The Problems of Performing Piety in some Exeter Dissenting Sermons c. 1660–1745

Abstract

This essay explores the theme of hypocrisy in a multi-volume collection of hitherto unstudied manuscript sermons by Exeter Dissenting ministers from the Restoration to the mid-eighteenth century held by the Devon and Exeter Institution. In these sermons, the theme of hypocrisy is addressed in a variety of senses and contexts, including the imposition by conformists of forms of worship not required by Scripture, the false accusations of hypocrisy made against Dissenters, the insincere performance of piety even by professing Dissenters, the tendency of sinners to justify vice as virtue and virtue as vice, and the incompatibility of persecution with true New Testament Christianity. These sermons trace a move from Reformed orthodoxy towards rational Dissent, with a soteriology that increasingly makes moral performance a condition of final salvation. The possibility of insincere performance of piety and virtue by hypocrites may have created increased anxiety in a context in which soteriology and ethics were increasingly entangled.