A friend and contemporary of the Mathers, regarded by some as their "mimic and tool," John Barnard is best remembered, in the words of Perry Miller, as "one of the finest examples of the eighteenth-century New England parson." As minister at Marblehead, Massachusetts, from 1716 to the year of his death, the enlightened and politically aware Barnard proved himself to be a master of the jeremiad, and, as Sacvan Bercovitch has noted, he played a role in "harnessing the Puritan vision to the conditions of eighteenth-century life." Barnard had a number of sermons published during his lifetime as well as a version of the psalms of David with hymns, an effort which one early reviewer noted did not lead him "to discover that he had music in his soul." Barnard's autobiography, which is more noteworthy for its clerical gossip than for its eloquence, was circulated among his friends and...