So few seventeenth-century Southern sermons survive that each is a significant historical document. Only three dated works are extant: Alexander Whitaker's Good Newes from Virginia ... (1613), Gov. William Joseph's lay "sermon" to the General Assembly of Maryland (1688), and Deuel Pead's "A Sermon Preached at James City ...," delivered in 1686. (A few manuscripts of Jesuit sermons from the late seventeenth-or early eighteenth-century South also exist but are undated.)

Little is known of Pead's early life. He was admitted to Cambridge as a pensioner in 1664, served as a chaplain in the British navy in 1671, and settled in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, in about 1682. By November of 1683 he had become the minister of Christ Church, Middlesex County, Virginia, and remained in this post until returning to England some seven years later. In 1691 Pead was appointed minister of St. James, Clerkenwell, London, a position which he held until his death, and in 1707 he was...