Friend and patron of Harvard College, pastor of the prestigious Old South Church in Boston, supporter of several missionary societies, and vigorous defender of the "old New England way," Joseph Sewall was a prominent member of the last generation of New England's great Puritan preachers. To that generation fell the impossible task of preserving the idealized faith of New England's founders against the inroads of cosmopolitan taste and enlightenment philosophy made during the eighteenth century. The rising secularism and apparent irreligion of that age, which in the eyes of many of Sewall's contemporaries foreshadowed the complete downfall of New England's mission as the kingdom of God in the New World wilderness, had been preached against by the generation of religious masters which preceded them in their pulpits, and it fell to men such as Thomas Prince, John Webb, Thomas Foxcroft, and Joseph Sewall to continue warning and, as...