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

Abstract

To show how thoroughly conventional seventeenth-century American jeremiads had grown, Perry Miller felt it necessary only to observe that they had become "as fixed and stereotyped as the funeral sermon or latin oration."1 While Miller is right that without exception funeral sermons, like the deceased saints for whom they were written, appear other-worldly in their theology and biography, the ministers who delivered them did not separate—as modern readers are apt to—the changeless lessons of theology from immediate practical concerns. Especially as challenges to the New England Way mounted during the final decades of the seventeenth century, ministers carefully constructed funeral sermons to apply traditional metaphors of Protestant sainthood to the specific political or social problems facing New Englanders. A brief survey of the development of the political jeremiad in colonial funeral sermons will provide the background for an examination of Joshua Moody's funeral sermon for Thomas Daniel, The Believers Happy Change By Dying, a sermon which exemplifies especially well the rhetorical strategies of these political jeremiads.