| This study of the sermons of Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College from 1795 to 1817, suggests that certain emphases of content and style characteristic of evangelical preaching in America through much of the nineteenth century may be traced to responses of the New England clergy to theological and institutional tensions in the post-revolutionary period. Dwight's advocacy of revivalism and the voluntarist ethic and his assertive rhetorical stance are presented in relation to his disillusionment with political process during the Federalist years, as well as his contention that the theological subtleties of much eighteenth-century preaching had proved injurious to the vitality of religion.;Ordering his discourses more on application than explication of doctrine, Dwight established ethical injunction to moral activism as a staple of evangelical rhetoric of the early nineteenth century. His theories of persuasive preaching, which centered on the force of personal charisma rather than the status of ministerial office, paralleled his educational philosophy of instruction by example and governance by suasion. In his effort to rehabilitate the impact of the pulpit on public life, Dwight is seen to have been a determinative influence on both his contemporaries and the succeeding generation of preachers of a popular evangelicalism associated with the "golden age" of American platform oratory.;Dwight's major contributions to the preaching of the Second Great Awakening were his predication of homiletical and practice on utilitarian criteria of persuasive effect and his stress on the propriety of personal activism in religious experience and expression. Theologically, Dwight's relation to the legacy of the Edwardsean pulpit is shown to have been more ambivalent than he admitted, and his defense of orthodoxy, to have consisted of a synthesis of Old and New Light principles which aimed at popular consensus at the expense of doctrinal precision. In matters of rhetorical invention, his manner of preaching advanced the demise of the structured tradition of the so-called plain style in "learned" homiletics, without, however, abandoning its ideals of reasoned appeal and lucidity. |
