Welcome back to another episode of Five Minutes in Church history.

Last time we were together, we were anticipating the Thanksgiving holiday and talking about some Thanksgiving sermons.

Well, I do hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving if you are an American and you celebrated it.

But I want to return to this theme of Thanksgiving sermons.

This sermon came from 1836.

That year, Thanksgiving was on December 15, and it was preached by Tri-On Edwards.

He is the great-grandson of Jonathan Edwards, and he preached this sermon at the First Presbyterian

Church in Rochester, New York.

He used this occasion to remind his congregation, and, as he says in the sermon, even the good

people of the city of Rochester, of the founders. And he was speaking

specifically of the Puritans. He speaks of the Puritans, how they were bound together by

persecution and by the sympathies of a common faith. He goes on to say that the name Puritan is a name in which every American

should delight to glory. And he says that we should desire to share in it even to the remotest degree.

Well, he goes on to say two things. He goes on to give us a little history of the Puritans in this sermon,

and then he goes on to get at what is the heart of being a Puritan

and the essence of Puritanism.

In the history, he goes back to Henry VIII,

and he speaks of how Henry the Eighth was trying to stamp out popery in Old England.

But even though he brought in some reforms, it did not clear it out altogether.

And of course, we know Bloody Mary would come along.

And he references the blood spilled on the plains of Smithfield and the Marian martyrs.

Then he goes on to reference Elizabeth and her two acts, which brought about the Puritans,

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