons could easily deteriorate into mere praise for the dead, thus deflecting the congregation's attention from the true significance of the event, from Godto man.2 The first funeral sermon printed in Massachusetts contains a preface lamenting the "Abusive, and justly to be Condemned practise" of praising the dead and misleading the living, but the minister, James Fitch, wentonto conclude that God's decree should not be set aside because of man's abuses. 1 At the end of the century, Cotton Mather, in his funeral sermon for Joshua Moody, put the matter more directly: "I readily grant, That the Customeof Praising the Dead, ha's been Scandalously Abused; but I cannot grant,That the Abuse is best Corrected, by taking away all Publick Meditations, onthe Funerals of Those, in whose Deaths God from Heaven speaks Great Things unto the Living."4 Here, Mather suggests how the benefits of funeral sermons were madeto outweigh their dangers: the sermons presented lessons, often very specific ones, to the living. But while both English and American funeral sermons were seen as "lessons to the living:' American ministers handled that lesson distinctively. For the most part, English funeral sermons had remained the expression of traditional theological arguments. But in the hands of New England's ministers, traditional theological metaphors assumed a specific. temporal significance: the metaphors that the sermon developed were elaborated to comment on immediate issues as well as timeless truths of reformed theology. 5 These jeremiads were lent additional force through one other change. Generally, English Puritans omitted any mention of the deceased from the text of the sermon, and any biography, when included, usually formed an independent, detachable work. But New Englanders made the deceased's life a part of the sermon itself, giving the eulogy a privileged status and adding the force of the saint's example to the sermon's doctrine. The deceased's life became a second text illustrating and applying the lessons of the sermon. Even before removing from England, Thomas Hooker, foreshadowing the New England pattern, delivered a funeral sermon for Robert Wilmot.DTaking as his text II Kings 2:12, Hooker develops a series of metaphors that present Wilmot as father, physician and soldier, all typical metaphors for the Puritan minister. But Hooker's elaboration of these traditional metaphors gi\eS Wilmot's death a political as well as spiritual significance. Like the stern father who chastizes his son, or the physician painfully lancing a festering wound so that it might heal, or the soldier who must defeat evil by force and violence, the Puritan minister, no matter how painful or how personally dangerous his counsel, must keep the king and commonwealth on course or disastrous consequences (Hooker implicitly threatens rebellion) will follow. Occasionally, his images make explicit the sermon's political dimension...