This book offers a chronolgical survey of Congregationalism throughout the course of its history and a collection of biographies of significant Congregationalists. The author aims to demonstrate how the Puritan way of seeing God, humanity, and salvation has continued to influence Americans and how the unique spiritual sensibility of the early Puritans endured throughout the Colonial period and long afterwards. This volume is divided into two parts. Part One contains a ten-chapter historical essay that summarizes basic information about the Church and also provides original interpretations of particular episodes in Church history or on Congregationalism as a whole, offering nre insights and ideas about such issues as the genesis of the idea of "visible saints" and the significance of Horace Bushnell. The continuity of congregationalism from colonial times through the 19th and 20th centuries is stressed. Part Two, the biographical dictionary, emphasizes the personal experiences of Congregationalists, and several score representative lives, both ministers and lay persons, famous and ordinary, illustrate and amplify points made in Part One.
This exploration of the personal spiritual experiences of John Winthrop, Jonathon Edwards, Horace Bushnell, and others, based on autobiographies, funeral sermons, books, and journals, conveys a feeling for the religious life of Congregationalists.