Henry Smith

As we have seen, Puritans preachers were diligent scholars, meticulous in their sermon preparation. But they were not show-offs, concerned with demonstrating just how scholarly they were. The purpose of their scholarship was to bring the message to all classes, from the most learned to the most simple.

William Perkins theorized that preaching “must be plain, perspicuous, and evident. . . . It is a by-word among us: It was a very plain sermon: And I say again, the plainer the better.” Richard Sibbes claimed that

truth feareth nothing so much as concealment, and desireth nothing so much as to be laid open to the view of all: when it is most naked, it is most lovely and powerful.

   And Henry Smith said that “to preach simply is not to preach rudely, nor unlearned, nor confusedly, but to preach plainly and perspicuously that the simplest man may understand what is taught, as if he did hear his name.”
   Plain preaching was defined by what it lacked as well as by what it contained. What is avoided was such things as the “heaping up of citations of Fathers, and repeating words of Latin or Greek.” What the Puritans did not want was a pastiche of quotations or an embellished style that called great attention to its own ostentatiousness. For Samuel Torshell it was a sign of bad preaching to “tell you how many Fathers we have read, how much we are acquainted with the schoolmen, what critical linguists we are or the like. It is wretched ostentation.”
   Why did the Puritans dislike the high style in sermons? For one thing, they felt it diverted attention from the content of the sermon to the preacher, for whom the occasion became, in modern parlance, an “ego trip.” In the ostentatious style, said Perkins, “we do not paint Christ, but . . . our own selves.”

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 104–105.